A Return to Serious Thought
Or, the entrapment of a passing traditionalist (or modernist) on the off-chance that he or she may decide to visit a postmodern page and become caught in a discussion which horrifies, scares and mutilates.
The postmodern performer sits on the edge of chaos. Seeing, feeling, and perceiving all the thoughts of years gone by. (Now, we all know, the best scholarly literature starts out the most pretentious…) The performer takes this knowledge and incorporates her (or his) own perspective and interpretation thereby creating her own individual performance—a mish-mosh of different styles and perspectives. This chaos is brought, in part, by an acceptance of everything, a feeling that change is always constant and that adaptation is the only key to survival. The new, the old, the classic, the modern.
In creating a postmodern performance piece, the performer creates what may fall under the broader category of performance art. On the one hand, performance art can be viewed as a complete disrespect to traditional theater (to be pronounced: thee-a-tur, with a soft "th" and accent on the "a") and the "respectability" of the performances associated with that institution (Respectable according to whom? you ask, and rightly so.) Viewed from another perspective, a decidedly postmodern one, we (I invite you to look at it with me) see performance art as a form of social critique that parodies its own medium of expression. Performance art can come in the form of outright social activism masquerading under the guise of entertainment or it can appear in the form of "critical pedagogy" that teaches students to question, identify and dispose of "forms of oppression perpetuated on the basis of cultural identity, gender, class, and sexual orientation" (Wolford—read her article, click here!)
Academics, actors and performers need to take themselves less seriously. We need to stop worrying about protecting our jobs and our careers. At academic conferences we hear wonderfully moving speeches and presentations about the power of feminism, the need for racial equality, the inherent inequality of the economic superstructure. But, these presentations are empty: the feminist delivers her speech in high heels, using the language of her patriarchal oppressors (as I am doing RIGHT NOW). The ethnic minority delivers her speech in the language of the white oppressor, discussing the argument in the white man’s terms (and, honey, I do mean white MAN). The self-proclaimed Marxist gives her speech amidst the backdrop of bourgeois excess, ignoring the plight of the homeless person as she walks down the street to her $200-a-night hotel room. What does this say about our true intent for subversion and our desire to bring about true change? We talk about issues of inequality while our body gives us away.
Postmodern performance art is, in many ways, a direct response to these types of contradictions. By employing, magnifying and exploding dualisms, the postmodern performer effectively says, "No! This will not do. I am a ridiculous construction and so are you." My earlier example of the academic conferences is not meant to imply that they are the only venue for performance art, quite the opposite. It is meant simply to illustrate the need for MORE performance art in our "postmodern world". (Awwww, what a cute, trite phrase—how soon words become co-opted. Hmmph.) My intention with this little diatribe is to outline some of the research on performance art, while necessarily inserting my own little commentary. I invite you to read, decipher and, of course, DECONSTRUCT!
Judith Hamera ambitiously set out in 1986 to define the parameters of postmodern performance art. I salute her for this task and will, of course, steal some of her ideas. (After all, isn’t that so much of what we do in Academia? Steal ideas, pretend to add our "own" theories and move on from there?) "Postmodern describes the shift in focus from the form of the object to both the process and the content of the artwork" (Hamera 13). So true, so true. In postmodern performance art (PPA), we see a shift from the performance-as-object, as an end product to the performance-as-process. In PPA the process of creating a performance becomes the performance itself. In my creation of a performance art piece (Simone 1997), setting out props and arranging the performance space became part of the performance, which Jonathan Gray referred to as "messy." (You know, it might be a very modernist thing to do to cite my own performance, but, oh well.) Therefore, the literal process of creating a performance became part of the performance.
In a more well-known work by Charles Ludlam, entitled Bluebeard: A Melodrama in Three Acts, Andrucki (1990) observed the same types of techniques. "The performers put their costumes on off-stage…" thereby making costuming part of the performance itself (302). The process of donning an "other" persona becomes important in postmodern performance. The audience is not "deceived" by realism (which we all know to be a inherent evil) and hence is invited to critique not only the actors and their characters as in Brechtian theater, but also the entire performance itself.
Looking at performance as process has other implications as well. (Well, of course it does, otherwise this would be a pretty short read and certainly would not fulfill the grade requirements for this assignment.) Interpretation and interaction on the part of the audience is required to get more than what you see out of the artwork. This action, in turn, leads to a devaluing of the art object and a valuing of the performance process of art. Performance, then, is uniquely suited to carrying out the aims of postmodern theory.
The idea that the audience must rely on its own interpretation of the work has found its way into many performance artists’ creations. Performance artist and gender educator, Kate Bornstein has taken this notion to heart in the creation of her unusual yet highly provocative art. As she says best, "One of the most joyful times is when there is really not boundary between me as a performer and the audience. That adds to the no-boundaries of the script and the no-boundaries of my life. I like to include the audience in the performance" (9). Bornstein invites the audience into her performance in order to aid them in their interpretation of her work. She cuts out the mystical, magical but also limiting "fourth wall" and lets the audience know right off the bat that her performances are going to be different from traditional thee-a-tur. (To read an interview with Kate Bornstein, click here!)
According to Lipucci (whoever the hell she is), Jean Pierre Ponnelle’s production of Verdi’s La Traviata extends the same invitation. "The point of his schemes was not to make a point, but rather to actively engage them [the spectators] in the process of interpreting the production and in discovering their role in that process" (Lipucci 247). Heaven knows, postmodern performers are very leery of making a point—after all, there is no absolute truth in the postmodern world, and performers would be the last people to start trying to introduce it. So, instead of making a definitive point, performers encourage audience members to create their own unique, individual "point" out of the performance. In this sense, audience members are encouraged (and, I believe, subsequently empowered) to define their own response to a work, the written and/or performed work.
Emphasizing process over product and the integral role of the audience is not enough for PPA. Postmodern performance is (maybe by necessity) a form of social critique—scathing in some instances, and subtly passive aggressive in others. Postmodern performance not only considers it a "good idea" to offer social critique, but it is an ideological necessity that it does. The performance of social critique also lends itself, quite handily I might add, to a form of political activism. Postmodern performance "collapses the boundaries between politics and aesthetics, formalism and pedagogy, the national and the transcultural in order to rewrite the mutually related discourses of commitment, desire, and representation as an act of public vigilance and strategy of social engagement" (Becker qtd. in Wolford 188). In other words, PPA takes perspectives that were originally conceived of as dichotomous and joins them together in order to reveal the seams that hold society together. These seams ranging from patriarchy to racism to heterosexism and back to sexism again. Wolford suggests, "The work of performers…functions, in one sense, as a type of lens that brings into focus the struggles and conflicts being waged in contemporary society—efforts to eradicate (or at the very least, identify, as an initial step toward change) forms of oppression perpetuated on the basis of cultural identity, gender, class, and sexual orientation" (189).
Parody is one of the main techniques that PPA achieves this goal of social critique/political activism. Performer Kate Bornstein parodies the mainstream construction of gender in this country. A description of her performance The Opposite Sex…Is Neither! reveals this biting humor. "Maggie, the goddess-in-training who finds herself in the 20th Century, finds the societal importance ascribed to gender very funny, and the fact that there are only two genders equally silly" (Bell 4). This is humorous because we have a mythic creature, a goddess, "finding" herself in this century. When she arrives she cannot believe the ludicrous nature our bi-polar conception of gender. Of course, the mere presence of Bornstein is a parody of gender—she is a male-to-female transsexual who refuses to be called a man or a woman, straight or heterosexual, masculine or feminine. She defies categorization.
Moving back to Martin Andrucki’s discussion of the plays of Charles Ludlam (you knew I’d be back to it…), we find that parody plays a large part in Ludlam’s revisionist works. Humor me by reading this extended excerpt from Andrucki’s article:
It [Bluebeard: A Melodrama in Three Acts] advertises itself as a ‘quick-change act’, a polite way of saying a drag show. This lends a particular piquancy to the morally-uplifting ending, when…an obligatory fog of sentimentality descends on stage…As the lights fade on the hushed couple tenderly holding hands, what strikes us as truly ineffable is not the silence of the great beyond, but the sight of a man in a dress undergoing a transport of Victorian piety. Thus the orthodox theatrical appeal to connubial bliss and divine providence as the joint solution to all problems is staged as a piece of transvestite schtick. (298)
In this description, we see the elements of parody through a humorous portrayal of Victorian sentimentalism, which we know dealt with issues of sincerity and hypocrisy, among others. Ironically enough (as opposed to "Interestingly enough…), the Victorian idea that a person’s dress could reveal their inward moral character is taken to imply that a biological male has the "innerds" of a woman. It’s music to a postmodernist’s ears!
Ludlam, being the smart, creative guy that he was, also parodied the theater itself. "Ludlam’s work achieves the well-known Brechtian goal of making the spectator conscious of the play-as-spectacle, so that the artificially constructed world on stage may be seen as the mirror of an equally contingent, socially constructed world off stage" (Andrucki 303). Now, we are just going to have to take ol’ Martin Andrucki’s word for it here. I’ve never seen a Ludlam play, so let’s just assume, for now, that Ludlam really did achieve this feat. In one swoop, Ludlam was able to parody the artificiality of the stage as well as the artificiality of the "world." But, regardless of whether Ludlam really achieved this or not, PPA really does strive to reveal this artificiality. Now, not all PPA, but this characteristic could be said to make up a component of postmodern performance.
Another way that postmodern performance lends social critique is through challenges to power relations and the construction of reality. Halstead provides an excellent example of this through his analysis of Peter Handke. Handke’s group performances focused completely on the prison of language. Ooooh, all you Derrida fans, I bet you just perked up! "I gotts ta get me sum of dat der Handke!" Halstead asserts that Handke, in the staging of his original work Calling for Help, "affirms the power of performance—of what we do with language—over against the insidious ideological pressure that language exerts on our lives" (187). What is most striking about Handke is that his performance style is extremely postmodern, as is his content. The entire focus of his Sprechstucke plays (which includes Calling for Help) is on language and meaning, a major tenet of postmodern thought.
Wolford, in her review of a symposium at Penn State University in November of 1996, states that the thrust of the conference was on the "role of the artist in contemporary society, with particular attention to the possibilities of activist work as a form of cultural intervention" (187). We see this desire in many performers’ works. In my own performance, I wanted to reach women who may feel demeaned by societal standards of beauty. In the performance art "house" piece at Petit Jean Performance Festival in 1997, we saw the performers’ critiquing many different themes of modern society: religion, money, anorexia, narcissism, and plastic surgery. In these performances, and the many other like them, the performers and creators hope that those involved with the performance (audience included) will be somehow changed by the experience. The hope is that underlying mainstream assumptions will be uprooted, brought to the fore, deconstructed and possibly thrown out in favor of more positive, equitable beliefs.
Schwichtenberg talks about the ways in which Madonna (you’ve heard of Madonna, right?) has challenged power relations in society, especially in terms of female sexuality and homosexuality. "As a postmodern vehicle for this insistent rifting, Madonna pries open a space in the mainstream to provide sexual minorities with visibility and confirmation, while provoking feminism to rethink its own lines, limits and boundaries" (128). While Schwichtenberg may be a little overly optimistic about Madonna and her role as a "feminist," she does make a good point that Madonna provides a voice to sexual minorities, beyond just the simple heterosexual/homosexual dichotomy.
Okay, talked a little bit about process over product, interpretation, social critique, ya-da, ya-da, ya-da. Let’s return to Hamera, shall we? She has a nice, little list of "structural" considerations that are helpful in determining when you are watching a postmodern performance. Even though, I’m sure we’d all agree, that postmodern performance is a lot like pornography: I’ll know it when I see it! First, Hamera asserts that postmodern performance encourages a "primacy of image over plot" which gives a non-narrative and nonlinear element to much performance art. Educators will notice this when they take their students to see performance art. The overwhelming consensus is that "I don’t get it." Well, before becoming a performance art aficionado, the non-narrative element takes a little getting used to. We are so tied to plot in the Western world. Everything must have a beginning and an ending. Well, forget it in postmodern performance. It’s right out!
Postmodern performance, especially performance art, generally tends to have an improvisational element to it. Many performance artists will follow a general outline, rather than a memorized script. In addition, the actions and gestures are not carefully accounted for as they were in the early days of elocution. Ah, the golden days. Well, the price of gold has just gone down, sister. It’s time to move on to the wonder years! The improvisational element helps the performer accommodate the audience, allows her (or him) to adjust for different types of audiences. After all, it is important to the performer to provide the audience with a common frame for interpretation.
The production of a postmodern performance art piece will typically take place in alternative space. Alternative from the thee-a-tur, that is. In addition to the alternative space, a performance is typically shorter in length than conventional thee-a-tur and has a substantially shorter run than, say, a Broadway show.
Now, as we all know, what I’ve listed here is hardly inclusive of everything there is to know about postmodern performance. To take on that task would be daunting, and somehow against the grain of what postmodern performance stands for. After all, isn’t parameters, limitations, restrictions and regulations what postmodernity is fighting against anyway?
