The felt sense of performance: affective meaning at the edge of words

ABSTRACT Created by Eugene Gendlin and Mary Hendricks, Thinking at the Edge (TAE) enables the articulation of meaning implicit in embodied experience, which in turn discloses the affective meaning of words (or topics), thus, empowering one to speak and think creatively from one’s felt knowledge. In this article, I present and analyse three TAE processes undertaken by Portuguese native speaker performers – Sónia Baptista, Maria Duarte, and Andrea Maciel – who have chosen to explore and expand the terms ‘performing’, ‘presence’, and ‘play’, respectively. Considering these terms from the felt sense of each performer’s culturally and aesthetically situated experience opens new ground to build a collaborative and affectively embodied vocabulary that can illuminate different approaches or lines of enquiry into some of the core concepts of theatre practice and performance studies. Based on these three cases, I argue that TAE is a stimulating tool to access the felt sense of live performance, thus contributing to the development of research on affect from a meaningful personal standpoint.