Editorial

In this Views and Reviews, we feature a diverse complement of perspectives on recent performances and plays that point to the ways in which spectators’ engagements often undertake a dramaturgy of the work itself. These engagements can generate an invaluable archive that re-performs and re-enacts the work itself, placing our investments in the supposed singularity of the “event” or playtext into a critically productive kind of jeopardy.

Sydney Tyber continues this issue’s conversation on digital performance by asking questions prompted by witnessing Eva and Franco Mattes’ re-enactment of Marina Abramović’s Imponderabilia in Second Life. How does the hybrid Second Life entity of the self-cyborg-avatar, Tyber asks, trouble our oftentimes romantic privileging of “live” performance and the indelible “presence” of the performer as the uniquely charged domain of body-to-body affective exchange? Moving from a consideration of the digital archives of participant responses to Abramović’s MAI Prototype installation in Toronto’s Trinity Bellwoods Park in 2013 to her observations of the notional and what she calls “anticipatory affects” of the cyborg-avatar’s responses to Imponderabilia in Second Life, Tyber invites us to consider how live, embodied performance cannot be so neatly delimited from the digital as a discrete realm in which affect operates differently. These archives of digital performance expose “the limits,” in Amelia Jones’s words, “of what we can know about live art” (18).

In A Dance Tribute to the Art of Football, reviewed here by Daniel Evans, these often competing yet mutually imbricating discourses of the live and the mediatized, the embodied and the digitized, become part of an explicit choreographic vocabulary that comments both on the labour of the dancer’s—and athlete’s—body and on our “fragmented consumption,” as Evans says, of televised sport. Dancers use tableaux to capture the televisual language of sport that is re-enacted and repackaged in a narrative of freeze-frames and highlight reels, placing multiple modes of mediatized consumption into conversation with one another. In this age of advanced capitalism and digital reproduction, sport, much like live art, is a durational performance that is reproduced and re-enacted. As Jones argues, re-enactment “activates precisely the tension between our desire for the material (for the other’s body; for ‘presence’; for the ‘true event’) and the impossibility of ever fixing this in space and time” (19). It perhaps goes without saying that the impossibility of fixing the performer’s presence and the event itself into place perpetuates our desire to do so, as evidenced in the long lineups of people eager to lock eyes with Ambramović in the flesh in The Artist Is Present or get tickets to an FC game. In the midst of a veritable cultural—and cognitive—condition of reproductions, replays, and re-enactments, in which the present is always slipping through our fingers, there seems to be so much more at stake in our eagerness to say, “I was there.”

Thea Fitz-James’s examination of LEAR highlights the vocabularies of performance art that ran through Philip McKee’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear as part of Harbourfront’s 2013 World Stage performance series. In particular, McKee’s LEAR attempts to harness performance art’s investments in one-to-one, embodied exchanges between performer and spectator in order to call attention to the materiality of the aging female body in the role of Lear. The “strangeness” of a female body in the role of Lear “reveals the ideology behind our expectations,” Fitz-James argues, particularly about “what kind of female bodies appear onstage” (90). In a powerful coup de théâtre in which the house is closed off and the spectator faces Lear one-to-one in a re-enactment of Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece, Fitz-James considers how this localized re-enactment within a larger production engages in a productive feminist reading of the body politic that dissolves the power dynamics inherited in theatrical traditions, registered here through the aging body of the female Lear.

And finally we move from the one-to-one encounter between spectator and performer in LEAR to the one-to-one exchanges between artist...