The Power of the Sad: Performance, bearing with and compassion

Sakuntala: Darlings, who else could I tell but you? But it will upset you.

Anasuya and Priyamvada: That’s exactly why we’ve asked you. When you share your unhappiness with your closest friends, you make it bearable.

Kalidasa (2008: Act 3, Verse 8, 35)

This issue of Performance Research, ‘On Sadness’, is edited by After Performance – a research collective of four founded at the National University of Singapore in 2015. The name ‘After Performance’ initially signalled our sense of urgency in re-thinking the paradigms and methodologies of performance studies in light of major geopolitical and ecological changes that substantively differentiated the world in which we were living and studying from that in which the field had been conceptualized. In particular, we felt it urgent to disrupt the individualism into which we had been initiated as students and workers in academic institutions, and we committed to writing and publishing as a collective. We have worked together on this issue and other publications through a shifting, mutable methodology that we have theorized as the transauthorship of an ensemble working ‘in adjacency’:

Ensemble thinking is an acquired mutual sensitivity to intellectual registers. Its moments have their own rhythm, cadence and breath, all features specific to the individual and collective peculiarities that co-form (after the Spanish conformar, to shape) the transauthorial ensemble. Though not always together in time or space, we have attended to the experience of being with – or adjacent to – one another, in our affinities, frictions and divergences. (After Performance 2016: 36).

From 2018, when we – the members of After Performance – started working on the ideas that inform this issue, and its publication in 2024, we have experienced bereavement, migration and loss. We have been sad in adjacency to one another, and to those beyond the ensemble. The world has moved through and remained with(in) a global pandemic, mass death, multiple armed conflicts, ongoing colonialisms, proliferating displacement, ecological destruction and genocide. We have been sad and called to share and bear with the sadnesses of others. Through these experiences and processes, we have asked ourselves how we might rethink our understanding of sadness and what performance does to or through it. Thinking about sadness together has made it easier to share in one another’s sadness. But beyond friendship, we have found that collective sadness is temporal, embodied and historically specific. Sadness has a historicity: it is worldly (Said 1991), it circulates and sticks (Ahmed 2004). How, then, do we think about sadness in the collective?

In this introduction to ‘On Sadness’, we propose to theorize sadness in a form that both revisits and revises performance studies’ foundational assumption that if we are to think of performance as political, it must imply a measurable, efficacious action. We question the mandate to ‘perform or else’ (McKenzie 2001) to suggest instead the political possibility of sadness as a collective practice that is not defined through its power to enact change in the world. We think of sadness in terms of performance because of the practices of co-presence it entails. To be sad is to be with and attend to the world. Yet sadness here enables us to think about politics in ways that may put pressure on the tenet that dictates performance to be, above all else, a social mechanism towards collective (and therefore political) actualization. Sadness is political not despite, but because it does not call for change; it is the radical acceptance of our shared mortality, of our shared destruction and of our shared non-agency vis-à-vis non-human actors and their vastly greater magnitudes. This editorial outlines this theorization of sadness, which we articulate in ‘adjacency’ to the writers gathered in the issue, whose work has informed and extended our thinking.

Shared as an interview between the two authors, in their piece Nana Adusei-Poku and Alhena Katsof discuss the relationship between exhibition and performance. They do so in relation to the exhibition ‘Black Melancholia’. Curated by Adusei-Poku in 2022, the exhibition brought together the work of twenty-eight artists of African descent, through which Audsei-Poku ‘subverts the idea of melancholy to describe a particularly Black experience of sadness, one borne of fatigue and the certainty of loss in the future’, and via the context of colonial legacies, and subsequent grief and loss. The interview explores the performative qualities of the exhibition and the specifics of Adusei-Poku’s activation of space.

Oscar T. Serquiña, Jr examines the MonoVlog – a digital performance form developed by Layeta Bucoy and Olivia Kristine Nieto in the Philippines during the outbreak of COVID-19 – as an ‘emotional weather report’. The genre emerged as a way of documenting the ‘entanglement of individual sorrows and communal lamentation’ of Philippine artists and other communities amidst the pandemic – sadnesses that, Serquiña writes, are not cathartically expunged by the performance, but rather ‘stick and sting’.

Chaomei Chen’s article explores how the play Che Guevara (2000–1) attempts to reclaim the notion of left melancholy as an ‘active aesthetic agency of hope to counteract the depoliticized trend of commercial theatre’. Sadness, or rather, melancholy, oscillates between being a shared and passive affect and an active force that drives collective creation.

In using the quotidian term ‘sadness’ in this editorial, we are consciously opening out from Euro-American psychoanalytic and contemporary therapeutic lexicons of melancholia, trauma and depression, and the classical dramaturgical ones of tragedy and catharsis. This is not to refute these as diagnostics in themselves, but to refute how they might overdetermine sadness through particular modes of pathologization and treatment (such as the performance of talking). Equally, we note how neocolonial and neoliberal humanitarian paradigms demand particular displays of trauma, and prescribe particular interventions to address it. In contradistinction to these paradigms, what if we are not looking for sadness as a social withdrawal to be ‘overcome’ through performative expression, but as in itself an affirmation of being, collectively, in the world? The sadness we are thinking of here is not a sadness we might ‘get over.’ Sadness has shaped us collectively; it has defined our muscle memory, coloured our innermost and shared memories, and defined our speech, writing, gestures and touch. Sadness allows us to relate, to be co-present, witnessing the world end for one another.

We propose that attending to the politics of sadness as performance would therefore require delinking performance from legible, efficacious action such as performance studies has predominantly stressed so far. Through sadness, we are proposing a theory of performance independent from the ontology of potential, actualization or change. We describe this as a performance theory of bearing with a relentless feeling of sadness. Unlike the canonical theories of performance and performativity in which we were trained (Austin 1962; Turner 1985; Schechner 1985; Butler 1988; Latour 2005; McKenzie 2001), the theory we propose here is not teleological, insofar as bearing with is not measurable as (or by) action, or even the potential for action. Canonical theory in performance studies has often been articulated in relation to an ontology of ‘disappearance’ and an expression of ‘mourning’ the loss of the present (Phelan 1993, 1997), while critical responses to the disappearance thesis have emphasized performance as repertoire and remains (Taylor 2003; Schneider 2011). For Diana Taylor, ‘[d]ebates about the ephemerality of performance are profoundly political. Whose memories, traditions, and claims to history disappear if performance practices lack the staying power to transmit vital knowledge?’ (2003: 5). Yet both theses assume the promotion of consecutive events and the temporal and material slippages between set moments in a given timeline. This is to say that while the disappearance thesis could imply that the material attainability of the political event can only be effective thanks to a larger infrastructure that captures performance and catapults it into the traceable future, the transfer-remains thesis argues that performance is in itself that infrastructure and that, therefore, performance contains time as much as other technologies, such as writing.

Amy Schofield invites us to think of lost repertoires of sadness. Her text analyses Black Flamenco dancer Yinka Esi Graves’s work and advances the need to revise the histories of flamenco to excavate the contribution that black dancers and choreographers have made to the form and its many manifestations. Schofield explains how, ‘since flamenco’s inception, it has served as an act of resistance and resilience for marginalised peoples, and now, more than ever before, Black Flamenco artists are gaining greater visibility, engaging with the form as embodied activism and interrogation of present and historical injustices’.

Laura Bissell writes on two ‘processional’ performances – Blast Theory’s SPIT SPREADS DEATH: THE PARADE and Hew Locke’s The Procession – that confound linear temporalities in ways that emphasize the co-relation of sadness and hope. Rather than synonymizing ‘processing’ (in both senses of the word) with moving forwards or ‘getting over it’, Bissell draws attention to how both performances entangle temporalities of commemoration and potentiality, remaining resolutely with difficult and violent pasts even as they also offer premonitions of the future.

Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau explores the performance of emotions online, and emotions as data. He does so via an analysis of his performance videos Googling Things in Hell 1 (Tammy) & 2 (Daniel) (2021), within which he has tried to ‘capture the contradictory nature of emotional performances in surveillance capitalism’. By examining emotions of sadness, shame and despair, de Kersaint Giraudeau posits a ‘weak theory’ of reading the agency of affect, but against a backdrop of sustained interest in negative emotions as a means to unearthing the potential for repair.

In both theories of performance highlighted above, there is the assumption that performance must lead towards an action, which may only be legible as such to the extent that it enables futurity. In either of these theses, performance is always there to bring better worlds forth and so it inevitably entails a kind of action that enables futurity. But what if it does not? What of the interminable present tense of feeling sad? What if there is no other world left to bring forth? Are we to be the damned sad that failed to achieve political change? Or can we be sad, and that’s all? Can bearing with sadness be a politics in and for itself?

A. Berkem Yanıkcan uses melodrama as a lens to examine staged representations of trans life in Turkey, and its erasure and re-presentation, via performances given by cis actors and for largely heteronormative audiences. Yanikcan argues how performances ‘utilize the rhetoric of suffering or aesthetics of sadness’ in presenting trans people as stereotypes. Using a theory of national abjection Yanikcan moves to look at how trans performers, through their own work, then challenge the appropriation of these often ‘sad’ narratives, but without necessarily offering a significantly sad or hopeful queer future.

BEARING WITH COMPASSION

Sad politics entail a commitment to bearing with worldly sadness. The power of the sad thus rests in the acknowledgement of each other’s sadnesses and of the power held in ‘just’ remaining sad. This is not an argument for the nihilistic or anti-political, and we are not advocating that bearing with sadness replaces other modes of politicized activity. Still, bearing with sadness does suggest that we avoid entirely subjugating our response to the world to what we think we can do to change it. During the working sessions that led to this editorial, whenever we tried to align on a conclusive definition of the performance of ‘bearing with’ sadness, we found ourselves landing on silence: in other words, performing, rather than describing, bearing with one another as an ensemble. We have found it difficult to describe ‘bearing with’ sadness precisely because it is a somatic experience that resists the grammar of object, subject and verb. The always-incomplete act of ensemble writing made sensible what text itself could not contain. Existing in tension with our desire to share these theories on the page, the performance of collective silence, then, was the best we could do to define the power of the sad.

Kiera Bono offers a reading of iele paloumpis’ performance In place of catastrophe, a clear night sky that is distinctive in its critical generosity. The article illustrates what ‘bearing with’ sadness might resemble in performance: from cleansing the air with eucalyptus branches, to KN95 masks that do not get disposed of or forgotten but instead erupt into gorgeous ornate headpieces. Examining how In place of catastrophe … enacts ‘choreographies of care’, Bono shows how it works with disabled and diasporic embodied knowledges to ‘transmut[e] trauma and alchemiz[e] grief’.

Yet, thanks also to the ensemble, we know that bearing with involves compassion – feeling with, but not feeling for – and compassion is unconditional: it does not demand transparency, identification or transformation, or limit time. By compassion, we mean a mode of feeling in adjacency, one that is not dependent upon verifying or identifying with another’s sadness, or projecting oneself into it (what we might think of instead as overbearing). Compassion, in the Daoist context, is borne out of cultivation, a practice of discerning suffering in others. From the etymology of 慈 (茲 + 心), the combination of Ci, or 茲, which first referred to the overgrowing of plants and evolved to mean ‘this’ or ‘the present’, and Xin or 心 that means ‘a heart’, suggests a growing (over time) of this virtue. The heart becomes available to show compassion. This implies that compassion does not depend on sadness being made legible or transparent; that is, compassion can be practised in relation to a sadness that remains opaque. For Edouard Glissant, the opaque ‘is that which cannot be reduced, which is the most perennial guarantee of participation and confluence’ (1997: 191). Although Glissant does not write in the terms of performance, we recognize it in the ‘participation and confluence’ that opacity describes, as well as the problematization of the expectation of authenticity-as-disclosure that Glissant shares with performance theory. Yet we also see in Glissant a critique of performance theory that claims to be able to “read” popular culture’, as Sarah Jane Cervenak has articulated (Schechner cited in Cervenak 2014: 2). We can bear with sadness in compassion even when disclosure is unwanted or unsafe, or feels too terrible to speak out loud (and is not for sale in the process of producing text in a knowledge economy either).

In her article on intimate partner violence (IPV) and performance, Heather Sincavage presents the stark reality under which survivors are often not believed or recognized as being desperately in need of help. She discusses the enduring somatic affects and effects of IPV on survivors, and through describing her three-part performance piece Inescapable Presence, arising out of her own experiences as a survivor of IPV. Sincavage argues for ‘recalibrating the definition of “women’s work” to include dealing with IPV in all its forms’ and as a war on women’s bodies, leaving behind an enduring sadness that is ‘embedded within one’s foundation despite surviving and leaving abuse’.

In The Sad Choreography of Epistemic Injustice, Martin Austin illustrates, but also counters, what he calls the sad choreography of injustice to which dancers are subjected in North American dance training circuits. Recounting documented accounts of sexual abuse and violence from dancers across various companies, Austin offers that while all these cases seem to indeed follow a perverse choreography, sadness here may offer a clear possibility to counter epistemic injustice. The text thus becomes an object of transfer, for in sharing his sadness, Austin enacts a powerful and moving display of courage and survival.

Katherine Nolan’s article and performance documentation extends the investigation of questions of the legitimacy and disenfranchisement of grief, writing on miscarriage as ‘a palpable embodied, visceral and painful experience of loss, [that] frequently remains unspeakable and unmournable’. Reflecting on her performance project Fluid Flesh amidst postcolonial and pronatalist discourses in contemporary Ireland, Nolan is interested in writing experiences of grief rendered ‘conceptually ambiguous’ into a ‘lexicon of grief’.

In our proposal to decouple sad performance from therapeutic intervention, historical efficacy and the legitimating orders of social legibility, we hope this issue opens connections with broader feminist conversations, mobilized in particular by queer, trans and feminists of colour, that see and hear radicality in practices that have conventionally been associated with inaction. Jack Halberstam traces these conversations in The Queer Art of Failure as elements of

a feminism grounded in negation, refusal, passivity, absence and silence, [that] offers spaces and modes of unknowing, failing, and forgetting as part of an alternative feminist project, a shadow feminism which has nested in more positivist accounts and unravelled their logics from within. (Halberstam 2011: 124)

In Halberstam’s work, such ‘shadow feminism’ is leveraged in particular against imperatives to do, make, produce and pursue happiness in a specifically US framework; yet this framework has had global consequences. For example, scholars in the former US colony of the Philippines highlight that the nation’s supposedly distinctive, resilient happiness in the face of profound social inequality and climate catastrophe can also be read as a ‘mode of self-exoticising’ as it ‘attempts to mark a unique space within a globalised world’ riven by imperialism (De Chavez 2017: 144). To be sad – or more specifically, to refuse to pursue happiness – is not simply to opt out (though it may be that too), but more fundamentally to undermine or ‘unravel’ the logics that link happiness to individualism, productivity and racialized colonialism.

Terry Ofosu’s article provides an example of the varied legibility of sadness and mourning. What is considered a legitimate performance of mourning? Investigating the practices of yala jama and yala paaty as pre- and post-burial celebrations of the Ga people in Ghana through interviews and participant observation, Ofosu provides an account of how the two practices would have been ‘cultural aberrations within the context of traditional funeral rites in the past’, but are ‘to a large extent accepted norms in the contemporary Ga society’.

Looking at theatre made under lockdown in Romania, Ilinca Todorut’s article examines how the pandemic exacerbated systemic problems: blocked or unfunded public theatre institutions and poorly supported independent groups. Sadness has long pervaded Romanian theatre artists, and their experimentation with digital forms became the occasion to confront the precarity of their work conditions and unsustainable operational practices. The freelance artists boxed within the Zoom window unravel the ‘capitalist model of efficient, quick production’ – always creative, always producing artist – to reveal a vulnerable state of collective precarity and alienation.

Alongside these ‘shadow’ projects, bearing with sadness in compassion might therefore be considered a mode of political refusal. Refusal in, or out of, sadness is not apolitical. Audra Simpson (2017) has documented and theorized a politics of ‘refusal’ practised by Indigenous peoples in the settler colonies of North America and Australia. This politics moves away from recognition – ‘the affirmation of one’s (inherent) rights by the state’ (20) – to acknowledge that such a state was born through lethal force, dispossession and enslavement. ‘“Refusal” rather than recognition’, for Simpson, ‘is an option for producing and maintaining alternative structures of thought, politics and traditions away from and in critical relationship to states’ (19).

For Bhumi Patel, writing in this issue on the choreographer Gerald Casel’s Not About Race Dance, refusal is intertwined with mourning in ways that interrogate the settler colonial lineages of postmodern dance. The sadness of Casel’s performance announces a mode of ‘regenerative refusal’. The politics of performance works such as Casel’s are not measurable in terms of positivist change, because they are not interested in fixing problems within a dominant order. Yet nor should their sadnesses be understood as apolitical or uninterested in performance’s potential for worldmaking.

Saba Zavarei’s piece testifies movingly to the courage of protestors and mourners in Iran in the 2022 protests. The choice to grieve publicly is a politicized choice to shame the regime, and enacts ‘alternative aesthetics of grief and mourning’ that reinscribed the absent bodies into a collective body, mobilized to persevere and preserve the shared affect of grief.

To refuse to stop being sad is indeed not equivalent to being passive, or willingly subjectified. Refusal, with sadness, germinates the politics of the sad. Syed Hussein Alatas writes in The Myth of the Lazy Native about reproducing the narrative of the indolent native. He draws from various colonial sources to evidence the extent to which colonial governance misread local attitudes and behaviours as indolence and laziness (2010: 72–3). The modes of politicized non-engagement described by Simpson and Alatas are distinct from sadness in terms of their affective register and, perhaps, intentions. But like so-called indolence, sadness complicates the modern logic of political action insofar as it does not, in itself, involve a positivist (by which we mean both empirically verifiable and morally valenced) pledge to change a given political reality. Instead, sadness can be considered the political expression of being-with the end of the world – of any world.

In gathering the texts published in this issue ‘On Sadness’, and introducing them in adjacency, we want to emphasize that, as a performance practice that is not defined through its potential for efficacy and change, bearing with sadness makes space for inaction, incommensurability and opacity. We see potential here for performance theory and practice to think at the various levels of engagement that genocide, extinction and other forms of violent finitude require. We put forward a sad theory of performance as an offer to the conversations mentioned above, as well as to others happening in contexts that underline the political magnitude of ‘just’ bearing with the relentless present of sadness.

We end the issue with In Remembrance by Emily O’Hara, where she invites the reader to contemplate the relationality proper to sadness and its myriad of practices. The text we publish here is, in fact, the accompanying text to an artwork that starts on these pages only to extend to the world. O’Hara offers a free candle subscription to 100 readers. These candles will be delivered yearly on the death anniversary of the reader’s loved one. When lit, they will enact a durational and participatory performance of mourning and sadness that is an attempt at building, as O’Hara puts it, a ‘connection … as part of a collective gesture [where] grief may be somewhat transformed’. O’Hara’s piece perfectly illustrates our argument – the act of bearing with the relentless ongoingness of sadness makes it such a powerful perspective to think through and experience the world.