Performance in America: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the Performing Arts (review)

My entry into David Román's new book coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of ASTR, a conference uniting many scholars of our day to debate the past and present significance of four keywords: American, Society, Theatre, Research. After days of charting the global futurity of these terms, I came across a reading group with a more localized set of concerns. In listening to this collective assess why Performance in America speaks to a particular nation at a particular moment in time, I discerned two primary interventions. First, Román questions our culture's investment in the "generational legacy paradigm" (14), a model of time rooted in the logic of reproduction. In doing so, he challenges a fundamental premise framing most academic inquiry: "[T]he contemporary is obligated to recognize the past or gesture to the future" (15). Secondly, Román urges scholars (including himself) to rethink our "romance with the indigenous" (30), by which he means "community-based artists whose primary interest in performance is activist based and political" (35). Huh—what's up with that? Why would an established champion of alternative theatre abruptly ask us to shift our attention to Broadway, upscale cabarets, or the feel-good extravaganzas that emerged in the wake of September 11th?

Román's reappraisal of "what constitutes a valid object of scholarly inquiry" (35) works in tandem with his insistence that today's performance "be evaluated primarily in terms of how it serves its immediate audience" (15). Whereas popular culture is often dismissed as lacking in lasting consequence, the sociopolitical value of a space he theorizes as the "contemporary" (10) is likewise deferred as something only posterity can evaluate. His introduction, "Here and Now," contextualizes the decade to be examined, 1994 to 2004, citing the unlikely resurfacing of verse on Broadway via Def Poetry Jam as an example of how today's artists "now and then return to past artistic practices and customs, though not in the teleological or positivist sense of exceeding, advancing, or improving on the past" (16).

In chapters 1 and 2, "Not about AIDS" and "Visa Denied," Román addresses the fraught processes by which HIV-positive gay men and Asian Americans revisit the archives of bygone eras. Though arguably betraying his caution about privileging the "seemingly authentic" (36), the critic takes up the real concerns of Bill T. Jones and Neil Greenberg, choreographers inextricably engaged with AIDS even as dominant culture insists the epidemic is over. Whereas Jones refuses to let his sero-status delimit his contemporary work, Greenberg incorporates prior dances about his brother's AIDS-related death into recent projects. Rather than "normalize AIDS or . . . imagine it as 'over,' he seeks instead to create a new vocabulary with which to address the continuing challenges of living with HIV" (75–76). Similarly, the racialized performers of Chay Yew's It's a Beautiful Country tactically fuse Asian oral history, Madonna's "Vogue," and gay drag. This "vernacular imagination" (79) challenges America's official archives, resulting in "queer immigrant acts" (104) that dramatize unprecedented types of Asian American experience.

In "Archival Drag" and "Cabaret as Cultural History," Román departs from Diana Taylor's influential distinction between the archive and the repertoire, redefining performance itself "as an embodied archival practice" (139). He uses Bette Davis's 1957 reenactment of Joshua Reynolds's painting Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse (1784) to show how "live performance remembers not only performances from an earlier historical period but also the prior archives of those past performances" (151). The problem is that Siddons, the best-known actress of the eighteenth century, never actually played a stage role as the goddess she depicts in Reynolds's portrait. As such, Davis arguably supplants Siddons's legacy of animate practices by rehearsing a man's static artifact. While supporting Román's critique of the idea that performance...