‘Never Work with Children and Animals’: Risk, mistake and the real in performance

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

¹García's piece, ‘Accidens’, featured the live killing, cooking and eating of a lobster. Presented worldwide, the performance has been banned in some Spanish and Italian cities. Evaristti's ‘Helena’ tantalized the audience to the killing of ten goldfish each of which had been placed in a liquidizer. The director of the Trapholt Art Museum (Denmark) where the piece was presented was taken to court under charges of animal cruelty.

²In Francis Fukuyama's view, ‘trust’ is instrumental in the development of ethically driven societies, since trust enables ethical community formations and the embracing of socially constructed fears (Fukuyama 1995).

³This is what both Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002: 2) and Giddens (1999: 1–2) call the ‘end of tradition’: a collapse of traditional beliefs and frames of reference such as science, religion, the state etc

⁴Animals are unpredictable even when trained as demonstrated by Roy Horne's tiger attack suffered during a Siegfred and Roy performance in Las Vegas in 2004. In this incident Horne was bitten in the neck by a trained white tiger causing critical injuries and severe blood loss. See Peterson (2007: 33–4)