Written for Exeunt’s Performance Column
We can think of performance as a frame for disclosure, as opposed to a space of representation. In cinema, we embody experience through the gaze, perceiving it as a unitary event mediated through the screen. This has certainly impacted on our understanding of spectatorship- we perceive the live encounter as external to us, despite its lack of containment. Just consider the extent to which practitioners have tried to challenge this boundary, and relocate us within the theatrical experience, as opposed to outside of it. Our relationship to performance is fragmented, displaced by collectivity and constrained by cultural assumptions. If, in Deleuze’s words, art “is not a matter or reproducing or inventing forms, but of capturing forces”, why are we so concerned by labels as models of reduction of the experience of a performance? Does calling a piece of theatre ‘immersive’ suggest a particular mode of spectatorship? Liveness is not external, yet it seems that, in contemporary practice, the process of categorization of theatre and performance is constantly attempting to externalize and domesticate performance in all its manifestations.
The problem of labels and categories feels outdated at a time when hybrids provide far more space for discourse than the rigidity of traditional frameworks. This, in part, has to do with the fact that within contemporary culture, labels have come to limit our understandings of work instead of promote it, being the result of convoluted art histories and public misappropriations. Even more problematic is the fact that a significant area of contemporary performance culture is rendered literally invisible in the public realm simply due to the fact that discussions hide in various obscure sections of newspapers and blogs (inaccessible outside of specialized publications and niche sites), or are considered not relevant to aexisting frameworks.
If the art world has readily embraced live events, performance-based exhibitions, and interdisciplinary work, the theatre world has been far more reluctant to do so. The US has also been more open to these changes: publications like The Village Voice, New Yorker and even The New York Times attempt to cover a larger span of performance art in all its cross-disciplinary manifestations, and they dedicate a specific section of their publication for this purposes.
The question of just what distinguishes a work of theatre from a work of performance or the experimental from the avant-garde tends to get in the way of developing coherent ways of reading performance. Take, for example, the discussion stirred by Michael Billington’s recent overview of experimental theatre as part of his A-Z of Modern Drama. For one thing, the historical period being looked at is rendered unclear: Billington is providing a brief assessment of the contemporary experimental theatre landscape whilst referring precisely to modern readings of the field.
For Billington, experimental theatre has become apoliticized in contemporary culture: “what we are witnessing, I suspect, is the ‘institutionalisation’ of experiment in a way that minimises its threat.” He associates experimental theatre with developments in 20thcentury performance culture that steered away from naturalism; his definition of what constitutes radical work, as that positioned outside of the ‘mainstream’, is problematic in relation to what’s going on in experimental theatre now. After all, we’re talking about a label whose meaning is displaced by contemporary associations and implications, not an immutable, quantified form of theatre. As Chris Goode explained in the comments that followed Billington’s piece: “how do we recognize the experimental, given that, (..) the very last thing ‘experimental’ can be is a description of a particular aesthetic.” Andy Field also responded by saying that “talking of ‘experimental theatre’ is like trying to play a game in which everyone has their own very different set of rules and even the pitch itself is a palimpsest of contradictory markings.”
This isn’t merely a problem of definitions, it is a symptom of just how little attention mainstream criticism has paid to the development of performance as a field, and the implications this has on critical language itself. A similar problem was recently pointed out by Contemporary Performance Network pitching a discussion on exactly what industry giant Rose Lee Goldberg means when labelling Peforma11, a performance biennale she curates in New York, as “visual art performance”, a term eagerly appropriated by a New York Times journalist in her review of the biennale.
Indeed, what does visual art performance mean? For most people, absolutely nothing. That’s partly because it is a term attempting to displace authority into the hands of visual art, in regards to performance that is staged in galleries and museums. It’s both a sophism and a misrepresentation of performance in an attempt to carve out a clear context for discussion. This brings forward the question of exactly how can we make a growing area of performance visible without being reductionist?
The main issue remains on how to question the constant interchangeability of terms like experimental, avant-garde, immersive, intimate etc; terms that only hold meaning in specific contexts and limit the possibilities of work to mean and exist in different contexts at the same time. It is impossible to ignore just how easy it is to kill off the discussion surrounding a production simply by the vagueness of its label. Antony Gormley and Hofesh Schechter’s piece Survivor which recently played at the Barbican Theatre was mostly reviewed in the Dance section of most newspapers, probably because Shechter is most known for his work as a choreographer. Yet the piece barely featured any dance. Likewise, where would you place, for example , Forest Fringe’s upcoming season of work at the Gate Theatre without denigrating the individual performances with some ill-informed label? Where would you put public projects such as Performance Matters?
Part of the problem I suspect lies with the lack of an appropriate language for theatre criticism to articulate discussions of these forms of work, which might explain why they are so absent from mainstream media. Perhaps there’s also the potency of discourses occurring within the fields themselves; for example, the brilliant work done by the Live Art Development Agency in attempting to publicize discourses on performance, collaborating with both artists and writers in thinking about appropriate methodologies (you can read their online publication In Time here ) .
Yet the discussion of genres, forms and categories should be one dominated by possibility and an openness to question contemporary understandings, seeking to recontextualize and challenge common doxa instead of supporting its vagueness. If we consider work to not fit into standardized cultural frameworks, then we need to engage in a questioning of those frameworks.
In the past thirty years, the UK has seen a proliferation of performance through live events, exhibitions, festivals, community projects and interdisciplinary endeavours, formal collaborations that seek to relocate the performance paradigm in various sites whilst engaging in a wide range of cultural, social and economic dialogues. Should we not try to venture outside common theatrical routes – and tropes – in order to render these manifestations more visible to the public?
Tagged: Exeunt, Performance Column