THE PERFORMANCE MARVELOUS
BONNIE MARRANCA
1. The
performance culture of America transforms everything into some form
of actor-spectacle equation. Can one differentiate any longer between
an installation, a theatre set, a window display or interior design?
In Soho, my Manhattan neighborhood, the fluidity of spaces is borne
out in designer clothing boutiques, with their minimalist sculptured
lines and digital attractions, and the big glass windows of its restaurants,
where those dining are simultaneously looking out and being looked
at, in a new kind of interface. Even all the gallery- and museum-
going seems another form of window shopping, adding a new spin to
the notion of cultural production.
2. One of
the most fascinating developments in the triumph of the urban sensibility
is the celebration of the individual as a staging ground of multiple
decentered selves, a work in progress, as it were. This is it means
to be "contemporary." Call it the performance marvelous. If at emotionally-heightened
moments people used to describe their lives as being like a film,
now the same situation is framed within the context of performance.
The difference is this: in the film metaphor, a person described him
or herself as a "character," which denotes someone who is part of
a larger narrative. In the theatrical scenario, one sees oneself as
a "performer," signaling that there is no narrative context, only
a repertoire of morphing positions. A significant development in the
entertainment and communications industries is to blur the distinctions
between performers and spectators in the new democracy of spectacle.
If once all the arts aspired to music, today art and culture long
for the state of performance. Performance has become an essential
point of reference, as it contributes increasingly to the analysis
of culture, and, at the individual level, redefines itself as a medium
of self-empowerment.
3. How is
one to sort out the various meanings generated by the concept of "performance"?
Neither public nor academic discourse differentiates with any degree
of refinement between performance as an ontology and performance as
gestural attitude, or performance in social space and performance
on the stage. The word "performance," then, is used interchangeably
to describe actors playing characters or those doing performance art.
It is also used to characterize everyday human behavior, ritual or
social interaction. In somewhat of a historical paradox, the often-scorned
actor is now the symbolic figure of liberation.
4. The great
freedom everyone can agree upon in America is the freedom to make
yourself up, to be self-made. Role-playing, as an act of self-creation,
has the power to turn oneself into a work of art. Intriguingly, the
cultural turn that joins the aesthetic realm to the public realm has
made representation into a rights issue: every performing body is
now a legislative body. In this sense, performance can be viewed as
a form of speech. The performance condition to which American culture
now seemingly aspires holds the promise of transformation and imagination,
demonstrating that this merging of bourgeois mentality with the protean
yearnings of the artist link modernity and its worship of subjectivity
to the mass cultural values of democratic pluralism.
5. Role-playing
and performance acts allow one to create any number of new images
of oneself, in effect to rewrite one's life, and to reshape reality
at will. But, looked at from another perspective, the individual who
is unable to break through to an inner self is fated to recast him-
or herself in the image of what is socially sanctioned behavior and
opinion. Roles, performances, the image, the mask, the mistaking of
the celebrity for the artist--these are large themes to grapple with.
Some of them have been with us for hundreds of years. The idea of
the theatrum mundi has been expanded to incomprehensible proportions.
There is much to be learned from the problematic and profound nature
of performance, especially its philosophical implications. The freedom,
even euphoria, of self-willed performance acts may be inherent in
democracy, but it has led to the cultivation of fascism as well. Twentieth-century
history has shown that societies are drawn to theatrical expression
at moments of profound identity crisis and myth-making. One of our
tasks might be to understand the differences between the performing
self on the street and the performer in the theatre. Now, we must
add the performer in cyberspace. How should we consider the performing
body in comparison to the body of a mediated presence, or the no-body
of a virtual performer, with regard to the condition of "action,"
theatre's traditional modus operandi? What are the differences between
social reality and theatrical reality, the varying conditions of the
real, the performative, the virtual; representation and reproduction?
In the contexts of the ontological, social, and digital, what is performance
to being and we to it?
(cont'd)
