the everyday activity of performance

From: Diane Hodges (dhodges@ceo.cudenver.edu)
Date: Sun Jun 10 2001 - 21:11:42 PDT


judy -
i understand you efforts at distinction, i know you attend the theatre
often
and so are familiar with where the lines can be drawn - in my experience,
studying drama and theatre, being a stage-actress, assistant director,
dialogue coach,
and participating in various ways in the theatre and with theatre folk( a
former life, prior to being a capitalist power bitch, ha ha),

there is a thread of continuity that performers come to realize in terms
of their "real" lives and their stage lives: that there is little
difference. we act in-relation to the audience, whether it is about how or
where we avert our eyes on a crowded subway or bus,
or how we order in a restaurant, or how we meet strangers at a party, or
how we interact with close friends and or work-related colleagues - that
social life in urban north america is a theatrical life, based on "what
others think" or "see" or believe" about us, as we interact from our own
spaces,
and the ways in which we worry how others see us, think of us,
the ways in which we change our behaviours on that basis, from apologies
to hostilities to isolation or repression,
the possibility that we are ever '"real" in the social world strikes me as
largely impossible - we are social in the social world,
and alone when we are alone, and however those differences manifest, we
are conditioned, positioned, socialized and speechified into audience -
modes of activity. any educator assumes the role of "performer" and
assumes the students are an audience, generally, when really every student
is quite acutely aware of themselves as "performers" for the educator, as
the audience,

any institution functions on patterns and scripts, repetition, and,
having little experience with improvisation, perhaps many are likely to
recoil at change.

 so while it is possible to characterize the differences between formal
theatre and non-theatre contexts,
i am still unclear on what is 'other' to social reality, when it is
organized around the presence of others, being watched, watching, being
listened, listening, learning how to speak towards particular people, how
to act in particular structures of activity (staff meetings, recess,
closing-time at the local bar, pot-luck dinners) - there are patterns,
expectations of behaviour, and a social self who acts in-relation to the
others which whom she acts, or for whom she is performing, -

to characterize art as distinct from the everyday is to underestimate the
demands of the social life,
and is to make "art" elite - art is an expression of the everyday because
the everyday is all there really is.

in relation to learning by expansion, it is precisely these kinds of ideas
about relations between improbable concepts that can produce
contradictions, and yet are more likely to be resisted by folks who hold
their concepts dear, or students who have their lives wrapped up in
particular beliefs, or workers who are dependent upon particular values,
or researchers whose specialization forbids excessive crossover.

again, i don't see how expansion can be induced in others if the
research-activity itself anticipates a programmatic expansion -
phillip capper's descriptions capture, to me, quite well the demands on
researchers in these kinds of realms. i don't see how expansion can be
manipulated and still be expansion.
thus, i don't see how any research project could be predesigned to
instigate a learning by producing the contexts for 'expansion' -

it's all lovely theory, really, and well describes the process of learning
- but the assumption that this can now be used to induce progress,
well, i don't know.

but heck, you know me, i'm still stuck at 'to thine ownself be true' -
whether at conferences or in writing, or in interpreting data that one
knows will be interpreted by others,
it's all theatre, acting, a performance that is conducted with an uneasy
relation with the audience.

diane

xmca@weber.ucsd.edu writes:
>diane, there's a diff between intervening in the (voluntarily present)
>audience's everyday & intervening in an institutional practice where
>participants are tied up, so to speak, in it.... A diff in the nature of
>participation in the performance...
>1st, a diff in the degree and kind of reflexivity that is typical of
>everyday (goal-oriented) work and deliberately contra-everyday cultural
>spaces -- which is what makes the latter so attractive, of course.
>It is much harder to interrupt what is presupposed when so much at stake
>(professional advancement; institutional commitments; networks of
>practice)
>depends on it. The point is that the workaday world is object-oriented.
>The
>subjunctive is a highly constrained 'space' there. Going in through the
>object is the only way in imaginable; AND there is a difference in WHO
>participates in the performance -- it's self-selected in the case of art;
>in an institutional intervention, the buying-into-&-performing-change is a
>collective project....

"If you'll excuse me now, I'd like to be alone with my sandwich."
Homer



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