I wanted to add something to our discussion about the meaning of the word performance:
My most immediate take on the term is related to how I perceive it to be replacing the word 'Theatre' in contemporary practice (at least in the UK and to some extent North America).
In April this year, I organised a panel called "On Theatrical Behaviour." The panel was in part about one venue's shift away from using the word 'theatre', opting to re-brand/re-imagine its annual 'Theatre Festival' calling it simply: Behaviour instead... In preparation for the panel, I asked Deborah Richardson-Webb, now head of performance pedagogy at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, if she could tell me a bit about why a course that she developed at the Academy, formerly called Contemporary Theatre Practice, had been renamed Contemporary Performance Practice. She shared with me a document she had written called: Troublesome Horses: Radical Performance Pedagogy in the Conservatoire. I thought I would share a paragraph from this document that addresses this semantic shift:
In the title of the Programme we chose to use the word ‘Performance’ not ‘Theatre’ in order to clarify its position in relation to the education of its students within the broadest field of performance practices. By ‘Performance’, it is understood that whilst drawing upon the tradition of British and European Theatre, the Programme seeks to address the wider phenomenon of performance in human cultures from ritual practices, through performance in everyday life to art-making processes. The Programme draws upon and synthesises a wide variety of disciplines and discourses including, improvisation, physical performance, writing for performance, voice, movement, visual art, feminist studies, gender studies, queer theory, semiotics, ethology, pedagogy, media and popular culture theory and cultural studies.
This seems relevant to the title of our course as well.
Performance for me, in part, means a shift in thinking about/experiencing/making contemporary 'theatre'--it is in some respect a way of distinguishing the old from the new.
Sorry we got cut off, it would have been nice to toast the end of the course together. Thank you for all your contributions and responses, and happy week-end and beginning of course for some of you, lets keep this conversation going...
The notions of medium, image and body and the possibilities of theatre (as a site of transformation) .
Images happen or are negotiated between bodies and media. - Belting
So the three parameters in reception and circulation which are at stake (according to Belting) are:
1. Image(s) --> do not exist by themselves; they happen/ take place via transmission. Therefore image is framed by the terms:
2. Medium the agent by which images are transmitted and
3. Body meaning the performing or perceiving body on which images depend.
How is this important for theatrical performance? Well when brought together in the theatrical space, these parameters can “swap places” meaning when the triangle is physically put together it appears as a non-static exploration in the splitting up of both reception and circulation process, it exposes the mechanisms of medial distribution, of power and violence in our highly mediated society. It is a way of overcoming the complicated relation between the what and how of an image. (The what of an image being what the image serves as an image or to what it relates as an image is steered by the how, shaped by the visual medium in which an image resides). As we all saw with the GGP performance the “device”/”medium” became an ACTOR/(the IMAGE itself)
What striked me this week, during the reflection upon Kati’s lecture, was that this insight in visualization of circulation and perception processes/mechanisms, in theatre as a sight of transformation can not only be explored on a metatheatrical and scholarly level (analysis), it is as much a usable concept in the creative modality as a tool/strategy. There is action. Theatre being part of and present in the world, transformation and reflection.
1 : a device or system consisting usually of a synchronized radio transmitter and receiver that emits radio waves and processes their reflections for display and is used especially for detecting and locating objects (as aircraft) or surface features (as of a planet)
We thought it was interesting to think of research in term of a radar because a radar is a sound that you send off, and then you get back a message that you have to interpret. It's a process that you do blindly, you can't see what you're looking for or fuly comprehend it, but only get a sense of it through the feedback of this signal. As well as hearing radio waves you can feel them so it involves a process of feeling with your body. This helps us imagine what it means to do embodieid research or practice. It is a more sophisiticated and nuanced sense of research than a conceptualization of it as re-search, looking through a body of established knowledge and trying to create something "new". It destabalizes the Western idea of sight as the dominant and most trustworthy sense in gaining knowledge and truth about the world, as in "seeing is believing" or "I saw it with my own eyes."
In some sense the idea of radar differentiates performance scholarship from scientific inquiry because the latter refers to something that is quantitative, where you can "see" the results. But in another sense, the concept of radar points to performance research as scientific inquiry because it is a method of exploration in unknown territory that yields unpredictable results.
The performance of a book
"One must want to experience the great problems with one's body and one's soul. I have at all times written my writings with my whole heart and soul; I do not know what purely intellectual problems are." (Nietzsche 12)
Another part of Hanna´s lecture that we picked up on was how passionate she was about the modality of curation, we especially liked her diagram of over-lapping circles in marine hues that denoted how the modalities of scholarly research and practice are centrally mediated by curation.
We got to thinking about one ostensibly scholarly medium - the academic book - and how (especially in performance studies) it is creatively curated and performed. In the following excerpts from the introductions to books by Diana Taylor, Rustom Barucha and James Clifford, the authors express their curatorial strategies, or the ways that they have have chosen to perform their authorial role.
In the paragraphs below, you will see some different approaches: Bharucha describes his book as enacting a linear "theatrical journey" while Clifford envisions his book as a series of criss-crossing paths, or "collage."Taylor talks about her book as being a series of conflicting voices and perspectives.These are all approaches to performing research and problematising the fact that in favour of the "objective", "academic" voice, scholarly writing is often not transparent about the curatorial modality that mediates their work.
"Some readers may be somewhat dismayed by the diverse 'styles' of these essays, which include autobiographical interventions, fictions, excerpts from a dramaturg's log, invocations, switches between the first and third person, polemics and even a letter.All I can say is that these 'styles' were necessary for what I had to say.They enabled me to find my voice as a writer where more academic essays with all their constraints and seeming 'objectivity' would have prevented me from representing myself...I would be perfectly happy if my book could be read as a theatrical journey, beginning with 'Points of Departure', leading to 'Transition' and finally proceeding to a state of 'Returning', that continues." (Bharucha 9)
"The essays gathered here are paths, not a map.As such,they follow the contours of a specific intellectual and institutional landscape, the terrain I tried to evoke by juxtaposing texts addressed to different ocassions and by not unifying the form and style of my writing.The book contains extended scholarly articles, supported and argued in conventional ways. It aslo includes a lecture, a book review, and several essays that respond to specific contexts of cultural display - museums and heritage sites - in immediate, sometimes frankly subjective ways. Experiments in travel writing and poetic collage are interspersed with formal essays. By combining genres I register, and begin to historicize, the book's composition - it's different audience and occasions."
Clifford 11-12)
"Because it is impossible for me to separate my scholarly and political conundrums from who I am, the essays in this book reflect a range of tone and personal interventions in the discussions. The first three chapters, particularly map out the theoretical questions that inform the chapters that follow; How does expressive behaviour (performance) transmit cultural memory and identity? Would a Hemispheric perspective expand the resitrictive scenarios and paradigms set in motion by centuries of colonialism? Although the theoretical implications are no less pressing, the tone in the reminaing chapters becomes increasingly personal. As my reflections come out of my own role as participant in, or witness to the events I describe, I feel compelled to acknowledge my involvement and sense of urgency. And, as I argue throughout, we learn and transmit knowledge through embodied action, through cultural agency, and by making choices. Performance, for me, functions as an episteme, a way of knowing, not simply as an object of analysis. By situating myself as one more social actor in the scenarios I analyse, I hope to position my personal and theoretical investment in the arguments. I chose no to snmooth out the differences in tone, but rather let them speak to the tensions between who I am and what I do."
(Taylor xvi)
Bharucha, Rustom. Theatre and the World. Routledge, 1990.
Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Harvard University Press, 1997.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus spoke Zarathustra: a book for everyone and no one. London:Penguin Books, 1969.
Taylor, Diana. The Arcvhive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Duke University Press, 2003.
