Bonnie Marranca: The Performance Marvelous (p. 2)

6. I had the occasion recently to collect the interviews and dialogues with American performers, playwrights, composers, video artists, and critics from more than two decades of Performing Arts Journal, which I co-founded in 1976 and continue to edit, for publication in a book entitled Conversations on Art and Performance. Many of the topics of these contributions anticipated contemporary thought in ways that now seem prophetic. Even subjects that once were the provenance of art, lately have come to the forefront of American social thought and cultural policy. What surprised me were that in so many of these conversations the artists and thinkers referred to as touchstones of ideas and ideals are repeated over and over. In theatre: Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Stanislavski, Pirandello, Stein, Brecht, Beckett, Artaud, Genet, Grotowski, Brook, Williams, Shepard; in visual art: expressionism, surrealism, Duchamp, Picasso, Pollock; in music: Mozart, Wagner, Stravinsky, Weill, Boulez, Cage; in dance: Balanchine, Graham, Cunningham, Judson Dance Theatre; in philosophy: Marx, Freud, Wittgenstein, Foucault; in letters: Thoreau, Rousseau, Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Barthes. And always, the Greeks and Shakespeare. In any given period serving as a context for discussion, a marked consensus flows around what is important to speak of, and why. Remarkably, and for the most part, traditionalists and avant-gardists, I learned, claim the same artistic heritage. What is also apparent is how much artists learn from each other and how essential aesthetic values and their own work processes are to them. In every sense, the historical continuum their chosen art form inhabits still retains its significance. If the Western canon has been under assault in the university and in arts institutions, the artists themselves unashamedly declare allegiance to surprisingly stable canons.

7. And, for all the theoretical issues circulating around us, artists and intellectuals, inspired by their constant exposure to art, are largely oblivious to it, educating themselves, as always, in artworks. What is the nature of the performance act? Where does language reside? Performers are still struggling to understand the ecstasy of presence, writers want desperately to live inside words, and everyone is concerned with the varieties of Time.

8. What is it that they speak of? In the early years of PAJ major preoccupations were consciousness and process, the potentiality of performance space, research and experimentation, the divorce of literary and theatrical culture and the alienation of theatre from intellectual life. There was talk of the decline of playwriting and the stultification of regional theatres, discomfort with the notion of the "theatrical" in art and theatre worlds, and excitement at the appearance of performance art. There were plenty of inquiries: What is performance space? How does one see? Why is acting not the same as performing? Over the years the conversations turned from space to text and play to fragment, from the modernist heritage to postmodernism, from group to solo, from art forms to arts funding, from the situation of the object to subject positions, from process to pedagogy, from art to culture. Power, representation, transgression, violence, ritual, gender, race, autobiography, censorship, and the critiques of representation, the image, and the canon were now the subjects that filled new dictionaries of ideas.

9. At the center of thought: the palpable body, the mediated voice. When is a man a woman? When is the body a text? The emphasis shifted from experience to interpretation, from art to theory, from the impersonal to the political, from high culture to pop, from invention to anger. Increasingly, performance space came to be regarded as public space and the individual as social construct. Artists were called "cultural workers" or "activists" and critics considered their writing "performing." The body, once celebrated as the site of pleasure and freedom, was now analyzed as a repository of disease, pain, death, and contested being. These are powerful themes which raise disturbing epistemological questions about the ever-expanding lyric of performance and aging avant-garde.

10. Representations of the body reveal all the recent upheavals in attitude towards myth, history, culture, and politics. In recent decades, sweeping social movements, a changing economy, AIDs and other health crises, ecological controversies, technological advancement, and the globalization of all manner of human activity in a post-communist world have left no one unperturbed.
(cont'd)