The Way We Perform Now

Terms of Engagement

I would like to group some thoughts under the title “The Way We Perform Now” in part to have a chance to think about each component part of such a phrase. So first, I would actually like to break down and complicate what we think we might mean by “The Way,” by “We,” by “Perform,” and by “Perform Now.” In the second part, I would like to review some thinking that I see so many others doing about this question, particularly in the last year, and to see if we can abstract some key concerns and occupational hazards of affiliating with so-called “performing institutions” in our current moment.

So to begin: “The Way” invokes larger and broader questions of medium, technique, skill, and material as they interface with different conceptions of duration, spectacle, amateurism, virtuosity, conceptualism, experience, pleasure, and rigor. These various Ways of making art and culture also interact with different conceptions of what we think that The Way used to be. Did The Way used to mean the making of objects in a studio, or did it mean the making of dance movement in a different kind of studio? Did The Way used to mean creating commodity art for selling to collectors, or has The Way referred to the rehearsing of ticketed plays for subscriber audiences? Did The Way used to be public plop art that has now been replaced by dispersed performative practices?

Those differing notions of what The Way might be obviously expose vastly different notions of who the We might be, based again on who you think that the We once was and whether you ever thought you were part of it. Is the We former art school students—people for whom performance inhabited a side pursuit in an under-resourced studio where one experimented with liberating oneself from the object before returning to proper object-making in the better-resourced studios of the rest of the school? Is the We former theater students—people for whom performance meant accessing the diaphragm, learning scansion, developing emotion memory, and experimenting with all varieties of objectives and obstacles to create believable characters? Is the We former dance students—those who perched limbs atop barres and bodies before mirrors, submitting themselves to Balanchinian discipline so that they could produce feats of virtuosic excellence that made it look like they were not suffering, only to realize that over there—in another studio, another gallery, under some different artists’ signatures, or PS1—the frank exposure of suffering in performance had become an aesthetic long before?

Perhaps the We is a set of museum curators—those trained in a wide and varied set of rigorous visual art histories, those who navigate that turmoil of setting up an exhibition while being responsive to an artist’s bidding, those who now find themselves cajoled and sometimes pressured to install performance-based activity whose precedents and purpose remain equivocal in a museum context hurtling ever more toward what this program’s announcement called “the experience of totalizing social production.” Perhaps the We is the group of performance curators who have been making performance happen for a while: people like Philip Bither at Walker Art Center or Peter Taub at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago who might see themselves in a longer lineage of performance enablers—the descendants of someone like Gertrude Lippincott who staged the first dance event at the Walker Art Center in 1940. Are these individuals called performance curators, performance coordinators, engagement specialists, or “event” schedulers at the museum? Such individuals might be called artistic directors at places like Danspace or The Public or The Met. If you descend from the longer and varied history of that We, it can be odd and de-familiarizing to learn that the performing art forms that your Performing Institutions have historically supported are those now associated with “the experience of totalizing social production.” Conversely, you may have a more sanguine reaction to the news that so many museums now want to make themselves performance-ready, transforming galleries into spaces for “music, dance, theater, and participatory programming.”

Finally, is...