Performance and Theatricality: The Subject Demystified

Performance and Theatricality: The Subject Demystified JOSETTE FERAL Translated by Terese Lyons Depending on one's choice of experts, theatre today can be divided into two different currents which I shall emphasize here by referring to a remark of Annette Michelson's on the performing arts that strikes me as particularly relevant to my concern: There are, in the contemporary renewal ofperfonnance modes, two basic and diverging impulses which shape and animate its major innovations. The first, grounded in the idealist extensions of a Christian past, is mytbopoeic in its aspiration. eclectic in its forms, and constantly traversed by the dominant and polymorphic style which constitutes the most tenacious vestige of that past: expressionism. Its celebrants are:for theater. Artaud, Grotowski, for film, Mumau and Brakhage, and for the dance, Wigman. Graham. The second, consistently secular in its commitment to objectification , proceeds from Cubism and Constructivism; its modes are analytic and its spokesmen are: for theater, Meyerhold and Brecht, for film, Eisenstein and Snow, for dance, Cunningham and Rainer,1 Rather than question this classification and the insufficient consideration it gives to men of the theatre like Craig or Appia, and to theatrical practices as varied as those of A. Boal's guerrilla theatre, Bread & Puppet's political theatre, and !he experiments of A. Benedetto, A. Mnouchkine, the TNS, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and Mabou Mines, I should like to make my own use ofit to account for the phenomenon ofperformance as it has appeared in the United States and Europe over the past twenty years. Inherited from surrealist practices in the twenties, as RoseLee Goldberg has shown in her book, Peiformance! artistic performance enjoyed quite a boom in the fifties, especially in the wake of the experiments of Allan Kaprow and John Cage. Conceived as an art-form at the juncture of other signifying practices as varied as dance, music, painting, architecture, and sculpture, performance seems paradoxically to correspond on all counts to the new theatre Performance and Theatricality 171 invoked by Artaud; a theatre ofcruelty and violence, of the body and its drives, of displacement and "disruption,'" a non-narrative and non-representational theatre. 1 should like to analyse this experience of a new genre in hopes of revealing its fundamental characteristics as well as the process by which it works. My ultimate objective is to show what practices like these, belonging to the limits of theatre, can tell us about theatricality and its relation to the actor and the stage. Of the many characteristics of performance, I shall point to three that, the diversity of practices and modes notwithstanding, constitute the essential foundations of all performance. They are first, the manipulation to which performance subjects the performer's body - a fundamental and indispensable element of any performing act; second, the manipulation of space, which the performer empties out and then carves up and inhabits in its tiniest nooks and crannies; and finally , the relation that performance institutes between the artist and the spectators, between the spectators and the work of art, and between the work of art and the artist. a) First, the manipulation ofthe body. Performance is meant to be a physical accomplishment, so the performer works with his body the way a painter does with his canvas. He explores it, manipulates it, paints it, covers it, uncovers it, freezes it, moves it, cuts it, isolates it, and speaks to it as if it were a foreign object. It is a chameleon body, a foreign body where the subject's desires and repressions surface. This has been the experience of Hermann Nitsch, Vito Acconci, and Elizabeth Chitty. Performance rejects all illusion, in particular theatrical illusion originating in the repression of the body's "baser" elements, and attempts instead to call attention to certain aspects of the body - the face, gestural mimicry, and the voice - that would normally escape notice. To this end, it turns to the various media - telephoto lenses, still cameras, movie cameras, video screens, television - which are there like so many microscopes to magnify the infinitely small and focus the audience's attention on the limited physical spaces arbitrarily carved out by the performer's desire and transformed into imaginary spaces, constituting azone...