THE BODY IN PERFORMANCE Lecture I
- Eryfili
- Sep 16, 2019
- 6 min read
Updated: Sep 29, 2019
Schechner, R. (2002). Performance studies: An introduction. London: Routledge. pp. 28-51.
Schechner on ch. 2 'What is performance?' starts by explaining the different meaning of what is :
-to perform
-being
-doing
-showing doing= performing (underlining)
-explaining showing doing = performance studies----- -reflexive effort to understand-
*In art but also in everyday life, performances are restored behaviors= rearranged, reconstructed, independent, long/short duration.->'as I have learned'.
Even so, these behaviors are never the same. They are in flux (Heroclitus), in impermanence.
*A performance always takes place as ACTION - INTERACTION - RELATION. -->'between'.
*Schechner categorizes performance in 8 kinds:
everyday life
arts
sports/ entertainment
business
technology
sex
ritual
play
BUT. not all performance is art.
*IS performance / AS performance
-is performance when it refers to specific cultural circumstances
-everything can be studied as performance
*artlike art / lifelike art
*make-belief / make-believe
Jones, A. (1998). Body Art: performing the subject, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.
pp. 1- 20
Heathfield, A. (2004). Alive. In A. Heathfield (ed.) Live: art and performance, London:
Tate Publishing. pp. 6-15
In this reading, the author is examining numerous artists and examples. For instance he talks about Franco B and how his wounds have a direct relation to duration and how this transforms the spectators to witnesses.
He also refers to Ron Athey, who by putting his body to physical risk, by de-naturalizing it, he challenges the relations of power and the dynamics of for example pleasure and pain.
The author also writes about Oleg Kulik and his zoophrenia series (dog performances) which seek to 'renounce anthropocentricism, human culture, and commune with animal nature in an effort to re-examine the values of art, culture and human exchange.
Kountouriotis, P.(2012) Notes on the necessity of the explicit body in performance. In: Performance Festival. State Museum of Contemporary Art,Thessaloniki.
• How can the theatrical paradigm explain the social conditions?
Since any performance is a rehearsed act, any performance is a reflection (or comment/ contradiction/refusal) of the social conditions that this act has been shaped in. In consideration to this, one can study the social conditions through the theatrical paradigm.
• What do we mean by the term “body” and how does the body perform?
'The body is locus of dispersed self, the hinge between nature and culture. It performs with all its apparent racial, sexual, gender, class indentifications'. (Jones, 1998)
• What is the purpose of Live/Body Art (to shock?) ?
The purpose of the body art is actually its potentiality. That it can and may 'destabilize the structures of conventional art history and criticism'. (Jones, 1998).
To shock is not realistic, since according to Schechner, even this would happen because of a restored- restored behavior that was actually already possessed.
• What is the necessity of the Explicit Body in Performance?
That it 'destabilizes societal script', 'responds to authorities over the body', 'promises empowerment' and celebrates diversity. (Kountouriotis 2012).
ARTISTS
Marina Abramovic
born November 30, 1946) is a Serbian performance artist, writer, and art filmmaker. Her work explores body art, endurance art and feminist art, the relationship between performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind.
Cindy Sherman
(born January 19, 1954) is an American artist whose work consists exclusively of photographic self-portraits, depicting herself in many different contexts and as various imagined characters.
La Ribot
María José Ribot Manzano (born 19 July 1962), better known as La Ribot, is a Spanish dancer and choreographer. She has contributed to the development of what is known as 'the new dance' in Spain since the 1980s. Her work calls into question the limits of time, space and the concept of dance."
Franco B
(born in Milan in 1960) is an Italian performance artist based in London. His work was originally based on the bloody and ritualised violation of his own body. Later on he embraced a wide variety of media including video, photography, painting, installation, and sculpture.
Guillermo Gómez-Peña
is a Chicano performance artist, writer, activist, and educator. Gómez-Peña has created work in multiple media, including performance art, experimental radio, video, photography and installation art.
Guerrilla Girls
is an anonymous group of feminist, female artists devoted to fighting sexism and racism within the art world. The group formed in New York City in 1985 with the mission of bringing gender and racial inequality into focus within the greater arts community. The group employs culture jamming in the form of posters, books, billboards, and public appearances to expose discrimination and corruption. To remain anonymous, members don gorilla masks and use pseudonyms that refer to deceased female artists.
Ron Athey
(born December 16, 1961) is an American performance artist associated with body art and with extreme performance art. Athey's work explores challenging subjects like the relationships between desire, sexuality and traumatic experience. Many of his works include aspects of S&M in order to confront preconceived ideas about the body in relation to masculinity and religious iconography.
Bob Flanagan
(December 26, 1952 – January 4, 1996) was an American performance artist and writer known for his work on sadomasochism and cystic fibrosis.
The final years of his life were portrayed in a documentary film a year later called SICK: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist.
Damien Hirst
(born 7 June 1965) is an English artist, entrepreneur, and art collector. Death is a central theme in Hirst's works. He became famous for a series of artworks in which dead animals (including a shark, a sheep and a cow) are preserved—sometimes having been dissected—in formaldehyde.
THEORISTS
Michel Foucault (15 October 1926 – 25 June 1984)
Foucault's theories primarily address the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a post-structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels.
Richard Schechner
one of the founders of Performance Studies, is a performance theorist, theater director, author, editor of TDR and the Enactments book series, University Professor, and Professor of Performance Studies. Schechner combines his work in performance theory with innovative approaches to the broad spectrum of performance including theatre, play, ritual, dance, music, popular entertainments, sports, politics, performance in everyday life, etc. in order to understand performative behavior not just as an object of study, but also as an active artistic-intellectual practice.
Dwight Conquergood
associate professor of performance studies at Northwestern University.
Conquergood was known for his groundbreaking research in performance studies, critical ethnography and cultural studies. He lived in refugee camps in Thailand and the Gaza Strip and in immigrant and impoverished neighborhoods in Chicago. His work in all these settings extended far beyond scholarship into advocacy and activism.
Victor Turner (28 May 1920 – 18 December 1983)
British cultural anthropologist best known for his work on symbols, rituals, and rites of passage. His work, along with that of Clifford Geertz and others, is often referred to as symbolic and interpretive anthropology. He acknowledged the contribution of structural functionalism to the study of rites of passage and of the broader category of ritual while pointing out its limitations.
Ervin Goffman (11 June 1922 – 19 November 1982)
Canadian-American sociologist, social psychologist, and writer, considered by some "the most influential American sociologist of the twentieth century". His best-known contribution to social theory is his study of symbolic interaction. This took the form of dramaturgical analysis, beginning with his 1956 book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. His major areas of study included the sociology of everyday life, social interaction, the social construction of self, social organization (framing) of experience, and particular elements of social life such as total institutions and stigmas.
Amelia Jones
American art historian, art theorist, art critic, author, professor and curator. Her work specializes in feminist art, body art, performance art, video art, identity politics, cultural biases and Dadaism. Early in her career she was associated as a feminist scholar, later she broadened her focus on other social activist topics including race, class and identity politics. Amelia has contributed significantly to the world of art as a teacher, researcher and activist.
Adrian Heathfield
Professor of Performance and Visual Culture at Roehampton, based in the Department of Drama, Theatre and Performance.
Heathfield works on contemporary art practices, particularly those involving live elements such as performance art, experimental theatre and dance. His writing has focused on questions of time, memory and the "ethics of the encounter between the spectator and the artwork".
CONCEPTS
Performance
According to Schechner 'any event, action, or behavior may be examined “as” performance. Even so, to say that “is” performance, means when it applies to historical, social context, convention, usage and tradition. To say that a perofrmance is 'art' also depends on the function, circumstance, venue and behavior.
Performance Studies
According to Schecnher is simply the explaining of the 'showing doing' when the latter means performing. To explain showing doing is to refer back to oneself itself = the reflexive effort to understand.
Disciplinary Authority
Practice
Event/ Happening
The Happenings of Allan Kaprow were intended to explore once-behaved actions and
everyday life occurrences.
Restored Behavior - Twice Behaved Behaviour
'Physical, verbal, or virtual actions that are not-for-the-first time; that are prepared or rehearsed. A person may not be aware that she is performing a strip of restored behavior. Also referred to as twice-behaved behavior' (p.29) Schechner.
Normativity (norm)
Theatre as a Metaphor
The theatrical metaphor (E. Goffan and R. Schechner) translates the body as the stage, where the script - the social structures- is reenacted. Through this reenactement -differance for Derrida- the identities are shaped. Each individual becomes the audience and the performer at the same time since they reproduce what they have received and then themselves tranfer it to others.
Body
Amelia Jones describes the body as 'locus of disintegrated dispersed self, the hinge between nature and culture.
Explicit
Explicit body in the Notes on the Explicit Body in Performance by P. Kountouriotis, is 'not controlled, inspected, subjugated but rather ebraced for what actually is, not what it can be and ought ti be. (...) Emphasis is put on recognizing and celebrating the diverse elements of humanity.'
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