Performance is often labeled a disappearance. By the time it’s happening, it’s already done. The moment performed is always already in the past. My present performance has already happened. And sure, we can wax philosophical all day long about such a statement but it feels like it’s just another way to say that it’s really hard to talk about what performance is. Performance scholar Richard Schechner says that performance is “restored behavior,” that when we perform, we’re always performing that which has been performed before, albeit in a slightly different way, if for no other reason than the space and time has disappeared. In this way, performance is about bringing the past into the present. It’s about remembering. Now this remembering is often unconscious. When the President, for example, gives an inaugural address, he is very clearly calling on the performances of presidents past, restoring the genre of the address but putting his own flair on it. Now, there’s no doubt that the whole thing is about pomp and circumstance, but it is a pomp and circumstance that is American. In this framing of the event, we forget (as a public) that the restored behavior of past president’s is a restored behavior of British parliamentary procedure. Which is probably a restored behavior of something else, maybe from the vikings? Who knows. The point is that in this respect performance is a breaking. When the restored behavior is restored in a place and time that is so starkly different than its original (or most recently original) context, that performance is a break with the past. It is suggesting a new way to do things. But at the same time, it is still a restored behavior. We can never get rid of the precedent, we can only forget what it was or imagine it to have been something else. But at this point we’re talking about mythmaking and mythmaking is about pretending one thing happened when it was actually something else. When it’s hard enough to keep things straight the least we can do is acknowledge those breaks.
In a recent post here on t.a.g., chicken flava presented some of the work of John Cage. Cage is an expert at creating performances that break, but he is clear to point out that this break is never a total one. To break totally with the past would be to create something so unique that we wouldn’t know how to encounter it. The most we can expect from such a performance is boredom. To do something truly unique, to engage in a performative break, we must be able to draw on the past, i.e. the familiar, and make the familiar strange. Once strange, we can then see new possibilities that arise from the present. Flash mobs do this by challenging the way we encounter public space. David Byrne does this in the film True Stories. Watch it on youtube. And for your pleasure, I now present to you Dr. Vince LaCata who does this by turning his dissertation into a dance. Hear about it here. Enjoy it here:
Photo Credit: Dance with shadows
allow me to explain, through interpretive dance!
From a perspective of a cartoonist performance would be enhancing perceived reality (past, future and present) to eliminate the TWEENS and create stereotypical moments exaggerated to the max. Uh? Anyway, I know what I mean.
[...] do the same. Now you might say that talking about presence might be as pointless as talking about disappearance, and under normal conditions, I would probably agree with you. But Marina Abramovic is not normal [...]