Re: the everyday activity of performance

From: Judith Diamondstone (diamonju@rci.rutgers.edu)
Date: Mon Jun 11 2001 - 07:51:54 PDT


diane, we agree on everything, but:
we disagree on how useful the distinction between art & everyday practice
is for social change interventions
and on how much promise LBE holds for social change.
judy

At 10:11 PM 6/10/01 -0600, you wrote:
>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
>
>



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Jul 01 2001 - 01:01:26 PDT