markelarias

MARKEL ARIAS LASTRA

Audiovisual student, creator, innovator

PERFORMATIVITY

Markel Arias - Aritz Zabala - Marcos García

Performativity means that language and actions don’t just describe things, they actually create meaning. As Judith Butler (1997) explains, what we say and do can shape how people see truth, identity, and power. This idea was central to our performance, where we didn’t just talk about ideas, we peerformed through words, movement, and emotion.

Erika Fischer-Lichte (2008) writes about how performers and audiences influence each other during a performance. Even though our piece wasn’t interactive at all, it created strong emotional reactions.

Our project also connects to Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed (1979), which sees theatre as a way to prepare people for real-life action. While our audience couldn’t change what happened on stage, the story was designed to make them think deeply and choose a side in their mind.

For the Performativity theme, our team created a dramatic, semi-improvised performance simulating a kidnapping scenario, where three fictional captors debate the value of a political hostage. Each captor embodies a different ideological stance: the capitalist pragmatist who seeks monetary gain, the social justice activist asking for systemic reform, and the nihilist anarchist who wants to destroy the system entirely.

The performance was divided into three acts: the capture, the argument, and the public resolution. It was designed to immerse the audience in an emotionally charged narrative while exposing them to clashing worldviews. Although scripted, the actors used performative gestures, tension, and physical space to make each ideological position feel embodied and emotionally resonant.

This wasn't a game or simulation, it was a live performative act built to engage with ethical questions about value, power, and societal change.

This project represents an exploration of journalism through live performance. Instead of producing a written article or video report, we constructed a narrative where political ideologies were acted out in real time. This allowed the audience to not just observe, but feel and react to competing arguments about corruption, inequality, and violence.

What made this performative journalism innovative was its use of:

  • Role-playing to embody philosophical ideas.

  • Live dialogue to expose contradictions between theory and action.

  • Staged tension to mirror the moral ambiguities that often underlie real news events.

This method aligns with the concept of embodied journalism, where issues are explored not just intellectually, but through bodily presence, tone, silence, confrontation, and choice. Our "hostage" character, silent until the end, acted as a symbolic stand-in for political figures, power, and public accountability.

This project was a bold exercise in turning journalism into action. Writing and embodying one of the captors challenged me to express complex ideas not through argumentation alone, but through posture, tone, timing, and confrontation.

The process made me realize that performance can carry journalistic value, especially when dealing with topics that require emotional engagement, not just information. Instead of presenting facts about political inequality or systemic failure, we dramatized those forces in a tightly constructed space, exposing their internal contradictions.

A surreal situation like the one in our performance allowed us to explore ideas and emotional responses that would be impossible to access in everyday life. By stepping into an extreme and fictional scenario, we were able to push creative and ethical boundaries, triggering new feelings, new questions, and new perspectives. The performance gave us a safe space to experience tension, power, fear, and moral conflict in ways that felt real, even though the situation was imagined. This helped us understand not only the story we were telling, but also how far journalism and storytelling can go when we allow ourselves to think beyond reality.

REFERENCES

  • Butler, J. (1997). Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative.

  • Fischer-Lichte, E. (2008). The Transformative Power of Performance.

  • Boal, A. (1979). Theatre of the Oppressed.