Survey
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
Ben Prout Professor Fink Second Draft April 30th, 2012 The Growing Gap or Connection? In recent years, there has been a rise in two very specific forms of art. Those two forms are performance Art and postmodern Theatre. Both have developed in very different ways in different settings. Postmodern theatre has started to stretch and test the boundaries and limits of “theatre” while Performance Art has eliminated those borders and attempted to create its own standards. In trying to achieve these goals, many performances have seamlessly fallen into defining themselves as either or. These performances, made up of both text and production, are not one of the other but rather create a balance between elements of the two art forms. Two performances that exemplify this balance are Anna Deveare Smith’s Fires in the Mirror and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. It is not just the authors who find balance with performance art and theatre, but the directors of these productions as well. Fires in the Mirror by Anna Deveare Smith was a performance centered on the 1991 racial conflict in Crown Heights, which resulted from the death of young Caribbean-American boy. The tensions rose in Crown Heights between the Jewish population and Caribbean population. Out of these tensions, Anna Deveare created this piece of art, which combines Performance Art and Postmodern Theatre. In this performance, Smith interviewed different individuals about the tensions in Crown Heights and the issue of race in America. She approaches the presentation of these interviews by embodying the people she interviewed. This style allows the audience to focus more on the one performer and the topic rather than on the language or dialogue. “For artists did not merely use performance as a means to attract publicity to themselves. Performance has been considered as a way of bringing to life the many formal and conceptual idea on which the making of art is based.”(Goldberg, 7). This quote gives one goal of performance and performance art; draw attention on the meaning behind the work. This is present in the text of Fires in the Mirror because Anna Deveare Smith wants to draw attention to the issue of Race in the United States. “It showed how artists chose performance to break free of the dominant media of painting and sculpture…and how they used it as a provocative form to respond to change-whether political, in the broadest sense of cultural” (Goldberg, 9). In the text it starts to become more and more evident that the text leans more towards a performance art piece. Smith is trying to do exactly what Goldberg talks about in that she is trying to bring about change in a provocative way. But even in this quote, I believe there is still an element of postmodern theatre. Postmodern theatre attempts to break away from the traditional forms of art in order to respond to change. For example in postmodern theatre, the goal of the text is not for the resolution of the plot but rather for the audience to grasp the subtext. The progression of Fires in the Mirror clearly indicate not a linear movement but many different scenes that start to point to an image of serious racial tension in the United States. There is no plot or resolution but makes the reader ponder the topic of Smith’s research. The other method used to combine elements of postmodern theatre and performance art is the performance of the text. Performance allows for the director to take the text and add more traditional theatre characteristics or more performance art traits. American Playhouse’s version of Fires in the Mirror takes a more theatrical approach to the show. For example Anna Deveare Smith calls herself an actress and a playwright and not a journalist in the introduction to the video. (George C. Wolfe, Fires in the Mirror). This reinforces the audience’s notions that this is an actor performing as opposed to Anna Deveare Smith. Mele Yamomo also notes how the acting style, costumes, production, design, music, are all taken from different historical time periods and contexts. (Yamomo, Articlesbase.com). Mele Yamomo introduces another element in this ongoing topic of conversation, “With the similar collapse of the modernist notion of Aristotle's linearity and the Hegelian logic of cause and effect, postmodern theatre is characterized by multidimensionality and simultaneity.” (Yamomo). This point becomes even more apparent in the performance because the audience must recognize that one actor is playing all of these roles. Not only that, but that one actor is portraying many different races and genders. Acting plays a large role in allowing this simultaneity to occur on stage. In Michael Kirby’s On Acting and Not-Acting, the work of Anna Deveare Smith in Fires in the Mirror is simply received acting. She is just recreating actual conversations that she had but Smith is replicating these conversations and adding nuances and mannerisms to make them unique. In Fires in the Mirror, Smith is taking specific quotes and dialogue of real people and stretching those words and emotions. The point that holds the most truth in relating Smith and Kirby is in the exercise of the mirror. Kirby notes that in an exercise where two people mirror each other the mirror is not acting if the intention is “I am imitating you” but if the intention is “editorializing” or purposely distorting that is acting. Smith does just that by bringing out certain characteristics of each person makes them bigger. Anna Deavere Smith also performed Fires in the Mirror without any costumes and still maintained those characters. Smith made it very clear that she did not fall under non-Matrixed performing even though she didn’t have costumes but enveloped each person through text. The significance of Kirby in relation to Smith’s work goes back to postmodern theatre and performance art. As a performance starts to move towards acting, it also leans more towards postmodern theatre. It is difficult for the text or the performance to be a completely performance art or postmodern theatre. Elements of both of these styles are combined in both text and performance in order to present the audience with Smith’s main issue, race. In a different work, Tony Kushner uses the two styles of art in order to allude to his overarching theme of homosexuality in the United States. The text itself tempts the audience into believing that this piece is solely theatrical, with elements of postmodern theatre, and does not incorporate any elements of performance art. Goldberg writes in the introduction to her book, “Performance has been a way of appealing directly to a large public, as well as shocking audiences into reassessing their own notions of art and its relation to culture…and to be surprised by the unexpected, always unorthodox presentations that the artists devise.” (Goldberg, 8). This quote can be applied very easily to the text of Angels in America. For example in Act 2 Scene 4, Louis and an unnamed man have very violent sex on stage. This scene is shocking and very unexpected when reading the play. This type of provocative shock happens to be a staple in performance art. Though Kushner structures the play in a traditional linear sense, the content exemplifies performance art. Another scene that illustrates the presence of performance art is Act 2 Scene 1, “Aaah I have…to go to the bathroom. Wait. Wait, just…oh. Oh God (He shits himself).” (Kushner, 54). Kushner must have acknowledged the work of Frank Wedekind, a performance artist, who included masturbation, and urination on stage. It is clear that the text does use elements of performance art but seems again to capture ingredients of postmodern theatre as well. The simultaneity and multidimensionality in Angels in America utilizes, as Fires in the Mirror did, these two qualities. In terms of simultaneity, Kushner takes two different conversations and places them on the stage at the same time. For example in Act 2 Scene 9, Joe and Harper are speaking whilst Louis and Prior are having a discussion both are about the crumbling relationships that they are in. Multi-dimensionality comes into play with the fact that actors are playing multiple roles. As a reader it is more difficult to understand these two concepts until they are put into practice. In a performance, those small things that make a performance seem like performance art or postmodern theatre are magnified. Starting with the postmodern theatre characteristics that multi-dimensionality of the play is highlighted in the actual performance of it. Emma Thompson plays the role of the nurse, and the woman in the south Bronx that adds another layer to the play, who are the angels in our society? The HBO performance does place more weight on the theatrical side of the show. But either way both elements become more palpable in performance than in text. This of course comes from the addition of a set, lights, and most importantly actors. The actors have the task of putting this piece of text on the stage and making choices that can give more or less weight to those elements of performance art or theatre. For example looking at this version of Angels in America during Act 2 scene 4, the scene between the unnamed man and Louis there was less violence. There was still an element of shock but less so than when it was revived in 2010. The scene was violent and people were really taken aback. Acting added another element to this debate. Kirby when speaking about complex acting says “Acting becomes complex as more and more elements are incorporated into the pretense...Complexity is related to skill and technical ability.” Angels in America in does call for complex acting that falls far away from the non-acting side. The acting component of the production of Angels in America begins to take shape as more theatrical. While production is influenced by the text however in performance, the director makes decisions that lean more towards one side or another as seen with Mike Nichols interpretation as opposed to the 2010 revival. Yet the question remains can apiece be entirely postmodern theatre or Performance Art? In the analysis of these two pieces of art, my initial viewpoint seemed to make more and more sense logically. However I am not contending that just these two pieces are interwoven but rather performance art and postmodern theatre as a whole. In the Theater of Transformation: Postmodernism in American Drama by Kerstin Schmidt, she says “Postmodern Theater predominantly creates images not language generated stories.” (Schmidt, 59) This quote reiterates the goal of another type of art form, performance art. Goldberg noted how the subject of the performance as well as the performer took on a life of its own. The similarities between these two art forms made more sense in this quote “Following the postmodern urge to experiment and play with a variety of art forms, postmodern dramatists approached performance art as a valuable resource for their dramatic endeavors.” (Schmidt, 59). This quote quickly seemed to reinforce my initial thoughts about a relationship between the two art forms. Elinor Fuchs believes that performance art is distancing itself from all things traditionally theatrical. “In any event, none of these contemporary theatrical and performance variants is the exclusive locus of a theatrical genre, style of practice.” (Fuchs, 7). It is clear that there is an ongoing debate about whether any of the variants of performance art even contain any elements of theatre as well as whether postmodern theatre seems to capture any theatrical elements. Which leads into another argument of modernist versus postmodernist theatre. However to contain my discussion I believe that postmodern theatre and performance have developed a symbiotic relationship to the point where I believe it is impossible to say that a text or a performance is solely performance art or postmodern theatre. Specifically with Angels in America and Fires in the Mirror, the two shows successfully capture parts of both art forms in order to convey their two images. One creates image of race and power in the United States, while the other discusses Homosexuality and AIDS in a society where those two subjects were taboo. Anna Deveare Smith and Tony Kushner use specificities of performance Art and Postmodern theatre in order to bring to life these two important subjects.