The most sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence be­tween the two art forms the­atri­cal live-per­for­mance and still is ob­vi­ously their re­spec­tive re­la­tion to time and move­ment. Whereas the former hap­pens in the pre­sent within an es­ti­mated time-frame, latter one rep­re­sents a frozen window to the past. But even if the per­for­mance is an­chored in the here and now, it pro­duces poses, ges­tures or nar­ra­tives mem­o­rized as fixed frames con­stantly over­com­ing the lim­i­ta­tions to their du­ra­tion and stylised sit­u­a­tion. On the other hand the still does not mean past dead­lock but is brought to life by actual re­cep­tion; for both arts carry cir­cu­lar­ity and re­flex­ive­ness to their passed and on­go­ing con­struc­tions of mean­ing point­ing to con­di­tioned/con­ven­tion­al­ized so­cio-cul­tural knowl­edge sys­tems.

With regard to the the ar­guably most active ges­tural body part, the hand, the rit­u­ally per­formed and often blindly fol­lowed con­ven­tional system of signs is to be ob­served by dis­course re­gard­ing the un­cer­tainty of its future.

By dis­cussing two of Re­becca Schnei­der´s texts (‘A Small His­tory ((of)) Still Pass­ing’ and ‘That the Past May Yet Have An­other Future: Ges­ture in the Times of Hands Up’) the scholar in­vites us to re­think visual cul­ture in terms of per­for­ma­tiv­ity and tem­po­ral­ity and chal­lenges to re-eval­u­ate tra­di­tional codes of com­mu­ni­ca­tion by ap­peal­ing eth­i­cally to our ‘re­sponse-abil­ity’ in con­tem­po­rary po­lit­i­cal-au­thor­i­tar­ian con­texts. Schnei­der´s eth­i­cal view of ‘re­sponse-abil­ity’ is ex­pand­ing the field of per­for­mance stud­ies by el­e­vat­ing yet lev­el­ling the dif­fer­ences be­tween past and pre­sent, move­ment and stasis, act and (un-)con­scious be­hav­iour.

Re­becca Schnei­der is a pro­fes­sor of per­for­mance stud­ies at Brown Uni­ver­sity. She is the author of The Ex­plicit Body in Per­for­mance (l997), Per­form­ing Re­mains: Art and War in Times of The­atri­cal Reen­act­ment (2011), The­atre & His­tory (2014), and Remain (with Jussi Parikka, 2019).

She has au­thored over fifty essays and in­ter­views in the fields of per­for­mance stud­ies, media stud­ies, the­atre stud­ies, visual stud­ies, and gender stud­ies. She has also edited three spe­cial issues of TDR: The Drama Review, On Pre­car­ity and Per­for­mance (with Nicholas Ridout, 2012), New Ma­te­ri­al­ism and Per­for­mance (2015), and Social Re­pro­duc­tion and Per­for­mance (2018).