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Perfonning the Self MARVIN CARLSON A distinction between the identity of an actor, with his or her own personal experience and history, and the role or the character taken on by that actor, with its own experiences and history within the fictive world of the drama seems fundamental to the operations of the theatre. Among the various minimalist definitions of theatre that have from time to time been advanced, one of my favorites is from Eric Bentley's The Life of the Drama: "A impersonates B while C looks on.'" Simple as this formulation is, it connects two of the functions normally considered fundamental to the theatre experience, the taking on of a fictive "other" persona by the actor and the necessity of an audience . In recent years, however, a type of performance has gained prominence which seems to challenge this basic formula by collapsing into a unity two of its three terms. This is autobiographical performance - where instead of creating a character or assuming a rol. e in a dramatic structure, the actor presents or seems to present personal reminiscence, anecdote or opinion. Here, it appears, "A impersonates A while C looks on." Such performance often challenges traditional assumptions about the relationship in theatre between the conventional concepts of character, role, and identity. It does not seem surprising that an interest in autobiographical performance would have arisen in the contemporary theatre, in a society with a passionate concern with the self, self-expression, self-fulfillment, and the relation of the self to society. Autobiographical performance was certainly not unknown in earlier periods; totally original manifestations are extremely rare in the theatre . Actors appearing as themselves on stage can in fact be traced far back in theatre history, and not simply in the common and familiar practice of providing prologues and curtain speeches "out of character." In I 276 Adam de la Halle appeared in p~opria persona, along with several of his Arras friends and neighbors, in his comedy Le leu de La Feuillee, and persons appearing as themselves were a fairly commoh feature of nineteenth-century popular enterModem Drama, 39 (1996) 599 600 MARVIN CARLSON tainment. One notable example was William F.Cody ("Buffalo Bill") who played himself in countless stage and later film reenactments of his scouting days and.fights with the Indians.' If autobiographical performance is not a new phenomenon. however. modem interest - in how the self is constructed. how it is displayed to others. and how it relates to social and cultural forces - has given to such performance a new significance and a new range of meanings. Although now widely recognized as an important part of so-called performance art (indeed for many people the most typical type of such activity). the development of autobiographical work within the modem performance tradition has been a complicated and contested one. When the theory and practice of modem performance art was being developed. primarily by male artists. in the late 1960s and early 1970s. it was much influenced by Ihe modernist search for a simplified "essence" of each art. Theatre was frequently rejected as inevitably hybrid. and opposed to performance or dance. whose essence was the physical body in space. Obviously. autobiographical concerns had no place in this agenda. If traditional theatre was inhospitable to such work on the grounds that it seemed to deny the imaginative . mimetic basis ofthe art. performance was inhospitable on the quite different grounds that autobiography introduced textuality and narrativity into the abstract. non-matrixed actions that characterized the body art of such performers as Chris Burden. Bruce Naumann. or Vito Acconci. In a '990 survey of modem performance art in Artweek. Jacki Apple argued that what had begun in the early t970S as primarily a visual. image-based art form had by the beginning of the 1990S become essentially word-based. with the performance artist appearing not as an abstract body in space. but as poet. storyteller. preacher. or rapper. and with image at the service of text.' There are many reasons, social, cultural, and economic, for this change. but clearly a major impetus for the shift from image to word was the work of the feminist performers who beginning in the...

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