On the Endurance of Theatre in Live Art

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Notes

Beth Hoffmann, ‘Radicalism and the Theatre in Genealogies of Live Art’, Performance Research, 14.1 (2009), 95–105. The language of ‘breaking’ runs throughout Hoffmann's essay. For the particular phrase ‘breaking with’, see p. 104.

Ibid., p. 102.

Ibid., p. 100.

On the historical connections between the terms ‘Live Art’ and ‘performance art’, see Hoffmann's discussion of the switch in nomenclature from the Midland Group in Nottingham's ‘Performance Art Platform’ to the National Review of Live Art, which grew out if it (p. 100). For the tendency to refer to ‘Live Art’ and ‘performance art’ together, see for example, Adrian Heathfield's introductory essay, ‘Alive’, in Live: Art and Performance, ed. Adrian Heathfield (New York and London: Routledge), pp. 7–13, where Heathfield states that the book is ‘about the “genre” of performance and Live Art’ (p. 7).

In particular, performance art is frequently described as effecting a break with modernist formalism. See for example, Henry M. Sayre, The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde since 1970 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989); and Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

Nick Kaye, ‘Live Art: Definition and Documentation’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 2 (1994), 1–7 (p. 3).

Hoffmann, ‘Radicalism’, p. 98. Hoffmann is responding to Etchells' description of ‘a desire to remake theatre and performance in some way – a picking up of the form, a delinquent turning it over. To break it. To open the space, as if it might be better broken, or wired a different way. To make new tools out of old ones.’ See Tim Etchells, ‘Step Off the Stage’, The Live Art Almanac, ed. by Daniel Brine (London: Live Art Development Agency, 2008), pp. 7–15, (p. 12). Emphasis in original.

Etchells, ‘Step Off the Stage’, p. 11. Italics in original.

Jon Erickson, ‘Performing Distinctions’, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 21.3 (1999), 98–104 (p. 98).

Ibid., p. 98.

Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 152.

Nicholas Ridout, Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 5.

Ibid., p. 170, n. 14.

Abramović, Schneemann, Burden, ORLAN and Acconci were all included in Exit Art's 1995 Endurance exhibition; Goldberg includes Athey's work within her discussion of ‘endurance art’ in Performance: Live Art since 1960 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998), p. 99; Nitsch is included in a similar list of names of artists known for ‘staging performances that demanded extreme physical endurance’ offered by Martin Kemp and Marina Wallace in Spectacular Bodies: The Art and Science of the Human Body from Leonardo to Now (Berkeley: University of California Press and Hayward Gallery, 2000), p. 154.

Marvin Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 103.

Marina Abramović in Nick Kaye, Art into Theatre: Performance Interviews and Documents (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 181. Ridout also quotes this passage to support his discussion of ‘the antitheatrical positions adopted by […] advocates of performance art's “real”’, in Stage Fright, pp. 16–17.

Erickson, ‘Performing Distinctions’, p. 98.

Herbert Blau, The Eye of Prey: Subversions of the Postmodern (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 164. Emphases in original.

Philip Auslander, From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism and Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 3–4.

Ibid. (quoting Diamond), p. 4.

Elin Diamond, ‘Introduction’, in Performance and Cultural Politics, ed. by Elin Diamond (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 1–12 (p. 4). Emphasis added.

Ridout, Stage Fright, p. 14.

Ibid., p. 13. Emphasis added.

Ibid., pp. 13–14.

Ibid., p. 13. Emphasis added.

Sara Jane Bailes, Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure: Forced Entertainment, Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 21. Bailes is quoting Elinor Fuchs, The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theater after Modernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 80.

Bailes, Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure, p. 8.

Ibid.

Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. by Karen Jürs-Munby (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2006). It is worth noting that the English translation of Lehmann's text has been critiqued for abridging the German original. See Elinor Fuchs' book review in TDR: The Drama Review, 52 (2008), pp. 178–83 (pp. 181–82). My discussion of Lehmann's text refers solely to the English translation.

Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 137.

Ibid., p. 27.

Ibid., p. 44. Emphases in original.

Karen Jürs-Munby, ‘Introduction’, in Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, Introduction, pp. 1–15 (p. 4).

Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 69.

Ibid., p. 85.

Ibid., p. 134.

‘Aesthetically and conceptually the real in theatre has always been excluded’ (ibid., p. 101).

I am grateful to Aoife Monks for making me aware of this story. Monks discussed this scenario in her paper, ‘The Secret Life of Actors’, Queen Mary, University of London, 30 March 2011.

Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 101.

Ibid., p. 140. Emphasis added.

Ibid., p. 97.

Ibid., p. 163. Emphasis in original.

Ibid., p. 166. Emphases in original.

Ibid., p. 103.

Ibid., p. 166. Emphasis in original.

Ibid., p. 101. Emphasis in original.

Ibid., p. 104.

Burden cited in Carlson, Performance, p. 103. Emphases added.

Erika Fischer-Lichte, ‘Performance Art – Experiencing Liminality’, in Marina Abramović, 7 Easy Pieces (Milan: Charta, 2007), pp. 33–45 (p. 35).

‘Irruption of the real’ is Lehmann's phrase. See, in particular, the section of Postdramatic Theatre titled, ‘Irruption of the Real’ (pp. 99–104).

Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 122.

Ibid., p. 137. Italics in original.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid., pp. 137–38.

‘It is not the knowledge that you are doing something, or even that you are doing something for an audience, it is the knowledge that you are repeating something which is the problem with theatre’ (Ridout, Stage Fright, p. 19).

Judith Helmer and Florian Malzacher, ‘Plenty Leads to Follow. Foreword’, in ‘Not Even a Game Anymore’: The Theatre of Forced Entertainment, ed. by Helmer and Malzacher (Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 2004), pp. 11–26 (p. 20).

Tim Etchells, Certain Fragments: Contemporary Performance and Forced Entertainment (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 116.

See Showtime (1996); (Let the Water Run Its Course) to the Sea That Made the Promise (1986); Some Confusions in the Law About Love (1989); Spectacular (2008); and Who Can Sing a Song to Unfrighten Me (1999).

Throughout, I have used the performers' first names in keeping with the company's practice in performance. The use of these names intentionally does not distinguish between the performer and the persona performed.

All quotes are my transcriptions from the published DVD recording of the production. I have attempted to preserve the feel of the hesitations in speech, but the ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ may not be exact transcriptions.

That it is the staging of death that is difficult is emphasised early in Claire's performance when Robin suggests to her that her performance would be ‘better’ if the audience could see her face. At this suggestion, Claire painfully turns her head while her body remains facing away from the audience, contorting herself into a precarious and uncomfortable position.

See Michael Kirby, ‘On Acting and Not-Acting’, TDR: The Drama Review, 16 (1972), 3–15.

Tracy C. Davis and Thomas Postlewait, ‘Theatricality: An Introduction’, in Theatricality (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 1–39 (p. 12). Emphasis added.

Ibid., p. 21.

Adrian Heathfield, ‘As if Things Got More Real: A Conversation with Tim Etchells’, in ‘Not Even a Game Anymore’, pp. 77–99 (p. 91).

Ibid., p. 92.

To see that that which is ‘theatrical’ is excessive from the start, one need go no further than the Oxford English Dictionary. See definition 3: ‘Having the style of dramatic performance; extravagantly or irrelevantly histrionic; ‘stagy’; calculated for display, showy, spectacular’. (‘theatrical, adj. and n.’, OED Online  <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/200230?redirectedFrom=theatrical>  [accessed 10 November 2011].

On the association of melodramatic behaviour with women, consider for example that the Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus offers ‘actressy’ as a synonym for melodramatic. On the phenomenon of women performance artists being criticised for being too excessive, demanding and self-involved, see for example, Rebecca Schneider's discussion of Carolee Schneemann's explicit body performance art, where she notes that ‘Schneemann was often dismissed as self-indulgent and narcissistic by the art establishment’ (Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance (London and New York: Routedge, 1997), p. 31). Numerous commentators have noted the tendency to describe performance art by women as narcissistic and self-indulgent. Amelia Jones, for example, notes that ‘body art, especially in its feminist varieties, has frequently been condemned (and occasionally exalted) for its narcissism’. See Jones, Body Art, p. 46.

For further discussion of the gendered connotations of antitheatricality, see Davis and Postlewait, ‘Theatricality’, pp. 17–19.