The fact that the series of editions of Performance Research that will be presenting the work arising from the annual PSi conferences starts with the fifteenth PSi conference, ‘Misperformance: Misfiring, Misfitting, Misreading’, which took place in Zagreb, 24–28 June 2009, is both accidental and representative of a desired ‘shift’ in the kind of scholarly and activist intervention the conference set out to explore.Footnote1 The longstanding issue of how to bridge the gap between theory and practice, between the delivery of papers and actual performances, without the performances simply figuring as a decorative addition to a ‘more serious’ programme as the essence of what a ‘proper’ conference should consist of, was the leading idea of the new format of work the conference proposed. That is why it was conceived as a double structure that insisted on the equivalence and mutual enhancement of morning ‘panels’ and evening and night ‘shifts’, which themselves were often carried out as a multiple structure combining various modes of reflection and (artistic) action. The topic of the conference – misperformance – proved to be particularly fruitful for this kind of exploration, liberating its participants from the strictures and pressures of absolute efficiency and providing a terrain for risk or, possibly, failure, reflected upon as a creative and productive moment of any performance.
It would, however, be erroneous to designate the outcomes of the conference as uncritical exaltations of the concepts accruing in the field of ‘misperformance’ – mistakes, misfires, misfits, failures and the like – since the discussion was organized around a twofold conceptual and political aim: to approach the distinctive forces of the all-encircling ‘performance’ through its inherent negative side, its non-functionality, futility and inoperativeness, and also to point to the site in which this debate was about to emerge, the location of its culture. After ‘Interregnum’, the PSi topic in Copenhagen 2008, ‘the temporary state of exception, a limited period of unrest and uncertainty’, the conference moved to the realm of often irreparable mistakes, to a region whose history made for a permanent state of exception, unrest and uncertainty, a place where different imperial ambitions, grassroots ideologies, revolutions and violent excesses found their playground for experimentation in misperforming. Misperformance, on the other hand, did not pertain here solely to the gloomy outcomes of war, trauma and divided societies, for it was designed to allude as well to the curious, simultaneous daily lack of performance pressure that characterizes the transitional landscape in Croatia, to its mock-version or inversion, a ‘perform or not’ apathy, an indifference to excellence that exerts its own, so far unreflected pressures on human sensibilities.
With a view to exploring linguistic, aesthetic, ritual, cultural, organizational and political performances, the conference wanted to deal with various ‘misfit’ issues in performance studies, performing arts, theatre studies, literary criticism, philosophy, linguistics, cultural, media, gender and folklore studies, (political) anthropology and critical theory. The call for proposals was addressed to such a large scholarly community because performance studies in the region do not form a stable academic network, they still need legitimation. The response we received in the region was partly disappointing – the scholarly milieu not being accustomed to transdisciplinary challenges, and the artistic one not being accustomed to interweaving theory and practice – and yet, having in mind daring exceptions in the region, as well as the creative input from all around the world, overwhelming in many respects.
To take just a glimpse of what we presumptuously called a ‘mis-performance web’ woven around some of the nuclear points of the conference, which irradiated both mutually engaging and clashing energies, it suffices to enumerate various fields and inventive entrances into mis-performance issues characteristic of morning and early-afternoon panels, often offering provocative terminological coinages that circulated in the corridors and rooms of our panel venue: first of all, the performing arts with their deviant actors and challenged audiences, their wilful mistakes and unwanted shutdowns, their festivals and marketing misplacements, their appearing and disappearing ghosts and dancing collisions. Then, only seemingly bordering on performance liveness, participants singled out distortions in film, video and photography, or technology in general, regardless of its manifold uses and abuses. Is failure an option? This was the question tormenting those reflecting upon aborted ambitions to cross the lines between aesthetic and political practices, as well as critical endeavours to distinguish artistic effects from activist objectives, being as they are linked to the slippery formations of rhetoric. In the conference papers, the rhetoric ranged from irony, parody and humour, through lies, pranks and misdemeanours, to standardized public mis-performances of presidential debates, oppositional protests and mis-informed discourses of nation-states, in all their actual hybridizations of democracy, totalitarianism and post-socialist nostalgia.
Actuality was approached as being always already a re-enactment – haunted by history, memory and trauma as reminders of its failure to appear ‘new’: in addition to being a stage device, ghosting was once again proved to be also a constitutive condition of performance. Its stage was shown to be everywhere, but what interested the participants was what happens when the space itself – eco-spheres, urban and architectural sites – is labelled with misperformance, criminalization and catastrophe. Aberrant communal spaces, with their disturbed distinctions of private and public, revealed to be gathering bodies that were themselves aberrant performances of identity. One of the participants discussed the fact that he almost suffered a heart-attack when confronted with the alienating cultural practices of a foreign milieu. Painstaking performances, enervation, fatigue and other kinds of derangement – sometimes leading to mystical, spiritual or religious experiences – brought the peculiar, illegible body to a new light, to the limit of the human. Above all, research into these phenomena, inevitably re-positioning the notion of subjectivity itself, begged the question of possible errors in theory, introducing the topic of error within theory, and these surely entailed a discussion regarding the mis-performativity of transmission of knowledge and of its lecture machine, of the very academic format of the conference.
The small selection of papers presented here is thus just an outcome of the endeavour to ‘cover’ that indomitable range, with a firm belief that interests in mis-performing are just starting to burgeon, and to show their trans-disciplinary potential. It is therefore that we begin with the text by Nicolas Salazar-Sutil, whose insights into the two opposed, classical and modern conceptions of the body bring mathematics and performing studies side by side. Correspondences and mis-matches between mathematically informed cultural discourses and either exalted or ostracized notions of corporeality in these two historical formations reveal the extent to which specific cultural conditions of possibility often (mis-)manage what Salazar-Sutil suggests should be a non-historically conceived ‘body manifold’. He therefore argues for the acknowledgement of vicinities and affinities among cultural discourses on seemingly distant points of the cultural continuum – such as the Vitruvian body and the surrealist Acéphale, the body-to-be, the proper image of our current ‘ideal’ of misperformed bodiliness. Ideological questions about regulations of the body and its sexual impulses are the topic of Rune Gade's inquiry into the vacillations of the Danish legalization of pornography and the role played in it by the scandalous surrealist Wilhelm Freddie, whose work was the focus of Danish authorities in the 1930s and 1960s. For Gade, the twenty-five-year gap dividing the two periods testifies to the change in discourses on pornography, censorship and freedom of speech largely brought about by dramatic shifts in the perception of sexuality, but also by a series of mis-performing avant-garde artists who appeared in the 1960s, joining the goals of emancipation with their politicized work. However, Gade concludes, the abolition of censorship in 1969 introduced sexism and commercialization of sexuality that now present new challenges calling for new artistic strategies.
The third aspect of this section on the body is treated by Brian Lobel, who deals with artists’ illnesses and unrealized projects, active nonactions, professional holes and private testimonies by Susan Sontag, Jo Spence and Bobby Baker, seeing in these different poetics of non-representation a disturbing factor preventing documentation and – especially if, as in Bobby Baker's case, exhibited without the artist's intention – amplifying societal discomfort, requiring precisely therefore serious consideration. This delicate discussion not only leads Lobel to a more general question regarding the position and desires of outsiders, of spectators to the illnesses of others, but also leads him to state that it is essential to honour, respect and critique artists’ refusals at least as much as the popular mediatization of decaying bodies and minds. Facing death, the one that has already occurred or the one attempted but failed, connects Lobel's discussion with the two papers that follow. Sophie Nield reminds us that dying and death are a longstanding fascination of theatre. She inspects the aborted effects of the exposure of the corpse, mis-performed in two recent instances: the failed appearance of the corpses of Uday and Qusay Hussein to the media and the much advertised corpses displayed at the Bodyworld exhibition by Gunther von Hagens, which Nield failed to attend. For her, both the first instance, obstructed for cultural reasons, and the second one, unsuccessful in its aim to entertain, raise questions about absence, appearance, imitation and representation, ultimately ‘proving’ that the corpse remains ob-scene, outside the scene of representation. The concluding paper of the section, by Gunhild Borggreen, focuses instead on the fear of death as the ultimate limit of artistic courage faced by the Japanese conceptual artist Yanobe Kenji during his protest re-enactment of the anti-expo performance Eyeball Man by the anti-Vietnam War activist Sato Hideo. Thirty years later, having climbed, as had his predecessor in the 1970s, out into the eye socket of the Golden Mask of the Tower of the Sun at the Expo 70 site, Yanobe Kenji in 2003, argues Borggreen, misperformed the misperformance, pointing nevertheless to the ever-changing contexts of the archives of protest.
The next section moves from individual to collective bodies, to issues concerning invisible, marginalized and manipulated identities, as well as to the emancipating but also compromising role of performance in pleading their cause. Ioana Szeman warns us of the absence of Roma from national and art histories of European countries, and in particular of the lack of institutionalization of the Romani Holocaust history, which provide the frame for her analysis of the counter-discursive emotional effects of Tibor Balogh's interactive installation ‘Rain of Tears’ in Budapest in 2004, as well as of the two exhibits, the 2004 ‘Hidden Holocaust’ in Budapest and the one in Roma Pavillon in Venice, that claimed national and European citizenship for Roma. Far from these rather innocuous artistic reminders of human suffering, however, lie acts of violent resistance, such as the one committed by the Vietnamese co Kim Dung, one of the female participants in the Majestic Theater Bombing on 10 June 1948, who performed identity masquerade to carry out this covert mission against French troops. Rivka Eisner uses Bhabha's notion of mimicry to approach this strange case in which various performativities are at (violent) stake: Frenchified high society, proper Vietnamese femininity, radical anti-colonial communism, Vietnamese nationalism and ancestral devotion, prompting Eisner to re-examine the tenuous relationships between socially fitting and mis-fitting, reading and mis-reading identities, and between real or successful performance and misperformance. The next paper, by Suzana Marjanić, continues with tackling issues of performance violence and its ethical misfire, this time on what she calls the ‘zoostage’, in the spectacle of the animal victim in the name of art. While approaching an assuredly unresolved problem of cultural practice, the perennial deflection of inter-human violence onto animal sacrifice, Marjanić includes contemporary performance into this tradition and presents a rather deviant overview of contemporary Croatian theatre and performance art scenes, testifying to a bizarre symptom of a persistent cultural trauma. Lourdes Orozco takes the risky side of employing animals in performance, adding to them children as well: she places the much advanced visibility of both of these abused and ‘endangered species’ in the context of market economy and media advertising, which incites reassessments of their socio-political role. Their appearance on stage, however, implies quite a different destiny – animals and children are indicators of the contemporary lack of points of reference, of void and fear, of the paranoid obsession of our society with uncontrollable risks, in a word – of the intrusion of the Real.
The section devoted to the issues of performance history and documentation comprises two papers that look in paradoxically opposing directions: while Kyle Gillette's turns backwards, to reflect upon Marinetti's ‘great futurist railroad’ and the suggestive value of the expression ‘train wrecks’, asking himself why the locomotive and its annihilation figure as prominent images of theatrical failure, Marko Pustianaz focuses on Rory Macbeth's sculptures, recognizing in them unexpected ‘inappropriate objects’ that provide a legacy of live art for the future, and that throw a new light on debates regarding respective abilities of various media to register, preserve, socially transmit, institutionalize and canonize performance art. While Gillette recognizes in futurist interventions the advent of a new theatrical perspective on traumatic disruptiveness of mortality and the world's mutability, Pustianaz is more concerned with issues of stability: he observes photographs of the sculptures of the photographs of the performances in order to promote what he calls Macbeth's ‘sculptural performative’ – a chance to read the relationship between performance event and visual document through a subtly alienating re-materialization that refuses to pay homage to the singularity of the artwork by inserting it into seriality in order to question the latter's twofold role, to make a work canonical and to expose it to consumption.
The final section is devoted to two areas of our all-too-human condition that can not but rely on mis-performance: humour and lies. Without yielding to an uncritical view of its escapist effects or to a denial of its often unpleasant pretexts, Charlie Fox deals with the radically democratic potential of laughter, placing situations in which a range of laughter responses is engaged, encouraged, co-opted and given voice in what he sees as an authentic form of cultural revolt. His provocative musings on the implications of the physicality of laughter bring together Sartre's and Kristeva's philosophic writings in order to discuss this experiential situation as an occasion for transformation beyond usual paths of achieving communion, and sees in it a significant part of de Certeau's tactical ruses, calling it a practice of everyday micro-performances of laughter, a certain anti-technology of resistance. Mario Vrbančić's approach, however, introduces a ‘glitch’ into this well-oiled machine of laughing responses: he starts with Bergson's famous formula for the comic – human body acting, moving and thinking like a machine – and intentionally mis-reads it from the position of that glitch, especially when it takes place in such a horrible realization of a machine-like system that was Holocaust, a point where humour coincides with horror. By comparing Agamben's The Remnants of Auschwitz with the play KAMP performed by the theatre group Hotel Modern, Vrbančić addresses issues of representation generated by the Holocaust, arguing that Bergson's formula cannot hold in a universe irretrievably disfigured by the nightmarish structures of the comic.
The very last paper presented in this selection of PSi#15 holds a pride of place not just because it dares to meddle with the dirtywork of the lie but also because it is a piece of paper-panel textual experimentation, combining unorthodox or rather unauthor(is)ed interventions by the four panelists – Bree Hadley, Jelena Rajak, Andrew Filmer and Rebecca Caines – with the intentionally slippery commentaries by their chair, Alan Read. Having fallen prey to the belief in what they state at the outset, I can assure all the readers that they are creatively responding to each other's papers and engaging in ‘a reflexive, multi-authored interrogation of the duplicity inherent in the performances, in academic analyses of the performances and in the ways scholars reflect, respond and listen to each other’, especially if the topic of the talk moves around ‘intersecting ideas about impression management, belief, disbelief and the productivity of the lie’.
Hoping that these ‘misfits’ corroding our dearest illusions regarding the truth-value of knowledge will not have too seductive an influence on performance scholars, let me close this editorial with warm thanks to all the participants of the PSi#15 panels, and especially to all the contributors to the ‘MISperforming’ issue of Performance Research. They gave shape and complexity to a promising intuition regarding the liberating powers of mis-, making us wonder even more where its trajectories could lead in the future.
Notes
1 It was organized by the Centre for Drama Art in Zagreb, and co-organized by the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Academy of Drama Art, Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Faculty of Architecture, Zagreb Youth Theatre, and Student Centre.