In popular parlance, being ‘under the influence’ conveys contradictory meanings about drugs and intoxication. On the one hand, the term designates impairment in the ability to perform an action, such as driving a car, which can lead to the charge of negligence and criminal punishment. On the other, being under the influence can connote freedom from conventional behaviours and the unleashing of creative inspiration, visionary capabilities and enhanced perceptivity. Such divergent meanings are typical of the discourse on drugs, which can in different contexts bring about liberatory, medicinal, spiritual or deleterious effects. If being under the influence carries ambivalent implications in society, the use of drugs in art and performance further complexifies matters. Aesthetic intentions, agendas and strategies can inflect the meaning of drugs in new and unpredictable ways.
This special issue of Performance Research explores how the use of drugs in art and society mobilizes intoxication and altered states. How does the featuring of narcotics, psychedelics, stimulants and depressants reflect, affirm or destabilize prominent discourses about theatricality? How have artists responded to the socio-political context of intoxication, such as the war on drugs or, conversely, the recent push to legalize psychoactive substances? How have drugs affected the visionary lives of performers? What impacts do drugs make on notions of agency, audience or performativity in general? By incorporating a range of perspectives by historians, critics and practitioners, this issue on ‘Under the Influence’ stakes out the multifaceted intersections between drugs and performance.
The articles in this issue address influence through many types of substances: alcohol, recreational drugs, psychoactive and hallucinogenic plants, and pharmaceuticals. Such drugs are considered in a variety of forms in the pages to follow, such as serving as the subject of political discourse, embodying the practices of particular subcultures, creating a method for enacting performances, as well as operating as an agent of transformation. ‘Performance’ likewise appears in multifarious ways, not only as theatre and performance art, but also as video, visual art, ritual, habitus, affect, everyday behaviour and therapeutic technique. From the nineteenth century to the present day, intoxication and altered states have influenced just about every major art and theatre movement, from Symbolism to Surrealism, from Fluxus to relational aesthetics. While it is difficult to generalize about the overall impact of drugs on art and performance, the diversity of their use provides a compelling reason to investigate the intensity of their theatrical effects.
‘Under the Influence’ is divided into three sections. The first, ‘The Social Context of Intoxication’, examines how intoxication involves an embodied and relational ethics whereby social and political issues become foregrounded. During the era of prohibition, for instance, alcohol became a fashionable taboo for those with the privilege and means to travel. Chloë Rae Edmonson analyses the phenomenon of ‘slumming’ in New York City of the 1920s and 1930s where white, wealthy urbanites visited Harlem to consume alcohol with abandon and engage in fantasies of blackness. Asher Warren delves into the legality of drinking and subsequent ethics of audience behaviour during an event in which the consumption of alcohol directly imperilled the life of an unsuspecting goldfish. Fernando M. Oliveira outlines how convictions for alcohol and drug abuse stigmatize marginal populations and often serve as a justification to indiscriminately deport and revoke citizenship.
The second section, ‘Performing Under the Influence’, focuses on the practices of drugs and alcohol in contemporary performances and artworks. My article on ‘Inebriationism’ surveys the prominence of drinking in recent decades, especially how it manifests in artists’ works as a methodology to produce events and experiences, as a performative substance in its own right, and as a relational medium in which to create encounters and participatory installations. The other articles in this section concentrate on individual artworks and performances. Jennifer Fisher considers visual artist Jeremy Shaw’s use of the powerful hallucinogen DMT (dimethyltryptamine) to aesthetically and affectively engage a network of friends. Two artists complete this section by discussing how drugs can morph the body to create a polymorphous eroticism (Caro Novella), and mimic human neuro-transmitters to facilitate cross-species communication (Ray Langenbach).
That drugs and addiction can bring about devastating consequences to a person’s mental and physical health finds confirmation daily in news reports – but how can performance weigh in on this problem? The third section, ‘Addiction, Treatment and Recovery’, offers perspectives on performance as a means to work through the damaging influence of drugs. Rather than sensationalizing addiction, or preaching sermons about the evils of drugs, performance can offer strategies to reduce and overcome compulsive behaviours. Cathy Sloan discusses how the sharing of personal narratives and affective experience help both audiences and performers to reconsider myths about addiction and to create new understandings. James Reynolds outlines how theatre can provide a set of approaches – whether participation, provocation, intervention or reflexivity – to help individuals seeking recovery to transform fatalistic attitudes into self-determining agency. Richard Talbot presents the work of Ridiculusmus, who have devised a collaboration involving clinical psychologists, theatre professionals and amateur actors to explore how MDMA (ecstasy) can treat post-traumatic stress disorder. For Zoe Zontou, performance therapy can carry a hidden complication when actors become ‘addicted’ to performing. What this situation foregrounds, however, is not that the cycle of addiction can never be exited, but rather that addiction, as a central feature of the posthuman condition, must be politically acknowledged.
The ubiquity of drugs in contemporary culture begs the question: When are we not under the influence? The pervasive use of prescribed medications, the relentless advertising about drugs, the easy availability of self-administered psychotropics, the tragic news stories of opioid addiction and premature celebrity deaths: all of these are symptoms of drugs swirling in our minds and impacting everyday discourse, if not also coursing through our bloodstreams and synapses. What this issue of Performance Research provides is a step back from the anxiety of influence to assess drugs’ agency, power and performativity.