Work on Paper

How does the drawing come into being? Does the drawing generate the movement for a performance or does the imagined performance generate the movement of the hand? The subject of drawing in relation to performance has been largely overlooked as an area of exploration in both theatre and visual studies, and neither has it been central to performance history or research. Due to the expanded numbers of visual artists, directors, performers, and choreographers now working in the fields of performance art, dance, and experimental theatre drawing has also increasingly become an element in the artistic process of many of them. If drawings were analyzed as part of performance-making, their study would make an important contribution to the enhancement of performance knowledge.

“In a drawing you take physical energy out of your body and put it onto a page,” is the way Kiki Smith describes the process. Enacting this transference in a notebook or in a studio is one approach, but drawing during performance commits the performer to embodiment in an entirely different context. Still, in both mediums the body is central, just as it is in the act of performance. It is possible to draw oneself into the performance or for the performer to be in, and to become, the drawing as the live act unfolds. The study of performance and drawing begins by exploring how this energy moves from act to gesture, from the body of the artist to the body of the performer. Questions of time and performance space raise a new set of questions in such instances.

A viewer who looks at a drawing focuses on the artist, but a viewer at a live event focuses on the performance. Looking at a drawing is trying to look into the mind of the artist. Where does the drawing begin and where does it end? What is it one sees in the intersection of performance and drawing, which is by nature process-oriented, experimental? Drawing is private, performance a public act. Drawing is a kind of performance imaginary. It can take the form of map-making, or notebook sketches and scribbles, or a collage of texts and images, or a notation, a diagram, a performance score. Drawings can be trance-like or ritualistic, even chaotic. Sometimes the mark making is a drawing on the body or a drawing of oneself into the performance. Is the body a pencil? Is the skin a piece of paper? Is a person a drawing?

The privacy of the drawing obscures the surety of whether the idea for the performance generates the sketch or the sketching on paper generates performance ideas. For the artist, moving from paper to the physicality of the performing body is to animate a line through time and space. Very little is known about the artistic process that develops a drawing from a work on paper to a completed performance. How is line related to motion? Is there a new meaning of portraiture in the drawn line?

The mystery of the action from thought to hand to paper, settling into the ephemerality of performance, is what lends majesty to the condition of presence. And in this ecstatic state both performer and viewer experience a privacy that is paradoxically only fulfilled in public space. Here, mind takes bodily form.