Download Postmodernism Theatre and Performance Art

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.