Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Modern Drama, Volume 25, Number 1, Spring 1982, pp. 170-181 (Article)
Depending on one's choice of experts , theatre today can be divided into two
different currents which I shall emphasize here by referring to a remark of
Annette Michelson's on the performing arts that strikes me as particularly
relevant to my concern:
There are, in the contemporary renewal of perfonnance modes, two basic and diverging
impulses which shape and animate its major innovations. The first, grounded in the
idealist extensions of a Christian past, is mytbopoeic in its aspiration. eclectic in its
forms, and constantly traversed by the dominant and polymorphic style which
constitutes the most tenacious vestige of that past: expressionism. Its celebrants are: for
theater. Artaud, Grotowski , for film, Mumau and Brakhage, and for the dance,
Wigman. Graham. The second, consistently secular in its commitment to objectifica-
tion, proceeds from Cubism and Constructivism; its modes are analytic and its
spokesmen are: for theater, Meyerhold and Brecht, for film , Eisenstein and Snow, for
dance, Cunningham and Rainer ,1
invoked by Artaud; a theatre of cruelty and violence, of the body and its drives,
of displacement and "disruption,'" a non-narrative and non-representational
theatre. 1 should like to analyse this experience of a new genre in hopes of
revealing its fundamental characteristics as well as the process by which it
works. My ultimate objective is to show what practices like these, belonging to
the limits of theatre, can tell us about theatricality and its relation to the actor
and the stage.
Of the many characteristics of performance, I shall point to three that, the
diversity of practices and modes notwithstanding, constitute the essential
foundations of all performance. They are first, the manipulation to which
performance subjects the performer's body - a fundamental and indispensable
element of any performing act; second, the manipulation of space, which the
performer empties out and then carves up and inhabits in its tiniest nooks and
crannies; and finally , the relation that performance institutes between the artist
and the spectators, between the spectators and the work of art, and between the
work of art and the artist.
a) First, the manipulation of the body. Performance is meant to be a physical
accomplishment, so the performer works with his body the way a painter does
with his canvas. He explores it, manipulates it, paints it, covers it, uncovers it,
freezes it, moves it, cuts it, isolates it, and speaks to it as if it were a foreign
object. It is a chameleon body, a foreign body where the subject's desires and
repressions surface. This has been the experience of Hermann Nitsch, Vito
Acconci, and Elizabeth Chitty. Performance rejects all illusion, in particular
theatrical illusion originating in the repression of the body's "baser" elements,
and attempts instead to call attention to certain aspects of the body - the face,
gestural mimicry, and the voice - that would normally escape notice. To this
end, it turns to the various media - telephoto lenses , still cameras, movie
cameras, video screens, television - which are there like so many microscopes
to magnify the infinitely small and focus the audience's attention on the limited
physical spaces arbitrarily carved out by the performer's desire and transformed
into imaginary spaces, constituting a zone where his own emotional flows and
fantasies pass through. These physical spaces can be parts of the performer's
own body magnified to infinity (bits of skin, a hand, his head, etc.), but they can
also be certain arbitrarily limited, natural spaces that the performer chooses to
wrap up and thus reduce to the dimensions of manipulable objects (cf. Christo's
experiments with this technique').
The body is made conspicuous; a body in pieces, fragmented and yet one, a
body perceived and rendered as a place of desire, displacement, and
ftuctuation, a body the performance conceives of as repressed and tries to free
- even at the cost of greater violence. Consider, for example, the intentionally
provocative scenes where Acconci plays on stage with his various bodily
products . Such demonstrations, which are brought to the surface more or less
violently by the performer, are presented to the Other's view, to the view of
others, in order that they may undergo a collective verification. Once this
exploration of the body, and therefore of the subject, has been completed, and
once certain repressions have been brought to light, objectified, and repre-
sented, they are frozen under the gaze of the spectator, who appropriates them
as a form of knowledge. This leaves the performer free to go on to new acts and
new performances .
For this reason, some performances are unbearable; those of Nitsch, for
example, which do violence not only to the performer (in his case, a violence
freely consented to), but also to the spectator who is harassed by images that
both violate him and do him violence.' The spectator has the feeling that he is
taking part in a ritual that combines all possible transgressions - sexual and
physical, real and staged; a ritual bringing the performer back to the limits of the
subject constituted as a whole; a ritual that, starting from the performer's own
"symbolic," attempts to explore the hidden face of what makes him a unified
subject: in other words, the "semiotic" or" chora" haunting him.6 Yet this is not
a return to the divided and silent body of the mother, such as Kristeva sees in
Artaud, but instead a march ahead towards the dissolution of the subject, not in
explosion, scattering, or madness - which are other ways of returning to the
origin - but in death. Performances as a phenomenon worked through by the
death drive: this comparison is not incidental. It is based on an extensive,
conscious practice, deliberately consented to: the experience of a body
wounded, dismembered, mutilated, and cut up (if only by a movie camera: cf.
Chitty's Demo Model), a body belonging to a fully accepted lesionism. 7
The body is cut up not in order to negate it, but in order to bring it back to life
in each of its parts which have, each one, become an independent whole. (This
process is identical to Bufiuel's in Un Chien andalou, when he has one of the
characters play with a severed hand on a busy road.) Instead of atrophying, the
body is therefore enriched by all the part-objects that make it up and whose
richness the subject learns to discover in the course of the performance. These
part-objects are privileged, isolated , and magnified by the performer as he
studies their workings and mechanisms, and explores their under-side, thereby
presenting the spectators with an experience in vitro and in slow motion of what
usually takes place on stage.
b) First the manipulation of the body, then the manipulation ofspace: there is
a functional identity between them that leads the performer to pass through
these places without ever making a definitive stop. Carving out imaginary or
real spaces (cf. Acconci's Red Tapes), one moment in one place and the next
moment in the other, the performer never settles within these simultaneously
physical and imaginary spaces, but instead traverses, explores, and measures
them, effecting displacements and minute variations within them. He does not
occupy them, nor do they limit him: he plays with the performance'space as if it
were an object and turns it into a machine "acting upon the sense organs. ,,'
Exactly like the body, therefore, space becomes existential to the point of
Performance and Theatricality 173
ceasing to exist as a setting and place. It no longer surrounds and encloses the
performance, but like the body, becomes part of the performance to such an
extent that it cannot be distinguished from it. It is the performance. This
phenomenon explains the idea that performance can take place only within and
for a set space to which it is indissolubly tied.
Within this space, which becomes the site of an exploration of the subject,
the performer suddenly seems to be living in slow motion. Time stretches out
and dissolves as "swollen, repetitive, exasperated" gestures (Luciano Jnga Pin)
seem to be killing time (cf. the almost unbearable slow motion of some of
Michael Snow's experiments): gestures that are multiplied and begun again and
again ad infinitum (cf. Aceonci's Red Tapes) , and that are always different,
split in two by the camera recording and transmitting them as they are being
carried out on stage before our eyes (cf. Chitty). This is Derrida' s diJferance
made perceptible. From then on, there is neither past nor future, but only a
continuous present- that of the immediacy of things, of an action taking place.
These gestures appear both as a finished product and in the course of being
carried out, already completed and in motion (cf. the use of cameras): gestures
that reveal their deepest workings and that the performer executes only in order
to discover what is hidden underneath them (this process is comparable to
Snow's camera filming its own tripod) . And the performance sbows this gesture
over and over to the point of saturating time, space, and the representation with
it - sometimes to the point of nausea. Nothing is left but a kinesics of gesture.
Meaning - all meaning - bas disappeared.
Performance is the absence of meaning. This statement can be easily
supported by anyone coming out of the theatre. (We need think only of the
audience's surprise and anger with the first "stagings" of the Living Theatre, or
with those of Robert Wilson or Richard Foreman.) And yet, if any experience is
meaningful , without a doubt it is that of performance. Performance does not
aim at a meaning, but rather makes meaning insofar as it works right in those
extremely blurred junctures out of which the subject eventually emerges. And
performance conscripts this subject both as a constituted subject and as a social
subject in order to dislocate and demystify it.
Performance is the death of the subject. We just spoke of the death drive as
being inscribed in performance, consciously staged and brought into play by a
set of freely intended and accepted repetitions . This death drive, which
fragments the body and makes it function like so many part-objects, reappears
at the end of the performance when it is fixed on the video screen. Indeed, it is of
interest to note that every performance ultimately meets the video screen,
where the demystiJied subject is frozen and dies . There, performance once
again encounters representation, from which it wanted to escape at all costs and
which marks both its fulfilment and its end.
c) In point of fact, the artist's relation to his own performance is no longer
one of an actor to his role, even if that role is his actual one, as the Living
174 JOSETTE FtRAL
It seems to me that all of us here are working on material, rearranging it so that the
resultant performance more accurately reflects Dot a perception of the world - but the
rhythms of an ideal world of activity, remade, the better in which to do the kind of
perception we each would like to be doing.
We are, then, presenting the audience with objects of a strange sort, that can only be
savored if the audience is prepared to establish new perceptual habits - habits quite in
conflict with the ones they have been taught to apply at classical perfonnance in order to
be rewarded with expected gratifications. In classical performance, the audience learns
that if they allow attention to be led by a kind of childish, regressive desire-for-sweets,
the artist will have strategically placed those sweets at just the "crucial" points in the
piece where attention threatens to climax.9
This technique accounts for the "selective inattention" that Richard Schechner
speaks of in Essays on Performance. W No more than the spectator, though, is
the performer implicated in the performance. He always keeps his viewing
rights. He is the eye, a substitute for the camera that is filming, freezing, or
slowing down, and he causes slides, superpositions, and enlargements with a
space and on a body that have become the tools of his own exploration.
In our work, however, what's presented is not what's "appealing" (the minute
something is appealing it's a reference to the past and to inherited "taste") - but rather
what has heretofore not been organized by the mind into recognizable gestalts; every-
thing that has heretofore "escaped notice." And the temptation each of us fights, I think,
is to become prematurely "interested" in what we uncover. II
This situation is all the more difficult for the spectator since performance,
caught up as it is in an unending series of often very minor transformations,
escapes formalism . Having no set form , every performance constitutes its own
genre, and every artist brings to it, according to his background and desires,
subUy different shadings that are his alone: Trisha Brown's performances lean
towards the dance, Meredith Monk's towards music. Some, however, tend in
Perlonnance and Theatricality 175
If one judges from everything that has thus fat been said about perlonnance, it
certainly seems difficult to ascertain the relationship between theatre and
perlonnance. And if we turn to the statements of certain perlormers, that
relationship would even seem to be, of necessity, one of exclusion. Michael
Fried writes to that effect: "theatre and theatricality ate at Wat today, not simply
with modernist painting (or modernist painting and sculpture), but with art as
such - and to the extent that different atts can be described as modernist, with
modernist sensibility as such."" Fried sets forth his atgument in two patts:
I) The success, even the survival. o/the arts has come increasingly to depend on their
ability to defeat theatre .
NOTES
I Annette Michelson, "Yvonne Rainer. Part One: The Dancer and the Dance,"
Art/orum, 12 (January 1974),57.
2 RoseLee Goldberg, Performance: Live Art, 19D9 to the Present (New York, 1979).
3 Luciano Inga-Pin says this in his preface to the photo album on performance,
Perfortnllllces, Happenings, Actions, Events, Activities, Instalilltions (padua.
1970).
180 JOSETTE FERAL
space wu generally empty except for intcnnissioo. But increasingly as the night went on people came
to the space and stayed there speaking to friends, taking a break. from the performance, to loop oot of
the opera, later to re-enter. About half the audience left the BAM before the perfonnance was over,
but lhose who remained, like repeated siftings of flour, were finer and finer examples of Wilson fans :
the audience sorted itself out until those of us who stayed for the whole opera shared not onJy the
txperieoce of Wilson's work but the experience of experiencing it.