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Performance and Theatricality: The Subject Demystified
Josette Féral, Terese Lyons
Modern Drama, Volume 25, Number 1, Spring 1982, pp. 170-181 (Article)
Published by University of Toronto Press
DOI: 10.1353/mdr.1982.0036
For additional information about this article
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mdr/summary/v025/25.1.feral.html
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Performance and Theatricality:
The Subject Demystified
JOSETTE FERAL
Translated by Terese Lyons
Depending on one's choice of experts , theatre today can be divided into two
different currents which I shall emphasize here by referring to a remark of
Annette Michelson's on the performing arts that strikes me as particularly
relevant to my concern:
There are, in the contemporary renewal of perfonnance modes, two basic and diverging
impulses which shape and animate its major innovations. The first, grounded in the
idealist extensions of a Christian past, is mytbopoeic in its aspiration. eclectic in its
forms, and constantly traversed by the dominant and polymorphic style which
constitutes the most tenacious vestige of that past: expressionism. Its celebrants are: for
theater. Artaud, Grotowski , for film, Mumau and Brakhage, and for the dance,
Wigman. Graham. The second, consistently secular in its commitment to objectification, proceeds from Cubism and Constructivism; its modes are analytic and its
spokesmen are: for theater, Meyerhold and Brecht, for film , Eisenstein and Snow, for
dance, Cunningham and Rainer ,1
Rather than question this classification and the insufficient consideration it
gives to men of the theatre like Craig or Appia, and to theatrical practices as
varied as those of A. Boal's guerrilla theatre, Bread & Puppet's political
theatre, and !he experiments of A. Benedetto, A. Mnouchkine, the TNS, the
San Francisco Mime Troupe, and Mabou Mines, I should like to make my own
use of it to account for the phenomenon of performance as it has appeared in the
United States and Europe over the past twenty years .
Inherited from surrealist practices in the twenties, as RoseLee Goldberg has
shown in her book, Peiformance! artistic performance enjoyed quite a boom
in the fifties , especially in the wake of the experiments of Allan Kaprow and
John Cage. Conceived as an art-form at the juncture of other signifying
practices as varied as dance, music, painting, architecture, and sculpture,
performance seems paradoxically to correspond on all counts to the new theatre
Performance and Theatricality
171
invoked by Artaud; a theatre of cruelty and violence, of the body and its drives,
of displacement and "disruption,'" a non-narrative and non-representational
theatre. 1 should like to analyse this experience of a new genre in hopes of
revealing its fundamental characteristics as well as the process by which it
works. My ultimate objective is to show what practices like these, belonging to
the limits of theatre, can tell us about theatricality and its relation to the actor
and the stage.
Of the many characteristics of performance, I shall point to three that, the
diversity of practices and modes notwithstanding, constitute the essential
foundations of all performance. They are first, the manipulation to which
performance subjects the performer's body - a fundamental and indispensable
element of any performing act; second, the manipulation of space, which the
performer empties out and then carves up and inhabits in its tiniest nooks and
crannies; and finally , the relation that performance institutes between the artist
and the spectators, between the spectators and the work of art, and between the
work of art and the artist.
a) First, the manipulation of the body. Performance is meant to be a physical
accomplishment, so the performer works with his body the way a painter does
with his canvas. He explores it, manipulates it, paints it, covers it, uncovers it,
freezes it, moves it, cuts it, isolates it, and speaks to it as if it were a foreign
object. It is a chameleon body, a foreign body where the subject's desires and
repressions surface. This has been the experience of Hermann Nitsch, Vito
Acconci, and Elizabeth Chitty. Performance rejects all illusion, in particular
theatrical illusion originating in the repression of the body's "baser" elements,
and attempts instead to call attention to certain aspects of the body - the face,
gestural mimicry, and the voice - that would normally escape notice. To this
end, it turns to the various media - telephoto lenses , still cameras, movie
cameras, video screens, television - which are there like so many microscopes
to magnify the infinitely small and focus the audience's attention on the limited
physical spaces arbitrarily carved out by the performer's desire and transformed
into imaginary spaces, constituting a zone where his own emotional flows and
fantasies pass through. These physical spaces can be parts of the performer's
own body magnified to infinity (bits of skin, a hand, his head, etc.), but they can
also be certain arbitrarily limited, natural spaces that the performer chooses to
wrap up and thus reduce to the dimensions of manipulable objects (cf. Christo's
experiments with this technique').
The body is made conspicuous; a body in pieces, fragmented and yet one, a
body perceived and rendered as a place of desire, displacement, and
ftuctuation, a body the performance conceives of as repressed and tries to free
- even at the cost of greater violence. Consider, for example, the intentionally
provocative scenes where Acconci plays on stage with his various bodily
products . Such demonstrations, which are brought to the surface more or less
violently by the performer, are presented to the Other's view, to the view of
others, in order that they may undergo a collective verification. Once this
exploration of the body, and therefore of the subject, has been completed, and
once certain repressions have been brought to light, objectified, and represented, they are frozen under the gaze of the spectator, who appropriates them
as a form of knowledge. This leaves the performer free to go on to new acts and
new performances .
For this reason, some performances are unbearable; those of Nitsch, for
example, which do violence not only to the performer (in his case, a violence
freely consented to), but also to the spectator who is harassed by images that
both violate him and do him violence.' The spectator has the feeling that he is
taking part in a ritual that combines all possible transgressions - sexual and
physical, real and staged; a ritual bringing the performer back to the limits of the
subject constituted as a whole; a ritual that, starting from the performer's own
"symbolic," attempts to explore the hidden face of what makes him a unified
subject: in other words, the "semiotic" or" chora" haunting him.6 Yet this is not
a return to the divided and silent body of the mother, such as Kristeva sees in
Artaud, but instead a march ahead towards the dissolution of the subject, not in
explosion, scattering, or madness - which are other ways of returning to the
origin - but in death. Performances as a phenomenon worked through by the
death drive: this comparison is not incidental. It is based on an extensive,
conscious practice, deliberately consented to: the experience of a body
wounded, dismembered, mutilated, and cut up (if only by a movie camera: cf.
Chitty's Demo Model), a body belonging to a fully accepted lesionism. 7
The body is cut up not in order to negate it, but in order to bring it back to life
in each of its parts which have, each one, become an independent whole. (This
process is identical to Bufiuel's in Un Chien andalou, when he has one of the
characters play with a severed hand on a busy road.) Instead of atrophying, the
body is therefore enriched by all the part-objects that make it up and whose
richness the subject learns to discover in the course of the performance. These
part-objects are privileged, isolated , and magnified by the performer as he
studies their workings and mechanisms, and explores their under-side, thereby
presenting the spectators with an experience in vitro and in slow motion of what
usually takes place on stage.
b) First the manipulation of the body, then the manipulation ofspace: there is
a functional identity between them that leads the performer to pass through
these places without ever making a definitive stop. Carving out imaginary or
real spaces (cf. Acconci's Red Tapes), one moment in one place and the next
moment in the other, the performer never settles within these simultaneously
physical and imaginary spaces, but instead traverses, explores, and measures
them, effecting displacements and minute variations within them. He does not
occupy them, nor do they limit him: he plays with the performance'space as if it
were an object and turns it into a machine "acting upon the sense organs. ,,'
Exactly like the body, therefore, space becomes existential to the point of
Performance and Theatricality
173
ceasing to exist as a setting and place. It no longer surrounds and encloses the
performance, but like the body, becomes part of the performance to such an
extent that it cannot be distinguished from it. It is the performance. This
phenomenon explains the idea that performance can take place only within and
for a set space to which it is indissolubly tied.
Within this space, which becomes the site of an exploration of the subject,
the performer suddenly seems to be living in slow motion. Time stretches out
and dissolves as "swollen, repetitive, exasperated" gestures (Luciano Jnga Pin)
seem to be killing time (cf. the almost unbearable slow motion of some of
Michael Snow's experiments): gestures that are multiplied and begun again and
again ad infinitum (cf. Aceonci's Red Tapes) , and that are always different,
split in two by the camera recording and transmitting them as they are being
carried out on stage before our eyes (cf. Chitty). This is Derrida' s diJferance
made perceptible. From then on, there is neither past nor future, but only a
continuous present- that of the immediacy of things, of an action taking place.
These gestures appear both as a finished product and in the course of being
carried out, already completed and in motion (cf. the use of cameras): gestures
that reveal their deepest workings and that the performer executes only in order
to discover what is hidden underneath them (this process is comparable to
Snow's camera filming its own tripod) . And the performance sbows this gesture
over and over to the point of saturating time, space, and the representation with
it - sometimes to the point of nausea. Nothing is left but a kinesics of gesture.
Meaning - all meaning - bas disappeared.
Performance is the absence of meaning. This statement can be easily
supported by anyone coming out of the theatre. (We need think only of the
audience's surprise and anger with the first "stagings" of the Living Theatre, or
with those of Robert Wilson or Richard Foreman.) And yet, if any experience is
meaningful , without a doubt it is that of performance. Performance does not
aim at a meaning, but rather makes meaning insofar as it works right in those
extremely blurred junctures out of which the subject eventually emerges. And
performance conscripts this subject both as a constituted subject and as a social
subject in order to dislocate and demystify it.
Performance is the death of the subject. We just spoke of the death drive as
being inscribed in performance, consciously staged and brought into play by a
set of freely intended and accepted repetitions . This death drive, which
fragments the body and makes it function like so many part-objects, reappears
at the end of the performance when it is fixed on the video screen. Indeed, it is of
interest to note that every performance ultimately meets the video screen,
where the demystiJied subject is frozen and dies . There, performance once
again encounters representation, from which it wanted to escape at all costs and
which marks both its fulfilment and its end.
c) In point of fact, the artist's relation to his own performance is no longer
one of an actor to his role, even if that role is his actual one, as the Living
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Theatre wanted it to be. When he refuses to be a protagonist, the performer no
more plays himself than he represents himself. Instead, he is a source of
production and displacement. Having become the point of passage for energy
flows - gestural, vocal, libidinal, etc. - that traverse him without ever standing
still in a fixed meaning or representation, he plays at putting those flows to work
and seizing networks. The gestures that he canies out lead to nothing if not to
the flow of the desire that sets them in motion. This response proves once again
that a performance means nothing and aims for no single, specific meaning, but
attempts instead to reveal places of passage, or, as Foreman would say,
"rhythms" (the trajectory of gesture, of the body, of the camera, of view, etc .).
In so doing, it attempts to wake the body - the performer's and the spectator's - from the threatening anaesthesia haunting it.
It seems to me that all of us here are working on material, rearranging it so that the
resultant performance more accurately reflects Dot a perception of the world - but the
rhythms of an ideal world of activity, remade, the better in which to do the kind of
perception we each would like to be doing.
We are, then, presenting the audience with objects of a strange sort, that can only be
savored if the audience is prepared to establish new perceptual habits - habits quite in
conflict with the ones they have been taught to apply at classical perfonnance in order to
be rewarded with expected gratifications. In classical performance, the audience learns
that if they allow attention to be led by a kind of childish, regressive desire-for-sweets,
the artist will have strategically placed those sweets at just the "crucial" points in the
piece where attention threatens to climax.9
This technique accounts for the "selective inattention" that Richard Schechner
speaks of in Essays on Performance. W No more than the spectator, though, is
the performer implicated in the performance. He always keeps his viewing
rights. He is the eye, a substitute for the camera that is filming, freezing, or
slowing down, and he causes slides, superpositions, and enlargements with a
space and on a body that have become the tools of his own exploration.
In our work, however, what's presented is not what's "appealing" (the minute
something is appealing it's a reference to the past and to inherited "taste") - but rather
what has heretofore not been organized by the mind into recognizable gestalts; everything that has heretofore "escaped notice." And the temptation each of us fights, I think,
is to become prematurely "interested" in what we uncover. II
This situation is all the more difficult for the spectator since performance,
caught up as it is in an unending series of often very minor transformations,
escapes formalism . Having no set form , every performance constitutes its own
genre, and every artist brings to it, according to his background and desires,
subUy different shadings that are his alone: Trisha Brown's performances lean
towards the dance, Meredith Monk's towards music. Some, however, tend in
Perlonnance and Theatricality
175
spite of themselves towatds theatre: Acconci's Red Tapes , for exatnple, or
Michael Smith's Down in the Rec Room. All of this goes to show that it is hatd
to talk about perlonnance. This difficulty can be seen also in the various kinds
of reseatch on the subject, often in the fonns of photo albums recording the
fixed traces of perlormances that ate forever over, with the few critical studies
of the subject tending towatds historicism or description. Here we touch upon a
problem identical to one presented by the theatre of non-representation: how
can we talk about the subject without betraying it? How can we explain it?
From descriptions of stagings taking place elsewhere or existing no longer, to
the fragmentary, critical discourse of scholats , the theatrical experience is
bound always to escape any attempt to give an accurate account of it. Faced
with this problem, which is fundatnental to all spectacles, perlonnance has
given itself its own memory . With the help of the video catnera with which
every perlormance ends, it has provided itself with a past.
• • •
If one judges from everything that has thus fat been said about perlonnance, it
certainly seems difficult to ascertain the relationship between theatre and
perlonnance. And if we turn to the statements of certain perlormers, that
relationship would even seem to be, of necessity, one of exclusion. Michael
Fried writes to that effect: "theatre and theatricality ate at Wat today, not simply
with modernist painting (or modernist painting and sculpture), but with art as
such - and to the extent that different atts can be described as modernist, with
modernist sensibility as such."" Fried sets forth his atgument in two patts:
I) The success, even the survival. o/the arts has come increasingly to depend on their
ability to defeat theatre .
2) Art degenerates as it approaches the condition o/theatre. 13
How is such a statement to be explained, let alone justified? If we agree with
Derrida that theatre cannot escape from representation which alienates and
undermines it, and if we also agree that theatre cannot escape natrativity (all the
current theatrical experiences prove as much, except perhaps for those of
Wilson and Foreman, which already belong to perlormance) , then it would
seem obvious that theatre and art ate incompatible. "In the theatre, every fonn
once born is mortal ... ," Peter Brook writes in The Empty Space. '4 But as I have
just stated, perlonnance is not a fonnalism. It rejects form , which is
immobility , and opts, instead, for discontinuity and slippage. It seeks what
Kaprow was already calling for in happenings thirty yeatS ago: "The dividing
line between art and life should remain as fluid and indistinct as possible and
time and space should remain variable and discontinuous so that, by continuing
JOSETTE FERAL
to be open phenomena capable of giving way to change and the unexpected ,
performances take place only once. "'s Are we very far from what Artaud
advocated for the theatre, or from what the Living Theatre and Grotowski,
following Artaud, have demanded as the model for theatre's renewal: the stage
as a "living" place and the playas a "one time only" experience?
That performance should reject its dependence on theatre is certainly a sign
that it is not only possible, but without a doubt also legitimate, to compare
theatre and performance, since no one ever insists upon his distance from
something unless he is afraid of resembling it. I shall not attempt, therefore, to
point out the similarities between theatre and performance, but rather show how
the two modes complement each other and stress what theatre can learn from
performance . Indeed, in its very stripped-down workings, its exploration of the
body, and its joining of time and space, performance gives us a kind of
theatricality in slow motion: the kind we find at work in today's theatre.
Performance explores the under-side of that theatre, giving the audience a
glimpse of its inside, its reverse side, its hidden face .
Like performance, theatre deals with the imaginary (in the Lacanian sense of
the term) . In other words, it makes use of a technique of constructing space,
allowing subjects to settle there: first the construction of physical space, and
then of psychological space. A strange parallel, modelling the shape of stage
space on the subject's space and vice versa, can be traced between them. Thus,
whenever an actor is expected to ingest the parts he plays so as to become one
with them (here we might think of nineteenth-century theatre, of naturalist
theatre, and of Sarah Bemhardt' s first parts), the stage asserts its oneness and its
totality. It is, and it is one, and the actor, as a unitary subject, belongs to its
wholeness.
Closer to us, in experiences of present-day theatre (experimental theatre,
alternative theatre - here we might think of the Living Theatre's first
experiments, or, more recently, of Bob Wilson's), the way theatrical space is
constructed attempts to make tangible and apparent the whole play of the
imaginary as it sets subjects (and not a subject) on stage. The processes
whereby the theatrical phenomenon is constructed as well as the foundation of
that phenomenon - an extensive play of doubling and permutation that is more
or less obvious and more or less differentiated depending upon the specific
director and aims - thus become apparent: the division between actor and
character (a subject that Pirandello dealt with very well); the doubling of the
actor (insofar as he survives after the death of the text) and the character; the
doubling of the author and the director (cf. Ariane Mnouchkine); and lastly, the
doubling of the director and the actor (cf. Schechner in Clothes). As a group,
these permutations form different projection spaces, representing different
positions of desire by setting down subjects in process.
Subjects in process: the subject constructed on stage projects himself into
Objects (characters in classical theatre, part-objects in performance) which he
Performance and Theatricality
177
can invent, multiply, and eliminate if need be. And these constructed objects,
products of his imagination and of its different positions of desire, constitute so
many "a" -objects for him to use or abuse according to the needs of his inner
economy (as with the use of movie cameras or video screens in many
performances). In the theatre, these "a"-objects are frozen for the duration of
the play. In performance, on the other hand, they move about and reveal an
imaginary that has not been alienated in a figure of fixation like characters in the
classical theatre, orin any other fixed theatrical form. For it is indeed a question
of the "subject," and not of characters, in today's theatre (Foreman, Wilson)
and in performance. Of course. the conventional basis of the actor's "art,"
inspired by Stanislavski, requires the actor to live his character from within
and conceal the duplicity that inhabits him while he is on stage. Brecht rose
up against this illusion when he called for a distancing of the actor from
his part and a distancing of the spectator from the stage. When he is faced
with this problem, the performer's response is original, since it seems to resolve
the dilemma by completely renouncing character and putting the artist himself
on stage. The artist takes the position of a desiring - a performing - subject,
but is nonetheless an anonymous subject playing the part of himself on stage.
From then on, since it tells of nothing and imitates no one, performance
escapes all illusion and representation. With neither past nor future, performance takes place. It turns the stage into an event from which the subject
will emerge transformed until another performance, when it can continue on
its way. As long as performance rejects narrativity and representation in this
way, it also rejects the symbolic organization dominating theatre and exposes
the conditions of theatricality as they are. Theatricality is made of this endless
play and of these continuous displacements of the position of desire, in other
words, of the position of the subject in process within an imaginary constructive
space.
It is precisely when it comes to the poSition of the subject, that performance
and theatre would seem to be mutually exclusive and that theatre would perhaps
have something to learn from performance. Indeed, theatre cannot do without
the subject (a completely assumed subject), and the exercises to which
Meyerhold and, later on, Grotowski subjected their students could only
consolidate the position of the unitary subject on stage. Performance, however,
although beginning with a perfectly assumed subject, brings emotional flows
and symbolic objects into a destabilized zone - the body, space - into an
infrasymbolic zone. These objects are only incidentally conveyed by a subject
(here, the performer), and that subject lends himself only very superficially and
partially to his own performance. Broken down into semiotic bundles and
drives, he is a pure catalyst. He is what permits the appearance of what slwuld
appear. Indeed, he makes transition, movement, and displacement possible.
Performance, therefore, appears as a primary process lacking teleology and
unaccompanied by any secondary process, since performance has nothing to
17 8
JOSETTE FtRAL
represent for anyone . As a result, performance indicates the theatre's 17IIlrgin
(Schechller would say its "seam"), theatre's fringes, something which is never
said, but which, although hidden, is necessarily present. Performance
demystifies the subject on stage: the subject's being is simultaneously exploded
into part-objects and condensed in each of those objects, which have
themselves become independent entities, each being simultaneously a margin
and a centre. Margin does not refer here to that which is excluded. On the
contrary, it is used in the Derridian sense of the term to mean the frame, and
consequently, what in the subject is most important, most hidden, most
repressed, yet most active as well (Derrida would say the "Parergon"'") . In
other words, it refers to the subject's entire store of non-theatricality.
Perfonnances can be seen, therefore, as a storehouse for the accessories of the
symbolic, a depository of signifiers which are all outside of established
discourse and behind the scenes of theatricality. The theatre cannot call upon
them as such, but, by implication, it is upon these accessories that theatre
is built.
In contrast to performance, theatre cannot keep from setting up, stating,
constructing, and giving points of view: the director's point of view, the
author's towards the action, the actor's towards the stage, the spectator' s
towards the actor. There is a multiplicity of viewpoints and gazes, a "density of
signs" (to quote Barthes'?) setting up a thetic multiplicity absent from
performance.
Theatricality can therefore be seen as composed of two different parts: one
highlights performance and is made up of the realities of the imaginary; and the
other highlights the theatrical and is made up of specific symbolic structures.
The former originates within the subject and allows his flows of desire to speak;
the latter inscribes the subject in the law and in theatrical codes, which is to say,
in the symbolic. Theatricality arises from the play between these two realities.
From then on it is necessarily a theatricality tied to a desiring subject, a fact
which no doubt accounts for our difficulty in defining it. Theatricality cannot
be, it must be for someone . In other words, it is for the Other.
The multiplicity of simultaneous structures that can be seen at work in
petformance seems, in fact, to constitute an authorless, actorless, and
directodess injratheatricality. Indeed, performance seems to be attempting to
reveal and to stage something that took place before the representation of the
subject (even if it does so by using an already constituted subject) , in the same
way that it is interested more in an action as it is being produced than in a
finished product. Now, what takes place on stage comprises flows , accumulations, and connections of signifiers that have been organized neither in a code
(hence the multiplicity of media and signifying languages that performance
makes use of: bits of representation and narration and bits of meaning) , nor in
structures permitting signification. Performance can therefore be seen as a
machine working with serial signifiers: pieces of bodies (cf. the dismember-
Performance and Theatricality
179
ment and lesionism we have already discussed), as well as pieces of meaning,
representation, and libidinal flows, bits of objects joined togetherin multipolar
concatenations (cf. Acconci' s Red Tapes and the fragmentary spaces he moves
about in: bits of a building, bits of rooms, bits of walls, etc.). And all of this is
without narrativity.
The absence of narrativity (continuous narrativity, that is) is one of the
dominant characteristics of performance. If the performer should unwittingly
give in to the temptation of narrativity , he does so never continuously or
consistently, but rather ironically with a certain remove, as if he were quoting,
or in order to reveal its inner workings. This absence leads to a certain
frustration on the part of the spectator, when he is confronted with performance
which takes him away from the experience of theatricality. For there is nothing
to say about performance, nothing to tell yourself, nothing to grasp, project,
introject, except for flows, networks, and systems. Everything appears and
disappears like a galaxy of "transitional objects"" representing only the failures
of representation. To experience performance, one must simultaneously be
there and take part in it, while continuing to be an outsider. Performance not
only speaks to the mind, but also speaks to the senses (cf. Angela Ricci
Lucchi's and Gianikian's experiments with smell), and it speaks from subject
to subject. It attempts not to tell (like theatre), but rather to provoke
synaesthetic relationships between subjects . In this, it is similar to Wilson's
The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin as described by Schechner in Essays on
Performance. 19
Performance can therefore be seen as an art-fonn whose primary aim is to
undo "competencies" (which are primarily theatrical). Performance readjusts
these competencies and redistributes them in a desystematized arrangement.
We cannot avoid speaking of "deconstruction" here. We are not, however,
dealing with a "linguistico-theoretical" gesture, but rather with a real gesture, a
kind of deterritorialized gesturality . As such, performance poses a challenge
to the theatre and to any reflection that theatre might make upon itself.
Performance reorients such reflections by forcing them to open up and by
compelling them to explore the margins of theatre. For this reason, an
excursion into performance has seemed not only interesting, but essential to our
ultimate concern, which is to come back to the theatre after a long detour behind
the scenes of theatricality.
NOTES
Annette Michelson, "Yvonne Rainer. Part One: The Dancer and the Dance,"
Art/orum, 12 (January 1974),57.
2 RoseLee Goldberg, Performance: Live Art, 19D9 to the Present (New York, 1979).
3 Luciano Inga-Pin says this in his preface to the photo album on performance,
Perfortnllllces, Happenings, Actions, Events, Activities, Instalilltions (padua.
1970).
I
180
JOSETTE FERAL
4 By wrapping up cliffs and entire buildings in their natural surroundings, Christo
S
6
7
8
9
10
II
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
isolates them. He thus simultaneously emphasizes their gigantic size and negates it
by his very project, and estranges his objects from the natural setting from which he
takes ihem (cf. Photo no. 48 in the illustrations to Inga-Pin) .
The perfonnances of the Austrian artist Hermann Nitsch were inspired by ancient
Dionysiac and Christian rites adapted to a modem context designed to illustrate in a
practical fashion the Aristotelian notion of catharsis through fear. terror. or compassion. His Orgies, Mysteries, Theatre were performed on numerous occasions
in the seventies. A typical performance lasted several hours. It began with loud
music followed by Nitsch ordering the ceremonies to begin. A lamb with its throat
slit was brought into the midst of the participants. Its carcass was crucified, and
its intestines removed and poured (with their blood) over a naked man or woman
lying beneath the animal. This practice originated in Nitsch' s belief that
humanity's aggressive instincts had been repressed by the media. Even ritual
animal sacrifices, which were so common among primitive peoples, have totally
disappeared from modem experience. Nitsch's ritual acts thus represented a way of
giving full rein to the repressed energy in man. At the same time, they functioned
as acts of purification and redemption through suffering. (This description is
based on the discussion found in Goldberg, p. 106.)
These notions are borrowed from Julia Kristeva, La Revolution du tangage
poetique (Paris, 1974).
"Lesionisrn" refers to a practice whereby the body is represented not as an entity or a
united whole, but as divided into parts or fragments (cf. loga-Pin, p. 5) .
Inga-Pin, p . 2.
Stephen Koch, Richard Foreman, et al., "Perionnance, A Conversation," Artforum,
II (December 1972), 53-54.
Richard Schechner, Essays on Performllnce Theory, [970-[976 (New York,
1977), p. 147·
Koch, 54.
Michael Fried, "Art and Objecthood," Art/arum (June 1967), rpt. in Minimal Art,
ed. Gregory Battcock (New York, 1<)68), p. 139.
Ibid., pp. t39-141.
Peter Brook, The Empty Space (New York, 1969), p. 16.
Allan Kaprow . Assemblage, Environments and Happenings (New York. 1966),
-p. 190, quoted in Performance by Artis/s, ed. A.A. Bronson and Peggy Gale
(Toronto, 1979), p. 193·
See Jacques Denida, La Write en peinture (Paris, 1978).
Roland Barthes. "Baudelaire's Theater," in Critical Essays. trans. Richard Howard
(Evanston, t972) , p . 26.
See Donald W. Winnicott, Playing and R eality (New York, t971).
Schechner develops the idea of "selective inattention" in his discussion of
Wilson 's TheLije and Times of Joseph Stalin (Schechner, pp. 147-148):
For the December, 1973. performances ... at the .Brooklyn Academy of Music's opera bouse, the
Le Perq space - a room of about 150 rut by 80 feet - was set up with tables. chairs. refreshments: a
place where people went DOC only during the six 15-minute intermissions but also dlUing many or !be
acts of Wilson's seven-act opera. lbc opera began at 7 pm and ran more than 1:2 hours .... The
behavior in the Le Perq space was no( the same throughout lbc night. During the first three acts the
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space wu generally empty except for intcnnissioo. But increasingly as the night went on people came
to the space and stayed there speaking to friends, taking a break. from the performance, to loop oot of
the opera, later to re-enter. About half the audience left the BAM before the perfonnance was over,
but lhose who remained, like repeated siftings of flour, were finer and finer examples of Wilson fans :
the audience sorted itself out until those of us who stayed for the whole opera shared not onJy the
txperieoce of Wilson's work but the experience of experiencing it.