After Live: Possibility, Potentiality, and the Future of Performance by Daniel Sack (review)

Daniel Sack's well-organized book has a beginning, middle, and an end. As in Aristotle's Poetics, the beginning is not in itself necessarily after anything else, but it has naturally something else after it. After Live begins with the vanishing point of military intelligence according to Donald Rumsfeld, whose foreclosed epistemology of the Iraq War has been adapted into free verse by Hart Seely: "But there are also unknown unknowns, / The ones we don't know / We don't know" (2). Starting with Rumsfeld's evacuated ground zero, which Sack later confesses partakes of a "deeply conservative and authoritarian potentiality" (189), stimulates his appetite for the imaginative excitement of unlimited potentiality itself, however nihilistic, un-disappointed by the buzzkill of mere possibility. After Live perforce ends with that which is itself naturally after something else, as its necessary or usual Aristotelian consequent, but which has nothing else after it: "the Last Frontier," Sack sums up, is the empty landscape in which Franz Kafka's unfinished novel, Amerika: The Missing Person, ends with its narrator's clairvoyant vision, hallucinated in the heart of the badlands, of "a poster announcing that a mysterious enterprise, the The Nature Theater of Oklahama (sic.)," is seeking a Vegas-like glitz-blemish on the cratered face of the state that Kafka names but cannot spell (196). But then at the very end of After Live, an apocalyptic tornado, caught on video, sweeps even that all away: "Here is a performance," Sack concludes, "of pure expenditure and absolute renewal, where the potentiality of a means is fully taken up and fully exhausted with every step" (200).

The heart of After Live is in the middle—that which comes naturally after something and before something else. While Samuel Beckett makes obligatory appearances, the real Muse of naysaying potentiality in this book at its most brilliant is Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener. By saying that he prefers not to do certain things, tasks that he will not name, Bartleby forecloses possibility but affirms potentiality. Sack gives Melville's passive-aggressive protagonist a grand role in his scheme, while reserving an even grander one for himself. Bartleby "emerges as a kind of Virgil," guiding Sack's Dante "through the abysses of potentiality" (18). The artworks that Bartleby leads Sack to behold and contemplate represent many media and genres, but they have one thing in common. They all try to hold still as objects but succumb to the "embodied potentiality" of motion, even when movement is "gagged," because, as Sack sees things, "performance thinks differently than philosophy and literature" (19). In the five chapters that follow from the usefully schematized introduction, Sack turns first to "Dramatic Possibility" in the plays of Caryl Churchill and Will Eno and theories of action and character from Aristotle to Konstantin Stanislavski. As theatre and drama give way to performance art, however, possibility, which by nature narrows down to specific psychological choices (ask any acting teacher), yields to potentiality, which opens wide to embrace metaphysical abstractions. Giving Sack an instance of open-ended potentiality in performance—as his touchstone Bartleby does repeatedly and the artists he chooses to present do singly and cumulatively—is like giving a Greek a right angle. He devotes the first of the central chapters of After Live to "Withholding Potentiality," with the eponymous scrivener morphing from Melville's narrated character into dancer-choreographer Didier Théron's Bartleby (2006), which Sack evokes in a passage of exceptionally precise beauty and kinesthetic sensibility (74–76). From withholding he moves to "Beholding Potentiality," making a thoughtful excavation of Minimalism in which he buries Michael Fried, and then, at last, to "Actualizing Potentiality," which begins with a surprising but illuminating account of Edward Gordon Craig's scenic art as prolegomenon to a sustained reading of Romeo Castellucci and the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio. Like Raphael's Transfiguration, which After Live reproduces...