Where is the performance in Joseph Roach's "Culture and Performance"?
I’d like to ask for some help, both in sorting out an essay, and in answering the question, “What is performance theory for?” I’ve been struggling with Joseph Roach’s essay in Performativity and Performance . At first reading, it seemed to be a clear tracing of three funeral performances as examples of social memory. Stepping back from it, though, I feel like it wanders over lots of territory, and I’m having difficulty finding the main point he is arguing. I believe one of his main theses is that literature and orature are interrelated, “that these modes of communication have produced one another interactively over time” (45). Another thesis is that performance allows culture to change. I don’t see how these arguments are supported with the analysis of different funeral performances, though. The literature he refers to is the libretto of an opera (an obvious aesthetic performance form) or a newspaper. How is performance related to what has traditionally been considered literatu...
Hey all!
ReplyDeleteI had such a great time with the continuation of the bag exercise. I agree wholeheartedly with Misty's comments about it today, mainly that we have the privilege of sharing intimate experiences with one another in this space. It really got me thinking about just how many privileges we have in this space as a whole. I appreciate that this space acts as our laboratory and we have the privilege of experimenting here.
Josiah mentioned something about these exercises "writing a story" about our bags, and I appreciate that in terms of perspective. These are crafted retellings of an exercise we did two weeks ago and honestly, I couldn't remember a lot about what I actually showed off apart from one or two things. Performance is fleeting and won't be done the same way twice, so it almost feels like we've constructed two separate stories of what's in our bags and, by extension, who we are.
Thank you, Misty, for your presentation today! I really enjoyed hearing your thoughts on Barthes in particular and the gendered nature of time. Your talk about death made me think of two books I read recently, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and From Here to Eternity, both by Caitlin Doughty. Both are about the nature of death and the author's experience with it. The author's youtube channel, Ask a Mortician, reminds me a lot of what you were saying about power structures and their relationship to death.
Kalli, your phrase "crafted retellings" brings up the issue of repetition. We all like to say that a performance is never the same each time it is performed. If that is so, what are we calling the performance? How do we look at two things which are, we claim, different, and call them the same performance?
DeleteI don't think this is just idle word play. I think there is an important idea (and I welcome any help articulating it) about activity and activeness. To imagine a play as something set, something you do, more or less, the same each night implies a certain passivity. But to imagine a play as something created when the players and the audience get together implies active creation. And I know which one is more inspiring to me.
I think it also leads to a vision of the world as emergent, rather than established. If, for example, I believe that the categories of male and female exist, even as every performance may be different (and yet the same), I will see that category prior to the person. If, however, I see every iteration of gender as a completely original performance, it should change how I approach a person, what assumptions I make, what relational posture I adopt, etc.
Thanks for pondering my comments, Kalli. I will look into those books by Caitlin Doughty, and youtube channel. I had a friend who was a badass coroner and first-response nurse for rape victims. She would give the best life advice, that was also quite dark. For example, she said when she gets hung up on assholes, she imagines them dead, since we are all-already dead, and then, they don't bother her so much anymore, she pities or empathizes with their humanity. Morbid? Powerful? Seems to relate to Barthes.
DeleteThe bag re-doings were cool! Thank you for sharing. I’m glad I got to experience a snippet of your bags. We talked in class about the narrativizing of the performances the second time around. As we discussed in class, I definitely felt the desire to narrativize/ find parallels and dichotomies in the performances. The juxtaposition of different bodies and performances together made me notice details I did not the first time around--while also disrupting and complicating the meaning I took from it. Josiah, Kalli, and Ethan’s performance suddenly highlighted this type of searching/ intentional careful decision to show certain things while hiding others, which somehow informed the meaning I took from Laura, Misty, and Simi’s more abstract performances. Misty, showing the vulnerability and apprehension she felt by signaling undressing, Simi’s exposure of everything in the bag, and Laura’ combing the chord ( hair ) highlighted the hesitant, uncertain, and filtered nature of Josiah, Kalli, and Ethan’s performance. The intentional grouping of the performances changed the meaning of both separate performances—for me anyway.
ReplyDeleteI appreciated Misty’s insight about incarcerated people and the bag performances. Our ability to decide how vulnerable and how much we want to expose is definitely a privilege considering the invasive forced searches incarcerated individuals must endure on the regular.
I also appreciated the conversation about structuralism vs poststructuralism. It helped me because I somehow thought Stanley Fish was more poststructuralist in nature. I guess the disruption of truth? ( or of one interpretation I guess ) made me think he was postmodern (lack of additional research on my part). I love that performance studies is a poststructuralist discipline. Performance scholars disrupt structure which is so important in order to destabilize and challenge hierarchical forces. However, sometimes the abstract nature of performances and the language we have developed to critique, explain, and demystify can feel a bit elitist/high-brow(not all, of course) and that does bother me. I do not know how to rectify this feeling because I simultaneously understand why we must develop these performances and a language to understand each other.
Responding to your last point, I am also concerned about how the language limits the dissemination of important ideas. I wonder how any of these concepts affect daily life. But I look at the growing acceptance of the notion of transgender and concrete actions like gender-neutral bathrooms or the answer "Choose not to say" on race/gender forms, and I credit people like Judith Butler. Somehow, it has trickled down or out.
DeleteRight! Judy B's ideas have totally trickled down -- like decades + after. Maybe since change influenced by thinkers moves glacially and so in order to further/expand/grow knowledge it's important to learn the difficult language. SO I guess using the language in certain contexts is what makes me wanna puke(like explaining gender as performance to your great aunt by using words like BINARY DICHOTOMY DISCURSIVE PROBLEMATIC DIALOGIC ONTOLOGICAL PERFORMITIVITY). But I also know how important it is to understand the ideas in depth. I guess if you're not an asshole it should never be a problem(I've definitely been that asshole though I'm the worst). HAHA.
DeleteURL:
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/ten-reasons-were-not-going-to-grad-school
I just want to chime in here about Judith Butler's theories trickling down, and add that many argue those ideas trickled-up to Judith. Also, can we even discuss Judith Butler right now without mentioning the letter she co-signed excusing sexual harassment and playing into the hierarchical power abuses within the academy?: "Some might argue that Butler’s stepping down will cause damage to the field of gender studies, which includes trans studies, all of which might in turn affect those already marginalised. But here we have a chance to be clear: Butler did not invent gender performativity; she was among the first to theorise it and a very particular set of institutional and cultural factors, including this sycophantic New York article which claims she is directly responsible for gender-queerness, has enabled the mythology that she is the Queen Mother of Gender. No, actually, she’s not. Centuries of what we might now call “genderqueer” people are responsible for that, sacrificing their lives along the way. The point is this: the idea that gender is a fluid construct existed before Butler and will thrive long after her. Her work remains important—though not for the reasons stated in either academic or popular publications—and it deserves study. It will continue to be studied." http://www.yasminnair.net/content/judith-butler-and-mla
DeleteYeah, Misty you're probably right about some of that. I've also heard about JB being RUDE AF. I guess the language is more of what I'm talking about. I don't think Butler invented gender performativity. But I think JB did name it(with the help of many others) and give us some language to name these concepts that are deeply philosophical and obscure at times. I do think the naming and general acceptance of "gender performance" is a trickling down, and even if gender performance already existed---it has been named or at least talked about. And that naming and theorizing can help us understand it on a deeper level + eliminate a little stigma for queer folks.
DeleteIn class on Tuesday, I found myself asking, “What is a performance?” I have a list of qualities at the ready—it is active, it is for an audience, it is intentional. I’ve always thought that a performance requires certain choices to be made, choices which reveal an intention and a point of view. As I said in class, I was struck by the clear choices made in our performances and the intentions I read into those choices. More and more, though, and this also happened in reaction to our performances, I’m interested in the failure of those intentions. If I were to connect this to the readings, those failures might be the punctum. It might have become obvious I am very sympathetic with the attraction of an accidental detail that exists outside an artist’s point of view. The stronger the intention or the point of view, the more likely I am to look for something that pops the bubble. Barthes’s boredom with the juxtaposition of nuns and drag queens resonated with me. Don’t tell me where to look.
ReplyDeletePart of my dissatisfaction with my definition of a performance as the choices of the performer comes from the tension between “real life” and “a performance.” For some reason, it felt like cheating when I left my papers out of the bag/performance or when Erfan took his sunglasses out. Why is it cheating? Is it because the exercise is based on autobiographical material? The first exercise took many of us unprepared, not as competent to present a specific image. Perhaps I wanted that lack of preparation or that vulnerability to inform the performances.
But I also feel uncomfortable with the idea of streamlining the performance, of removing elements to get what I want. Which leads me to what my question may actually be: “Who is performing?” Am I performing the story of my vulnerability and my pride, or is the bag performing its clothness? Are the sunglasses performing connectivity when they catch on the poncho?
Or is the performance emerging from the interconnected assemblage of these things? So that the performance is not what I did, but what happened within a time frame.
Or am “I” and “the bag” and “the water bottle” and “the audience” constituted by the relationships, the struggles, the working out? We could see how Taylor’s “I don’t give a shit” attitude was heightened or brought into focus when she performed next to Erfan. And both Misty’s and Simi’s performances were obscured for me, so that I had trouble seeing Simi’s traveling back and forth as well as Misty’s revealing. These qualities emerged from the relationship of performances to each other and from my spectating. And Erfan’s blue poncho moves from a tool, a part of the bag, to another character when it works against the human. The performance of back-to-frontness allows the poncho to distinguish or differentiate itself from the human.
In class this week I thought about the following themes: how power is performed and excercized in the classroom/ university; how much of my own personal internal dialog is about my objects/relationship with objects and how that compares to others. I am constantly damming myself for forgetting pens/pencils, spilling things on my shirt, damning my purse for getting stuck on chair arms, etc. I think the performance of Misty is a clumsy clown bit, teetering a too-large stack of boxes and dropping them over and over to the laughter of children, and pity of adults.
ReplyDeleteWhen Sinmisola made the relatable declaration that he didn't care about his bag, I remembered the mic-drop scene in the movie The Devil Wears Prada, wherein Meryl Streep's character (top fashion magazine editor) schools Ann Hathaway's character (intern who hates fashion) about how even an irreverent shopping choice is 'chosen for consumers' by a designer who has put hundreds of hours into designing (a backpack for example), building on hundreds of years of fashion history, the political and cultural moment, etc. If I can find a clip and share it here I will!
I find Taylor's comment about the language we use to critique and explain performance elitist relatable. I think this is not a problem only with performance studies but the academy at large. Often times, we (faculty and students) have brilliant and insightful ideas that can make remarkable difference but becomes inaccessible because of the language. Even though the trends are changing, it is as if you have to sound lofty in order to sound "scholarly" which, I think, also becomes a form of performance.
ReplyDeleteThe re/performance of our bag introductions were great to watch and raised some interesting ideas. Like Kalli, I did not remember much of what I did the first time I introduced my bag and what I actually chose to perform was inspired by Serap’s comment that I seemed to be holding my bag carefully. In my re/performance, I chose to be less vulnerable and more careful; both in what I chose to show/not show and in my actions. I loved seeing some of the changes to others re/performances too. I remember when we first introduced our bags, Laura was conflicted on what to name her bag and even mulled it over the following week. In her re/performance, it seemed Laura’s unnamed bag had personified, growing phone charger hair that Laura was now combing. I think this is interesting in regards to our discussion that performativity is about doing, not showing. In my case, I performed my care for my bag. In Laura’s re/performance, she performed, in my interpretation, the next stage in the personification of her bag.
ReplyDeleteIn class on Tuesday, I really enjoyed our improvisation. The thing I really enjoyed looking at was different interpretations of a subject from different subjectivities. How each person could have their own version of the bag idea and how each performance could tell you about different personalities. The other thing that was interesting was the idea of performing the ones which shared some sorts of similar ideas together. It really affected the way in which each performance was executed the first time.
ReplyDeleteMemory, temporality, spectatorship, space, resonance, P.O.V (authorship), stillness as an action produces a way to frame an experience for the people watching and for the persons experiencing it. What happens to the present? Are we ever really present? The event that is "happening" is temporal. Vulnerability and power produce identity as expanded upon in the class activity of the bag activity. There is also fear and excitement associated with the performances as performing with an object causes you to question, "does it speak to my performative style?"
ReplyDeleteWhen the class individually performed the revised bag exercise, it told us a narrative about the way they compose and recognize the possibility of the different ways they can conceptualize a performance of the bag. Bag being the things that has a direct relationship to the performer. In this case, the specific audience also became a part of the assignment by allowing the performers to internally process freely to work with new ideas and create temporary moments. When we paired or grouped up, the creative processes where altered as the projection and interpretation of each narrative was extended into the co-performer(s). I believe these performers generated our understanding of how to frame a new narrative or image that essentially becomes part of the project. This playful experimentation allowed us to manifest ourselves as authors and storytellers outside of the regular context of introductions.
laura