TDR: The Drama Review

Returning to a formative moment in the discourse of performance studies with a glancing dialogue between Richard Schechner and Michael Goldman, this article traces a series of efforts by Benjamin Bennett, Herbert Blau, Elin Diamond, and Stanton Garner, among others, to seize the work of dramatic performance as performance and to develop a critical vocabulary that understands dramatic theatre as an encounter with writing rather than as a reinscription of the archive.

In May 2007, David Levine’s experimental performance in Brandenberg attracted international attention for its unique blending of endurance art, land art, concept art, site-specific performance, and traditional theatre. A key innovation was its challenge to the distinction drawn by Michael Kirby in the 1960s between the “matrixed” action of traditional theatre and the “nonmatrixed” action of the Happening. By creating a dramatic matrix for an actor placed in what is essentially a Happening, Levine has, in his terms, “short-circuited” this distinction.

Trauma studies and existing performance theory facilitate the exploration of the poetics of an indigenous music and dance form found in Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. The Highland Clearances is the background for this overlooked dance form that inscribes and records the unspeakable and unknowable. An interloping, performative autobiographical narrative further illustrates the way Cape Breton dance represents an archival “hauntopia” in the wake of the amnesiac and aphasiac fallout of mass trauma.

Chicago performance artist and educator Brian Jeffery staged Look Again 2002: Alaskan Landscapes in Transition, comprised of six site-specific performances and numerous related events. Like other performance art works at the turn of the 21st century, Look Again exemplifies a shift from an artist-centered conception of art to one that is more audience-centered.

For the past 10 years Seattle-based choreographer Pat Graney has directed “Keeping the Faith” at the Washington State Women’s Correctional Facility. The project provides participants with rare opportunities for self-expression and group cooperation, apparently serving the prison’s stated goal of rehabilitation; but it also offers possibilities for transgression as it extends freedom of movement to highly regulated bodies.

Feminist performance artist Deb Margolin is well known for her loquacious and witty performances. Most recently, however, her focus has been on the use of silence in her explorations of the failure of language in performance. In recent pieces such as Index to Idioms and O Yes I Will, Margolin challenges feminist ideas of absence as well as patriarchal standards of language through a reclamation of silence.

Deb Margolin and the late Hannah Wilke, along with other feminist artists, defiantly create fluid and intimate relationships between the self and the other in performance, and as such, create a space for us to see ourselves. Margolin and Wilke insist on the body in performance and find particular truths through the very personal experiences they reveal in their work. Both artists create a space for permeating the boundaries of identity; they ask only that we bear witness.

Claudia Orenstein reconsiders the notion of “entertainment for the whole family” via a puppetry-centered program that, by drawing on the power of performing objects, delves into the uncanny and fantastical to appeal to young minds, inventive artists, and adventurous adult spectators alike. Edward Scheer considers the aesthetics of disappearance within Australian performance artist Mike Parr’s most recent series of actions, Amerika, which involve extreme physical demands even as they posit the body as subject simultaneously to its own presence and absence.

Claudia Orenstein reconsiders the notion of “entertainment for the whole family” via a puppetry-centered program that, by drawing on the power of performing objects, delves into the uncanny and fantastical to appeal to young minds, inventive artists, and adventurous adult spectators alike. Edward Scheer considers the aesthetics of disappearance within Australian performance artist Mike Parr’s most recent series of actions, Amerika, which involve extreme physical demands even as they posit the body as subject simultaneously to its own presence and absence.