The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics (review)

Artists hurt themselves purposefully on stage, they spend days with a wild coyote in a gallery, they stage well-known plays with actors ostensibly physically ill-equipped to portray characters, or they invite the audience to participate in multiple ways. Since the 1960s artists increasingly do not produce stable artifacts; instead, they question the borders between reality and fiction, they invite the audience to be co-participants and force them to question how theater and performance can make meaning. It is for this so-called performative turn in the arts that Erika Fischer-Lichte provides a comprehensive approach for its analysis in her recently translated book with the shorter, original German title, Ästhetik des Performativen (2004). Fischer-Lichte, one of Germany's most renowned theater and performance studies scholars, continues and expands in this book on her extensive research on notions of the performative, questions of ritual, and the role of the audience (for example, Fischer-Lichte 2005). Despite her clearly interdisciplinary approach, she brings a distinct theater studies perspective to the performative turn in the arts, and thus provides the English-speaking reader with a central European perspective on debates concerning performance and performance theory as they were mostly developed in the United States. She engages, questions, and expands these debates through the discussion of numerous examples of performance art from Germany, as well as from international theater, performance, and visual art.

While the English subtitle of her book (A New Aesthetics) might suggest that Fischer-Lichte argues for a new form of performance art and aesthetics, she rather sees her task as showing that the performative turn, both in the arts and in scholarship, can be dated back at least to the beginning of the twentieth century. She demonstrates the parallel and interdependent development of performance art and its theory. For instance, in Germany the birth of theater studies is closely linked to a new form of theater, most prominently recognized in the mise-en-scène of the influential director Max Reinhardt (for example, King Oedipus [1910] or Oresteia [1911]). Reinhardt's "events" inspired Max Herrmann, the prominent founder of German theater studies, to conceptualize theater as distinct from literary studies, using the term "performance" (Aufführung) to signify the difference. It is from Hermann's terminology that Fischer-Lichte starts her discussion and development of an aesthetic theory capable of capturing the characteristics of art practices that resist easy interpretation and that focus instead on the experience of events and sensations, on process over product, and what Fischer-Lichte calls the "autopoetic loop" between performers and audiences.

As such, this book is a highly interesting addition to the many publications within the North American performance debate. Fischer-Lichte draws on, combines, and questions the well established theories of Turner, Butler, Austin, Schechner, Auslander, and many more. But she is not affected by the separation or even antagonism between performance and theater studies that mark North American scholarship, where the focus on performance has more likely developed by either focusing on events not clearly marked as theater or those challenging conventional theatrical forms (see Jackson 2004). The insightful introduction to the English edition by Marvin Carlson also helps to elucidate this crucial difference and to contextualize The Transformative Power of Performance for the Anglophone audience, who might not be so familiar with the German theater scene. However, some of Carlson's statements (for instance, that the antagonism between theater studies and performance studies in Germany never existed, or that theater goers in Germany will associate theater more generally with "innovative, controversial and artistically challenging productions" [5]) seem slightly too optimistic and overlook differences within the varied German theater (studies) field.

Despite the theoretical focus, this book is anything but a dry and abstract academic study because Fischer-Lichte consistently employs an inductive approach, deriving her terms, questions, and categories from a variety of examples (Joseph Beuys, Frank Castorf, Guillermo Gomez-Pena). This...