Performance Art in Education

PERFORMANCE ART IN EDUCATION Jeff McMahon erformance art (or performance) is an essential tool for young artists, a dynamic way to find and refine the essential gesture. All art is performative; all art is, in some way, a physical act. It is the encapsulating of a conscious sense of time for presentation to another consciousness-the audience. Skittering around under assorted cultural bombardments, we have come to doubt the integrity of much of the material performed for our consumption, be it on the political or cultural stage. There is a suspicion in the art world that any kind of performance/ creation is yet another commodity, the integrity of which must be in question. Forms lose their ability to move us; we cease looking and listening. While there is anguish, debate, and posturing over the inclusive/exclusive aspects of culture, we risk abandoning the core in our search for the seeds. As late-capitalist Americans, we seldom like to talk about the means of production. As artists, we should; as teachers, we must. Performance is a form where the evanescence of time becomes key. A performance cannot be repeated; only re-enacted in another time/space setting. It is a marker of the frailty of human action and the malleability of our consciousness. To a society that is based in the creation of saleable acts, facts, and faces, performance is a mask behind and through which research and investigation can occur. The body becomes the narrative and the site for the working-out of questions and strategies. Time and space are experienced, not represented. Performer and audience experience the process simultaneously, as something done together, putting the hierarchy of artist/ audience in a vortex. The overwhelming product of spectacle is replaced by the symbiotic process of performance. In an era when so much "style" is available, and art is an entertainment wrapped and packaged like cake mixes, the research element of live performance becomes a respite from too much to consume, too little to create; come into my kitchen, step into my laboratory, squeeze under my skin and behind my eyes. Just as performance lurks in the cracks between art and theatre, theory and practice, so is it placed pedagogically. Whether as "non-static" "4-D" art, or "bad theatre," it is viewed as an adjunct to the more accepted palace arts; an embarrassing and shabbily dressed orphan whose occasionally amusing antics cannot be relied upon, 126 E and are thus ignored. If we do not speak up, other mouths will be fed, whose place is more assured, due to a more traceable pedigree. It is critical that students, the creators and consumers of the near future, are given creative tools and techniques that are malleable and applicable for that future. We can drown them in theory and critique, or we can give them tools to create a dialogue with the physical world, incorporating spirit and fact, sense and sensibility, seduction and disjunction. We are not just training artists, but citizens who need new ways to respond and react to culture. Performance is the place where philosophy is put to the test, where theories are put to flesh, and the Village Green becomes the democracy of the body. Ifthe tradition of performance art is the tradition of rebellion, as Matthew Goulish has put it, then we must find ways to make the most of that "constructive outlet for radical energy."' The anarchic urge can be folded into the synthetic and constructive if it is respectfully guided. The blocks that stand in the way of the student of visual art, theatre, music, etc., may dissolve when the student finds other entrances, other ports. Human beings are multivocal; we walk and talk, speak both literally and figuratively, and conflate fantasy and reality with ease. Performance is a way of reinvigorating and reassessing that skill; bringing back our innately complex creative urges. Performance art as a practice cuts through the sometimes immobilizing effects of theory with creative acts. After the act, the theory has taken on a body, and can be examined in much more detail, with increased accuracy and empirical evidence. An artist can "own" a text or cultural fact by re-working...