Writing & Performance

The evolution of text in performance takes many forms in the last half century: as dramatic literature, as fragment, as archive, as intertext, as poetry. While contemporary transformations in theatre have moved increasingly away from staging new plays in favor of collage-based work, performance in the visual arts has embraced language as a narrative mode, and dance has become both more theatrical and more text-oriented.

What are the issues that influence your thinking about writing and performance? How are they reflected in your process and the kind of work you do?

Juliette Mapp

In my dancing and choreography I seek a clarity of intention, even when I do not know exactly what my intention is. I hope that by stripping away layers of effort and tension in my body, and inside the performance space, I can move more consciously. As a result of that stripping away, I feel more freedom to add other elements, including text, into my dances. I have found that using text puts into relief some of the abstract questions that dancing brings to the surface. As words exit the body and enter the performance space, they help me uncover a layer of meaning for the audience, one that for me is embedded in movement. Writing text for a dance is a means of understanding why the dance exists. Writing activates different compositional tools. It also enlivens my process. Sometimes the dance reflects the text; other times the text contrasts the dance. How I choose to embellish or emphasize what I am saying with text adds an additional compositional tool that I relish using. The process of memorizing and performing text demands that I be even more present with the meanings of my work. It can push performances into a transcendent space as the audience engages with language and as the sounds of the words—and their meaning—reach the audience from a different part of my creative, physical body.

Theodora Skipitares

The text in my performance work has always come after the objects. As I look back on the things I made as a child, I see myself as a stitcher. My mother and her sisters were expert seamstresses. Either with a sewing machine, or a hand needle, I was always creating objects, mostly to wear. After a brief period as a costume designer in New York, I began making solo autobiographical performances, strongly influenced by the vibrant scene of visual performance art in SoHo in the mid-1970s. My performances featured handmade objects that were attached to a true story or a fragment of a story and had a connection to my body. Along the way, I began to make realistic representations of myself, about one-third life-size. These figures, which I called “little Theodoras,” started to take over the performance space, and soon I left the stage to become their director. What I didn’t realize immediately was that I had stumbled onto a kind of puppet performance.

Autobiography became less important to me, as I discovered that these “puppets” were innocent and neutral and therefore capable of telling the truth in a way that most actors couldn’t. They seemed a perfect match for documentary material, whether it was historical, scientific, or medical. The puppets in effect determined the texts, which were, not surprisingly, fragments of information, stitched together. I used a variety of puppet styles: shadow puppets, miniature toy theatre puppets, rod puppets, giant inflatable figures. My work continued in this way with found text for more than twenty years, until 2000.

Even though I have created twenty-three works, only the most recent ones are based on actual plays. When I began looking at the Greek texts, it was mostly odd fragments that interested me. Then, in 2004, when I studied Euripides’ Iphigenia, I decided to create a new...