Remembering Praxis: Performance in the Digital Age

Abstract

For nearly two decades, performers have been engaging in digitally mediated performance practices. Though performance theorists have been debating the ontological status of performance that relies on digital and information technologies, practitioners have carried on without waiting for a scholarly verdict. In this essay, I interrogate the central ontological condition of the live body in performance theory in light of digitally mediated performance, making a call for a renewed commitment to performance praxis. Furthermore, I argue that performance practitioners have understood the virtual long before the advent of digital technologies.

Keywords:

• Virtuality
• Liveness
• Digitally Mediated Performance
• Praxis
• Pierre Lévy

Notes

Marcyrose Chvasta is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of South Florida where she teaches performance, cultural, and media studies. The author thanks the reviewers, and especially Michael Bowman, for all of their helpful input. Correspondence to: Marcyrose Chvasta, Ph.D., Department of Communication, University of South Florida, 4202 E. Fowler Ave., Tampa, FL 33620. E-mail: [email protected]

[1] From their website: “The Wooster Group has played a pivotal role in bringing technologically sophisticated and evocative uses of sound, film and video into the realm of contemporary theatre, and in the process has influenced a generation of theatre artists nationally and internationally. The Group's work is unique because it attracts not only the theatre-going community but also artists and enthusiasts of many other cultural disciplines, such as dance, painting, music, video & film” (“About” par. 3).

[2] Samples of the Desperate Optimists' work can be found at their website (do).

[3] Auslander has argued convincingly that “all performance—if not electronically mediated—is mediated by language. Because language mediates our experiences, any presentation of one's self is not one's Self. Auslander employs Derrida to argue that the “mind cannot communicate the body without being defined by ‘the rules of language as a system of difference,’ and the body cannot express the mind without being defined by its system of differences” (36). In short, any presentation of self—“live” or “mediated”—is mediated. Every mediation is intertextual, containing a multiplicity of texts that are mediations themselves.

[4] The mediated performances I discuss throughout this essay are not all-inclusive of what could be considered DMP. For example, while I believe it is worthwhile to investigate the ways that performance theorists consider online textual activity to be performance (e.g., Murray; Rayner) and the ways that media theorists (e.g., Barbatsis, Fegan, and Hansen; Nakamura; Turkle) employ the language of performance to explain digitally mediated phenomenon such as Multi-User Domains, MUDs-Object-Oriented, and other various forms of computer-mediated communication, such endeavors are beyond the scope of this essay.

[5] See Butler's Bodies that Matter for her detailed differentiation between performance and performativity: “In no sense can it be concluded that the part of gender that is performance is therefore the ‘truth’ of gender; performance as bounded ‘act’ is distinguished from performativity insofar as the latter consists of a reiteration of norms which precede, constrain, and exceed the performer and in that sense cannot be taken as the fabrication of the performer's ‘will’ or ‘choice’; further, what is ‘performed’ works to conceal, if not disavow, what remains opaque, unconscious, unperformable. The reduction of performativity to performance would be a mistake” (234).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marcyrose Chvasta

Marcyrose Chvasta is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of South Florida where she teaches performance, cultural, and media studies. The author thanks the reviewers, and especially Michael Bowman, for all of their helpful input. Correspondence to: Marcyrose Chvasta, Ph.D., Department of Communication, University of South Florida, 4202 E. Fowler Ave., Tampa, FL 33620. E-mail: [email protected]