Making a Performance

Devising Histories and Contemporary Practices

Emma Govan, Helen Nicholson, Katie Normington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134447961
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Making a Performance traces innovations in devised performance from early theatrical experiments in the twentieth-century to the radical performances of the twenty-first century.

This introduction to the theory, history and practice of devised performance explores how performance-makers have built on the experimental aesthetic traditions of the past. It looks to companies as diverse as Australia's Legs on the Wall, Britain's Forced Entertainment and the USA-based Goat Island to show how contemporary practitioners challenge orthodoxies to develop new theatrical languages.

Designed to be accessible to both scholars and practitioners, this study offers clear, practical examples of concepts and ideas that have shaped some of the most vibrant and experimental practices in contemporary performance.

PART ONE
Genealogies and Histories

INTRODUCTION: PERFORMANCE AND THE ART OF LIVING

Western art actually has two avant-garde histories: one of artlike art and the other of lifelike art. They’ve been lumped together as parts of a succession of movements fervently committed to innovation, but they represent fundamentally contrasting philosophies of reality . . . artlike art holds that art is separate from life and everything else, whereas lifelike art holds that art is connected to life and everything else. In other words, there is art at the service of art and art at the service of life. The maker of artlike art tends to be a specialist; the maker of lifelike art, a generalist.

(Kaprow 1993: 201)

Performing the avant-garde

Devised performance is often seen to be innovative in its negotiation of cultural conventions. Although variously inflected and differently motivated, the performance practices that are investigated and documented in this book share an aspiration to break with tradition, to find new working methods and to challenge audiences through their inventive use of theatre form. Contemporary devised performance does not constitute a coherent movement or a distinct cultural ambition, and consequently there is no single or continuous history that can account for the richness of its influences and artistic practices. Nonetheless, however radical it may appear, no artistic endeavour is developed without cultural conversation, or dissent and affiliations, and this section marks an attempt to explore some of the contours of history that might be traced in the contemporary cultural landscape of devised performance.

Because of their emphasis on artistic innovation, the practices of the historical avant-garde of the early twentieth century and the neo-avantgarde of the 1960s and 1970s provide an appropriate touchstone for this discussion of the genealogy of devised performance. Contemporary devised theatre practitioners are indebted to avant-garde artists, whose radical questioning of the role of the arts in society led to a critical re-evaluation of the European artistic tradition. The modernist avant-garde grew up in a particularly turbulent period of European history around the First World War, and generally signalled a move away from the élitist values that had become associated with Romanticism. The avant-garde specifically challenged the Romanticist view that artists have specialised imaginative powers, described by Coleridge (among others) as poetic genius. Modernists sought to renew and redefine Romanticist notions of authenticity and originality by examining what artists bring to aesthetic encounters and how spectators enter into dialogue with artistic representations of reality. This led avantgarde artists to question the social values attributed to art, and their work was intended to demonstrate how the art object had become commodified.

The term ‘avant-garde’ does not, however, refer to a fixed or static set of values. As Andrew Benjamin points out, the modernist avantgarde ‘implies movement. The movement within it questions the possibility of art itself’ (Benjamin 1991: 99). Peter Bürger provides a theoretical reading of the avant-garde which has become an important point of reference for further analyses. He claims that the two periods of aesthetic invention (the historical avant-garde of the early twentieth century and the neo-avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s) were each characterised by an intention to reconnect art and life. It is the connectivity between art and life, however differently inflected and interpreted, that provides the conceptual lens for this section through which the interrelated histories of devised performance will be viewed.

Bürger insists that the radicalism of the historical avant-garde lay in its ability to transform everyday life by enabling people to recognise the oppressive patternings of daily existence. This process was, he argues, regarded as a precursor to both personal liberation and social change. Bürger claims that the central characteristic of this eclectic movement was that artistic practice and the art of living became mutually embedded:

Art was not to be simply destroyed, but transferred to the praxis of life where it would be transformed, albeit in a changed form.

(Bürger 1984: 49)

Avant-garde artists working within this idealistic movement frequently wanted to shock their audiences into an engagement with personal and social ‘truths’ as they saw them, and used the practices of art itself to facilitate shifts in the audience’s perspective. Avant-garde practice, therefore, was not just about probing the conventions of artistic practice, but also challenging and changing the practices of everyday life.

Bürger’s narrative of the avant-garde has been critiqued by Hal Foster among others for conflating its many different theories and practices into one homogenous discourse, and for his interpretation of the early years of the movement as more politically radical than the later neo-avant-garde period. Foster charts the shift in thinking between the historical avant-garde of the early twentieth century (spanning Dadaism, surrealism, expressionism, and constructivism) and the counter-cultural movement of the later period. The avant-garde of the mid-twentieth century, Foster suggests, was concerned with producing new aesthetic experiences which, unlike the historical avant-garde, sought not to destroy artistic institutions but to extend them by challenging the boundaries of art and non-art. Foster claims that Bürger failed to recognise the radical potential of mimesis (the imitation of life in artistic form) in his analysis of the avant-garde, observing that the avant-garde attacked ‘languages, institutions, and structures of meaning, expectation and reception’ (Foster 2001: 16). He specifically cites how everyday practices and objects were framed as if they were art objects in order to prompt social critique and radical questioning. It is possible, Foster suggests, to read the avant-garde subversion of established practice as performative in that it is a productive force which initiates new languages and modes of reception. The relationship between art, mimesis and non-art in the performative practices of the avant-garde provides the basis for discussion in the first chapter in this section. There were various artistic movements in the early and mid-twentieth century that might have served to illustrate the relationship between art and non-art, including the theatrical experiments of Oskar Schlemmer in the Bauhaus. The choice of Dadaism and the counter-cultural ‘Happenings’ of the 1960s is intended to demonstrate how the interrelationships and conversations between artists led to new performative activities, although there were many other productive connections between artists and theories of the everyday that might have been traced.

The avant-garde’s concern with blurring the boundaries between life and art led to performances that invited both actors and audiences to participate spontaneously in the event. The idea of the creative performer, which was developed during the period of the avant-garde, remains a significant aspect of contemporary devised performance, and this will be discussed in the second chapter of this section. Emphasising the creativity of performers in the process of theatre-making not only reflected a commitment to breaking the authority of directors and, in some instances, to challenging the authorial voice of the playwright, it also signalled a new interest in the power of spontaneity and improvisation. It was a way of thinking about human subjectivity which drew inspiration from the newly emergent field of psychology, where freedom of expression and self-exploration was considered both personally and socially enriching. This led to theatrical experiments that aimed to liberate individuals through unleashing their ‘natural’ creativity in rehearsal and devising processes. This legacy has led to practices where performers use their own experiences – social, physical and psychological – to create performance texts.

The third chapter extends the idea of the avant-garde to theatre as political activism. In the social upheaval that followed the First World War and the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, political activists devised performances that acted as a means of communication and mobilisation. In his study of the avant-garde, David Graver categorises this aspect of the movement as ‘partisan art’ in which dissent from mainstream culture became harnessed to organised political action, and theatre was used to serve revolutionary objectives (Graver 1995: 13). Writing in 1920, Erwin Piscator stated that ‘any artistic intention must be subordinated to the revolutionary purpose of the whole’ (quoted in Bradby et al. 1980: 168). Following Piscator’s dictum many radical theatre companies tried to live, as well as work, according to their political ideals, particularly during the period of the 1960s and 1970s, where idealistic experiments with collective living aimed to integrate life and art-making as a practical cultural politics. Devised theatremaking chimed particularly well with left-wing idealism in that it fostered ways of working in which ideas and practices were (in theory at least) discussed democratically and shared understandings reached. The final chapter in this section maps the paradigm shifts that led to performance practices being harnessed to social efficacy, and considers how and why devised theatre became a potent weapon in the armoury of the politically committed.

One of the outstanding legacies of the period lies not so much in the artistic product, but in the process of working – on the expanded role of the audience, the development of collaborative ways of making theatre, on the rehearsal process, on ensemble acting and actor training. Taken together, this selective tradition marks different ways to practise and theorise the elision of life and art that was furthered by avantgardism and related political movements. Because artistic creativity thrives on dialogue, there are inevitably areas of overlap within the narratives woven in the three chapters in this section. Each offers a different perspective and identifies some of the antecedents of the cultural strategies associated with devised performance, albeit long after the specific political and cultural impulses of twentieth-century practitioners had been questioned and redefined.

TWO

BUT IS IT ART?

Art and Non-Art

Relationships between the arts and everyday life became subject to radical scrutiny in the period of the historical avant-garde. Sceptical of the ways in which the high arts, and specifically the visual arts, had been commodified and rarefied by the capitalist market, the challenge to the bourgeois cultural institutions in the period during and immediately following the First World War was led by the Dadaists. This movement began in the politically neutral zone of Zurich in Switzerland and quickly spread to Paris, Barcelona and New York. The Dadaist project was to expose the uselessness of art, not by rejecting art itself but by removing the frame that separated and elevated the work of art from everyday life. Their practice was intentionally controversial, designed to provoke audiences into questioning both the values of the arts and contemporary social values. The spontaneity and playfulness that characterised Dadaism was re-imagined and reconfigured in the later, neo-avant-garde period, where it became associated with ‘Happenings’ as part of the permissive and counter-cultural performance practices of the 1960s and 1970s. This chapter will examine these two specific historical moments as illustrative of aesthetic experiments that sought to challenge perceptions of both art and the everyday.

Walter Benjamin commented that ‘Dadaists attached much less importance to the sales value of their work than its uselessness for contemplative immersion’ (Benjamin 1999: 231). In Dadaist performance, the cabaret format was particularly popular because it easily accommodated topical issues and had, therefore, a spontaneity that worked against the idea that art objects should be enduring and revered. In the visual arts, Dadaists rejected oil paintings in favour of work that was equally anti-commodity in its immediate, throwaway nature.

Whatever the medium of artistic expression, Dadaist work consistently sought to shock audiences into recognising how they had uncritically accepted the conventions of society. When modernists presented a mimetic representation of reality, therefore, they did so in order to offer a social critique of the world as they saw it. Hal Foster argues that ‘the avant-garde mimes the degraded world of capitalist modernity in order not to embrace but to mock it’ (Foster 2001: 16). He also suggests that Dada’s attack on the formal conventions of culture was utopian in proposing ‘not what can be so much as what cannot be’ (Foster 2001: 16). The exposition of the uselessness of art, rather than following a particular political agenda, lies at the heart of the Dada project. Rather than seeking to create art, Dadaists sought to make ‘anti-art’ or ‘anti-performance’ that marked their dissatisfaction with the art market and their nihilistic vision of the world acquired by living through the atrocities of the First World War. Anti-art was not, therefore, a coherent set of practices but rather a motto for invention, signalling what the 1960s’ art critic Hans Richter characterised as a ‘new artistic ethic’ (Richter 1997: 9).

This chapter shares the aims of cultural theorist Renato Poggioli who, writing in the 1960s, examined ‘the avant-garde art not under its species as art but through what it reveals, inside and outside of art itself’ (Poggioli 1968: 4). The examples are intended, therefore, to serve as models of avant-garde practice that indicate innovation in artistic form. Three aspects of innovation will be examined: first the use of ‘readymades’, secondly the use of chance, and thirdly the newly configured relationship between performers and audiences.

The art of the everyday

The art of the everyday was newly conceptualised by Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), a key Dadaist innovator whose work in Europe and North America has influenced many conceptual artists. Duchamp famously asked, ‘Can one make works which are not works of “art”?’, and he saw beauty in mass-manufactured items and machines rather than in more conventional artworks. Duchamp is celebrated for his ‘readymades’, in which he reframed everyday objects as works of art in order to trouble the nineteenth-century idea that art is defined according to specific aesthetic principles. One of his most famous ready-mades was a piece entitled Fountain, which was actually a massproduced urinal inscribed with the signature R. Mutt. Fountain was shown in a New York Gallery in 1917, and its exhibition in the gallery space invited viewers to reconsider their ideas about what constituted art. Art critic Hans Richter comments on the playfulness of this performative gesture:

The urinal says that ‘art is a trick’ . . . Duchamp set up Reality, as represented by his ready-mades. His purpose was to administer a strong purgative to an age riddled with lies.

(Richter 1997: 90)

Both Duchamp’s humour and his seriousness of purpose imbued his work with ready-mades. The impulse behind his conceptual artworks was the belief that everyday objects can be viewed as artworks because the active agent in making a work is not the artist, but the audience’s perception. He was pleased, for example, when visitors did not notice two ready-mades that had been placed in the entrance hall of a gallery exhibition as it demonstrated that works of art have no special ‘aura’.

The notion of the ‘aura’ of an artwork is a complex one in relation to ready-mades. In his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1935), the Marxist critic Walter Benjamin suggests that the special ‘aura’ associated with original works of art was the product of history and ideology rather than any intrinsic quality of the artwork itself. He argues that the invention of mimetic machinery that could reproduce works of art (he cites cameras as an example) would strip away the mystery and mystique associated with artworks. Benjamin regards mimetic technology as potentially liberating because, by showing the detail of everyday objects in mass reproduction, the ideological patterning that ruled people’s lives might be amplified and exposed. The Dadaists, as Benjamin points out approvingly, were similarly intent on ‘a relentless destruction of the aura of their own creations’ (Benjamin 1999: 231). For the Dadaists, however, the ‘aura’ of originality, although resisted, remained an important signifier of authorship. Duchamp’s biographer Calvin Tomkins explains how Dadaists transferred the discourse of originality from the intrinsic value of the art object to the creative mind of the artist:

Only by giving it a title and an artist’s signature could it attain the odd and endlessly provocative status of a readymade, a work of art created not by the hand or skill but by the mind and decision of the artist.

(Tomkins 1997: 157)

In this sleight of hand, Dadaists retained for themselves qualities of creative individuality which recalled and adapted earlier aesthetic traditions.

The principles of the ready-made were applied to Dadaist performance practice. Tristan Tzara, a key experimenter in the field, also sought to blur everyday life with the fictional realm of performance. His performance on 22 January 1920 entitled La Crise du Change was staged at a venue in Paris that contained scenery that had been abandoned by an amateur theatre company. Tzara and his collaborators employed the ready-made setting of half-salon, half-forest they found as a miscellaneous backdrop to their performance. This inappropriate setting served to ‘make strange’ the activity on stage, and they hoped this juxtaposition would unsettle the audience. As part of the programme, which included music, readings and the exhibition of painting, it was announced that Tzara, the Dada leader, would be performing one of his works. When Tzara came on stage he read from a found text, the transcript of an address that had recently been given to the French parliament. This was accompanied by the ringing of many bells. This cacophonous bell-ringing served to undercut the Kantian perspective that great art required contemplation, and members of the audience – who had thought they would be attending a cultural afternoon – were outraged. The piece apparently challenged the authority and authenticity of performance because that which was framed as Tzara’s ‘own work’ was, in fact, merely a repetition of a speech by a politician. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of this performative intervention relied on Tzara’s ‘authentic’ presence (his ‘aura’ in Benjamin’s terms) as Dada leader. In referring to this work he showed that he was aware of the necessary ambiguity of his aesthetic statement: ‘All I wanted to convey was simply that my presence on stage, the sight of my face and my movements ought to satisfy people’s curiosity’ (quoted in Melzer 1976: 7).

The principles applied to the ready-made offered an ironic comment on the idealisation of the art object, and implied a radical questioning of the Enlightenment perspective that great art is to be recognised and revered through aesthetic contemplation. This had the effect of drawing attention to what philosopher Jacques Derrida described as ‘a discourse on the frame’ that places meaning on works of art and invites spectators to question the limits of art and non-art (Derrida 1987: 45).

Taking chances

Related to the cultural experimentation of the ready-mades was the concept of chance, which became one of the guiding principles of Dadaist performance practice. Like the framing of a ready-made item, chance problematises the idea that great art is dependent on the skill of the artist. Furthermore, it also complexifies the relationship between everyday life and the artwork as the creative impulse is taken from a ‘real’ source rather than from the imagination. Tzara’s recipe for a Dadaist poem provides a good illustration of the process of making art in this way:

Take one newspaper. Take one pair of scissors. Choose from tha...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One Genealogies and Histories
• Part Two Shaping Narratives
• Part Three Places and Spaces
• Part Four Performing Bodies
• Conclusion
• Bibliography