EFFICIENCIES OF SLOWNESS:
THE POLITICS OF CONTEMPORARY COLLECTIVE
CREATION
A DISSERTATION
SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF DRAMA
AND THE COMMITTEE ON GRADUATE STUDIES
OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Rachel Anderson-Rabern
May 2011
© 2011 by Rachel Elizabeth Anderson. All Rights Reserved. Re-distributed by Stanford University under license with the author.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/
This dissertation is online at: http://purl.stanford.edu/zn707mp3731
ii I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Branislav Jakovljevic, Primary Adviser
I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Harry Elam, Jr
I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Janice Ross
Approved for the Stanford University Committee on Graduate Studies. Patricia J. Gumport, Vice Provost Graduate Education
This signature page was generated electronically upon submission of this dissertation in electronic format. An original signed hard copy of the signature page is on file in University Archives.
iii Abstract
My project focuses on the process and performance of three contemporary devising groups. Working from Henry Bial’s claim that performance moments bear “. . . the hallmarks (and scars) of the process that generated it,”1 I draw processual and aes- thetic connections between collective creation methodologies and the consequences of those methodologies in performance. Initially, I take up the concept of collaborative
“devising” in America, and compare its contemporary manifestations to American performance collectives of the 1960s and 1970s. I choose three contemporary groups that work from a collaborative base: Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and Nature
Theater of Oklahoma. I compare their models of process and organization with those of earlier groups, including The Living Theater, the Performance Group, and the
Open Theater, arguing that contemporary groups engage with collaborative process and the aesthetics of performance by turns resisting and embracing previous models.
I then examine themes of everyday employment that persist in contemporary work, utilizing Henri Lefebvre’s writings on the role of the worker within everyday philoso- phy towards a claim that collective creation constructs new economies of performance.
Working from images of the everyday, I develop a theory of danced gestural forms in performance informed by Georgio Agamben’s writings on gesture. These forms,
1Henry Bial, “Part VII: Performance Processes,” The Performance Studies Reader, Second Edi- tion, ed. Henry Bial (New York: Routledge, 2007) 215–216.
iv I argue, unfold according to a complex engagement with velocities and speeds that, along with the political implications of gesture, enable us to chart collective creation methodology—even when the content of performance is not ideologically explicit— according to its political significance. This not only opens up process as relevant to the aesthetics of performance, but also considers how contemporary collective creation, through interdisciplinary explorations of source material drawn from the everyday, constitutes political engagement.
v Acknowledgements
As this project has reminded me, the process of making work, and the multiplicity of voices that go into a process, are undeniable parts of the final product. In accor- dance with this, I would like to deeply thank the many people who poked, prodded, expanded, questioned, and added immeasurably to this dissertation. Peggy Phelan and my cohort Ljubi Matic and Ileana Drinovan, who read pieces of my work early on. Jisha Menon for her thoughtfully organized dissertation workshop, which served as such an excellent model for giving and receiving positively constructed critical feedback. Members of the dissertation writing group at University of Colorado at
Boulder, run by Beth Osnes, who generously included me when I was away from my academic home. My supportive committee, who asked many questions that will continue to guide this project in the future: Harry Elam, Janice Ross, Leslie Hill,
Andrea Lunsford, and Gabriella Safran. Creative collaborators who were partners in putting theory into practice: Slanters!, Morgan Spector, and the casts and classrooms
I’ve worked with at Stanford. So many of my fellow Stanford graduate students (and former graduate students) whose conversation prompted new avenues of thought:
Kathryn Syssoyeva, Ciara Murphy, Matthew Moore, Kris Salata, and many others.
Most importantly, my advisor, Branislav Jakovljevic, whose guidance walked a diffi- cult line between tireless encouragement and rigorous standards. I cannot overstate
vi his influence or my admiration for him; he is the kind of advisor I aspire to become.
I also have many friends and family members whose support truly made this project possible. My mother Katherine Baker, my sister-in-law Jennifer Tomczyk, my brother Keith Anderson, and my father Clark Anderson. I also extend special thanks to Christine and Marie, whose extraordinary child-watching abilities freed me to think and write. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the tremendous support
I received from my son Atticus and my husband Landon. Atticus, your arrival in
February, 2010 taught me to organize my time in ways I could never have imagined.
I have no idea what I did with all my spare time before your appearance, but it certainly wasn’t finishing my dissertation. Thank you for putting my priorities into focus for me, and for teaching me that part of being a good parent is spending time on work I love. Landon, I am so fortunate to have you as a partner in life. Not just for your wicked formatting skills, but also for your questions, your calmness, your excitement, your willingness to toss me out of the house when I need to be tossed, your own academic passions that help to fuel mine. You are the most genuinely unselfish person I have ever met, the most annoying person to debate with, and overall the best possible collaborator I can imagine.
I would also like to thank Lin Hixson, Matthew Goulish, and the other members of Goat Island. John Collins and the rest of Elevator Repair Service. Kelly Copper,
Pavol Liska, and all of Nature Theater of Oklahoma. I hope this investigation is useful and interesting for you all.
vii Contents
Abstract iv
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction 1
1 Successors 21
2 Performative Economies 67
3 Dance As Gesture 106
4 The Ethics of Velocities 144
Conclusion 177
viii Introduction
I first encountered the work of contemporary collective creation groups Goat Island,
Elevator Repair Service, and Nature Theater of Oklahoma via a circuitous route. This investigation, which analyzes the methodologies that fuel contemporary collective practice, evolved from simple questions: when we see groups of performers working together onstage, what is it we’re looking at, and why is it important?
Initially, I found myself inspired by performance moments I interpreted as ev- idence of processes committed to group-oriented ethos: I perceived such moments in Mary Zimmerman’s Secret in the Wings when it arrived at Berkeley Repertory
Theatre in 2004, and again in William Forsythe’s Three Atmospheric Studies, which performed at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall in February, 2007. Secret in the Wings, a fusion of imagistically rendered fairytales, seemed to frame the delight and terror of childhood stories as a springboard for collective adult creativity. Part I of Three
Atmospheric Studies is a dance that depicts a young man’s arrest, which William
Forsythe choreographs – with a complex variety of tempo changes and freezes – to no sound save the dancers’ breath. These moments I interpreted as evidence of rigorous ensemble-based work that I assumed correlated with rehearsal processes emphasiz- ing the organism of the group as a creative and creating body. These perceptions, these assumptions with which I encountered Zimmerman’s and Forsythe’s work, were
1 INTRODUCTION 2 both wrong and not wrong. Group work, a vaguely encompassing term, is present in both pieces as in the form of ensembles made up of performers who have trained over time to be responsive to one another throughout acts of play, instants of si- multaneity, and within rigorous choreographic demands. However, my first tentative steps toward researching in this direction quickly unearthed the mismatch between my perception of process and the process itself: while I identified seeming indicators of “group process”, both Zimmerman’s and Forsythe’s work is very much the work of
Zimmerman and Forsythe. They build ensembles, onstage manifestations of mutually attentive performers. This does not, I discovered, necessarily equate with a process of development that involves the group as creative authority. Both Zimmerman and
Forsythe maintain unquestioned control over the development and production of the creative product.2 Zimmerman writes scripts alongside guided actor improvisation, in a process similar to Caryl Churchill’s work with Joint Stock, yet maintains strict single-authorship credit (she would not describe herself as a deviser at all) over the resulting text.3 This gap, a result of my own idealized sense of what staged collective practice would (or should) look like, helped me to establish a new set of assumptions that guided my subsequent exploration. Firstly, I believe that – when making per- formance – method matters. Secondly, method marks performance, a phenomenon scholar Henry Bial identifies in The Performance Studies Reader, saying performance
“bears the hallmarks and scars of the process that created it.”4 If I misjudged the
2For a discussion of Forsythe’s process and aesthetics, see Gerald Siegmund’s book William Forsythe: Denken in Bewegung (Thinking in Movement). For descriptions of how Mary Zimmer- man’s role as playwright and director integrates with the work of performers, see her 1994 disser- tation, The Archaeology of Performance: A Study of Ensemble Process and Development in the Lookingglass Theatre Production of Arabian Nights. 3Joint Stock worked with many other British playwrights, including David Hare (a co-founder) and Howard Barker. See, for example, Rob Ritchie’s The Joint Stock Book: The Making of a Theatre Collective. 4Bial 215. INTRODUCTION 3 traces of process that filtered into performance, then it was necessary to develop a clearer way of seeing informed by the study of both methodology and ensuing performance. This way of seeing demanded that I delineate some key terms, and distinguish between the stage work of an ensemble (which can occur as the fruition of a variety of practices, and in response to pre-scripted work) and collective creation, which develops ensemble work through nonhierarchical creative development without a pre-existing dramatic text.
My assumptions, which situate process as my central focus, consequently informed my research methodology. I began by shifting away from the high budget ensemble work produced by accomplished auteurs, and toward lower budget experimental work by performance groups that transparently articulated their commitment to collective processes of devising. I then spent 2008 acquainting myself with the contemporary landscape of this kind of performance, and experienced as many performances as I could. I attended the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival, and P.S. 122’s COIL
Festival in New York, as well as – with recommendations from friends and colleagues in mind – a handful of independently produced performance work throughout New
York City. I saw performance at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, Chicago’s
Museum of Contemporary Art, Ohio’s Wexner Center for the Arts, On the Boards in
Seattle, the Time-Based Art Festival in Portland, OR, and REDCAT in Los Angeles.
In sum total, I viewed performance (often more than one piece) produced by about
25 different performance groups, many of whom were on tour at the time. I became acquainted with performances devised by the established Wooster Group (New York) and Dell’Arte Company (Blue Lake, CA), both of whom have been producing work for over 30 years. I also attended devised performance by groups established in the
1980s, including Goat Island, though the largest swell noticeably belonged to groups INTRODUCTION 4 established in the mid to late 1990s and into the 2000s: Elevator Repair Service,
Radiohole, Collapsable Giraffe, Target Margin, The New York City Players, Pig Iron,
1927, Hand2Mouth Theatre, Sojourn Theater, Washington Ensemble Theatre, Na- ture Theater of Oklahoma, Hotel Savant, Big Art Group, the TEAM, the Civilians,
Half Straddle, and others. From this range, different creative philosophies emerged that helped to sharpen my investigation. While many flourishing and fascinating collective creation groups make use of performance as a tool for social change, a way of engaging with and prompting dialogue with their community, this tends not to be the ideological motivation for most of the experimental groups I encountered.5
Accordingly, my investigation follows the material and examines experimental per- formance that does not overtly espouse particular dogmas, nor pose specific questions or solutions for a community. In place of ideology that directly shapes the political content of performance, these experimental groups tend to assemble ideologies that are significant on the level of method. Their focus on method demands an equivalent scholarly focus, and I believe it is within methodology that we can begin to discover and recognize the significance of collectively created work to our field.
While I cannot claim to be familiar with every collective creation group who developed and produced work in the United States throughout 2008, this year of accumulating experience as an audience member shaped my ability to make links between performance groups actively producing work throughout the country, and to differentiate the aesthetics produced by this kind of work more precisely from the “ensemble” moments I observed in The Lookingglass Theatre and the Forsythe
5Among the companies listed above, Sojourn Theatre is an exception. Their artistic director, Michael Rohd, uses performance to address current issues directly impacting the Portland, Oregon community. For example, their 2008 site-specific performance BUILT, asked the audience to partic- ipate in an exploration of urban planning, population explosions, and consider how Portland should handle its changing demands for living space. INTRODUCTION 5
Company.
From the performances I attended, I culled three groups to serve as focal points for my investigation: Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service (ERS), and Nature The- ater of Oklahoma. Taken together, these groups provide three points that emphasize the differences and connections between American collective creation practice in the
2000s. While each company presented work throughout 2008, they represent three decades of performance making: Goat Island was founded in the mid-1980s, Elevator
Repair Service in the 1990s, and Nature Theater in the early 2000s. In terms of their presence in existing scholarship, these groups again offer a wide spread. Goat
Island have both produced and prompted scholarly engagement with their work for the past 20 years. They co-authored a series of reading companions to accompany their performances It’s An Earthquake in My Heart and The Sea and Poison. These
reading companions include essays by members of Goat Island, passages from literary
and historical works that serve as source material for performance, and writings by
performance scholars Peggy Phelan, Adrian Healthfield, Stephen Bottoms, Sara Jane
Bailes, and others. Additionally, the group co-wrote Small Acts of Repair: Perfor-
mance, Ecology, and Goat Island (2007) with contributing editor Stephen Bottoms,
has published numerous reflections on their collective process, including Schoolbook
2 (2000), and is featured in Sara Jane Bailes’ book, Performance Theatre and the
Poetics of Failure (2010), as well as in countless scholarly articles.6 Bailes’ book also
focuses on the work of Elevator Repair Service, linking their aesthetics to those of
Goat Island though ERS does not participate in a similar process of reflection through
6For a list of the group’s co-authored publications, see: www . goatislandperformance . org / publication.htm. Notable scholarly articles include: Stephen J. Bottoms, “The Tangled Flora of Goat Island: Rhizome, Repetition, Reality,” Theatre Journal 50.4 (1998): 421–446; and Joe Kelle- her, “Their Hands Full of Ghosts: Goat Island at the Last,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 31.3 (2009): 98–107. INTRODUCTION 6 writing; members (most prolifically director and co-founder John Collins) participate in interviews published in practice-based periods like the BOMB and American The- atre, and occasionally appear as critical subjects in journals including Women and
Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, Performing Arts Journal, TDR: The
Drama Review, and Theater.7
The youngest group of this trio, sparse scholarly attention has yet been paid
Nature Theater of Oklahoma. They are liberally celebrated in newspaper reviews and profiles in The Village Voice, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, and BOMB, but scholarship, save for one article in TDR: The Drama Review, is scarce.8 This is not an indication of the depth or relevance of their work, but rather provides this investigation with an opportunity and responsibility: to situate Nature Theater, as a new company that continues the genealogy of collectively created performance in the
U.S., both historically and aesthetically within the ever-growing terrain of American group performance.
That terrain, as I hope to show by focusing on these three groups, is forever a work in progress formed of both beginnings and endings. In 2008, just three years after the company got paid for the first time, Nature Theater toured four shows
(No Dice, Poetics: A Ballet Brˆut, Romeo and Juliet, and Rambo Solo).9 In contrast,
Goat Island toured only The Lastmaker, a work the group had already decided would
7See Paul David Young, “Performing the Novel,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 30.3 (2008): 52–59; Mark Russell, “A Coda: An Epilogue of Sorts,” TDR: The Drama Review 51.3 (2007): 76–79; Mark Zimmermann, “Some Sort of Awakening,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 20.2 (1998): 40–48; Shawn-Marie Garrett, “The Awkward Age: New York’s New Experimental Theater,” Theater 31.2 (2001): 45–53; Sara Jane Bailes, “This America: A Conversation with John Collins about Elevator Repair Service,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 12.2 (2002): 183–200. 8Rachel Anderson-Rabern, “The Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Aesthetics of Fun,” TDR: The Drama Review 54.4 (2010): 81–98. 9The company chronicles this moment on video, which can be accessed at: www.oktheater.org/ video.htm INTRODUCTION 7 be their last. Though they continued to tour through 2009, Goat Island, in 2011, is defunct. Following The Lastmaker (2007), the ninth and final performance piece
Goat Island made in its twenty-year span, the group disbanded.10 The six core mem-
bers: Karen Christopher, Matthew Goulish, Lin Hixson, Mark Jeffery, Bryan Saner,
and Lit´oWalkey, unanimously decided to go their separate ways. Goat Island did
not fade out of existence due to financial trouble, interpersonal drama, or disparate
artistic visions. Rather, the group made a purposeful aesthetic choice to define their
lifespan with their ninth piece, re-enforcing their fascination with numbers and pat-
terns, and with formal structure in general, as meaning-making. On 15 May 2008,
Lin Hixson and Matthew Goulish participated in a discussion at Stanford University,
led by Peggy Phelan, about Goat Island’s work. Describing the group’s decision to
separate after The Lastmaker, Goulish remarked on the fittingness of ending after
Goat Island’s ninth performance piece. Nine, Goulish stated, is the largest numeral;
after the number nine, it’s just more of the same. The group’s agreement to finish
at the point of greatest potentiality suggests Goat Island’s refusal to imitate itself,
to do “more of the same.” Goat Island are not the only group to seek to transcend
sameness; that is the cornerstone of experimental performance. Their ending, how-
ever, illustrates the profound level of their commitment, to avoid sameness in favor
of the aesthetically appropriate pattern. For Goat Island, the manner of their ending
reveals as much about their working philosophy as does their beginning. There is
a sense of symmetry and rhythm to their work that threads through their process
and into performance; a meaningful introduction to their work must recognize the
group’s pursuit of aesthetic completeness, a goal Goat Island ultimately realizes by
10Their final performance was in February, 2009 at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. INTRODUCTION 8 contemplating, and then enacting, their own end. Goat Island’s tendency to mutu- ally reflect on the group’s endpoint mirrors, in many ways, a process they established when they came together for the first time. In 39 Lectures in Proximity of Perfor- mance, Matthew Goulish recalls this meeting, “we did not know we were beginning a performance group or even that we were beginning a performance. We only knew that we were beginning. . . We unanimously elected Lin Hixson director.”11 For Goat
Island, organizational decisions: to begin, to end, to elect a director, are not practical concerns somehow separate from the creative act of performance-making; they are all opportunities to consider and to create.
Like Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service has had a consistent director since the group’s formation in 1991, though the remaining membership of the group changes almost chaotically. In a 2008 interview, ERS artistic director John Collins referred to Elevator Repair Service’s performers as participating in a kind of “revolving door” organizational structure, involving themselves in individual productions and perfor- mances as their interest and other work allows.12 Originally founded by six college friends from Yale and NYU (Steve Bodow, John Collins, Rinne Groff, James Han- naham, Susie Sokol, and Colleen Werthmann), ERS has used nearly 50 different performers in the fifteen devised pieces produced between 1991 and 2010. No two performances have had the same cast, cast sizes have ranged from four to fourteen, and only one performer (Susie Sokol) has performed in all pieces to date. The com- mon thread, in addition to Sokol, is John Collins, who has directed or co-directed all of the ERS’s pieces.
While Goat Island and ERS utilize single directors, though they reframe this role to support collectively-oriented rather than authoritarian processes, Nature Theater
11Matthew Goulish, 39 Microlectures in Proximity of Performance (London: Routledge, 2000) 9. 12John Collins. Phone interview with author, April 16th, 2009. INTRODUCTION 9 of Oklahoma uses two: spouses Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska are the group’s co- founders and co-directors. Unlike most contemporary collective creation groups, the
Nature Theater of Oklahoma is organized as a for-profit company; they are a low- budget, small scale (and self described) “Mom and Pop” operation.13 This is unique because it changes the way the group fiscally operates; instead of drawing support from state and federal grants accessible to non-profits, as most performance groups do, Nature Theater garners support primarily from corporations and established the- aters that sponsor the development of individual productions. Nature Theater also sets up an organizational process apart from the processes of other contemporary experimental devising groups. They are not, like New York City’s Radiohole, a col- lective.14 They also did not, like Goat Island, democratically elect roles within the group. As other devising groups have done, they contend with the long tradition of collaboration in performance making, both resisting and embracing its implications as they establish their own working process. For Nature Theater, the process proceeds from the working relationship of Liska and Copper, who co-direct and co-conceive Na- ture Theater’s shows, usually, as their press material states, “in conversation with” performers, friends, and/or colleagues.15 Liska and Copper met in the 1990s dur- ing their undergraduate years at Dartmouth College, where they also began working with performer Zachary Oberzan and designer Peter Nigrini.16 After graduating from
Dartmouth in 1993, Copper moved to New York where Liska joined her two years
13Kelly Copper. Email correspondence with author, March 3rd, 2010. 14By saying they are “not a collective,” I mean that the roles within the Nature Theater of Ok- lahoma (performer, director, designer, etc) are defined. Within these defined roles, group members participate in the process of collective creation. 15See oktheater.org 16Oberzan and Nigrini also moved to New York independently, and in the early 2000s the four began working together under the auspices of Nature Theater of Oklahoma. INTRODUCTION 10 later. Following an occasionally integrated and occasionally independent period of ex- perimentation in the mediums of film, photography, and visual art, Liska and Copper eventually re-immersed themselves in theater-making. Subsequently, both pursued and obtained MFA degrees; Copper in playwriting at Brooklyn College (studying with Mac Wellman), and Liska in directing at Columbia University (studying with
Anne Bogart). They produced their first devised work, Poetics: A Ballet Brˆut, as
Liska’s master’s thesis production in 2005.17 Their forays into graduate studies also introduced them to many of their collaborating performers, especially as they cast and recruited for student projects, including Robert Johanson and Anne Gridley who also studied at Columbia, and Fletcher Liegerot who studied with Bogart’s SITI Com- pany. In a 2008 interview, Copper describes the delicate balance of putting together the ensemble, noting that Zachary Oberzan, the group’s first consistent performer, was a bit high strung and difficult to work with – and so they assembled the rest of the ensemble around him, seeking to strike the right creative and personal balance.18
Organizationally, then, these three groups offer three distinct conceptions of the director within collective creation methodologies. We will discuss these iterations further as we move into Chapter One, but in broad strokes we can introduce these groups by acknowledging their three different models of directorial leadership: the single director, elected by the group (Goat Island); the single director, who co- founded the group with his artistic role already in place (Elevator Repair Service); co-directors, who approach their group-oriented process of devising from a personal and pre-existing partnership (Nature Theater of Oklahoma). These differences, each of which motivates a process that seeks to establish nonhierarchical modes of creating
17Though Liska and Copper have been working together since the early 1990s, I consider NTO to be a company of the 2000s since they cohered into a formally organized group in 2002, and the first production they list in their performance chronology is Poetics (2005). 18Kelly Copper. Phone interview with author, April 24th, 2008. INTRODUCTION 11 performance, enable this project to achieve a scope that takes several strategies for fostering group creativity into account.
As I gradually became familiarized with the work of contemporary experimen- tal performance groups, I noticed trends of interdisciplinarity, stuttering eruptions of dance, film, and sound that threaded from group to group. Accordingly, I chose three groups whose aesthetics and backgrounds stretch across maximal breadth: Lin
Hixson, Goat Island’s director, has a background as a filmmaker. John Collins, ERS’s director, began as a sound designer. Pavol Liska’s education in directing under
Anne Bogart very much ties him to New York’s experimental theater community, as does Kelly Copper’s playwriting study with Mac Wellman. All three groups pro- duce performance according to budgetary constraints, yet the technical elements of each group’s performance aesthetic unfold very differently. Goat Island produces work with the help of small, humble objects, a few microphones, and scattered in- stances of recorded sound. Elevator Repair Service increasingly utilizes extensively constructed sets, sometimes performing in rooms built within rooms, and intricate soundtracks in keeping with John Collins’ technical design predilections. Nature The- ater of Oklahoma’s use of technology mediates between that of the other two groups; they occasionally make use of a projection screen or two, employ recorded sound, and
fill the theatrical space with bodies but few objects.
For all the differences between these groups that mark them as productively dis- similar components of a singular creative community, there is one crucial, unscholarly reason I chose to focus on these three: I loved watching their performances, and that is a bias I admittedly carry into this project. This also means that I encountered their work from the outside in, viewing their performances as part of an audience before experiencing these groups’ methodologies for making. In order to resolve this INTRODUCTION 12 discrepancy, I made contact with members of each of the three groups, all of whom generously agreed to begin dialogue. In the second half of 2008 and into 2009, I conducted interviews with John Collins and Mike Iveson of Elevator Repair Service, as well as Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska of Nature Theater of Oklahoma. I then ar- ranged travel to New York with the plan of observing parts of these groups’ rehearsal processes, throughout their development of The Select: The Sun Also Rises (ERS) and Life and Times: Episode One (Nature Theater of Oklahoma). I did not observe any of Goat Island’s rehearsals, as in 2009 they were no longer devising new work.
I was, however, fortunate enough to assist Lin Hixson and Matthew Goulish during their teaching tenure at Stanford University, where they served as visiting faculty in 2009. Hixson and Goulish, apart from their partners in performance making, are individual and partnering artists – they are not Goat Island. Yet, while teaching and performing with Hixson and Goulish, I found that each often made links back to their work with Goat Island: philosophical, aesthetic, and processual. They kindly agreed to serve as resources for me, in support of this project.
This methodology: extensively viewing performance, choosing three groups, and then conducting field research in order to acquaint myself with the creation methods of these groups, I intended to provide the foundation for an ethnographic study. In- stead, mundane practicalities intervened, and reshaped the project again. Firstly, it seemed inadequate to view the rehearsal processes of two groups rather than all three.
Secondly, following a flurry of miscommunications, my planned residency with Ele- vator Repair Service never materialized. Thirdly, my dialogue with Nature Theater led me to the conclusion that to enter a rehearsal space for short-term observation
(knowing that the project would continue to develop over months and even years) and then to make broad claims about the specifics I observed, would be irresponsible. It is INTRODUCTION 13 difficult, if not impossible, to avoid changing the environment when that environment is already geared toward self-consciously performative goals. In acknowledgment of these challenges posed by ethnographic study in general and for this project in partic- ular, I adopted a theoretically grounded approach that would allow my ethnographic study to inform, rather than to encompass, my analysis of these groups’ methodolo- gies.
By interpreting these groups’ self-articulated goals for process and performance through interviews and their own writing, and juxtaposing these elements with the aesthetics of their performances, a subtle politics began to take shape – one that has footprints in performance, but that primarily operates on the level of methodology.
In its contemporary forms, collective creation is a process that, while it may veer away from activist content, derives political engagement through its relationship to historical models, its rendering of performance-based economies, its engagement with
“gesture” through danced forms, its development according to processes that require a certain slowness, and its display of ethical frameworks that emerge as a consequence of juxtaposed speeds and velocities. While I cannot claim that every collective creation process proceeds slowly, I identify slowness within the pacing of the processes of Goat
Island, Elevator Repair Service, and Nature Theater of Oklahoma. While “slowness” is inescapably subjective, a term that cannot come into being without comparison
(slow in relation to what?) I employ it here in order to focus attention on the relationship between power dynamics and speed. That is, as these contemporary groups seek rehearsal structures that do not erect hierarchies between group members, or draw individual lines of ownership governing the creative product, they participate in processes that make space and time for collaboration. Scholar Paul Virilio remarks on the relationship between speeds and collaborative decision-making, or democracy, INTRODUCTION 14 saying that in order to share power there must be “time to share.”19 This “time,” which I call slowness, is embedded into the process of performance making for these groups, who each take between one and two years to construct a single piece.
Methodology, as we examine it in relation to performance, often slips through the cracks of scholarly inquiry. Process and method, as I have already suggested, paradoxically mark performance yet remain obscured from the audience – and often from researchers as well. Yet, it is within the slippery and ever-evolving experience of method that we, as artists, build the partnerships and ideologies that progress into the sphere of performance. As any performer, director, designer, etc. knows, it is through process that a group either coheres into a sustainable body, or fractures into a temporary experiment. Processes geared toward nonhierarchical exploration are, as I hope to show, experiments in and of themselves; they have the potential to serve as a microcosm for a collaborative and attentive way of living, or to collapse under too-strained power dynamics or disorganization. We can examine the forms and aesthetics these methods take in performance, and those products are one way in which we can derive a sense of method – but performance is not disembodied from the day-to-day decisions and attitudes that created it.
Although I establish the methodologies of collective creation as unique to devised work, I would like to emphasize the applicability of these methodologies to a wide variety of performance work, including pre-scripted theater and dance choreography.
As collective creation practitioners begin without a dramatic text, so do choreogra- phers. We might imagine the source material through which contemporary collective creation groups begin their investigation, as analogous to the sound (which might in- clude the presence or absence of music) that guides the development of choreography.
19Paul Virilio, Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light, trans. Michael Degener (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005) 32. INTRODUCTION 15
Elevator Repair Service, for example, creates performance out of pre-existing literary texts, including The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Sun Also Rises by
Ernest Hemingway, and The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. I consider these to be instances of devised performance, because the group begins without a pre-existing dramatic text. Elevator Repair Service uses the novel, as choreographers might use sound, as source material that prompts exploration, and problem-solving, within a new medium. Even when staging dramatic texts, opportunities for devising solutions to open suggestions in the text continually arise. In Deidre Heddon and
Jane Milling’s book, Devising Performance: A Critical History, they suggest that
“Perhaps it is because devising is so prevalent, so present, that critical enquiry has been so sparse.”20 Despite its pervasiveness in and applicability to all forms of per- formance development, there is yet a small (but growing) body of scholarship that specifically addresses collectively created work.
Historiographies written in the years following the apex of the American avant- garde’s performance collective movement survey a broad spectrum of group-oriented approaches. These include: Arnold Aronson’s American Avant-Garde Theatre: A
History, Arthur Sainer’s The New Radical Theatre Notebook, Theodore Shank’s Be- yond the Boundaries: American Alternative Theatre, Mark Weinberg’s Challenging the Hierarchy: Collective Theatre in the United States, and Charlotte Canning’s Fem- inist Theaters in the USA: Staging Women’s Experience. All of these works posit defining characteristics of the American avant-garde and its relation to the social and political landscape of the 1960s and 1970s, and deal with specific groups and significant productions of the period. Scholars link these groups and productions to- gether with terms like avant-garde, radical, alternative, etc. in order to investigate
20Deirdre Heddon and Jane Milling, Devising Performance: A Critical History (New York: Pal- grave Macmillan, 2006) 1. INTRODUCTION 16
the materiality, ideologies, and resulting artistic and cultural significance of American
performance in the 60s and 70s. Because of the scale on which they operate, these
works inevitably move farther away from the complexities of the groups’ everyday
processes.
Single case studies of the work of avant-garde American companies offer more de-
tailed insight, but are still relatively rare. Peter Savran’s seminal monograph Breaking
the Rules: The Wooster Group intimately surveys daily working processes and indi- vidual performances of the Wooster Group. Other studies focusing on single groups or individuals of the 60s and 70s include Rachel Kaplan’s edited writings and Jan- ice Ross’s scholarship on Anna Halprin’s extensive career, Sally Banes’ Democracy’s
Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962-1964, and George Dennison’s recorded observa- tions of the performance and organizational aesthetics of Bread and Puppet. There exist multiple books and articles that seek to capture and record the history of other
American collectives, including the Living Theater, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and Cornerstone. Because of the groups’ focus on process as a site for challenging social and cultural boundaries, scholarly monographs often take up everyday expe- riences of the groups with a kind of fascination for the blur between personal and professional.
This sense of the “form” of the process, as combined with and related to the form of performance, inspires a large part of my project. Contemporary devised performance, as I argue throughout my dissertation, uniquely unites the two. Yet, despite this union, critical engagement, as I have stated, remains limited. Deirdre
Heddon and Jane Milling’s rigorous Devising Performance: A Critical History is
the only work to date that discusses and analyzes the history of devising. Their
book links group-oriented political theater, community theater, visual spectacle, and INTRODUCTION 17 post modern performance through the lens of collaborative creation. Only a handful of other books, including Lives and Deaths of Collective Creation (Baldwin, Page,
Larrue) and Bruce Barton’s Collective Creation, Collaboration, and Devising make gestures toward situating contemporary American and Canadian work within the international history of collective creation, a history which includes experiments by
Vsevolod Meyerhold, Jacques Le Coq, Jacques Copeau, Michel Saint-Denis, Eugenio
Barba, and Jerzy Grotowski.
My purpose is to contribute to the field of scholarship that focuses on collective creation through an investigation that grounds the methodology of contemporary groups within the context of the history of American performance collectives, ideally restoring a way of “seeing” performance that accentuates the significance of ways of working. Though I concentrate on three specific contemporary collective creation groups, I invite consideration of a much broader question: what might we discover about contemporary performance, and its relevance to our social world, if we make methodology the center of performance scholarship?
In service of this question, in Chapter One I begin to lay out recent historical foundations that inform contemporary practice, and discuss degrees to which we may or may not consider contemporary performance groups to be successors of American performance collectives of the 1960s and 1970s. Successorship, I argue, erects a power dynamic of its own – which is particularly problematic when in the sphere of collective creation experiments that espouse nonhierarchical models of working. Yet, many of the processes and aesthetics that coalesce into contemporary group work have historical roots: Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and Nature Theater of
Oklahoma all articulate ways in which their approaches to performance are indebted to performance-makers of the 1960s and 1970s, including Yvonne Rainer, John Cage, INTRODUCTION 18 and the Wooster Group. Within this chapter, I chart contemporary methodologies as they relate to previous work, seeking (the beginnings of) a genealogy of American collective creation that contextualizes contemporary group performance as a balance between historically-motivated inspiration and historically-informed resistance.
Chapter Two identifies everydayness as a key thematic of contemporary collective creation, and examines ways in which these groups make use of the everyday concept of employment. I analyze the employment imagery that filters into the performance work of Elevator Repair Service and Nature Theater of Oklahoma in particular, which stems from source material drawn from group members’ real-life, dual work roles as performance-makers and temporary employees. These dual roles, I claim, enable these groups to resist the philosophy of the everyday by constructing new economies of performance. With the aid of Henri Lefebvre’s writings on the everyday, I sketch a blueprint for “everyday philosophy” as it relates to work in general, and to employ- ment specifically. I then analyze ways in which contemporary groups make use of this philosophy, by manipulating and transforming it in service of performance that transforms the productive potential of the employee role.
In Chapter Three, I extend the concept of “the political” in contemporary collec- tive creation, a claim I advance in Chapter Two through the avenue of economy. I approach the political via Giorgio Agamben’s writings on gesture, in which Agamben theorizes the political in terms of gesture, as means without ends.21 Using Agamben as theoretical grounding, I investigate “gesture” as it applies to dance forms that appear in the work of Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and Nature Theater of
Oklahoma. Beginning from concrete gestural forms in performance, I discuss these forms as consequences of methodologies that investigate the potential of the untrained
21Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2000). INTRODUCTION 19 body. The untrained body becomes a complex symbol in performance, a purveyor of gesture that validates differentiation, performs acts of deskilling/reskilling, and allows the gestus of the work to emerge.
In Chapter Four, I return to the discussion of economy, and elaborate on ways in which contemporary performance groups make use of conjunctions of speed and slowness in order to construct ethical frameworks: ways of living in the world. Though
Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and Nature Theater of Oklahoma do not identify themselves with explicit political ideologies, Goat Island claims their collaborative methodology as a political statement in and of itself. Working from this statement, I explore ways in which collective creation, with the slowness inherent in its immanent process and the speeds present in the aesthetics of performance, opens up velocity as politically relevant. Citing writings by Paul Virilio and Guy Debord, I imagine velocity as conceptually intertwined with economy and production, and outline a politics these contemporary groups develop by virtue of their speed-based engagement with construction, destruction, efficiency, inefficiency, and care. As I discuss politics in the last chapter, and as a throughline throughout the investigation at large, I treat the politics inherent in method rather than political content, returning to a primary question: is there a politics inherent in the process of collaboration, or collective creation? This is a question informed by the distinction filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard identifies with his claim that, “The problem is not to make political films but to make films politically.”22 What qualities characterize the collective creation processes of these groups specifically and processes of collective creation in general, and can we coalesce these qualities toward an understanding of the politics of making original performance work?
22Jean-Luc Godard quoted in Maureen Kiernan, “Making Films Politically: Marxism in Eisenstein and Godard,” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 10 (1990): 93–113. INTRODUCTION 20
Throughout this project, I keep collaborative process at the forefront of inquiry, returning to basic questions that I hope will be of use to scholars and practitioners alike. What are the stakes of working in this way? When performance groups con- struct models of collective creation, respond to everyday sources, generate creative material, and collect these into structured performance, what do they display? Sus- tainable collective practice, as Chapter One elucidates, is no easy feat. Yet, this way of working advances methodologies and produces performance moments that seem somehow important, that trade traditional conceptions of efficiency – anathema to the creative process, yet very present for groups who must subsist practically as well as artistically – for something else of value. That something, whose outlines I have only begun to glimpse through analysis aided by audience experience, ethnographic study, and theoretical research, guides this investigation. Chapter 1
Successors
. . . tradition. . . means successors to pass your life’s knowing on to. How come so few people in their 20s are doing significant theatre? Where are the inheritors? – Richard Schechner23 . . . young companies in New York may have adopted the principles of their formalist forebears, but their formalism is largely devoid of argument, whether implicit or explicit; devoid of subjective idealism; devoid in fact to a commitment of form-as-idea. – Shawn-Marie Garrett24
“Successorship” implies a power dynamic, too easily eclipsing the identities of the
“successors” against the unassailable historical prestige of their “forebears.” This re- lationship is especially tricky in the world of collective creation, where the ideals and realities of constructing a group-centered process are so inextricable from the product of performance. There are many layers that make up the group work we call collec- tive creation, processual and ideological as well as aesthetic, which offer extensive opportunities for contemporary groups to resist, as well as to support, the forms and
23Richard Schechner, “The Decline and Fall of the (American) Avant-Garde: Why It Happened and What We Can Do About It,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 5.2 (1981): 9–19. 24Garrett 52.
21 CHAPTER 1. SUCCESSORS 22 principles of earlier work. In her above quote, Shawn-Marie Garrett suggests that there is a relatively narrow aesthetic margin contemporary groups must walk in order to establish themselves as successful inheritors: their work must advance an argu- ment, communicate subjective idealism, and utilize form-as-idea. These are similar to the properties implicit in Richard Schechner’s perspective that laments the absence of successors and inheritors. As the former director of the American collective the
Performance Group (1967-1979), Schechner’s “tradition” belongs to American perfor- mance collectives of the 1960s and 1970s, and he, like Garrett, charges contemporary groups with the task of continuing and extending the principles and forms that char- acterized group performance of this earlier time period. Contemporary groups, and in particular the three that provide case studies for this investigation, Goat Island,
Elevator Repair Service (ERS), and Nature Theater of Oklahoma, by turns reinforce and resist this historical responsibility. On one hand, each of these groups openly acknowledges and embraces previous artists and groups as inspirations. Goat Island describe their indebtedness to the work of Yvonne Rainer during her involvement with
Judson Dance Theater in the 1960s. Nature Theater of Oklahoma creates according to structuring and philosophical principles they trace back to John Cage and Merce
Cunningham’s work in the 1950s and 1960s. Elevator Repair Service cross-pollinates with the still-active Wooster Group (and shares Schechner’s Performance Group as a common ancestor) through performers, technicians, and borrowed rehearsal space at the Wooster Group’s Performance Garage.25 Yet, these contemporary groups also interrogate and outright challenge principles that spurred collaborative performance
25John Collins, the director of Elevator Repair Service, is a longtime sound designer for the Wooster Group. Additionally, Wooster Group actor Scott Shepherd—who appeared in the title role of the Wooster Group’s Hamlet (2007), also played the main role in Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz (2006). Additional examples, including Wooster Group interns that have gone on to perform in ERS shows, abound. CHAPTER 1. SUCCESSORS 23 work of the 1960s. Rather than having “adopted the principles of their formalist for- bears,”26 as Garrett claims, I argue that the successor relationship between contem- porary groups and their forebears is a tense product of pushes and pulls, alignments and resistance. Viewed as a linear model, in which contemporary groups expand and continue the work of their predecessors, they—as Garrett suggests—fall short. How- ever, if we more closely examine ways in which contemporary experimental groups reframe and redefine processes and aesthetics of American performance of the 1960s and 70s, finding alternatives to the forms, idealism, and argument of earlier work, we can better elucidate a genealogy of group performance for the new millennium. Goat
Island, Elevator Repair Service, and Nature Theater of Oklahoma are three groups of the 2000s that create in conversation with their predecessors, but assert themselves as successors that—like the performance collectives of the 1960s and 70s—work against concepts of ownership and authority, within individual performance works as well as within the methodological philosophy that is collective creation, and create work that assembles contemporary conceptions of the political as responsive to a unique time and place.
The Contemporary Landscape
The 2000s unfold as a decade particularly ripe for comparison with 1960s and 1970s performance because of the recent and extraordinary resurgence of group-centered and group-generated work. Though group-oriented and collectively created work never disappeared from American performance, indeed many earlier groups such as
The Living Theatre (founded in 1947) and The San Francisco Mime Troupe (founded
26Garrett 52. CHAPTER 1. SUCCESSORS 24
in 1959) have produced continuously into the 2000s; there has been a dramatic and
visible increase of group performance from the mid 1990s into the 2000s. In 1996,
eight American theater groups established the Network of Ensemble Theaters (NET),
following an inter-group dialogue funded by Theatre Communications Group (TCG)
that took place at Towson State University in Maryland.27 The NET defines ensem-
ble as “. . . a group of individuals dedicated to collaborative creation, committed to
working together consistently over years to develop a distinctive body of work and
practices. . . ,”28 indicating that the “ensemble” work of NET members, though this
term does not implicitly define collective process, develops out of cohesive groups of
cooperating artists, committed to methodologies of collective creation, or devising.
Over the course of fourteen years (from its inception in 1996 to 2010), the NET’s na-
tional membership has grown from the original eight groups to well over one hundred.
Additional experimental groups, many of which Jane Milling and Deirdre Heddon cat-
egorize under the umbrella term “postmodern” in Devising Performance: A Critical
History (including Goat Island), are not members of the NET, suggesting that there
is an even wider reinvigoration of devised group work—particularly in New York
downtown theater -than the NET membership indicates.29 Also, as Milling and Hed- don’s work mainly chronicles groups through the late 1990s and early 2000s; inevitably newer groups fall through the cracks. In addition to groups like Chicago’s Goat Island
(founded in 1987)30, New York City’s downtown venues host collaborative devising
27These eight founding groups were: A Traveling Jewish Theatre, Bloomsburg Theater Ensem- ble, Cornerstone Theater Company, Dell’Arte International, Independent Eye, Irondale Ensemble Project, The Road Company, and Touchstone Theater. 28“Network of Ensemble Theaters.” (Accessed on August 3rd, 2010).
York City Players (1997), Radiohole (1998), and others. In the first decade of the
2000s, the number of devising groups working in New York’s close-knit experimental performance community swelled to include the TEAM (2004)31, Nature Theater of
Oklahoma (2005)32, and others even younger. All of these groups, and in particu- lar this investigation’s three case studies: Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and
Nature Theater of Oklahoma; contribute to the ongoing conversation regarding con- temporary collective creation and its relationship to previous experiments of the 60s and 70s.
Collective creation, as I refer to it throughout this investigation, is the defining similarity between contemporary work and historical performance collectives. Col- lective creation names a kind of performance-making that is both distinctive and ambiguous: it involves a commitment to the ideal of shared creativity, to perfor- mance that is created or devised by a group rather than performance that interprets and stages a pre-written dramatic text. While many performance collectives of the
1960s and 1970s, including the Performance Group (founded in 1967) and the Open
Theatre (founded in 1963), staged scripts as well as original works, the underly- ing values of collective creation as a means of working against the hierarchy of the playwright and the text persist throughout the groups’ creations. Yet, as this chap- ter touches on, collective creation is not so much a methodology as it is a set of
31TEAM: Theatre of the Emerging American Moment 32Though Nature Theater’s press material states that they’ve been working since 1995, I consider them to be a group of the 2000s. While the founding members and artistic directors Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper have been working together on and off since 1995, the group as an organized and ongoing entity came into formation with the first showing of Poetics: A Ballet Brˆut in 2005. CHAPTER 1. SUCCESSORS 26 methodologies: no two processes of 60s and 70s performance collectives, or of con- temporary groups, are alike. Each process involves a unique interpretation of what it means to collaborate, though as we shall see the word “collaboration” carries its own baggage as a result of its association with utopian agreement, into contemporary performance-making climates. For this reason, though I refer to the collaborations between artists and the collaborating nature of particular groups, I use “collective creation” rather than “collaborative creation” as an overarching reference point. It should be clear, however, that “collective creation” should not fall prey to the ide- alism of the non-hierarchical “collective” as it persists throughout the foundations of performance collectives throughout the 1960s and 1970s.33 I consider “collective creation” as a name for processes that emerge as a consequence of the ideals of the group combined with the day-to-day realities of the working process enacted by indi- viduals. Collective creation processes are not utopias; they retain the freedom to be problematic.
“Devising” is another name for collective creation, though it carries slightly dif- ferent connotations. In Devising Performance, Heddon and Milling point out that devising need not refer to the work of a group; an individual performance artist can devise work either on her own or with the assistance of a director. Categorically,
Heddon and Milling write, “Devised performance does not have to involve collabo- rators.”34 In light of their distinction, I employ “devising” as a broader term that encompasses collective creation. That is, collective creation is an act of devising but devising may not be an act of collective creation. To clarify by example, the Wooster
Group’s Rhode Island Trilogy consisted of three devised works inspired by pieces
33There are a variety of names historians use to refer to collectively-oriented groups from the 1960s and 1970s: group theaters, performance collectives, radical group theaters, alternative group theaters, etc. 34Heddon and Milling 3. CHAPTER 1. SUCCESSORS 27
of Spalding Gray’s autobiographical experiences: Sakonnet Point (1975), Rumstick
Road (1977), and Nayatt School (1978)35; all three of these pieces are examples of both devising and collective creation, as they were developed and performed by mul- tiple collaborating members of the Wooster Group.36 Gray’s subsequent monologue performances, including India and After (1979) were devised solo endeavors, rather than instances of collective creation.37
Collective Creation as a Collective Endeavor?
One pathway into the conversation between collective creation groups of the 60s and
70s and those of the 2000s involves examining the role of partnership, or shared re- sources, among groups in these two time periods. Garrett claims that “. . . among young theater makers in New York today, there’s no real sense yet of a shared en- deavor, a common struggle, or a pressing need to join forces. Instead, the scarce resources and low sociocultural stakes seem to have produced a surprising amount of competitiveness.”38 Garrett’s claim of “no real sense yet of a shared endeavor”39 seems to define “endeavor” implicitly, in terms of political engagement, or ideological consistency. From another angle, perhaps she equates “shared endeavor” and “com- mon struggle” with activism, and notices the absence of politically activist content in the performance of contemporary groups. Garrett’s assertion of “competitiveness”
35Point Judith followed as an epilogue to the trilogy in 1979 36In his monograph Breaking the Rules, David Savran writes that during the development of the Rhode Island Trilogy, the group of working artists had not yet formally become the Wooster Group, though the Trilogy is generally included in the cannon of the Wooster Group’s work after the fact. 37David Savran, Breaking The Rules: The Wooster Group (1988; New York: Theatre Communi- cations Group, 2005) 72. 38Garrett 47. 39Garrett 47. CHAPTER 1. SUCCESSORS 28 likely has credence, especially considering the high rent and high artistic popula- tion of New York’s downtown performance district. However, she does not take into account the effects of fertile creative partnerships that characterize this same com- munity, or the possibilities that political activism may have transformed, at least for some groups in the contemporary sphere, into subtle aesthetics or ideologies enacted methodologically. While we will analyze ways in which common political engagement does subsist in contemporary work as our investigation progresses, here I would like to question Garrett’s comparison between the “shared endeavor” of group work of the sixties and seventies in relation to the “competitiveness” of contemporary ex- perimental performance groups.40 While it is true that Goat Island, Elevator Repair
Service, and Nature Theater of Oklahoma retain a kind of insular quality in relation to one another, there are close associations between many contemporary collaborative groups that echo the aesthetic and ideological associations between groups of the 60s and 70s. Also, though Garrett implies that “competitiveness” is a contemporary phe- nomenon in relation to earlier group experiments, and that earlier groups enjoyed the cohesion of “a shared endeavor, a common struggle. . . a pressing need to join forces”, many groups of the 60s and 70s developed out of the fissures and splintering of, or individuals departing from, existing organizations and creative partnerships.
The American model of process-oriented, group-centered devising, as it evolved in the early years of the 60s, gave rise to a performance community that was both con- structively and combatively interactive. Julian Beck and Judith Malina of The Living
Theatre drew interdisciplinary partners and collaborators from the artistic commu- nity surrounding them, first at New York’s Cherry Lane Theatre and later at their found performance space on 14th Street and Sixth Avenue that the group deemed
40Garrett 47. CHAPTER 1. SUCCESSORS 29
“suitable for sharing as a theatre and dance space.”41 Beck and Malina were the ear-
liest and arguably the most influential figures in the history of American performance
collectives. They modeled original experiments that explored the organization and
potential of creative collective process, and their performance space developed into
a nexus that drew John Cage and Merce Cunningham, as well as other dancers and
choreographers that later produced work at Judson Church. They also established
an ensemble of performers that gave rise to other groups, including the Open The-
atre. Joseph Chaikin, who founded the Open Theatre in 1963, began as a performer
with The Living Theatre but eventually moved away from Beck and Malina’s work in
search of a more actor-centric mode of performance. Chaikin was interested in actor
training and performance that grew from workshops and critical feedback, and ex-
plored techniques for developing what Stephen Bottoms calls the actor’s “disciplined
spontaneity.”42 Yet, Chaikin retained great respect for the Becks’ commitment to practice, saying “Everyone else talks, the Becks do.”.43
As Sally Banes discusses in Democracy’s Body, the creative partnership of Cage and Cunningham was another locus of significant artistic influence throughout the
1960s, and beyond. Among others, their work directly impacted musician and chore- ographer Robert Dunn, who began teaching a choreography class at Merce Cunning- ham’s studio in 1960. This class included Yvonne Rainer and later Trisha Brown, who joined in 1961. Brown had previously studied with Anna Halprin and went on from Dunn’s workshop, with Rainer and others, to produce work at Judson Dance
41John Tytell, The Living Theatre: Art, Exile, and Outrage (New York: Grove Press, 1997) 129. 42Stephen J. Bottoms, Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-off-Broadway Movement (2004; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009) 171. 43Joseph Chaikin, “The Open Theatre: Interview with Richard Schechner,” TDR: The Tulane Drama Review 9.2 (1964): 191–197. CHAPTER 1. SUCCESSORS 30
Theater.44 Judson Dance Theater was initially formed by a group of choreographers
who were motivated to collaborate and to openly and freely explore choreographic
possibilities, in contrast to Merce Cunningham’s comparatively formalist techniques.
The relative permissiveness at Judson included using everyday gestures and move-
ments, as well as the everyday bodies of untrained dancers.45 As the Becks’ and
Cunningham’s students and collaborators developed into independent leaders and
practitioners in their own rights, performance work of the 1960s flourished as diverse
practices multiplied.
Perhaps the most infamous case of artistic fissure in New York collectives of the
60s and 70s occurred during the latter part of the 1970s, when Richard Schechner’s
Performance Group transitioned into the Wooster Group under the new director-
ship of Elizabeth LeCompte. Initially, LeCompte joined the Performance Group
as Schechner’s assistant director, then eventually began working with other Perfor-
mance Group performers—on independently created pieces—outside of Schechner’s
rehearsals. Dissatisfied with Schechner’s leadership and artistic direction, this new
faction of the Performance Group eventually ousted Schecher and began producing
work under the new name of the Wooster Group.46 Throughout this transition, the
group retained residence (and still performs) at the Performance Group’s rehearsal
space, The Performance Garage.47
Though undeniably influenced by her time working with and observing Schecher,
LeCompte felt compelled to take the company in new aesthetic and processual direc- tions. “She found his (Schechner’s) mise en sc`ene too highly symbolic and ritualistic
44Sally Banes, Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962-1964 (1983; Durham: Duke Uni- versity Press, 1993). 45Banes, Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962-1964. 46The Wooster Group was actually the legal name of the Performance Group from its inception, but only became the producing name of the company when LeCompte formally took over directorship. 47Savran. CHAPTER 1. SUCCESSORS 31
and his approach to performance dangerously psychoanalytical. . . She believed that
the group situation (in which he enjoyed the role of guru) took precedence for him
over the art. . . ”48 In fact, it was only a year after the Wooster Group replaced the Per- formance Group that Schechner published his plaint that opens this chapter, “Where are the inheritors?”49 Evidently, he did not consider the group work of his literal
successors to be work that continued the tradition of the Performance Group. As
Arnold Aronson writes his history of American avant-garde theater, perhaps Schech-
ner’s stance came from “sour grapes”: the cynical response of a displaced director
no longer in command.50 Assuming that these sour grapes at least partially fuel the
void of successorship Schechner identifies in 1981, his tone is quite different more
than twenty-five years later in 2008. In a persuasive commentary addressed to the
President of the United States describing the importance of arts funding, Schech-
ner writes, “What needs more support are. . . companies like the TEAM (Theatre of
the Emerging American Moment), The Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, The Wooster
Group, Elevator Repair Service, and The Builders Association to name five notable
New York groups.”51 This does not discount or resolve Schechner’s earlier commen- tary that precluded the Wooster Group from successorship; though his personal taste in 2008 reflects a longstanding predilection for collectively created group work, he does not go so far as to name any of these groups as “inheritors” of a particular tradition. But perhaps the inclusion of the Wooster Group in Schechner’s 2008 list of
“notable New York groups”, points to the entanglement of the historical relationship between collective practice and inter-group and/or inter-artist conflict and resistance.
48Savran 3. 49Schechner, “The Decline and Fall of the (American) Avant-Garde: Why It Happened and What We Can Do About It” 52. 50Arnold Aronson, American Avant-Garde Theatre: A History (London: Routledge, 2000) 181. 51Richard Schechner, “An Open Letter to the President of the USA,” TDR: The Drama Review 52.3 (2008): 7–8. CHAPTER 1. SUCCESSORS 32
However long Schechner’s “sour grapes” lasted, they reference the 60s and 70s model
of displacement, moving from one director to another, one group to another, and con-
sequently from one set of aesthetics and ideologies to another. Garrett’s concept of a
“shared endeavor”52 in relation to 60s and 70s group work is somewhat idealized, as is the notion that “competitiveness” is the exclusive property of contemporary groups.
However, the model of an intimate—and sometimes competitive—experimental community continues in present day New York as a result of common educational backgrounds, scarce resources, personal relationships, and artistic partnerships. Kelly
Copper and Pavol Liska, the founders of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, began their personal and creative work together (they subsequently married) at Dartmouth Col- lege. Most of the founding members of The TEAM met one another during their undergraduate years at New York University.53 Pavol Liska received his MFA in di-
recting in 2005 from Columbia University, where he studied with Anne Bogart of
SITI Company.54 Likewise, Rachel Chavkin of The TEAM also received her MFA from Columbia.55 Additionally, Chavkin has worked as both dramaturg and assis- tant director with Elevator Repair Service, and—as of January 2011 -has been in a relationship with ERS’s founder and artistic director, John Collins for over a year.
John Collins has worked as a sound designer for Richard Foreman and Target Margin
Theater, and has designed for multiple Wooster Group shows including The Hairy
Ape (1995) and House/Lights (1999). Scott Shepherd, a core member of the Wooster
Group since 1999, has also performed in and co-created several ERS shows, and plays
the title role in ERS’s six-hour production, Gatz (2006).56 Tory Vazquez, a frequent
52Garrett 47. 53Rachel Chavkin, “Five Years and Change with the TEAM: Moving Fast Past the Apocalypse,” TDR: The Drama Review 54.4 (2010): 108–117. 54Founded in 1992 by Bogart and Tadashi Suzuki 55See theteamplays.org/who.html 56See elevator.org/shows/show.php?show=gatz accessed 22 January 2011 CHAPTER 1. SUCCESSORS 33 performer with ERS, is also the wife of Richard Maxwell, director of the New York
City Players. A solo performance artist in her own right, Vazquez was interviewed with three other New York downtown performance makers, including Pavol Liska, by
Sarah Benson in 2006.57 Eric Dyer, one of the founding members of Radiohole, has collaborated as a performer with Collapsable Giraffe, and as a lighting designer for both the New York City Players and Elevator Repair Service. These are just a few of the more evident examples of inter-group cooperation. For contemporary New York devising groups, cooperation tends to take place on individual levels, rather than between groups as cohesive bodies.
When we factor in performance space, this close collection of groups expands to include Goat Island. Though based in Chicago, Goat Island, like ERS and Nature
Theater of Oklahoma, frequently toured throughout the first decade of the 2000s.
Though there are many collective creation groups scattered across the country and most of these must tour regularly to increase both income and exposure, there are few venues that regularly host local and touring experimental performance work. As a result, performance groups often spatially overlap. These venues include PS 122, The
Kitchen, and Soho Rep in New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; the Wexner Center in Columbus, OH;
On the Boards in Seattle; and REDCAT in Los Angeles.58 Between 2005 and 2010, both ERS and Nature Theater of Oklahoma performed multiple times at On the
Boards and in Portland, Oregon’s annual Time-Based Art Festival; Elevator Repair
Service and Goat Island performed at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art; Goat
Island and Nature Theater performed at the same venue in Zagreb, Croatia; and
57Sarah Benson, “Working Downtown: Pavol Liska, Ruth Margraff, Annie-B Parson, Tory Vazquez in conversation with Sarah Benson,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 28.2 (2006): 42–60. 58The Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater CHAPTER 1. SUCCESSORS 34 all three groups performed at PS 122 in New York.59 These three groups, as part of the same contemporary community, follow one another across the country and even internationally, ghosting one another’s performances with recent (or imminent) presences.
However, despite similarities that include performance venues, touring schedules, and collective creation methodologies, Goat Island, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, and
Elevator Repair Service each notably express themselves differently, especially when situating themselves in relation to their peers. ERS, at the center of so much inter- group work in New York, is the most apt to articulate comparisons. After a show at
REDCAT, John Collins wryly referred to ERS as the “poor man’s Wooster Group,”60 suggesting, with the mask of good humor, a somewhat cynical attitude toward the now-institutionalized (and closely related) Wooster Group, which operates with a comparatively large budget of more than a million dollars a year. Garrett riffs on this fiscal disparity in her article on New York’s experimental groups of the 1990s, saying “These days, when the Wooster group wants new costumes it calls Prada; when
ERS does, it treks over to the Salvation Army.”61 Perhaps part of what’s changed for contemporary collaborative groups has to do with individualized survival in an age when supposedly nonhierarchically-oriented groups occupy financially hierarchical positions in relation to one another.
In part because of these differences, contemporary experimental group perfor- mance in New York is not, in comparison to the work of the 1960s, a cohesive exercise in visually rendered poor theater aesthetics. While some groups tend more towards
59The MCA is just down the street from the Art Institute of Chicago, where Lin Hixson and Matthew Goulish of Goat Island serve as instructors. 60Following a performance of “The Sound and the Fury: April Seventh, 1928,” REDCAT: October 11, 2008 61Garrett 48. CHAPTER 1. SUCCESSORS 35 the poor theater pole, such as Goat Island and Nature Theater, groups like ERS and
Builder’s Association (founded in 1994) grapple with multimedia that requires signif- icant budgets and prodigious technical support. Theater’s technological capacity has grown since the 1960s and 1970s, changing the individual’s relationship to collective creation as a collective endeavor. With greater technical demands, there is a new- found place for the individual performance-maker as technical specialist. This is the perspective from which ERS enters into partnership relationships with other groups: sharing workspace, lighting expertise, sound design skill. For groups like Goat Island and Nature Theater, who are more independent, likely as a result of their compara- tively modest need for technical personnel, there are fewer crossovers, and so fewer opportunities for either a “shared endeavor” or “competitiveness.”62
Slow Processes
Though the sense of a collective endeavor is different between groups of the 60s and
70s and contemporary groups, groups of both time periods share the core collective creation value of centralizing the group from process into performance. One way this manifests is through collective creation as an extended process, one that takes the time to develop unique blueprints of process and performance for each group, each production. Consequently, and with ethical ramifications I will discuss in Chapter
Four, the collectively created performances of Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and Nature Theater of Oklahoma, often develop relatively slowly. Like many of the 60s and 70s performance collectives, Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and
Nature Theater of Oklahoma fulfill the NET’s definition of ensemble that stipulates
62Garrett 47. CHAPTER 1. SUCCESSORS 36 the commitment of “working together consistently over the years.”63 While the core ensemble members dynamically change for every group, including those of the 60s and 70s as well as those of the early 2000s, the principle of building a group through the process of making performance remains the same. To become an ensemble, the group must work together consistently, if not over the years then at least throughout the extensive time commitment collective creation requires.
The relative inefficiency of experimental, collectively created work becomes ap- parent through contrast: while contemporary regional American repertory theaters perform approximately eight to ten shows a season, contemporary devising groups work much more gradually. New York based groups Collapsable Giraffe, Radiohole, and Elevator Repair Service produce one or two shows a year. Nature Theater of Ok- lahoma creates approximately two shows a year. Goat Island are perhaps the most patient, taking years to create each of their performances. In a grant application in
2003, Goat Island acknowledge this: “We earned a reputation for working slowly. One critic described our process as ‘glacial.’ It was true. We took two years to develop a piece, and we still do. It takes us that long to get it how we want it.”64
Throughout the 60s and 70s, radical performance groups also left room for the process of creation to grow and lengthen, providing models that validate the slower, exploratory work of our contemporary case studies. The Living Theatre’s Paradise
Now developed out of months of total immersion in discussion and theatrical explo- ration during the group’s retreat to Sicily in 1968. The Performance Group produced
63“Network of Ensemble Theaters.” (Accessed on August 3rd, 2010).
its first work, Dionysos in 69, in 1968 after a year of workshops and explorations be-
gun at New York University.65 The Wooster Group has produced 19 theatrical works in its twenty-five year history from 1975-2010, which averages out to roughly one production every sixteen months.66 Joseph Chaikin, in an interview with Richard
Schechner in 1964, described the extended workshop/rehearsal process of the Open
Theatre, saying “We’re in no hurry.”67 We might understand the continuing “tra-
dition” of these performance collectives, if there is such a thing, as hinging on the
principle (to varying degrees) of an unhurried process of exploration that outweighs
the drive to efficiently construct a product. Pavol Liska, co-director of Nature Theater
of Oklahoma, describes the group’s approach to making work, saying “We never have
a goal in mind, we just have a process in mind.”68 By focusing on the process rather than the goal of performance-as-product, Nature Theater offers a model of collective creation that is unhurried in the sense that the group does not rush toward an end- point, but rather lingers over the journey. This suggests that inheritors might come into being through the values they apply to the process of making a performance, rather than exclusively through the content of their work.
Political Engagement
Looking at properties of process rather than content creates a problematic gap be- tween much of the group work of the 60s and the 2000s: earlier group perfor- mance responded explosively, urgently, and politically to reflect the concerns of their
65Aronson 97. 66See thewoostergroup.org/twg/chrono.html for a complete chronology of Wooster Group produc- tions. 67Chaikin 195. 68Pavol Liska quoted in Young Jean Lee, “Nature Theater of Oklahoma,” Bomb 108 (2009): 88–94. CHAPTER 1. SUCCESSORS 38
times, while contemporary groups resist didacticism and overt political agendas. As
Harry Elam writes, “The turbulent events of the 1960s and 1970s brought issues
of race, class, gender, war, and economic deprivation to America’s consciousness
in profound ways.”69 Consequently, groups formed that deliberately and passion- ately produced theater as a form of social protest, rebellion against oppression and marginalization, and cultural communion, such as The San Francisco Mime Troupe,
El Teatro Campesino, the Black Revolutionary Theater (BRT), and At the Foot of the Mountain. These groups created ideologically explicit performance as a means of spurring their audiences to social action.70 This involved not only redefining the actor/audience/community relationship, but also the composition of the audi- ence/community itself. El Teatro Campesino, for example, performed for groups of immigrant workers using mixtures of Spanish and English language. The San Fran- cisco Mime Troupe co-opted performance spaces in parks and public squares in early versions of guerilla theater, and in the 1970s carefully and consciously reconstructed the (then mostly white) company to achieve the troupe’s goal of a multiracial iden- tity.71 The process of collectively creating theater, an anti-hierarchy ideal for these groups, was then reflected in the performances that sought to remove the implicit hierarchies of performance, making theater that could both reflect and affect commu- nities.
Alternative experimental groups of the 60s and 70s, distinguished from the social
69Harry J. Elam Jr., Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka (1997; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008) 19. 70See Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka for more on the cross-cultural impact of black and Chicano social protest forms, and Charlotte Canning’s Feminist Theaters in the U.S.A. for a detailed history of feminist performance from the late 1960s- mid 1980s. 71Susan Vaneta Mason, “San Francisco Mime Troupe Legacy: Guerrilla Theater,” Restaging the Sixties Radical Theaters and Their Legacies, ed. James M. Harding and Cindy Rosenthal (2006; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009) 196–212. CHAPTER 1. SUCCESSORS 39 protest theaters named above, channeled their politically and socially engaged drive toward performance aesthetics emerging from particular processes. This approach tended to be equally ideologically transparent, though focused toward the boundaries imposed by American society, culture, and politics—and even performance—at large.
Organizations like The Living Theater, The San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop, the
Open Theater, the Performance Group, and Grand Union, to name a few, broke open conventional notions of spectatorship and performance aesthetics as they sought to create modes of performance, and of making performance, beyond the confines of the dominant political and social authority. Theodore Shank writes in Beyond the
Boundaries, that performance experimenters during this period attempted to provide an “. . . alternative to the theatre of the dominant complacent middle-class society which tended to perpetuate the status quo in its aesthetics, politics, working methods, and techniques.”72 By resisting the “status quo” through each of these arenas, and utilizing their own distinct strategies, performance groups integrated sociopolitical concerns into the backbone of their work, whether or not the content of the work was overtly political.
Even within the work of the 60s and 70s, therefore, there are divisions between degrees of political content in performance. Yet another category concerns early expressions of postmodernism, explorations of performance through structure and formalism. This experimentation initially took place through the work of musicians and choreographers, notably John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Judson Church choreographers including Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, and Steve Paxton. Through formalist techniques, including chance operations as a strategy for structuring musi- cal composition and choreography, these more aesthetically oriented experiments also
72Theodore Shank, Beyond the Boundaries: American Alternative Theatre (1982; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009) 1. CHAPTER 1. SUCCESSORS 40 worked against existing hierarchies. They staged the dismantling of the hierarchies of their own art forms, challenging assumptions about what constituted appropri- ate sounds, movements, and bodies to include as performance. The sociopolitical agenda of these individuals and groups, while admittedly far from identical to one another, were less explicit than those of the social protest theaters or the alternative performance collectives.
However, while I have suggested three categories of 60s and 70s performance: so- cial protest, alternative performance collective, and formalist experimentation, I must acknowledge that these sharp delineations, while useful for organizing a discussion, are inadequate. In the reality of practice ideologies, individuals, and creative directions intermingled. The fertile music/dance interdisciplinary collaboration between John
Cage and Merce Cunningham is well documented, as are Cunningham and Cage’s in- volvement with The Living Theatre, and The Living Theatre’s status as an epicenter of New York experimental performance throughout the 1960s. In Democracy’s Body,
Sally Banes posits both Cage and Cunningham as inspiring and rebellion-inducing
figures, whose influences ghosted Robert Dunn’s dance workshops that brought to- gether choreographers who eventually went on to produce work together at Judson
Church.73 In Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and
Amiri Baraka, Harry Elam cites the “Cross fertilizations (that) repeatedly occurred and affected the theaters’ practices and even the social protest work of El Teatro and
BRT. The Radical Theater Festival held in San Francisco in 1968-featuring the San
Francisco Mime Troupe, The Bread and Puppet Theater, as well as El Teatro- was an example of this interaction.”74 Because of this blending, even formalist work—such
Cunningham’s choreography structured by chance operations—rubbed shoulders with
73Banes, Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962-1964 xvi. 74Elam Jr. 26. CHAPTER 1. SUCCESSORS 41 self consciously political performance and performance makers. This suggests that, while the particular political focus was different for different groups, as was the level of didacticism and overt social protest, all these groups and artists shared some de- gree of political engagement. Perhaps, then, political performance might take many forms, and emerge through a variety of (even formalist) aesthetics.
By leaving open the possibility that “the political” in performance might ap- pear through means that are not necessarily didactic or activist, we leave space for contemporary groups to contribute to evolving conceptions of political performance.
In Restaging the Sixties, James Harding and Cindy Rosenthal discuss eight theater groups that operated during the 1960s (and beyond) that they feel “redefined the relationship between theater and political activism.”75 Harding and Rosenthal seek to establish an understanding of the legacy that these groups have provided for con- temporary performance, considering that, as Harding and Rosenthal write in the mid
2000s, “political activism in the United States is once again on the rise.”76 They imply that the legacy of radical group theater is an essentially political one, and further, that it is politically activist. However, as I further consider in Chapter Four, activism is only one way to interpret sucessorship, or legacy, with regards to the political in performance. By confining “legacy” to contemporary forms of social protest theater, we might easily miss ways in which contemporary groups deliberately resist dogma, yet still construct politically expressive performance through contemplative processes and ensuing forms and structures.
Although Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and Nature Theater take up the challenge of collective process and practice as explored by radical collectives of the
75James M. Harding and Cindy Rosenthal, Restaging the Sixties Radical Theaters and Their Legacies (2006; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009) 3. 76Harding and Rosenthal 1. CHAPTER 1. SUCCESSORS 42
60s, their aesthetics have more in common with the early footprints of postmod-
ern practitioners John Cage and Yvonne Rainer. These three groups mark trends
away from overt or didactic performance and towards formalist aesthetics, which il-
lustrates significant ways in which contemporary experimental work both embraces
and resists successorship, if we define “successor” as one who carries on and contin-
ues pre-established practices. Art theorist Nicolas Bourriaud writes that the visual
art work of the 1990s, which he interprets according to his theoretical model of re-
lational aesthetics, is “. . . unlike Process Art and Conceptual Art, which, for their
part, tended to fetishize the mental process to the detriment of the object. . . ”77
We might re-imagine Bourriaud’s assertions in relation to process-centric (fetishized)
performance, which pervaded performance collectives of the 60s and 70s as they in-
creasingly devised original work. Devising, and especially collective creation, places
great emphasis on process and runs the risk of doing so “to the detriment of the ob-
ject”: performance.78 Further, Bourriaud claims that “. . . present-day art is roundly
taking on and taking up the legacy of the 20th avant-gardes, while at the same
time challenging their dogmatism and teleological doctrines.”79 Bourriaud identifies the 20th century avant-gardes as overly inclined to instruct, and implies that in the
“present-day”, such transparency is obsolete. Arnold Aronson echoes a similar sen- timent about performance in the 2000s, arguing that the “‘avant-garde’ has become somewhat pass´e.. . ” and has faded in favor of downtown performance aesthetics that utilize “. . . a slightly jaded, distanced, ironic attitude or point of view.”80 Considered together, Aronson’s assessment speaks to the missing link in Bourriaud’s claim. If
77Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods (Dijon: Les Presses du r´eel,2002) 47. 78Bourriaud 47. 79Bourriaud 45. 80Aronson 207. CHAPTER 1. SUCCESSORS 43 contemporary artists are not dogmatic, then what are they?
In response to didactic performance and fetishized process, our three case studies make performance according to principles that query the power structures inherent in both historical group tendencies. Both didacticism and fetishization imply fixation, or idealization. In order to create performance with an obvious instructive message, a group must be willing to identify themselves fully with that message. To fetishize in the context of a creative process is to view process within the confines of blinders that obscure the value of the performance (object). Both actions create an implicit utopia: didactic performance imagines a world in which instruction is no longer needed, and fetishized process seeks a utopia in which the value of the inner experience of the performer constitutes the performance in its entirety. Perhaps “irony” and “distance” appear in contemporary downtown performance work as consequences of attempts to steer clear of utopias, which history has shown to be fraught with their own reinforced power structures.
Collaboration and Leadership
On the heels of every discussion of collective creation, either contemporary or histori- cal, is the specter of an impossible dream: perfect communication, perfect democratic balance, absolute expulsion of hierarchical relationships of all kinds. This is the utopia referenced by the term “collective,” as it appears in discussions of performance col- lectives of the 60s and 70s; it is also the utopia that contemporary collective creation models seek to alter and reexamine in favor of achievable and sustainable working models.
Performance collectives of the 60s and 70s attempted to construct these ideal, CHAPTER 1. SUCCESSORS 44
nonhierarchical models of living, creating, and performing, and found themselves per-
petually plagued by problems of power. Richard Schechner’s charismatic first-person
Environmental Theater, for example, reinforces the controversial power dynamics that
plagued the Performance Group with Schechner as director: in Environmental The-
ater he continues to function as auteur, writing the history of the Performance Group
from his singular perspective. As Arnold Aronson states in American Avant-Garde
Theatre: A History, group performance of the 50s, 60s, and 70s constructed wide gaps
between idealized, nonhierarchical ways of working and actual and acute power rela-
tionships that perpetually asserted themselves. He writes, “The reality rarely lived
up to the ideal. Most groups functioned more on the model of the totalitarian phase
of communism: there was a collective of actors, but the groups tended to have auto-
cratic, even dictatorial, leaders in the form of visionary directors. . . ”81 These visionary
directors, choreographers, and performance makers, seem ironically inseparable from
real world attempts to achieve democratic ways of working within this period. Judith
Malina and Julian Beck (The Living Theatre), Richard Schechner (the Performance
Group), Joseph Chaikin (the Open Theatre), Peter Schumann (Bread and Puppet),
R.G. Davis (The San Francisco Mime Troupe), Elizabeth LeCompte (the Wooster
Group) all functioned as directors whose individual contributions equaled or even
eclipsed those of the groups they established and shaped. In some cases, this led to
mutiny: Richard Schechner reflects on the splintering of the Performance Group, say-
ing “. . . we moved to crisis, confusion, disruption, and explosion. As I tightened my
authoritarian grip, the group members increased their pressures against me.”82 Simi-
larly, The San Francisco Mime Troupe fractured over a leadership struggle, “. . . some
81Aronson 80. 82Richard Schechner, Environmental Theater (1973; New York: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 1994) 263. CHAPTER 1. SUCCESSORS 45
were determined that the Mime Troupe become a collective in its structure with
all decisions made by the group as a whole. Davis, however, was equally determined
that he continue as the company’s sole director and make all important decisions him-
self.”83 Looking back and reflecting on the process of the Open Theatre, Jean-Claude
Van Itallie acknowledges that “. . . there was the myth that everyone was equal, that the pieces were created by everybody. It may have been a necessary myth, to facili- tate the actors’ commitment to the material. Yet it was a myth. Joe (Chaikin) was very much the head.”84 Versions of this narrative appear again and again in records of groups that sought to fashion themselves as collectives. Leaders remained lead- ers, perpetuating the notion of equally balanced collective creativity as a “necessary myth”.
If performers remained outside the sphere of the leadership, directors and choreog- raphers (if they did not also perform with the group) were inhibited from performer ex- perience. Outside the process of enacting performance, the director/choreographer/composer becomes the epicenter of audience experience; consuming the performance as a kind of super-audience member while avoiding the performer’s vulnerable experience of be- ing the focus of sensory attention. This is clearest in experimental forms with fewer boundaries between performer and spectator, as illustrated in the following exchange between choreographer Anna Halprin and two of her dancers. In her Experience As
Dance, dance scholar Janice Ross quotes Halprin’s remarks on the success of Carry, an
audience participatory piece that invited spectators to physically handle performers
and each other. In stark contrast to Halprin’s glowing interpretation of the emotional
togetherness that transpired during the event, Dancer 3 responds, “I find it hard
83Shank 62. 84Jean-Claude van Itallie, “The Open Theatre [1963-1973]: Looking Back,” Performing Arts Jour- nal 7.3 (1983): 25–48. CHAPTER 1. SUCCESSORS 46 to be really open with guys from the outside. They were kind of horny. They got me uptight.”85 Even for a very sensitive leader, the difference between the outside versus the inside experience of a performance moment is unmistakable. As auteur,
Halprin could not experience the physical vulnerability experienced by the dancers, and furthermore her attention to the wider field of the performance—the apparent responses of the participating spectators, the meaning of project as a whole, her desire for the project to succeed according to her own standards—limits her ability to focus on the dancers’ individual understanding of the unfolding moment. Similar, more extreme issues arose in the Performance Group’s Dionysos in 69 : “. . . some male spectators took advantage of the ritual-like scenes to join the action and fondle the female performers. The performers demanded that Schechner structure these scenes more rigidly so that clear-cut and appropriate boundaries would be established.”86
These examples foreground a particular challenge of much of the group work of the
60s and 70s that sought to dismantle many of the barriers between performers and spectators, while still reinforcing the barriers that placed the director, composer, or choreographer outside the performer’s experience in relation to audiences: protecting the physical and emotional safety of the performer.
Resisting these boundaries between performer/director, in favor of departing from a history of male-dominated and created power structures, many feminist theaters of the 70s produced models of collaboratively created work that relied on consen- sus rather than on single artistic visions. Charlotte Canning’s Feminist Theaters in the U.S.A. devotes an entire chapter to the resulting difficulties of “Collectivity and Collaboration,” exploring the perpetual power conflicts that split many feminist
85Janice Ross, Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007) 217. 86Aronson 100. CHAPTER 1. SUCCESSORS 47
collectives in the 1970s, despite their desires for nonhierarchical rubrics, including
Womanrite and Spiderwoman.87 Even for companies who were not headed by guru-
like male figures, and contained no Peter Brooks or Jerzy Grotowskis, the strain of
collaborative attempts could easily crack companies into pieces. Canning also iden-
tifies the aesthetic challenge that waits on the other side of the coin, when there
is no artistic hierarchy. She summarizes the viewpoint of a former member of San
Francisco’s Lilith Theater, who believes that artistic consensus negatively impacts the
work, for “If everyone has an equal say then risks will rarely get taken because those
who are hesitant will veto the new idea or image. . . ”88 The absence of risk means
the absence of the impulse to say “yes,” and results in a stymieing environment in
which hesitancy replaces artistic freedom. There are challenges in either direction: if
a singular visionary drives the supposedly “collaborative” group, this can easily de-
volve into traditional director-actor relationships, though with additional resentment
arising from unrealized collaboration or compromising (for performers) performance
scenarios. However, if there is no leader, as the former member of Lilith Theater
notes, it can be more difficult to make the bold choices and to take the provocative
chances that result in dynamic performance aesthetics.
Following in the wake of these previously explored and identified tensions, con-
temporary devising groups interested in resisting hierarchies throughout process and
performance, and also in creating sustainable companies with supportive group dy-
namics, must contend with paradoxical problems: how do you protect safety without
87Clare Coss and Sondra Segal left Womanrite to form WET (the Women’s Experimental The- ater) in 1977 with the Open Theater’s Roberta Sklar. In 1981 Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw left Spiderwoman (directed by Muriel Miguel) to form their company Split Britches. 88Charlotte Canning, Feminist Theaters in the U.S.A.: Staging Women’s Experience (London: Routledge, 1996) 71. CHAPTER 1. SUCCESSORS 48 being safe, and how do you get the agreement without the agreement? Perhaps con- fronting these questions is itself an act of successorship, an expression of legacy. Previ- ous collaborative attempts have revealed the utopia of collectivity, and the paradoxes inherent in the set of methodologies that constitute collective creation. Contempo- rary groups create in a world that is, following historical models of collaboration and group work, newly aware.
This awareness prompts Kelly Copper, one of the directors of the contemporary
Nature Theater of Oklahoma, to veer away entirely from descriptions of collaboration in her group’s work. Copper prefers to allow space for non-utopian creative tension to arise. Because she co-directs Nature Theater with her husband, Pavol Liska, she often fields questions about their creative partnership. In an online interview, Copper identifies the problematic idealism inherent in the topic of their collaboration:
We’ve worked together a very long time. I would say this is a murky area. It’s not always ‘collaborative’—that’s a sort of hippie word and it sounds prettier than what it is-it’s often combative. Sometimes we have the same brain, sometimes we don’t.89
Collaboration as a “hippie word” hearkens back to the handicap this word has as- sumed since its association with the performance collectives of the 60s and 70s. In its idealized sense collaboration suggests a creative methodology that is conflict-free, although we know from works like Environmental Theater (1973) and David Savran’s
Breaking the Rules: The Wooster Group (1988) that creative and personal tension was certainly present in earlier devising investigations. Nevertheless, “collaboration” persists as a name for a utopia-directed process with little relationship to the realities of everyday work. In this utopia, artists successfully resist hierarchical process and
89Kelly Copper. “Nine Questions for Kelly Copper (Nature Theater of Oklahoma).” Off-Off Blog- way (15 March 2009. 1 December 2009).
Inevitably, small, practical, and unromantic everyday considerations fuse to be- come building blocks for the process that in turn marks the performance. In 1976, Lee
Breuer wrote an article describing Mabou Mines’ working process. Bluntly, he writes,
“Usually two or three people arrive around eleven thirty. Those, usually, whose keys don’t work in the studio lock. Or if they work in the studio lock they don’t work in the front door. . . .they get pissed off and go have coffee at the Bini Bon.”91 Minor annoyances, major setbacks, getting up on the wrong side of the bed, these are often part of creative endeavors that take place over long periods. Everyday activity, as
Breuer’s process description illustrates, is often fraught with obstacles.
Since collaboration seems to reference a process that is obstacle-free, and there- fore impossible, perhaps there is an issue of terminology. Kelly Copper says that collaboration makes her work with Pavol Liska sound “prettier than what it is.” Her statement returns the working relationship to everyday practices. As Lee Breuer re- minded his reading audience in 1976, talking about process might, and probably does, result in a foray into the most mundane elements of everyday experience. It might be a list of good dreams, bad smells, and missed connections. It might be memo- ries of locked rehearsal halls. It might be boring. It might be cases of two directors and conceivers agreeing, disagreeing, and creating out of an atmosphere that includes the freedom to be combative. Just as real-world collaboration doesn’t correlate with 90Copper, “Nine Questions for Kelly Copper (Nature Theater of Oklahoma)” Off-off Blogway. 91L. Breuer, “Mabou Mines: How We Work,” Performing Arts Journal 1.1 (1976): 29–32. CHAPTER 1. SUCCESSORS 50
imagined utopias, so combat needn’t equate with negativity. Many of the impossible
implications that have grown up along with the word “collaboration” as applied to
performance, come from pressure to “collaborate” by thinking the same way, or pre-
ferring the same thing. As Charlotte Canning’s research unearths, this can guide the
group to pursue the least controversial, or least interesting, creative path.
More often in partnerships of any kind, including the partnerships within contem-
porary groups as well as historical collectives, “sometimes we have the same brain,
sometimes we don’t.”92 Kelly Copper’s acknowledgement of this reality sharply defines the necessity of protecting partnerships from homogeneity. Though the tendency to describe collectively created work and artistic partnerships as “collaborative” is deeply embedded into performance vocabulary, including the vocabulary of this investiga- tion, it is important to examine ways in which the term can be deeply problematic when applied to performance making. In his literature review, Collaboration: What
Makes It Work, Paul W. Mattessich and his research assistants distinguish between
collaboration, coordination, and cooperation as distinct working strategies. One cru-
cial way in which coordination differs from collaboration, according to Mattessich,
involves its emphasis on independence and individual contribution.93 Applying this
distinction to performance making, coordination suggests that there is a space for
creative partners to separate themselves while continuing to work together. Simply
put, they might combine or coordinate efforts but would not necessarily attempt to
perform exactly the same job at the same time. This does not preclude the use of
“collaboration” as a description of group work; I persist in referring to “collaborating
groups” or “collaborative groups,” by which I mean groups that participate in the
92Copper, “Nine Questions for Kelly Copper (Nature Theater of Oklahoma)” Off-off Blogway. 93Paul W. Mattessich, Marta Murray-Close, and Barbara R. Monsey, Collaboration: What Makes It Work, 2nd Edition (2001; Saint Paul: Fieldstone Alliance, 2008). CHAPTER 1. SUCCESSORS 51 collaborative project of pooling time, resources, and ability toward the common goal of making performance according to specific group-oriented processes. Goat Island, for example, are unfazed by the word’s “hippie” overtones and regularly refer to their work as collaborative.94 However, when we increase the level of detail, looking at the contribution of individuals, “coordination” can provide helpful descriptive clarity;
“coordination” reminds us that sharing creative responsibility does not necessarily correlate with sharing creative roles.
Coordinating partners or group members are, according to Mattessich’s definition, freer to divide the creative labor and under less pressure to converge toward either consensus or authoritarian dynamics. In Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska form a marriage and creative partnership, and their website and performance programs list them both as directors.95 However, they create their works
“in conversation” with performers, colleagues, family, and friends, acknowledging the many minds and experiences that form their source material.96 As directors, they provide structure for the stories they cull from the everyday world around them. As partnering directors, they divide labor as a result of their performance backgrounds
(an M.F.A. in playwriting, an M.F.A. in directing), their different temperaments, and their exploration of the inspiring consequences of murkiness and combat. In a 2009 interview, Liska remarks on ways in which their distinct strengths and weaknesses fit together into a mutually beneficial creative process, “I get bored very easily. . . I can make material for five projects in one month, and then Kelly’s job is to make one project out of those five different ideas for a project. . . Kelly is able to look back, take the whole of the material and organize it. . . There’s no hierarchy. I’m restless and
94Bottoms and Goulish. 95“The Nature Theater of Oklahoma.” (Accessed on March 4th, 2009).
Goat Island, as another case of collective creation in contemporary culture, relate differently as collaborators, though they also craft processes and performances that resist hierarchies between artists. Though they do make performance under the guid- ance of Lin Hixson as director, Goat Island carefully resist the modern tradition of director as auteur with creative supremacy. In 1986, the group came together with the mutual desire to explore and create—they were not pulled together by the charisma of a leader or a guru—and then the group, as Goat Island performer Matthew Goulish recalls, “unanimously elected Lin Hixson director.”98 Programs and press releases list the members of the group alphabetically, seeking to avoid the traditionally superior designation for the director. Hixson’s role as director is just that—a role on an equal playing field with the roles of the rest of the group. She provides challenges and questions that spark generative responses from the group, and then shapes material with an insightful editorial eye. Each individual member of the group researches, con- templates, remembers, writes, and develops action outside the rehearsal space that then becomes material for the group to work with. As Mark Jeffrey, Goat Island performer, writes in Small Acts of Repair, “The process of making a Goat Island performance is a process of connecting physically with appropriated, separated and broken contours or terrains that we carefully join together, six individuals rotating
97Lee. 98Goulish 9. CHAPTER 1. SUCCESSORS 53
in a core.”99 The individuality of each member is crucial to Goat Island’s process.
The joining, and the development along the way, aligns the voices of six equals into a whole (performance) that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Emmanuelle Delpeche, a performer with the contemporary Philadelphia collective creation company Pig Iron, in an interview with scholar Kathryn Syssoyeva, “pro- poses that what may have changed since the sixties is the dream of a director-less collective. . . (and) advocates for the role of the director within collective creation.”100
Perhaps rejecting the “dream” is the primary way in which contemporary groups
in general have shifted away from the collaborative practices of their predecessors.
Collaboration connotes utopian leaderlessness, an ideal that group theaters of the
60s and 70s struggled to embody through collective creation that manufactured “the
myth that everyone was equal.”101 These attempts provoked unsustainable collective practices that often only widened the gulf between leader and performer. Perhaps we can approach links between contemporary practices with a generalization appli- cable to Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, Nature Theater, Pig Iron, and others: many contemporary collective creation groups accept and integrate the role of the director, approaching nonhierarchical process practices by valuing distinct roles as equally important, with no myth-making necessary.
99Bottoms and Goulish 166. 100Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva, “Pig Iron: A Case Study in Contemporary Collective Practice,” Lives and Deaths of Collective Creation, ed. Jane Baldwin, Jean-Marc Larrue, and Christian Page (Boston: Vox Theatri, 2008) 180–196. 101Van Itallie 34. CHAPTER 1. SUCCESSORS 54
The Performance’s Relationship to the Audience
Contemporary performance groups have also moved away from confrontational stances toward the audience, eschewing the power dynamics that accompany an audience’s discomfort or physical titillation. Taking The Living Theatre and the Performance
Group as two representatives, radical performance collectives of the 50s, 60s, and 70s experimented with tactics that sought to jolt spectators out of the complacency of daily life by engaging them in participatory physical acts. In Paradise Now, which
The Living Theatre first performed in 1968, the fourth section of the performance consists of “The Rite of Universal Intercourse” during which “Spectators are invited to speak out about sexual taboos, to undress, and to join the ‘body pile,’ a gath- ering onstage of actors and audience groping for each other.”102 This usage of the bodies of the audience in order to manifest expressivity, freedom, and equality was also highly evident in the work of the Performance Group. In 1970, reviewer Dan
Isaac commented that Richard Schechner, throughout his directorship of the Perfor- mance Group, “. . . recommended the invasion of the private domain, the senses of taste and touch..”,103 citing such examples as TPG’s production of Victims of Duty that culminated in the actors literally stuffing bread down the throats of audience members. Additionally, Isaac remarks that “Sexual assaults upon individual members of the audience is almost a trademark of Schechner’s work. . . ”104 Schechner himself does not dispute this claim, but supports it in the form of the exhaustive details he includes in various writings about the Performance Group, particularly in Envi- ronmental Theater. These details explicate Schechner’s fascination with merging the
102Tytell 228. 103Dan Isaac, rev. of Dionysus in 69, ed., Educational Theatre Journal 22.4 (1970): 432–436. 104Isaac 434. CHAPTER 1. SUCCESSORS 55 physical and the psychological in an ongoing quest for vulnerability and authentic- ity in performance. As part of this search, and according to Schechner’s six axioms of environmental theater, the audience itself—through its spatial and psychological integration into the performance—becomes part of the performance canvas.
Assimilated, at least on some level, into the theatrical event, the bodies of specta- tors transform into commodities that either cooperate (right) with the participation asked/offered/demanded, or resist it (wrong). Schechner would not agree with this assessment of audience-as-commodity, having categorically stated that “The buyer- bought relationship is abolished because there is nothing for sale, either goods or services. Instead, there is an agreement to begin, maintain, and possibly complete a set of actions-many of which, in order to develop, need the audience.”105 However, if the performance needs the audience, especially the physical bodies of the audi- ence, in order to develop its action, then—with or without the exchange of money— cooperation becomes the currency that allows the product of performance to move forward. As Schechner distinguishes between an “agreement” between performance an audience, and “the buyer/bought relationship,” one crucial distinction arises: in a buyer/bought relationship, the exchange of goods is explicit. In a performance, how is the “agreement” made clear? What happens if it doesn’t occur? What arises if the two parties, comprised of performers and audience members, misinterpret the level of agreement? These practical questions raise some of the ethical dilemmas that result from audience participation, especially if—as the Performance Group was notorious for—performance makers exercise dominion over the performance space and seek (or demand) participation aggressively.
105Richard Schechner, “Audience Participation,” TDR: The Drama Review 15.3 (1971): 73–89. CHAPTER 1. SUCCESSORS 56
Aggression, even if levied against the confines of dominant authority, easily re- inforces the same control it originally sought to protest. Richard Gilman, a theater theorist and critic who took part in the Open Theater’s workshop process, describes some aesthetic ramifications of this that impact the entire atmosphere of performance.
In his 1971 review of the Performance Group’s Commune, Gilman writes:
From almost all our recent stage phenomena of performance-theatre, au- dience participation, games, and rituals there rises, along with undeni- able daring and vigorous search, an atmosphere of surrogate behavior, a sullen or hyperthyroid but always willed esprit, narcissism masquerading as ‘openness’ and exhibitionism as honesty.106
Gilman’s insightful review prompts us to recognize the difficulty of involving the audience in an expectation-free inclusionary performance environment. This is, as
Gilman argues, due mostly to the doubling of “surrogate behavior” modeled by per- formers and performances themselves. Gilman offers the possibility of a gaping, and unacknowledged, divide between the performance environment as it is supposed to be, and as it is. If performers and audience members must will a certain attitude or response, then the openness and honesty sought by the production is irreparably compromised: constructed response takes the place of spontaneity. Gilman goes on to include an amusing anecdote about a fellow audience member at Commune who became frustrated with Gilman’s note-taking during the performance. The audience member becomes part of Gilman’s spectatorship experience, as an individual fallen prey to an intense desire to inhabit the responses sought by the production, and to prove himself the perfect spectator.
He had yakked at dirty words, yelled ‘Wow!’ at a nude scene, twitched with self-satisfaction on hearing Anti-Establishment views expressed, and
106Richard Gilman, “Commune: The Performance Group,” TDR: The Drama Review 15.3 (1971): 325–329. CHAPTER 1. SUCCESSORS 57
done all this with a beady-eyed attention to what others in the audience were doing, including me, and with that violent determination to have a good time, to belong and be with it, that reveals no sort of open spirit or impulse toward the communal but their terrifying absence.107
This description of the eager spectator is almost cartoonish, an audience member
overdoing his commodified role. It is as though this spectator approaches the perfor-
mance with behaviors and responses drawn from a pre-established script, resurrecting
the disciplinary authority that collective creation experiments attempt to dismantle.
The “violent” and “terrifying” consequences Gilman references, are the consequential
oppositions between the relationship the performance is purportedly trying to create
with the audience (provoking openness, sincere thought, etc) and the relationship
created (rule-oriented, boundaries reinforced).
In the contemporary experimental performance of Goat Island, Elevator Repair
Service, and Nature Theater of Oklahoma, the audience occupies a less central, and
consequently less ethically ambiguous role. Goat Island frequently configure the au-
dience into tennis court seating, eschewing the proscenium arch but generally elimi-
nating direct contact—either through gaze, touch, or dialogue—between performers
and spectators. Elevator Repair Service also avoids environmental staging; both The
Sound and the Fury: April Seventh, 1928 and Gatz utilize standard proscenium seating.108 Additionally, ERS adds to the framed boundary between performance and audience in both productions by building entire rooms onstage. These rooms function as stages-within-a-stage, enclosing the action and rendering it only partially visible to the audience, or visible only through plexiglass. Nature Theater of Okla- homa changes the material of audience seating more than the audience orientation in
107Gilman 329. 108The Sound and the Fury: April Seventh, 1928, based on one of the chapters of William Faulkner’s novel, premiered in 2008. Gatz, a six-plus hour word-for-word staging of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, premiered in 2006. CHAPTER 1. SUCCESSORS 58 relation to the action: sometimes the audience sits on pillows on the floor, sometimes in steep risers, and sometimes upon folding chairs. Nature Theater prefers to use intimate, found spaces rather than theatrical spaces, with the exception of Poetics:
A Ballet Brˆut which seats the audience in the upstage section of the stage floor as performer action takes place downstage and in the auditorium seating. Audience in- teraction is minimal in the work of Nature Theater, but present in each performance: a brief touch, a held gaze, a proffered peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Performers break the fourth wall, speaking earnestly to the audience in general rather than to particular audience members. Eye contact is not challenging, seeming to represent brief moments of connection—whatever that turns out to be—rather than instances of provocation.
One could argue that these contemporary groups opt out of formal experimental potential, enabling the audience to retreat into passivity. This is perhaps one reason why the descriptor “activist” eludes this contemporary work; activism is function of form as well as content. Theorist Una Chaudhuri likens the motionless spectator to a predator intent on consumption, as “. . . proscenium staging can be thought of as an instance of constructing the ‘picturesque spectator,’ the ever-threatened and threat- ening predator, temporarily enjoying a moment of safety. . . ”109 We might extend this metaphor to imagine that the participatory (rather than picturesque) spectator un- leashes her predatory nature, relinquishing the safety of darkened seats and putting the form of the performance at her mercy. Similarly, performers and performance that include the physical bodies of spectators have the audience—as both threatened and threatening—at their mercy as well: it is a tenuous trust that is easily fulfilled, but even more easily broken. In this sense, the passive spectator of a non-participatory
109Una Chaudhuri, “Land/Scape/Theory,” Land/Scape/Theater, ed. Elinor Fuchs and Una Chaud- huri (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002) 21. CHAPTER 1. SUCCESSORS 59
performance participates in the non-aggressive performance environment she helps
to establish. Or from a different and less historically idealized perspective, mini-
mizing audience interaction simply enables performance groups to enact fewer power
dynamics and to retain greater control over the aesthetics of their work.
But, in terms of spectatorship, what does this control foreground and what kinds
of perception does it enable? In Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s,
Carrie Lambert-Beatty acknowledges that, by comparison with others arts experi- ments of the period including Happenings, Fluxus performances, and radical theater performances, “. . . Rainer and her peers seemed content to work-or were intent on working-within the convention of watchers, seated and silent, with moving, active performers before them.”110 This is not, Lambert-Beatty makes clear, an argument for interpreting conservatism in Rainer’s work, but is rather an opportunity for recog- nizing that “. . . spectatorship as such was the social phenomenon to be, not negated, but explored.”111 Rainer did not ignore or dismiss the audience, but rather identified the audience as the crux around which to build the gaze of the performer. Perhaps, then, we must consider these three contemporary groups with their similar “conven- tion of watchers”112 as posers of questions and identifiers of complexities, rather than dismissing them as perpetuators of theatrical convention. Whether by erecting clear plastic walls, engaging deeply in the task at hand, or inviting the audience to briefly share a gaze, Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and Nature Theater draw atten- tion to fixed differences between performer and spectator. This performer/audience relationship has more in common with postmodern dance of the 1960s than with par- ticipatory radical theater of the same era, as it foregrounds the individuality of both
110Carrie Lambert-Beatty, “Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s” (2008): 13. 111Lambert-Beatty 14. 112Lambert-Beatty 13. CHAPTER 1. SUCCESSORS 60
performer and spectator through formalist aesthetic practices, thereby personalizing
the performer/spectator relationship as one worthy of scrutiny and also of ethical
treatment.
Body and Task as Obstacle
Thus far, this discussion has engaged far more with “successor” in relation to radi-
cal theater collectives than in relation to postmodern dance. However, if the “dog-
matism. . . and teleological doctrines”113 of radical collective performance are points of resistance for contemporary groups, the more reductive practices of postmodern dance, including task-based choreography, and untrained or amateur dancing bodies, continue to appear in the work of contemporary groups. Increasingly, contemporary experimental work puts traditional delineations between theater and dance under suspicion—either by seeking to erase them, expose them, or even poke fun at them.
Goat Island refer to their work simply as performance, and create complex montages of task-based physical movement, static images, and fragmented speech. Elevator Re- pair Service uses moments of choreography as interrupters in established theatrical worlds, opportunities for gathering and coalescing the energetic pacing of the group.
Nature Theater of Oklahoma stages their devised Poetics: A Ballet Brˆut, as a “ballet”
performed by non-dancers and composed of familiar, everyday gestures.
Dance, as it appears throughout the work of these three groups, is invariably
performed by untrained dancing bodies with no formal dance training. Without
formal training, the quality of movement is quite different than it would appear if
performed, say, by an Alvin Ailey dancer. Less fluid, less precise, the untrained
113Bourriaud 45. CHAPTER 1. SUCCESSORS 61
dancing body is not the product of repeated “dance gestures that mold, carve, and
otherwise impress their way into ligaments, muscles, and even bones. . . ”114 as is a professional body; it is not the product of continuous effort experienced over years of practice. Rather, as we will explore more fully in Chapter Three, the untrained body is an obstacle that shapes performance through the performer’s physical limitations rather than through her virtuosity.
The exploration of the amateur and untrained can be, however, as threatening to critics of performance as “hiccupping in choreographed movement”115 can be to critics of dance. In Exhausting Dance, Andr´eLepecki writes that the assumption of an assailable bind between movement and dance is so fixed, that when contempo- rary choreographers experiment with “hiccupping” in their work, critics fear that “it is dance’s very future that appears menaced by the eruption of kinesthetic stutter- ing.”116 Similarly, performance critics worry that contemporary work that foregrounds the untrained body—particularly the untrained dancing body—constitutes an artistic dead end. Writing of Goat Island, one spectator despairs that there is any aesthetic merit to The Lastmaker, the group’s ninth and final performance piece: “its use of movement was astoundingly amateur: blocky, clumsy, and uncoordinated ‘dance’ se- quences. . . ”117 For this audience member, amateurism is an indictment, an admission of inability that can only be labeled as “dance” in quotes. For Shawn-Marie Gar- rett, the awkward dancing of ERS performers during Cab Legs (which performed
114Sally Ann Ness, “The Inscription of Gesture: Inward Migrations in Dance,” Migrations of Ges- ture, ed. Carrie Noland and Sally Ann Ness (Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2008) 1–30. 115Andr´eLepecki, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement (New York: Rout- ledge, 2006) 1. 116Lepecki, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement 1. 117Ryan Platt. “Psi 15: (Mis)Performance Studies (Shifts and Goat Island)).” (7 July 2009. 2 January 2010).
Adrian Healthfield writes of Goat Island’s dancing as choreographed moments that display “. . . a kind of strategic humiliation, exposing their awkwardness, their vulnerability, their limits. . . (the performers) necessarily, become more autonomous in their strategies for coping, in improvising un-prescribed physical adjustments in order to catch up to speed as they fall behind.”119 Untrained bodies, then, reveal an unmaskable performing experience. The task before them is so difficult that they cannot escape the lived moment of the attempt. They are thrown off balance, they achieve, they falter.
Precariousness, as part of amateur and untrained aesthetics, merges with perfor- mance demeanors that result from contemporary groups’ task-based movement. In a
1992 interview, Lin Hixson of Goat Island remarks, “I think we’re influenced particu- larly by the work done at the Judson Church in the 1960s, where there was a certain respect for pedestrian movement-like Yvonne Rainer pushing a vacuum cleaner as dance.”120 Task-like, pedestrian movement does not just comprise the content of a particular piece, but, if the performer pursues the task with unwavering commitment,
118Garrett 46. 119Bottoms and Goulish 77. 120Bottoms and Goulish 69. CHAPTER 1. SUCCESSORS 63 actually shapes the demeanor of the performer. It generates an acting style, or danc- ing style. Matthew Goulish, Goat Island performer and co-founder, describes the process of completing a set task in performance, “A lot of what we do is organized around a task or a series of tasks, and the way to deal with those tasks—I’m talking as a performer now—is with a feeling of urgency. . . In performance we become possessed by the spirit of the action, by the impossibility of doing it correctly.”121 This sense of “impossibility” shapes the quality of movement, and also demands a level of focus from the performer that equally contributes to the demeanor, or performance style.
It is important to establish that this performance demeanor, which I call an acting or performing style, arises as a performer response to task-based obstacles. Radio- hole, a contemporary New York collective of four performers, unfailingly includes compelling moments when the four performers, onstage, close their eyes, sketch black and white open eyes on their lids with body paint, and perform difficult physical actions while sightless. It’s one of Radiohole’s signature performance moments. Al- though each performer has closed and then painted his or her eyes literally hundreds of times, it remains an inevitably tricky task that requires total concentration. In this case, sightlessness is an obstacle that influences the manner of the performers’ movement. Other task-based work abounds in contemporary group work: Goat Is- land include many complex choreographic sequences that might require chairs to be lifted at precise angles, according to a particular rhythm. Elevator Repair Service, inspired by the Wooster Group’s tight integration of technical paraphernalia (video, sound, light), has actors recreate—as precisely as possible—dances from videos, and incredibly complicated group movement in alignment with strict sound scores. The
121Bottoms and Goulish 70. CHAPTER 1. SUCCESSORS 64
directors of Nature Theater of Oklahoma assign difficult accents to their perform-
ers and require the performers, as untrained dancers, to memorize complex grids of
choreography, “just to give them something to work against.”122
While the use of obstacle in performance has myriad aesthetic ramifications, chore- ographers of the 1960s describe obstacle as a tool for focusing the energy and attention of the performer. Yvonne Rainer had her dancers “. . . interact with objects like floppy mattresses that were heavy or awkward enough to ensure that performers manipulat- ing them couldn’t embellish or accent the activity in any way.”123 In an interview with
fellow dancer, choreographer, and former teacher Anna Halprin, Rainer questions Hal-
prin’s exploration of task-based performance.124 Referencing her 1962 performance
Five-Legged Stool, Halprin replies, “Doing a task created an attitude that would bring
the movement quality into another kind of reality. It was devoid of a certain kind of
introspection.”125 This lack of introspection suggests that the performer must focus
her energy and attention outwards, resisting self consciousness and releasing individ-
ual subjectivity. This opens up amateurish, or “awkward” movement and moments in
performance as moments that arise from extreme difficulty, even impossibility, a phe-
nomenon we will continue to discuss in ensuing chapters. It also explores the beauty
of functionality, of a body engaged in absolute commitment to a physical task. The
relationship to earlier movement experiments resides in the level of the performer’s
fidelity to the task in the moment, and the task’s ability to stage the performer’s
awkwardness; that is to say, vulnerability.
Another means of describing the performer’s demeanor or style links to Mark
122Lee 89. 123Lambert-Beatty 5. 124Anna Halprin was known as “Ann Halprin” until 1972, when she changed her name by adding the additional “a”. 125Rachel Kaplan, ed., Yvonne Rainer Interviews Ann Halprin (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1995) 83. CHAPTER 1. SUCCESSORS 65
Franko’s discussion of “Expressivism and Chance Procedure” in Dancing Modernism
/ Performing Politics. Franko identifies a unique expressivism formerly present in dancers of Merce Cunningham’s chance-based choreography, despite Cunningham’s insistence that performers divest themselves of emotional expression in favor of abso- lute concentration on the movement of their particular body in space. Franko argues that this expressivism gradually drained away over the many years of Cunningham’s choreographic career as dancers become accustomed to chance procedure, and con- sequently able to overcome chance as obstacle.126 Franko writes, “The Cunningham
dancer of the eighties and early nineties does not manifest the detached subjectivity
in the way his or her predecessors did. . . (and) is now too frequently a body devoid of
intention, agency, and interiority, a body primed to mirror the dictates of chance.”127
We can focus Franko’s discussion toward an argument that the “detached subjectiv-
ity” of earlier Cunningham dancers arose from their approach to chance choreography
as task, task that remained such as long as it was performed by bodies that were not
“primed to mirror. . . (its) dictates. . . ” This suggests that there can be a certain ex-
pressive quality to performing a task, and that it emerges when the performer is not
“primed”. Even if the performing body is virtuosic in some physical way, as Cunning-
ham’s dancers generally were, it still has the potential to retain subjective expression
through its relationship to amateurism. In this case, the amateurism becomes a kind
of magic spark that ignites what Franko calls the “detached subjectivity” of Cunning-
ham’s works pre-1980. This manifestation of amateurism does not result from lack
of training, as it accompanies the work of trained bodies crafted over years to reflect
126According to Franko, Cunningham first utilized chance procedure in his 1952 work Sixteen Dances for Soloist and Company of Three. (Franko) He continued to adopt chance procedure as a primary choreographic technique through his last work, Nearly Ninety, produced in 2008/2009 just before Cunningham’s death at age 90. 127Mark Franko, Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995) 81. CHAPTER 1. SUCCESSORS 66 dancing virtuosity, but rather through the dancing body’s unfamiliarity with certain formalist choreographic processes. Therefore, the desirable demeanor of detached subjectivity that accompanies fidelity to task, requires continual renewal through strategies that invite an intense level of presence in the performer, a sensitivity to the challenges posed by change. Introducing obstacle—whether encountered through un- familiarity, physical barriers, or untrained bodies, is one way to stage the performer’s attention and illustrates nonhierarchical aesthetic leanings.
These subtle instances of nonhierarchical process and performance structures set the contemporary group work of Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and Nature
Theater apart from that of their radical predecessors, even while reinvigorating many of the practices of early postmodern dance. Using these three contemporary groups as three points that together map a plane: Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and
Nature Theater of Oklahoma; the landscape of contemporary performance reveals itself as in conversation with, but not overcome by, the weight of earlier collaborative work. ReplaceCThese three contemporary groups do not use the radical and highly visible strategies of 60s and 70s collectives, but they nonetheless work from this his- tory of unsustainable utopian attempts. Consequently, the experimental performance group in the contemporary period, has renewed potential to be conscious of sustain- ability, and to devise through both coordinating and collaborating principles that keep oppositions very much in mind. If there is a general aesthetic (informed by the history of collective theater) that we can apply to the work of these three uniquely different contemporary models, it is an aesthetic that embraces complexity and invites unresolved contradiction. Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and Nature Theater seek to balance collective creation and individual contribution in preparation for the performance space even while questing for perpetual imbalance, or precariousness, CHAPTER 1. SUCCESSORS 67 throughout the performance itself. Their performances do not so much take didactic stances as they create impressions of boundarylessness within carefully constructed performance scores. This boundarylessness comes into being as these groups strip away nonhierarchical displays, and substitute a horizontal plane of collaborative cre- ative potential to replace the verticality of layered authorities. Aesthetically, this consists of dismantling hierarchical divisions between media (dance, theater), pur- pose (activist, aesthetic), performing bodies (untrained/amateur, virtuosic) towards a subtle, but nonetheless passionately invoked and ethically rendered, performance of collective creation in the 2000s. Chapter 2
Performative Economies
The everyday is the space in which dialectical movement advances or comes to a halt, in an unpredictable blend of opaqueness and transparency, of clear-sightedness and blindness, of determinability and transience. – Henri Lefebvre128
As we quest for an understanding of how the political takes shape in the work of contemporary collective creation groups, we can begin with everyday economy, a concept we can begin to explore through the lens of employment. For contemporary artists, and especially for members of Elevator Repair Service and Nature Theater of
Oklahoma who live and create within the high-cost city limits of New York, “having work” (employment) goes hand in hand with “making work” (performance); they cre- ate in awareness of their dual roles as office employees and performance-makers. This tense reality of their everyday directly impacts their performance-making: they make creative work, usually rehearsing in the evenings and on weekends, using method- ologies that sharply contrast with the everyday economies of their day jobs. This
128Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life: Volume II: Foundations for a Sociology of the Every- day, trans. John Moore (1961; Verso, 2002) 10.
68 CHAPTER 2. PERFORMATIVE ECONOMIES 69 contrast illuminates two economies whose means of exchange is primarily performa- tive: the everyday economy supported by the role of the employee, and the economy of performance constructed by groups who use that role as source material for creative exploration. There are, therefore, two ways in which the artists of these low-budget groups engage in work: artistic work as vocation, and work (employment) as a money making endeavor. Though these two processes of work need not necessarily be mu- tually exclusive, for Elevator Repair Service and Nature Theater, they are interde- pendent. Members of these groups seek temporary employment, and especially office employment, in order to support their vocation of performance making. Imagery and experiences from office employment then motivates particular performances. In this way, these groups allow the two “work” economies to entangle, making use of the
first in order to construct the second. This results in a complex relationship to the everyday, in which performativity—as it relates to the role of the employee - is the
(potential) locus of productivity. Nature Theater and Elevator Repair Service are two examples of contemporary groups who institute new economic structures that play out on both concrete and symbolic levels: proceeding from their experiences as employees and artists, they interrogate the supposed labor/product exchange that takes place within the existing office environment, and then restore productivity to the role of office employee by reorienting her tasks toward the product of performance.
This results in performance that differs considerably from activist performance that communicates political engagement through readily available content. In contrast, as we approach the political through economy, I propose that contemporary collective creation groups have the potential to create performance that is implicitly politically engaged insofar as the methodologies of creation, responses to work experiences within CHAPTER 2. PERFORMATIVE ECONOMIES 70 the everyday economy, are themselves politically significant. In this chapter, I pri- marily draw evidence from the methods and performance of Elevator Repair Service and Nature Theater, who utilize members’ employee-roles as temporary office work- ers toward processes of making that are both collaborative and economically-engaged, and therefore implicitly political on the level of methodology.
Employment as Everyday Work
Firstly, in order to claim a particular performativity for the employee within the every- day, I ask—what is employment? Unlike labor, with its latent imagery of the effort of the body, employment is a relational term. It situates the worker as employee within a stratosphere of status: hiring, firing, producing, seeming to produce, all in service of keeping one’s job. There are two distinct definitions for “employment,” both of which relate to the performance projects of contemporary groups, that persist throughout its etymological development. The first defines employment in the modern sense, “to make use of, apply,” and the second, which dates from the Latin implicaire, means to “involve, be connected with.”129 These definitions, interestingly, correspond to the two performative processes members of Elevator Repair Service and Nature Theater engage in throughout their experience of everyday work. Employees, and office em- ployees in particular, are subject to the demands of their employers, who “make use of, apply” the ability and the time of the worker.130 In contrast, performance-makers involved in collective creation pursuits, generally speaking, attempt to construct non- hierarchical dynamics that, in place of the employee/employer relationship, do not
129“Online Etymology Dictionary” (Accessed on March 21st, 2011), 0 0
consist of one individual making use of another. Instead, all individuals (ideally)
make use of each other, toward making performance whose processual task is to “in-
volve, be connected with.”131 These two definitions of employment, which reference two different relational (and economic) structures, unite under the umbrella term of
“work,” which we can apply either to the creative process or to the day job. Perhaps, then, in order to clarify the performance economies prompted by structure, we must return to the connection between work in general and everyday philosophy.
Henri Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life outlines the perpetuating economic cycles of “work” in everyday life, claiming that these cycles halt the “dialectical movement” that is possible, but paradoxically difficult, within the obscuring power of everyday.132 He advances his critique from a sociological perspective, critiquing class- based social structures, imbedded behaviors that form ritualized social practice, and the social and individual alienation that results from unexamined, socially-formed thought and activity: his critique does not indict the everyday at large, but criticizes prevailing attitudes toward (and unconsciousness within) the everyday, for this results in an absence of dialectical flow. Lefebvre describes his project as approaching a theory of needs, a positive program that seeks to liberate actual human needs from the socially conditioned perception of necessities. Lefebvre writes of the authority this notion of necessity has assumed in modern life, saying:
In the realm of necessity, human needs became degraded. They repre- sented ‘the sad necessities of everyday life.’ People had to eat, drink, find clothes. . . and so they had to work. But people whose only reason for working is to keep body and soul together have neither the time nor the inclination for anything else. So they just keep on working, and their lives are spent just staying alive. This, in a nutshell, has been the philosophy
131“Online Etymology Dictionary.” 132Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life: Volume II: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday 10. CHAPTER 2. PERFORMATIVE ECONOMIES 72
of everyday life—and it still is.133
Lefebvre describes the “philosophy of everyday life” as hinging on a cyclical attitude
towards work: live to work, and work to live. In our contemporary climate, more
than half a century removed from Lefebvre’s publication in 1947, this persists as a
familiar mantra. “Working to live” represents a basic exchange common to the ev-
eryday experience of lower and middle classes: one trades goods and services within
an economic system, only to find oneself on the fringes that system. Clinging to the
fringes, the only way to maintain one’s grip is to continue to work. Yet, Lefebvre
suggests that this economic system of work, which pretends to meet human needs,
is in fact a product of “the realm of necessity, (in which) human needs became de-
graded.”134 Presumably, “working to live” enfolds the worker’s action into a system
of representation that clouds her ability to recognize “need.” Instead, necessity—a
representation of need according to everyday philosophy—takes its place. Therefore,
need as a barometer of exchange, remains out of reach.
If we consider “necessity” as a representation of need, we can begin to imagine ways
in which the entire everyday system of work rests on economics formed of symbolic
exchange. Perhaps then, “necessity” does not in fact motivate a process of work
exchange that is as basic as it seems. Writing of Oscar Wilde, literary scholar Carolyn
Lesjak indicates Wilde’s espousal of an economy of pleasure that constitutes “an
expanded notion of needs and use which privileges pleasure and the imagination over
utility.”135 Wilde suggests that needs and use may not equate with utility, a concept
Lefebvre gestures toward through his claim that the “necessities” of life as defined
133Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life: Volume I, trans. John Moore (1947; Verso Books, 2008) 173. 134Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life: Volume I 173. 135Carolyn Lesjak, “Utopia, Use, and the Everyday: Oscar Wilde and a New Economy of Pleasure,” ELH 67.1 (2000): 179–204. CHAPTER 2. PERFORMATIVE ECONOMIES 73
in everyday philosophy, alienate the worker from her actual human needs. There
seem to be important similarities between “necessity” according to Lefebvre, and
“utility” according to Wilde. Both, it seems, threaten our ability to recognize “need”
within the symbolically based economic structures of the everyday. Additionally, both
indicate a self-perpetuating economy that produces in excess of both need and use:
it produces itself.
This self-perpetuating realm of necessity, while engaged in an ongoing cycle of
movement (work, eat, work, drink, work, clothe) results in a philosophy of the ev-
eryday that is opposed to imagination; imagination implies expansive movement and
boundless possibility, while the cycle of everyday philosophy enfolds the role of worker
into symbolic stasis. Individuals must “keep on working, and their lives are spent just
staying alive.”136 The goal of living, in this model of everyday life, is not dialectical movement but maintenance. To “work” in the context of Lefebvre’s argument is to en- able the perpetuating cycle of more work. In this sense, work is a process of exchange that neutralizes either forward or backward motion; it establishes motionlessness.
This motionlessness is the fuel that allows the alienation (from need) instigated by everyday philosophy, to continue.
Elevator Repair Service and Nature Theater of Oklahoma stage this motionless- ness, the sum total of cyclical everyday work, by creating performance that displays a specific kind of everyday work as a cycle composed by the everyday role of office employee—and especially temporary office employee. The temporary office employee is a cog in the larger machinery of everyday work whose position is always tenuous: replaceable, disposable, she is by definition “temporary” and therefore subject to constant change. In order to “work to live,” the temporary employee must remain
136Lesjak. CHAPTER 2. PERFORMATIVE ECONOMIES 74 in a constant state of instability, moving from job to job with no security, healthcare benefits, sick leave, and limited union representation. Union representation in par- ticular poses a complex problem for the temporary employee: most employees work for a staffing agency, and then through the staffing agency for specific companies.
The staffing agency ultimately controls the wages of the temporary employee, while the specific company controls hours and overtime. For example, the National La- bor Relations Board ruled in 2001 that temporary employees working for Gourmet
Award would be covered, with limits, by the provisions of existing union contract that previously applied only to regular employees.137 However, these provisions did not apply to wages, lasted only for the brief term the temporary employee remained at Gourmet Awards, and had no effect on the employer/employee relationship be- tween the temporary worker and the staffing agency. To date, no unions exist that specifically manage the rights of the temporary worker within a staffing company.
When contemporary performance groups display conditions of the temporary of-
fice worker, they provide structure for the unstructured: they organize the experience of the temporary worker which is, in everyday life, so transitory as to be unorga- nized and unorganizable. I am not suggesting that this constitutes a substitute for union organization and representation, but rather that Elevator Repair Service and
Nature Theater make visible their own, and unrepresented, experience as workers in temporary, and consciously replaceable, roles. Further, I claim that the inherent re- placeability of the temporary employee role gives rise to artistic practices that resist the symbolic motionlessness of everyday philosophy governing work.
137“Union Contracts Cover Temporary Workers, NLRB Has Ruled.” (Accessed on March 25th, 2011).
Why artistic practices in particular? In the previous chapter I offered statis- tics on the growing number of experimental ensemble groups, and collective creation groups especially, throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Many of these groups, including
Nature Theater of Oklahoma, generate revenue by touring. Touring requires that, if individual artists are unable to make a full-time living as performers and performance- makers, that they capitalize on the flexibility of temporary employment. In a 2011 workshop, Jake Margolin of The TEAM mentioned the wide array of temporary jobs he has taken in concurrence with his creative work with The TEAM, saying, “If you’re a temp, you can pick up or put down your job whenever you like; you always have to be free to go on tour.”138 There are, however, certainly exceptions to the rule. Susie
Sokol, a founding member of Elevator Repair Service who has performed in each of group’s performances to date, is a first grade teacher. Her permanent position, however, severely limits her capacity to tour with the group, and often results in the group’s temporary employment of actors to take Sokol’s place when her work schedule does not permit her to travel with individual shows. To be “free to go on tour,” as
Margolin describes it, is a freedom that comes with a price: economic entanglement in a work-role designed more for the fiscal imperative of companies than for employee rights.
Throughout 2010 and 2011, The New York Times published multiple feature ar-
ticles on the status of temporary workers in the contemporary economy, all of which
acknowledge the extraordinary growth of the temporary employment sector as growth
that opposes the employment goals of most temporary workers. A survey by Staffing
Industry Analysts research firm found, “68 percent of all temporary workers are seek-
ing permanent employment.”139 Despite the fact that most temporary employees see
138Conversation during a workshop for Hanging Georgia, Stanford University, March 2011 139“Weighing Costs, Companies Favor Temporary Help.” (Accessed on March 15th, 2011). their temporary status as temporary, the growth of the contemporary U.S. economy makes moves toward permanent positions, at least in the immediate future, unlikely. An article from 2010 notes that “In November, they (temporary jobs) accounted for 80 percent of the 50,000 jobs added by private sector employers, according to the Labor Department.”140 While the percentage of temporary jobs has steadily climbed throughout the U.S. recession of the 2000s, they have been a significant means for companies to grow revenue for decades. In 1997, just two years before Elevator Repair Service first performed Highway to Tomorrow, which interprets The Bacchae using language and objects associated with temporary office workers, The New York Times wrote that “Growth has been so explosive that the biggest firms providing temporary workers—like Kelly Service and Manpower International—now employ more people than some of the largest corporations in the country. Manpower, with 750,000 on its rolls, has more employees than General Motors, AT&T and IBM combined.”141 The demand for temporary workers is, for employing companies, largely based on cost. One human resources director explains the equation, and her preference for hiring temporary workers, saying “An actual employee with benefits costs more than a temp or contract worker.”142 While I do not differentiate between an “actual em- ployee” versus a “temp or contract worker,” preferring to analyze temporary work as a very specific form of employment, it is interesting to note this director’s vocabulary. If a temporary worker is not an “actual employee,” then what is she? Evidently, she is part of a category of the workforce that enjoys short-term contact with individual companies, which renders her less real and her time less valuable. nytimes.com/2010/12/20/business/economy/20temp.html>. 140“Weighing Costs, Companies Favor Temporary Help.” 141“Learning the Benefits of Temping.” (Accessed on March 15th, 2011). Whereas the flexibility of temporary work may appeal to the immediate needs of touring theater artists, this flexibility represents an imperfect exchange: temporary employees do not have a stake in their employing companies in the long-term, and those companies have no stake in them. This leaves many theater artists, whose performance groups do not have the financial resources to permanently employ them on salary, let alone provide healthcare benefits, without medical security. The per- former’s body, the instrument by which she makes her living, is a very concrete asset the performer cannot insure. This is certainly the case for many social categorizes and classes beyond the scope of this investigation, but here I discuss the condition of the experimental performance maker in order to emphasize the dichotomy between the economy of temporary work and the economy of collectively created performance: even as temporary employment engenders and relies on constant change, it also fixes the (isolated) employee in the immediate moment. Isolation, a consequence of impermanent employment, is in many ways an eco- nomic imperative of the “philosophy of everyday life” within “the realm of neces- sity”143 Lefebvre describes in Critique of Everyday Life. On one hand, to be isolated is to be cut off from the human need to experience social contact and partnership. In this way, collective creation practices create an economy founded on methodologies that restore and respond to this need. On the other hand, isolation removes the individual from the sphere of everyday influence, even as it results from temporary work-roles instituted by the everyday cyclical economy. Perhaps, within the imposed role of the temporary office worker, “the philosophy of the everyday” imposes isolation that, in turn, allows individual employees to excavate a revolutionary space. 143Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life: Volume I 15. CHAPTER 2. PERFORMATIVE ECONOMIES 78 The Performative Economy of the Work-Role When Lefebvre discusses work, he includes the potential for the work-role to sub- stantiate or to resist the lure of everyday stasis through conceptions of the role as performance. He writes: The waiter in a caf´eis not playing at being a waiter. He is one. And he is not one. He is not selling his time (for working and living) in exchange for the role of a waiter. And it is precisely when he is playing at being a waiter. . . in front of his costumers that he is no longer a waiter; by playing himself he transcends himself. Moreover, it is certain that a worker does not play at being a worker and could not transcend himself if he did.144 Initially, this passage seems to contain several contradictions: the waiter “is not play- ing at being a waiter” yet also “is playing at being a waiter.” The waiter “transcends himself” “by playing himself”, yet the worker “does not play at being a worker and could not transcend himself if he did.”145 With this, Lefebvre illustrates the dialecti- cal tension of the status of the role in the everyday. The role is something we play at, something composed of a variety of tasks that are familiar to the social world in which with live; it is paradoxically something we both are and are not. Transcen- dence, Lefebvre seems to suggest, arises not from “playing” as inauthentic expression, but as authentic enactment of being. The waiter is not authentic by “playing at being a waiter” but by “playing himself.”146 Both potentialities exist within the work-role, and both—the authentic and the inauthentic—emerge as products of performative exchange. These potentialities indicate ways in which the employee as role-player can par- ticipate in discourses that expose everyday economies even while remaining firmly 144Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life: Volume I 15. 145Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life: Volume I 15. 146Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life: Volume I 15. CHAPTER 2. PERFORMATIVE ECONOMIES 79 entrenched in the performativity of the work-task. While the waiter “is not selling his time (for working and living) in exchange for the role of a waiter,”147 as Lefeb- vre suggests, and incidentally inhabits that role as an unintended but unavoidable consequence of exchange, perhaps there are other consequences of that exchange that do fall within the dominion of the worker’s authority. We might conceptualize the worker as role-player engaged in two summary tasks: to objectively complete the action demanded by the work-task, and to subjectively orient himself in relation to the role. By way of example, I offer a 1983 interview in which Henri Lefebvre dis- cusses his association with Situationist International with scholar Kristin Ross. In this interview, Lefebvre recounts an anecdote passed onto him by Mich`eleBerstein, a member of the Situationists, concerning her work life: H.L.: Mich`eleBernstein had come up with a very clever way to make money, or at least a bit of money. . . She said that she did horoscopes for horses, which were published in racing magazines. It was extremely funny. She determined the date of birth of the horses and did their horoscope in order to predict the outcome of the race. And I think there were racing magazines that published them and paid her. K.R.: So the Situationist slogan “Never work” didn’t apply to women? H.L.: Yes it did, because this wasn’t work. They didn’t work; they managed to live without working to quite a large extent-of course, they had to do something. To do horoscopes for race horses, I suppose, wasn’t really work.148 For the Situationists, to work was to participate in the society of the spectacle, and therefore to contribute to the self-manufacturing spectacular economy, a phenomenon we will continue to discuss in relation to speed in Chapter Four. By way of challeng- ing that economy, dismantling and confronting it, they advocating stepping outside 147Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life: Volume I 15. 148Kristin Ross and Henri Lefebvre, “Lefebvre on the Situationists: An Interview,” October 79 (1997): 69–83. CHAPTER 2. PERFORMATIVE ECONOMIES 80 the spectacle’s project of self-manufacture and perpetuation. Work, which placed the time and the labor of the individual in service of spectacular economy, was to be avoided. Hence Kristin Ross’s reminder of “the Situationist slogan, ‘Never work.’”149 However, Lefebvre asserts that Mich`eleBernstein’s foray into horoscopes for race horses “wasn’t really work.” It was, instead, “a clever way to make money.”150 We can connect Lefebvre’s distinction back to the dual role of the everyday worker. On one level, Berstein did indeed work: she adopted the role of horoscope writer by per- forming the tasks of writing and selling racehorse horoscopes. However, in terms of the secondary role of worker that relies on the intention of the individual, Bernstein did not participate in the self-perpetuating cycle of working to live. Instead, as Lefeb- vre claims, Bernstein was consciously aware of her manipulation of the product of the horoscope, and through the horoscope of larger economic systems. Further, Bernstein sought a “clever way to make money” that was as far from the capitalist ideal as pos- sible; she could have mass marketed her horoscopes, taken an entrepreneurial tack that maximized her financial compensation. Instead, she, like the other Situationists, “managed to live without working to quite a large extent” but, like every member of society, in order to live “of course, they had to do something.”151 That “something” involved taking on a work role in one sense, while manipulating the secondary social role prompted by intention. In place of the cyclically constructed role of “worker”, Bernstein substituted a different role we can broadly characterize as the revolutionary. This further extends the role of the worker as we have considered it thus far: there is always a secondary role that correlates to intention. Within that secondary role, which either supports or resists the pull of everyday cyclical economies of work, the 149Ross and Lefebvre 70. 150Ross and Lefebvre 70. 151Ross and Lefebvre 70. CHAPTER 2. PERFORMATIVE ECONOMIES 81 individual encounters the everyday internally as “space in which dialectical movement advances or comes to a halt.”152 This space is important, concerning the concept of everyday work as it appears in contemporary performance, because it asserts the potential for the individuals to make use of the everyday work role in order to produce expressions ideologically op- posed to the dominant everyday philosophy. Situationsts describe this process as detournement, which Debord defines as “the bringing together of two independent expressions, (which) supersedes the original elements and produces a synthetic orga- nization of greater efficacy.”153 This investigation offers a perspective on the conse- quences of detournement applied to the social role, in which role intended by everyday society (that is, the role as an expression of what is socially familiar) combines with the intentions of the individual worker. This creates a product that is unintended by society, that gains “greater efficacy”154 through its status as product, arising from the misuse of the performative economy of social roles. For example, Bernstein’s horoscope writing, as Lefebvre illustrates in the 1983 interview, becomes product as story; told to Lefebvre and then recycled through the decades it transforms into a performed anecdote that is “extremely funny.”155 In addition to the horoscope as product, Bernstein creates a more enduring product that measures value in terms of the laughter that accompanies her (and others’) tales of her irreverent employment habits; this new product is ideologically opposed to the everyday work economy. The records of racehorse horoscopes may disappear, but the delight of the anecdote, which communicates a lasting resistance toward the motionless cycle of working to live, is 152Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life: Volume II: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday 10. 153Guy Debord and G. Wolman, “Methods of Detournement,” Situationist International Anthology. Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets (1989): 9. 154Debord and Wolman 9. 155Ross and Lefebvre 70. CHAPTER 2. PERFORMATIVE ECONOMIES 82 infinitely replicable. This suggests that though roles of any kind are inherently performative, a claim Lefebvre continually returns to throughout Critique of Everyday Life, additional lay- ers of performativity—and efficacy—surface when we divide the role of the worker into two components: task-based and intention-based. The secondary aspect of the role of worker as intention-based allows us to conceive of ways in which an individ- ual’s status as worker enables her to construct a performative economy that makes use of the work task in service of a new product. This leads us back to the project of contemporary performance groups: to reorient their roles as employees in service of performance that employs the role of the worker in the philosophy of the everyday. Employment as Foundational Imagery Having discussed temporary employment specifically, as well as the performative and revolutionary aspects of the work role in general, we can identify and mark the di- alectics of employment that filter into the names of both Elevator Repair Service and Nature Theater of Oklahoma. “Elevator Repair Service” derives from the re- sults of a career aptitude test. Director John Collins describes the test he and a cousin took as young men, saying “the career predictions that came out-were pretty hilarious and included Elevator Repair Man. . . ”156 Transformed into the name of a performance group, instead of indicating what the group does for a living (elevator repair), the name stands in for what for they won’t do. “Elevator Repair Service” is a joke passed down from Collins’ personal history, and as such enjoys repetition similar to Bernstein’s horoscope/work anecdote. Through repetition, every time members of 156Bailes, “This America: A Conversation with John Collins about Elevator Repair Service”. CHAPTER 2. PERFORMATIVE ECONOMIES 83 Elevator Repair Service tell the story of how they got their name, they renew Collins’ initial refusal to participate in the economy symbolized by the career aptitude test. The “pretty hilarious”157 joke resists the everyday system that seeks to bestow social work roles, without taking either passion or preference into account. For Elevator Repair Service, the concept of “employment” is irrevocably tied to that system. In the case of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, “employment” is a seemingly beau- tiful promise the group borrows from Franz Kafka’s novel, Amerika. In Amerika, protangonist Karl Rossman encounters a poster advertising employment in the Great Nature Theater of Oklahoma. New York’s Nature Theater then quotes this poster on their website: . . . personnel is being hired for the Theatre in Oklahoma! The Great Theatre of Oklahoma is calling you!158 It’s calling you today only! If you miss this opportunity, there will never be another! Anyone thinking of his future, your place is with us! All welcome! Anyone who wants to be an artist, step forward! We are the theatre that has a place for everyone, everyone in his place!159 For Rossman, as for New York Nature Theater founders Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper, the poster’s charm is in its claim that it will give everyone, even Rossman who is a recent immigrant with no employment prospects, a job.160 However, employment within the Nature Theater is a utopian promise Kafka’s novel never realizes. The novel ends in a flurry of bureaucratic headaches: Rossman has difficulty navigating his way into the hiring center, receives contradictory information from hiring personnel, fills 157Bailes, “This America: A Conversation with John Collins about Elevator Repair Service”. 158Michael Hofmann translates Kafka’s theater as “The Great Theatre in Oklahoma.” Other trans- lations call it “The Natural Theater of Oklahoma,” or—in keeping with the name adopted by New York’s contemporary performance group, “The Great Nature Theater of Oklahoma.” 159Franz Kafka, Amerika, trans. Michael Hofman (1996; New York: New Directions Publishing, 2004) 202. 160See Young Jean Lee’s article “Nature Theater of Oklahoma” for Copper’s discussion of Kafka’s novel as an inspiration for the name the New York performance group. CHAPTER 2. PERFORMATIVE ECONOMIES 84 out endless forms and partakes in a series of seemingly meaningless interviews, and finally finds himself on a train bound for the still-unseen Great Nature Theater. Kafka seems to suggest that there is a complex relationship between the everyday and the utopian conceptions of employment: one cannot exist without the other. To gain entry into the utopia of the Nature Theater, job-seekers must first encounter its antithesis in the erratic, inefficient, and inevitable red-tape of the everyday. This is the paradox of finding work: in its ideal form, a job is a beautiful thing. However, the bureaucracy of employment and the materiality of navigating a large company is another, and far less idealized, matter. We might also imagine this relationship as one that takes place within the journey performance groups enact from process to performance. Process, which we have described as fraught with conflict as well as mundane details and obstacles, leads into a compressed (and controlled) performance. By this analogy, process is the everyday red-tape, and performance is the result in ideal (or at least consciously composed) form. As with Kafka’s dichotomy of everyday/utopia, one cannot exist without the other. Moving from employment as a concept that informs their names, both Elevator Repair Service and Nature Theater of Oklahoma produce performance that interro- gates the nature of both idealized and everyday “employment” within the office job of the temporary worker. Elevator Repair Service’s Highway to Tomorrow (1999) stages an interpretation of The Bacchae interspersed with temp workers and office materials. They use, as New York Magazine describes, “no more props than you might find in your cubicle.”161 ERS’s Gatz (2006) also takes place in a white-collar atmosphere; performer Scott Shepherd reads The Great Gatsby aloud, word for word, 161“New York Magazine 20 November 2000.” (Accessed on March 17th, 2011). When distinguishing office employment as a category of work, I consider it in accordance with the performances of Nature Theater and Elevator Repair Service, as work organized in accordance with at least one unspoken goal (from the perspective of the employee): to achieve the appearance of productivity. When Elevator Repair Service and Nature Theater use everyday, and especially temporary, employment as source material, they develop creative responses to the unique economy of the office job: the primary goal of the employee is to keep one’s job, and in order to keep one’s job, one must seem busy. This posits employment as a part of an essentially performative exchange, in addition to the performative aspects that accompany any role within social life. The “role” of the employee is self-consciously constructed in relation to a specific, authoritative audience (employer). The task of the employee is to convince her audience that she is working, which may or may not correlate with actual work, and redefines employment as “work” in accordance with perception rather than product. Employment as an Act of Adaptation In order to create the perception of productivity, the temporary employee must con- tinuously adapt to new conditions and new audiences as she moves from job to job. This ability, to adapt one’s performance to the given circumstances, is perhaps the CHAPTER 2. PERFORMATIVE ECONOMIES 86 most necessary skill of the temporary worker. It is also the skill that ultimately renders her replaceable. Adaptation and adjustment are also indispensable qualities for contemporary collective creation groups, but they orient these skills toward their ability to endure over time. The state of the temporary worker is to be impermanent; the task of the performance group is to achieve sustainability. Nature Theater of Oklahoma seeks sustainability through their adaptation to everyday limitations, to the obstacles imposed by their financial instability. For ex- ample, the performance economy of Poetics developed in response to the restricted budget for the show. Co-director Pavol Liska describes his attitude towards obstacles, and his philosophy that obstacles provide transformative properties that feed into per- formance, saying “I wanted to figure out how to deal with everything as material and not obstacles-to use everything as creative material.”162 Liska’s philosophy helps to construct a performance economy that appropriates and adapts practical limitations into the fabric of performance. Most rehearsals for Poetics, for example, took place in a New York apartment, as the company could not afford a formal rehearsal space. The highly physical nature of the show did not lend itself to a quiet rehearsal atmosphere, and it wasn’t long before a downstairs neighbor complained of the noise. Unable to move their rehearsals to another location, the group adapted by staging a segment of Poetics as a dance performed in rolling office chairs. The chairs, simultaneously a reference to the day jobs of the performers, appeased the cranky neighbor. Likewise, Kelly Copper describes the inclusion of particular props and costume pieces as a re- sult of budgetary constraints. The choreography of Poetics makes use of a variety of consumables, including pizza, cigarettes, and coffee. Eventually seamlessly integrated into the urban-inspired gestural choreography of the piece, Nature Theater initially 162Benson 44. CHAPTER 2. PERFORMATIVE ECONOMIES 87 made use of these objects in order to meet the practical desires of the performers: rehearsal overlapped with dinner, as well as with coffee and cigarette breaks.163 The group utilizes the qualities of the temporary employee, flexibility and adaptation, in service of an economy of performance that they can sustain on a shoestring. Their approach reorients these qualities toward performance, and layers their social roles as office workers with their roles as performance-makers. As performance-makers, they recoup authority over the use-value of the everyday, “employing” the objects and experiences that surround them. Like Nick from Gatz, Nature Theater makes use of what Lefebvre calls the “sad necessities”164 of the everyday (mass-produced novels, rolling chairs, fast food) in order to resist the motionlessness that these ob- jects symbolize as part of the everyday cycle of working to live. Using the tools of the employment economy, Nature Theater proposes an economy of progression: instead of working to live to work, they work to create—allowing the first model to inform and even enable the second. The product of performance is a result of both the given conditions of temporary employment, and the methodologies of nonhierarchical creation that makes use of the everyday role of the temporary worker. By combining displays of everyday philosophy with images of manipulation and resistance, contemporary groups seek aesthetics that display, in terms of their roles as both performance-makers and office workers, authenticity. Nature Theater does not obscure the multiplicity of social roles among group members, preferring to render them—with dialectical tension intact—for an audience. For example, when Nature Theater publishes their performance texts, they indicate dialogue through the names of performers, not characters. This suggests that the role of the performer overlaps and integrates with the social roles performed as “character” throughout performance; 163Kelly Copper. Phone interview with author, April 24th, 2008. 164Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life: Volume I 15. CHAPTER 2. PERFORMATIVE ECONOMIES 88 we do not know where the performer leaves off and character begins. Nature Theater directs our attention to the performative qualities of both. We can also observe traces of authenticity as aesthetic in the group’s refusal to theatricalize the edges of their performances; to describe this another way, Nature Theater does not produce performance in soft focus. Instead, they make the details of their experience as performance-makers clear. There are few, if any, light changes throughout their performances. The lights they do use have no warm gels to fill in or accentuate the planes of the performers’ faces. Instead, the lighting recalls the overhead fluorescents of cubicle life, it is not intended to flatter but to display. Staged transitions are similarly anti-theatrical. In Romeo and Juliet, performers Anne Gridley and Robert Johanson occupy the stage one at a time, by turns soliloquizing to the audience. As Gridley and Johanson exchange places, there is no music or other distraction to entertain the audience throughout their transitions. Instead, we listen to the clomping shoes of the performers; as one exists down the stairs on stage right, the other unhurriedly climbs the stairs from stage left. These moments all coalesce into Nature Theater’s aesthetic gestures toward authenticity. While we, as audience, have no objective measure by which to differentiate the real from the natural, the authentic from the inauthentic in performance, we can recognize means by which performances direct attention to one or the other. Attention, therefore, is the currency of the new performative economy. Recouping Productivity for the Employee In Gatz, Elevator Repair Service focuses their process of collective creation toward a performance that exposes the instabilities inherent in the perception-based economy CHAPTER 2. PERFORMATIVE ECONOMIES 89 of everyday employment. In the first moments of the production, the main character, Nick, notices a copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby lying on an unoccupied desk. He picks it up and begins to read the novel aloud as the movement of other office workers ebbs and flows around him. Initially, Nick’s manner of reading is circumspect; he uses his posture to try to hide the book from his fellow office workers, keeps his voice low, and pauses to type a letter or walk to the copy machine when other employees are especially close by. From the perspective of the audience, Nick’s attitude casts him in the role of a petty, low-stakes criminal. But what is the crime? It is clear that Nick views his reading of the book as a transgression, yet it is equally clear that he has virtually no other demands on his time. The nature of his transgression, therefore, relates to his use of time in the eyes of others. His co-workers do not seem to be any more productive than Nick: they frequently get up from their desks to get cups of coffee, chat with one another briefly, move papers from one end of the room to the other for no discernable purpose, stretch, type furiously for a minute or two before staring off into space, etc. Nick’s peers, however, have no hesitant body language, no need to hide their actions from one another. They are evidently confident that they enact their office-worker roles adequately, as expected and required. Like Nick, they perform their roles as office workers by faking productive action. Unlike Nick, the other employees do not transgress in the eyes of their audience/employer, because their faking is so vigorous as to make use of all their available energy. They thereby act according to the predominant philosophy of everyday work, by “faking” their productivity in such a way as to leave no room for anything else. Nick transgresses, not because he does not produce, but because he does: he produces performance that redefines the workplace as an environment that allows him to access and explore his imagination; we see this throughout his act of reading, CHAPTER 2. PERFORMATIVE ECONOMIES 90 and the subsequent playful unity between his imagination and his office world. The resulting performance of Gatz, staged as an act of articulating and imagining the action of the novel, coopts the inherent performativity of the role of the office worker into a new performative economy. This new economy exchanges the performativity of the everyday for the performance of imagination, thereby enacting a progression and productivity that transcends the motionless cycle of everyday work. By staging a show that suggests that imagination can transcend the 9 to 5 employment econ- omy based on perceived productivity, Elevator Repair Service identifies the insidious undercurrent of exchange that accompanies the everyday role of the employee: if the employee must keep busy, she negates her potential to imagine and therefore to con- struct other economies. That is, her role requires constant, unproductive action that alienates her from her ability to control her intention, and therefore her secondary— and potentially revolutionary—role as employee. When Nick surreptitiously reads from The Great Gatsby, he resists this imposed stasis, thereby neutralizing his em- ployer’s sense of ownership over the employee’s inner life. It is no accident that Gatz takes more than six hours to perform; in less time than it takes to complete an eight hour workday, ERS transforms the employment experience into creative terrain that restores revolutionary potential to the office environment by restoring imagination to the individual. Through different means than Oscar Wilde might have imagined, Nick resurrects an economy in which imagination is neither luxury nor necessity—but need. Nick’s act of imagination displays an economy of need that supplants the realm of necessity shaped by the incessant, and unproductive, movement of his coworkers. Lefebvre writes that the exercise of human need can oppose the stagnant everyday realm of necessity, for “every human need, conceived as the relation between a human CHAPTER 2. PERFORMATIVE ECONOMIES 91 being and ‘the world’, can become a power, in other words a freedom, a source of joy or happiness.”165 Nick stumbles upon a copy of Fitzgerald’s novel, the instigating action that gives rise to the rest of the performance, within the realm of necessity symbolized by the office setting. The pages of the book, bound artifacts that provide written traces of Fitzgerald’s own imagination, contrast with the single pages Nick’s co-workers transfer from one counter to another: this underscores the office worker’s acts of paper-pushing as manifestations of disposability. Whereas the novel has some enduring meaning, and functions in Gatz as the “source of joy or happiness”,166 the office paper offers no such potential. It is, instead, nothing more than an object that employees move simply in order to have something to move; by moving papers with- out no goal beyond the mechanics of the task, the employees cycle back to another day at the job that consists of. . . moving papers. Because ERS poses this work task as composed entirely of self referential action, they implicitly suggest that it is an act perpetuated by the realm of necessity, rather than need. If need is, as Lefebvre re- marks, “the relation between a human being and ‘the world’,”167 then paper-pushing, with no established relation beyond its perpetuation, neither produces nor responds to human need. Further, ERS interrogates everyday economies using the temporal structure of per- formance. Transplanting the office workday into a theatrical framework, the group retains the performative roles of the office workplace: worker (actor) and employer (audience), though these roles—within a theatrical framework—coalesce toward dif- ferent goals and include an overtly mutual expectation of performativity. The group 165Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life: Volume I 173. 166Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life: Volume I 173. 167Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life: Volume I 173. CHAPTER 2. PERFORMATIVE ECONOMIES 92 then challenges the limitations (or established boundaries) of the performance-as- product by presenting Gatz according to temporal constraints, six plus performing hours, that are closer to the time restrictions of a day at the office than to a typical 2-3 hour evening at the theater. By using everyday employment as creative material, they devise performance that asks for an exchange (between producer and consumer) that departs from the standard economy, from the standard role of the audience. Whereas an employer asks for continuous movement, for busy-ness that creates the perception of constant task-based engagement, Elevator Repair Service asks the au- dience for patience and partnership as they pit imagination against the dominant economic cycles of office employment. At the end of the performance, unlike the office worker’s experience at the end of the workday, ERS involves the audience in an experiential product; they “enfold” the audience into the durational experience of work-role resisted. As we watch Nick, a single narrator and single employee, gradually break down the dynamics of his office environment, we become aware of the instability of the everyday performative economy. When Nick, a single office employee, inserts his imagination as a stopgap into the cyclical mentality of “work to live, live to work,” the entire system begins to devolve. From watching one employee hide his creatively productive transgression from co-workers, the action develops as we see co-workers co-opted into new performative roles. Gradually, they begin to enact the actions Nick reads from the novel, and their roles as employees eventually fall away almost completely as they increasingly move in service to the performance of the story. Gatz stages employment as a concept that contains, in the materiality of a novel encountered by chance, and in the voice of Nick as dissembling employee, the seeds of its own destruction. To tip dominant performative economies into expressions of resistance, Elevator Repair CHAPTER 2. PERFORMATIVE ECONOMIES 93 Service seems to suggest, one can begin even as an isolated employee working on the small-scale, low-stakes level of the temporary office job: in fact, that isolation might even provide the necessary conditions. Performing Temporary Employment Whereas Gatz stages an office environment that displays ways in which employees can exert control over their performative roles as workers, Nature Theater’s No Dice self-consciously fuses the role of temporary employee together with the role of the artist throughout the performance. In Gatz, ERS maintains the fourth wall and actors perform naturalistically, at least until the function of the office space begins to break down. In No Dice, performers inhabit both roles at once: they speak in everyday office lingo, but their gestures, facial expressions, and costumes are the stuff of melodrama. For example, Zachary Oberzan delivers the mundane lines of an office temp, but the audience encounters his lines as speech emanating from a body made-up as an exaggerated composite of “theatrical performer”: Oberzan wears a cowboy hat, an obviously fake moustache, no shirt, and scrunches his facial features into absurdly dramatic expressions. His clownish appearance clashes with his earnest descriptions of his work tasks. The combination of office worker and archetypal performer are so ludicrous that they begin to make sense: by offering us a “performing” temporary office worker who labors under the extreme demands of performance, Nature Theater draws our attention to the performative nature of the role of the temporary employee. Perhaps the accoutrements of performance are not so evident in everyday life, but by combining the overtly theatrical with the mundane, Nature Theater poses the question: does the role of temporary employee performed within the philosophy of CHAPTER 2. PERFORMATIVE ECONOMIES 94 the everyday escape ridiculousness simply because it is familiar? One of the chief conditions of the temporary office worker, Nature Theater sug- gests, is boredom. As one method of alleviating that boredom, performers Zachary Oberzan and Anne Gridley excitedly list the material benefits of office rifling: free alligator clips, stickie pads, cans of Dr. Pepper, and paper clips. Thieving these small treasures, the two acknowledge, is one of the few perks of working in a low-paying office: Anne: Trying to get your money’s worth. That’s how you—that’s how you really make up—make up for the, uh—deficiency in pay. . . Zack: Yeah. . . the little that they’re paying me. . . (long pause)168 But this benefit, the two quickly agree, is limited; it is a gesture of resistance that ultimately leads nowhere. How many alligator clips and stickie pads does one person really need? As a gesture, stealing office supplies is less about gaining access to free commodities, and more about partaking in an impotent act of defiance. Zack and Anne’s stuttering performance language gives the audience room to reflect: even if Zack were to take home a box of Dr. Pepper (a suggestion of Anne’s he summarily rejects because he doesn’t want to get caught) would it really make up for the defi- ciency in pay? A box of sodas costs around five dollars. Stealing those five dollars, represented by the box of sodas, is evidently not the point. Rather, Zack and Anne use small acts of theft as ways to express their job dissatisfaction; they must play out their dissatisfaction through means they can conceal. For, as the temporary worker occupies a perpetually precious work-role, she is so vulnerable as to be—in relation to her economic relationship with the employer—essentially voiceless. As there are finite objects in the office, even strategically planning small-time 168The Nature Theater of Oklahoma, No Dice (New York: 53rd State Press, 2007) 21. CHAPTER 2. PERFORMATIVE ECONOMIES 95 theft becomes boring. It is not possible to maintain the brief rush of adrenaline that accompanies breaking the rules. Accordingly, Zack and Anne soon begin to repeat themselves, naming and renaming objects, repetitively debating the benefits of regular versus diet Dr. Pepper, before sadly returning to their mimed keyboard-tapping. It is, Zack ventures, an existence without sparkle: Zack: Yeah, work is good ‘cause, you know I’m—I’m—I’m really—Like— I get bored here. Anne: Yeah, that’s when you need—that’s when you need me to—It’s like my job is now to. . . (pause) perk people up. . . Zack: Right. Anne: While they’re suffering. Zack: Right. To help them out. Anne: Yeah. Yeah so that—to make—to make your work. . . productive. Zack: Right, right. . . Anne: You know. . . to make your life into art. Zack: Yeah, you’re taking- you’re taking the boring part of my life and making it into art.169 Within Nature Theater’s irreverent self consciousness of their stance as performance- makers in relation to the source material of everyday work, they pose serious claims. Anne and Zack equate boredom with suffering, but then suggest that boredom/suffering make productivity possible. We can infer this by examining Anne’s economy trajec- tory: she proposes that boredom gives rise to suffering gives rise to strategies for alleviating that suffering, which gives rise to productivity in the form of making art. This trajectory also implies that Zack’s work, as he taps furiously away coding TAR’s (Time Adjustment Request Forms)170 is unproductive. But, as we learn throughout Anne and Zack’s scene together, Zack has entered 153 forms into the system in a 169The Nature Theater of Oklahoma 21. 170The Nature Theater of Oklahoma 18. CHAPTER 2. PERFORMATIVE ECONOMIES 96 single day, and he still has hours ahead of him. If he is accomplishing so much, in what way is he unproductive? There seem to be two mingling threads of productivity/unproductivity, one of which relates to the role of the employee as task, and one that relates to intention. Zack enacts the task-demands of his job, meeting the quota of completed paperwork. However, as Kafka suggests within the bureaucratic imagery within Amerika, the task of the bureaucrat is almost totally alienated from productivity as a consequence of work. Zack finishes the stack of papers in front of him, but there is an endless supply that he will never finish: he participates in an ongoing project of paper that produces nothing concrete except more paper. The results of his efforts, which align an employee’s actual work time with the time they have entered into the system (in Zack’s office world, Time Adjustment Forms account for mistakes, gaps between time worked and work time recorded), support bureaucratic systems that impede productivity. Like the office workers in Gatz, Zack moves papers from one stack to another—coding them into an additional computer system in the interim—but all this “produces” is the cycle of more work. This cycle, Nature Theater suggests, results in a precise form of boredom, in which the employee becomes bored within the act of completing the work task. This boredom, then, is not the result of leisure but the result of work. Scholar Leslie Paul Thiele invokes Heidegger’s theories on boredom in the postmodern era, as a consequence of becoming enmeshed in technologies that accustom us to novelty and therefore to constant unconscious activity. Thiele writes, “Busy-ness is the chief means by which everyday life evades ontological questioning. The everyday achieves its escape from anxious though in heightened worldly activity. . . Indeed, a continuous CHAPTER 2. PERFORMATIVE ECONOMIES 97 flurry of activity often becomes boredom’s chief defense against thoughtful anxiety.”171 We meet this “continuous flurry of activity” in the office spaces staged by Elevator Repair Service and Nature Theater of Oklahoma, as instances where the task—even if (and especially if) it consists of constant movement—transforms into a mode of “not doing” is both boring and unproductive. The “not doing” refers not only to the alienation of the office worker from product, but also in the alienation of worker from thoughtfulness and contemplation, from what Thiele via Heidegger calls “ontological questioning.”172 Ontological questioning, which restores productivity to the role of the temporary employee, plays out in the work of Elevator Repair Service and Nature Theater through these groups’ explorations of aesthetics that excise the busy-ness of boredom. When these groups, as Zack says in No Dice, engage in processes of “taking the boring part of my life and making it into art”,173 they construct performance economies that use aesthetic properties as tools for opposing the busy boredom of everyday employment roles. An Aesthetics of Lessness Performance groups resist the busy-ness that prevents ontological questioning by uti- lizing everyday material, and then altering the performative relationship between artist/everyday and employee/everyday. This results in performance that visually ar- ticulates a property I call “lessness,” which combines traces of minimalist aesthetics with principles of poor theater. When Elevator Repair Service and Nature Theater 171Leslie Paul Thiele, “Postmodernity and the Routinization of Novelty: Heidegger on Boredom and Technology,” Polity 29.4 (1997): 489–517. 172Thiele. 173The Nature Theater of Oklahoma 21. CHAPTER 2. PERFORMATIVE ECONOMIES 98 of Oklahoma focus on employment imagery, they express the confinement of the em- ployee role: Nick’s co-workers in Gatz move about the office space with a frenzied busy-ness, yet the performance suggests that the more they move kinetically, the more they remain symbolically fixed within everyday economic cycles. Likewise, Na- ture Theater presents the temporary office employee as a figure almost crushed by the inauthentic, and highly repetitive, demands of everyday role-playing. These are staged interpretations of the employment of the everyday, as a stultifying economy that substitutes empty action for authentic productivity. Contemporary groups resist this economy by embracing poor theater aesthetics that exploit the potential for performance to make space for both individual agency and formal, task-based structure. However, as I indicated in Chapter One, poor theater aesthetics do not create a consistent visual vocabulary that connects contem- porary performance groups. When one watches a Goat Island, Nature Theater, or Elevator Repair Service performance, three different versions of poor theater aesthet- ics take shape. For Goat Island, it is a “poor theater” of space: like Nature Theater, Goat Island includes few (if any) lighting cues, no set to speak of, and a handful of cheap objects transplanted from everyday life (old boomboxes, 2x4’s, shoes, a saw, a watering can, etc). Nature Theater’s approach is, as we have discussed, a result of fiscal constraints transformed into deliberate aesthetic properties: they make perfor- mance on a shoestring budget and then appropriate the shoestring. In one segment of Poetics: A Ballet Brˆut, Nature Theater performers exuberantly toss their t-shirts into the crowd only to ask for them back due to budgetary constraints. For Elevator Repair Service, poor theater principles are not visual so much as they are ideological. The group marshals a small army of technical paraphernalia throughout their national CHAPTER 2. PERFORMATIVE ECONOMIES 99 and international tours. However, they increasingly devise performance as choreog- raphy inspired by pre-existing literary works, which allows them to investigate the primacy of the performer in making text theatrical—in bringing words to life. Their sentiment is similar to Jerzy Grotowski’s in Towards a Poor Theatre, “This does not mean that we look down upon literature, but that we do not find in it the creative part of the theatre, even though great literary works can, no doubt, have a stimulating effect on this genesis.”174 Though their poor theater aesthetics express themselves dif- ferently, Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and Nature Theater all find strategies to foreground the performer, to make the actor the central—and essential—aspect of the theatrical event. The performer/spectator relationship, for Grotowski, forms the basis for his poor theater. He considers all other elements: scenic, lighting, cos- tume, etc., to be nonessential. Toward the end of ridding theatrical performance of its nonessential elements, he advocates for, “The acceptance of poverty in theatre, stripped of all that is not essential to it, revealed to us not only the backbone of the medium, but also the deep riches which lie in the very nature of art-form.”175 The nature of the art-form, according to Grotowski, is rooted in the free and authentic performer, and takes hold in the interactions between the authentic performer and the equally authentic spectator. There are, however, important distinctions between “poor theater” aesthetics as Grotowski describes them, and as they play out in the work of contemporary groups. Perhaps one of the most important involves the direction from which contemporary groups, in comparison to Grotowski, arrive at their particular aesthetics. Whereas Grotowski describes a via negativa process that demands stripping away aspects of traditional theatrical production, Kelly Copper of Nature Theater discusses Nature 174Jerzy. Grotowski, “Towards a Poor Theatre,” Simon & Shuster (1968): 23. 175Grotowski 21. CHAPTER 2. PERFORMATIVE ECONOMIES 100 Theater’s process of arriving at an aesthetic from a different direction. She says that she and Liska, “look for the least thing, the tipping point where it (the starting point of the theatrical investigation) turns into theater.”176 Copper and Liska begin from starting points that are essentially non-theatrical, and gradually add elements until they cross a boundary into the theatrical; through this process they produce aesthetics informed by minimalism. In the early stages of developing Poetics, Copper and Liska began with a ques- tion: can we create theater, can we tell a story, through changing spatial relationships onstage and nothing else?177 They structured the show piece by piece, using chance operations to determine entrances and exits, lengths of segments, three-dimensional choreographic placement of performers, the order of danced gestures, etc. This process was in service of the group’s philosophy of via positiva: they stopped adding choreo- graphic structure when, in Copper and Liska’s estimation, the formalistic experiment “turn(ed) into theater.”178 While chance operations open up another significant con- nection between contemporary work and the everyday, here I would like to focus on the consequences of using chance in service of looking for “the least thing” that constitutes performance. Processually speaking, this way of working is, even when undertaken slowly, highly efficient. In contrast to bureaucracy, a spectacle of empty and inefficient activity, Copper and Liska institute a system of performance-making that eliminates waste. Their via positiva process ensures that they will make max- imal use of each formally-structured element of performance. That is, there is no busy-ness, in the form of excess or unproductive motion, to distract them from their contemplation of the product they seek to create. 176Lee. 177Kelly Copper. Phone interview with author, April 24th, 2008. 178Kelly Copper. Phone interview with author, April 24th, 2008. CHAPTER 2. PERFORMATIVE ECONOMIES 101 Of course, this minimalist boundary between theatrical and nontheatrical is a subjective one, guided by the preferences and expectations of each director, and each group. Goat Island approach this process from an aesthetic standpoint inspired by Yvonne Rainer’s “No Manifesto” of 1965. Rainer wrote: NO to spectacle no to virtuosity no to transformations and magic and make believe no to the glamour and transcendency of the star image no to the heroic no to the anti-heroic no to trash imagery no to involvement of performer or spectator no to style no to camp no to seduction of the spectator by the wiles of the performer no to eccentricity no to moving or being moved.179 In Rainer’s manifesto, some of the differences between her choreography, reductively minimalist, and Grotowski’s poor theater come into focus. Rainer describes key aspects of her minimalist aesthetic, which involves more than stripping away non- essential production parts. It requires active refusal, beginning from a place where we must redefine all aspects of performance including the craft of the performer. It also, Rainer claims, demands changing the actor/spectator relationship, getting rid of “in- volvement of performer or spectator” and therefore also “moving or being moved.”180 Minimalism is, then, an aesthetic property that is very much concerned with the expressivity of the performer: rather than privileging the performer as the creator and communicator of authentic experience and emotions, the minimalist performer is formalistic and impersonal. However, we might also imagine minimalist aesthetics as resistant to the alientation effect of “busy-ness” in everyday employment. Rainer’s 179Yvonne Rainer, “Some Retrospective Notes on a Dance for 10 People and 12 Mattresses Called ‘Parts of Some Sextets,’ Performed at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, and Judson Memorial Church, New York, in March, 1965,” The Tulane Drama Review 10.2 (1965): 168–178. 180Rainer, “Some Retrospective Notes on a Dance for 10 People and 12 Mattresses Called ‘Parts of Some Sextets,’ Performed at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, and Judson Memo- rial Church, New York, in March, 1965”. CHAPTER 2. PERFORMATIVE ECONOMIES 102 “No Manifesto” opposes elements of everyday performativity by dismantling exist- ing hierarchies between performer and spectator, and by creating formally structured performance that offers an opportunity for the audience to encounter performance- as-product with their ontological anxiety intact. I include this brief discussion of minimalism and poor theater in order to support my claim that—by combining aesthetic elements of both—Elevator Repair Service and Nature Theater approach an aesthetic that helps to develop their new economies of performance. Toward an understanding of “lessness” as a balance between individ- ual agency and objective structure, I would like to introduce Samuel Beckett’s prose work, Lessness by way of example. Beckett composed Lessness through a combination of Dadaist structuring strategies and creative writing. In their article, “Chance and Choice in Beckett’s Lessness,” Enoch Brater and Susan Brienza describe how Beckett wrote the 120-line Lessness. “He wrote each of the 60 sentences on a separate piece of paper, mixed them all in a container, and then drew them out in random order twice: the resulting sequence became the order of the 120 sentences.”181 However, Brater and Brienza remind us that Beckett’s deterministic technique applies only to structure, and not to content. “Though the ultimate arrangement of sentences is left to chance, it is not chance, but Beckett, who has chosen the constituent parts. Lessness is, then, an ingenious interaction of choice and chance, the most important single act being the composition of the 60 elements.”182 Here, they distinguish between “arrangement” and “composition”: arrangement refers to the formalistic structure of Beckett’s prose piece. Composition is the creative act of writing, of forming each of the 60 sentences to be so structured, that preceded the arrangement. Lessness, as Beckett titles his 181Susan Brienza and Enoch Brater, “Chance and Choice in Beckett’s Lessness,” ELH 43.2 (1976): 244–258. 182Brienza and Brater. CHAPTER 2. PERFORMATIVE ECONOMIES 103 work, encapsulates both deterministic techniques that remove human agency and (even unconscious) expression, while retaining a space for the creativity of the indi- vidual. This is very like the ethos of Goat Island, in which Stephen Bottoms can locate “no attempt to remove human agency from the creative process, acknowledg- ing that the connections which exist between any two points are often very personal, intuitive ones. . . ”183 Though Goat Island, along with Nature Theater of Oklahoma, produce work through formalistic strategies that organize content (source material) supplied by the responses of performers. They enable structure to emerge as part of an aesthetic of lessness, combining concerns of volume/speed/sequence with material that develops according to “personal, intuitive” connections.184 Replacing Busy-ness Yet, how does this aesthetic of lessness, conceptualized as a combination of determin- ism and agency, respond to employment-as-role within the everyday? The temporary employee must accommodate to a work role that is universal rather than unique, she must participate in a “performance” of role that is so flexible and adaptive that it renders her disposable—easily replaced by the employee on the staffing agency’s roster. Yet, enacting the work-task of that role, which might involve the busy-action of (figuratively or literally) shifting papers from one side of the office to the other, or repetitively filling out forms that simply motivate self-perpetuating systems of bureaucracy; the employee has the potential to become productive by either manip- ulating her intention toward to the work-role she inhabits, or by participating in acts 183Bottoms and Goulish 135. 184Bottoms and Goulish 135. CHAPTER 2. PERFORMATIVE ECONOMIES 104 of detournement that reframe her experiences into artistic expression. Both method- ologies, which involve substituting the performativity of a new role (revolutionary, artist, or both) reverse the economic cycle of “working to live” that results in a poli- tics of universal exchange: in summary, acts of productivity as resistance transform the employee’s “use” from universal to unique. Contemporary groups, through methodologies that oppose everyday economies that treat temporary employees as commodities, create performance that—using source material drawn from everyday experiences of employment—employ aesthet- ics of lessness in service of ontological contemplation. The substance of that con- templation is a consequence of the audience member, and the performance-maker, as individuals with authority over their own intention. They have the potential to exert authority over their experience. Accordingly, contemporary groups exercise methodologies that liberate experience from the busy-ness “by which everyday life evades ontological questioning.”185 We can also conceptualize this as an aesthetic re- imagining of John Cage’s theories that identify “silence” as a concept that provides opportunities to encounter the dialectics of the everyday. As employees can utilize their own boredom as a productive opportunity, Cage’s musical compositions make use of everyday sound towards an attentiveness with the potential to free us from the cyclical nature of unexamined everyday experience. In his lectures and writings, he reminds us again and again that “There is no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound.”186 We call “silence” that which names the absence of intentionally-generated sound; silence is the experi- ence of soundlessness that accompanies a lack of attentiveness. In search of silence, Cage entered an anechoic chamber in 1951 “to discover that one hears two sounds of 185Thiele 503. 186John Cage, “45’ for a Speaker,” Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage (1973): 191. CHAPTER 2. PERFORMATIVE ECONOMIES 105 one’s own unintentional making (nerve’s systematic operation, blood’s circulation), the situation one is clearly in is not objective (sound-silence), but rather subjective (sounds only), those intended and those others (so-called silence) not intended.”187 The term “silence” Cage concluded, is misapplied in reference to those sounds that persist without our intention, yet which assert their existence when one stops and listens. We are beings that produce sound, though we may dampen our ability to recognize this productivity when we obscure it through claims of “silence.” Raoul Vaneigem, member of Situationist International, conceptually links silence with everyday economies in his article “Comments Against Urbanism” saying “Urban- ism and information are complementary in capitalist and ‘anticapitalist’ societies— they organize the silence.”188 Vaneigem’s remark is strikingly relevant to this discus- sion, if we imagine “silence” according to Cage’s theories, as a fictive phenomenon resulting only from the everyday philosophy that alienates us from the reality: there is no silence. Organizing the silence, in these terms, involves organizing the opacity of everyday life that Lefebvre identifies as the quality that causes the dialectical move- ment of the everyday to “come to a halt.”189 If urbanism and information organize the silence, then they take fictitious experience and mold it into structures masking that fictitiousness. In contrast, Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and Nature Theater are three examples of contemporary performance groups that seek, as this discussion has claimed in several sections, performative authenticity: unapologetically anti-theatrical dis- plays in service of honest expression. Goat Island associate CJ Mitchell remarks on the group’s relation to the audience throughout durational danced segments.190 As 187“Experimental Music: Doctrine,” Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage (1973): 13. 188Raoul Vaneigem, “Comments Against Urbanism,” October 79 (1997): 123–128. 189Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life: Volume II: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday 10. 190Goat Island differentiates between core members (regular makers and performers) and associate CHAPTER 2. PERFORMATIVE ECONOMIES 106 the performers move repetitively with little sound, “The audience begins to hear itself in the silence.”191 When (or if) the audience hears itself, each member of the audi- ence becomes aware of the environment in which they sit and view performance, their own presence within that environment. I suggest that this goes beyond an expression of meta-theatricality, the objective realization that we are together in the theater. Instead, I suggest that these moments remind us, as audience, of our uniqueness. By hearing ourselves as that which is not silence, we become aware of the auditory details that establish this audience, comprised of these specific individuals; in service of the particular composition that is awareness within a given moment, nothing is disposable or replaceable. On a symbolic level, if we hear ourselves in the silence, we dissolve the economically perpetuated fiction that there is silence—that is, we become aware of everyday gaps between perceived environment/condition and actual environment/condition. From this perspective, the contemporary performance work of our three case studies seeks to establish structures of performance that connect us to, rather than alienating us from, our roles in everyday work life and our capacity to control the intention and productivity offered by those roles. These groups restore our connection to “need” by inviting us to experience both imagination and awareness. When we speak of contemporary performative economies, we speak of methodolo- gies that bring two definitions of employment together: everyday economies make use of the (unproductive) employee, and new economies of performance measure produc- tion through collective practice that unfolds according to methods of involvement and connection, of collaboration. In resulting performance, “seeming busy” is as much members (who may assist on individual projects). Associate members tend to assist on the technical and organization ends of things; they do not participate as performers. 191Bottoms and Goulish 67. CHAPTER 2. PERFORMATIVE ECONOMIES 107 a part of an economy of alienation as is “seeming silent”; in both cases, as Eleva- tor Repair Service and Nature Theater strongly suggest, one can resist alienation by substituting authentic productivity. This potential productivity resides in the atten- tiveness of the individual. The everyday, even as it temptingly lures the employee into a cycle in which empty gesture masquerades as productive activity, and produc- tive activity masquerades as silence, is—as contemporary models of collective creation practice enact through methodologies and performance moments—full of imaginative, and therefore revolutionary and productive, potential. Chapter 3 Dance As Gesture It is nearly an hour into the performance. The four performers, who have been moving nearly continuously throughout the show, intensify their ec- static dance in front of a red curtain. They stand in a line parallel to the audience, who watches from tightly packed perches on steep risers. It is a backstage dance: the audience, along with the performers, occupies the stage on the wrong side of the curtains. From this intimate perspective, it is easy to observe the performers’ smallest motions and physical id- iosyncrasies. Anne Gridley’s long hair bounces around her body. Fletcher Liegerot has a handlebar moustache and tattoos. Robert Johanson makes regular eye contact with individual members of the audience. Zachary Oberzan is clean-shaven with gel in his hair that catches the light. These four string together physical actions that seem somehow familiar: smoking mimed cigarettes, slapping their chests, stretching their arms far out to the sides, throwing imaginary objects over their shoulders, covering their faces with their hands, giving themselves bunny ears with their fingers. Their dance is a gestural montage that emerges from four separate indi- viduals, linked through movement though each dances alone. All the while, their feet move ceaselessly in a pattern that is part jazz square, part jog. Simultaneously, the performers’ upper bodies cycle through task-based ges- tures that coalesce into sequences that by turns repeat, fragment, and form alternate iterations. They dance with abundant alertness and generosity, but without technique; the four bodies do not exactly mirror one another. The gestures, so similar yet so different when mapped onto different bod- ies, are their language. Communication with the audience comes about as a consequence of spatial relationships: their physical positioning onstage 108 CHAPTER 3. DANCE AS GESTURE 109 in relation to one another, and the permutations of their chosen gestures. Though their bodies are deeply engaged, the performers do not appear to be physically pained. Rather, they seem attentive to the sensations of their own frenetic movement. The mood is desperate, it is joyous. The pace of the dancing increases and the energy expands. The performers’ hands come up to their heads, and the bunny ears reappear. The audience smiles. In contemporary work, as in the above performance moment borrowed from a 2008 production of Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Poetics: A Ballet Brˆut, gestures place marginalized methods, bodies, and movements firmly, and with an attitude of accep- tance, in front of the eye of the audience. That is, gestures resist hierarchies as a result of who performs them, the manner in which they are performed, the means by which they are created, and the material they render visible. In the previous chap- ter, I discussed themes of the everyday that thread through employment imagery in the performance of two contemporary groups, underscoring these groups’ commit- ment to exploring the marginalized, easily overlooked and under-interrogated. In this chapter, I focus on the gestural forms, as evidenced in the performance of Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and Nature Theater of Oklahoma; that grow out of these contemporary performance-making strategies. Poetics: A Ballet Brˆut is a particularly rich example of how contemporary groups increasingly frame these forms as dance. In Poetics, dance becomes gestural—an argument I will elucidate with the help of Giorgio Agamben’s writings on gesture—by foregrounding modest movements including bunny ears, cab hailing, stretching, and the like, generated by ordinary bod- ies. These phenomena are, like collaborative practices that prompt them, so pervasive as to be nearly unseen and un-seeable. Yet pedestrian bodies and ordinary movement claimed as dance render these ordinary elements stubbornly, and unavoidably, visi- ble. This not only pushes the boundaries of “gesture” as a definitive component of dance performance, but re-imagines gesture in contemporary performance as a means CHAPTER 3. DANCE AS GESTURE 110 through which groups caninvite the audience to experience the ethics of awareness. Nature Theater director Pavol Liska calls this prompted awareness an opportunity to “propose to the audience a way of living.”192 Towards Differentiation If dance is gesture, this is, however, because it is nothing but the physical tolerance of bodily movements and the display of their mediating nature. Gesture is the display of mediation, the making visible of a means as such. – Giorgio Agamben193 While I will analyze the substance of the “way of living” that Liska describes, in Chapter Four, throughout this chapter I ask the question: what is gesture, that it can formulate such a proposal? In two essays, Kommerell, or On Gesture and Notes On Gesture, Giorgio Agamben describes gesture as both mysterious and material, a consequence of the “gestic sphere”194 of criticism concerned with a work’s gestus, or intention; and gesture as kinetic expression of its own “mediating nature”.195 Gesture can also be, as Liska indicates and Agamben illustrates, a politics. When Agamben writes on gesture, he does so situated within his larger political project: both politics and gesture are means without ends.196 While I will discuss political qualities of the “way of living”197 proposed by contemporary groups more concretely in the following chapter, here I would like to mark Agamben’s connection between the gestural and 192Benson 51. 193Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture,” Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience (1993; London: Verso, 2007) 155. 194Giorgio Agamben, “Kommerell, or On Gesture,” Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999) 77. 195Agamben, “Notes on Gesture” 155. 196Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics. 197Benson 51. CHAPTER 3. DANCE AS GESTURE 111 the political in order to set up “gesture” as a meaningful designator. By discussing the work of contemporary groups as gestural, as producing and displaying means without ends, we lay the groundwork for a broader critique of that work’s political import, and for the “ways of living”198 it proposes and models. Moving from the in- side out, charting the kinetic components of performance before analyzing the “gestic sphere” of whole works, I begin with movement as produced by the performing bod- ies throughout Nature Theater’s Poetics, and consider the gestural content of these ordinary motions: shifting weight, stretching, rolling, hand waving, etc. In Notes on Gesture, Agamben defines gesture in terms of structure and mo- tion that neither contains the end in itself, nor moves toward a particular endpoint. Through both negative examples, Agamben articulates what gesture is not: it does not contain an end. For a movement to contain an end in itself, as Agamben de- scribes it, is to be aesthetic.199 For it to be focused on a particular endpoint is to be directional.200 Having eliminated both aesthetic and directional qualities from his categorization, Agamben considers the validity of claiming dance as gesture. He concludes that dance is gestural only insofar as it is only the “physical tolerance of bodily movements and the display of their mediating nature.”201 There are, then, two distinct properties that fuse to inform Agamben’s definition: physical tolerance, and mediation. On a basic anatomical level, physical tolerance equates with endurance experienced by a motor body over time. The structure of the body or body part 198Benson 51. 199Here, Agamben makes a theoretical claim regarding the aesthetic: that which contains the end in itself. Though this and other aesthetic theories, including Nicolas Bourriaud’s theory of relational aesthetics, provide springboards into further investigation, I use the term “aesthetic” throughout this argument in its broadest sense, referring by turns to the organization of/appearance of production elements that together contribute to some cohesive sense of style (“aesthetic”) in performance. 200Agamben, “Notes on Gesture” 155. 201Agamben, “Notes on Gesture” 155. CHAPTER 3. DANCE AS GESTURE 112 endures (tolerates) motion, maintaining integrity while supporting the act of move- ment. The hand waves, but though the spatial orientation of the hand changes, the structure of the hand as “hand”, an apparatus that lends itself to movement and to the support of movement, does not. In dance, “the mediating nature” of gesture is similarly physical; the waving hand mediates, or transitions, between two static states: the orientation of the hand before the wave begins, and after the motion of the wave is completed. To “display” that mediating nature, as Agamben puts it, is to focus attention on the process or nature of transition, rather than on the starting or ending point. Nature Theater’s Ballet Brˆut enacts the mediating nature of gesture, focusing at- tention on the process of movement as such, through messy kinetic differentiation. In segments where Gridley, Johanson, Liegerot, and Oberzan perform the same choreog- raphy simultaneously, differences between their individual interpretation of the chore- ography becomes especially clear. As untrained dancers, the four lack the capacity to “aim” gestures as, for example, a ballerina might aim, and their bodies have not ac- cumulated familiarity with dance steps accomplished over years of rigorous, repetitive practice. Instead, their arms extend at different angles, their spacing is somewhat uneven, and their feet hit the floor according to slightly different rhythms. These are spontaneous expressions of each performer’s individuality, made possible—not in spite of, but because of—their lack of dance training. Unable to exert full physical control over their movement, the performers produce a gestural vocabulary modeled off pedestrian motion, and then executed with a pedestrian (lack of) technique. This results in a style of performance that opens up the title of the piece, Poetics: A Ballet Brˆut, as a meditation on what it means to dance in brˆutfashion, adopting (through movement) a brˆutattitude toward dance. Rather than interpreting this CHAPTER 3. DANCE AS GESTURE 113 attitude as a destructive one, I consider a secondary definition of brˆutas “foul, ragged, shapeless.”202 The differences in gestural production, the absence of sameness and simultaneity as similar movements map onto different performers, create a complex and unrepeatable layering of motion that has no pattern; it is both “ragged” and “shapeless.” Gridley, Johanson, Liegerot, and Oberzan produce an infinite array of spontaneous physical variations. These variations, each an unplanned micro-gesture, resist anonymity and foreground individuation, both anatomical and expressive. Interestingly, the “raggedness” of individual gestures takes place within a tightly formalistic performance structure. Nature Theater carefully organizes the choreogra- phy of Poetics (entrances and exists, the length of the piece, the length of individual segments, the position of performers onstage, the composition of gestural strands, etc.) according to aleatoric techniques. Within this carefully ordered structure, the identities of the four Nature Theater dancers as untrained, assert a form that must make room for (brˆut) formlessness. The contrast, between the precise choreography and the spontaneous variations resulting from the performers’ pedestrian experience with dance, stages gesture as a transition from precise forms toward shapelessness, or differentiation. Intentional gestural shapelessness, arising from simultaneous movements with vis- ibly different execution, materializes in the work of Elevator Repair Service and Goat Island as well. For each group, dance can be both isolating (each performer dances alone) and collective (performers make similar attempts to render movement). In The Lastmaker the five Goat Island performers stand in a line parallel to the audience banks, configured into tennis-court seating. Evenly spaced, and dressed identically in brown trousers and blue shirts, the performers fall to the ground, get up as quickly 202Rev. Walter W. Skeat, An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1882) 80. CHAPTER 3. DANCE AS GESTURE 114 as they can, run in place, attempt 180 degree rotating jumps, etc; the long dance, which comprises about one third of The Lastmaker’s total performance time, loops with punctuations of recorded “neighs” and clopping horse hooves. New York Times critic Claudia La Rocco describes the movement as, . . . a dry little dance, in which the five performers briskly and with ritual- istic precision execute pedestrian movement sequences to a regular beat. It is not cuddly. It is not exciting or emotionally fraught. The mind some- times wanders, brought back to the stage by the intermittent recordings of horses cantering and whinnying.203 The mind wanders, as La Rocco puts it, in part because of the predictability of both gesture and rhythm; the performers form an unbroken, lulling pattern throughout the dance. Yet, the “ritualistic precision” she identifies erodes as the dance progresses, exhaustively, over time. The distinctness of each performer becomes increasingly ap- parent; the movements themselves are broad strokes, with each performer physically interpreting their task according to the constraints of their particular body. As the performers run, their feet do not hit the ground in perfect rhythm. Each sets up the 180 degree jump differently, looking for rotational force either through their legs, knees, or arms; and the responsiveness of each body slows over time. This creates an inverse relationship between the physical energy of the performer and the level of gestural differentiation between performers: as time lengthens and physical en- ergy decreases, the visibility of difference increases. Whereas Nature Theater stages brˆut,shapeless gesture beginning in the opening moments of Poetics, Goat Island’s use of durational dance foregrounds the labor of the performers over time. This la- bor, which unfolds through meditatively extended motion and rhythm, displays what 203Claudia La Rocco, “Time to Say Goodbye, With Dry Wit and Camp,” The New York Times (November 9, 2008). CHAPTER 3. DANCE AS GESTURE 115 Agamben calls the “physical tolerance of bodily movements.”204 Aligning Agamben’s theory of gesture with Goat Island’s physicalized performance, gesture opens up as a differentiated display of transition that ultimately never escapes formal structure. Even as labor emerges as an increasingly individuated process, that individuation is part of the “mediating nature” of gesture as Goat Island stages it; it is part of the architecture of the group body as it exists in motion over time. Whereas the dance sequences in Poetics and The Lastmaker unfold with a kind of radiating awareness between performers of their shared task, dance in ERS’s The Sound and the Fury comparatively insulates individual bodies. Dance erupts several times throughout the course of the show, first from two performers, Ben Williams and Mike Iveson, and then expanding to include the entire twelve-person cast during the show’s finale. Unlike dancing in The Lastmaker, the ERS dances of The Sound and the Fury do not present the performers with durational obstacles in the moment of per- formance, nor do they echo Nature Theater’s movements from New York’s everyday urban landscape; they are brief, startling, and alien kinetic eruptions that some critics call “non sequitur,” frequently prompting allusions to The Wooster Group.205 Scholar Paul David Young describes the disjointedness of the first explosion of the dance in The Sound and the Fury, noting how—unlike the Wooster Group—ERS performers establish their dances as unique through performance demeanors that communicate irresistible compulsion: The boys dance in a line, facing the audience, wild energy propelling their angular movements. One of them even fakes a fall as if overcome by the ecstasy of the moment or the anticipation of hearing Faulkner’s text once more. The Wooster Group prefers to imitate the machine in motion; ERS’ dancers seem unable to restrain themselves from jumping around, as if at 204Agamben, “Notes on Gesture” 155. 205Garrett 47. CHAPTER 3. DANCE AS GESTURE 116 a late-night college party where the urge to dance is the moving principle and the idea of partnering of no concern.206 Like Goat Island’s dance sequence from The Lastmaker, and many of the dance seg- ments from Poetics, Williams and Iveson dance “in a line.” The line, always parallel to the audience, references the boundary of the proscenium, offering up the bodies as representations arranged in a sequence that references difference: the eye of the audience naturally moves across the performers one by one, reading their bodies from left to right. However, in ERS’s case the line of two does not invite recognitions of physical or kinetic uniqueness. Williams and Iveson are approximately of the same age, weight, height, and complexion. They perform their dance only briefly, explod- ing into frenetic activity and that recedes with similar abruptness. The “wild energy propelling their angular movements” does not offer movement as an opportunity for reflection, as does the dance from The Lastmaker, but does leave the impression that “the idea of partnering (is) of no concern.” In place of partnering with one another, the bodies of the individual transform into self-contained partners as Williams and Iveson contend with an “urge to dance” that seems eerily Dionysian. The choreogra- phy supports this urge, as Olga Muratova notes in her article on The Sound and the Fury, by dividing the body of each performer in three: The dancers’ bodies become a three-tiered ensemble: the legs are doing a typical flatfoot, buck-dance routine; the arms live their own lives and make involuntary, spasmodic movements as if they belong to a person with a nervous-system disorder; and the faces wear an absolutely impenetrable and detached expression of not being involved in the act.207 In this description, which Muratova summarizes from a conversation with performer Ben Williams, the individual body of the performer creates its own group body; 206Young 56. 207Olga Muratova, “Dionysian Symphony of Distorted Reality: Elevator Repair Service’s Eisegesis of The Sound and the Fury,” Contemporary Theatre Review 19.4 (2009): 456. CHAPTER 3. DANCE AS GESTURE 117 Williams and Iveson each form their own “three-tiered ensembles.” As an ensemble, the individual body divides into three pieces along horizontal planes, each with in- dependent tasks: the legs, the arms, the face. In addition to the divisions across the body of the performer, ERS also assigns seemingly disparate qualities to each of these divisions. The feet move according to repetitive patterns that are part “buck- dance,” part line-dance. The arms are given free rein, allowed to express the “urge to dance” improvisationally through “involuntary, spasmodic movements.” The face is detached, attempting to deny—through neutrality—the “wild energy” that fuels the lower body. Each part of the body performs its own movement vocabulary, fusing into the performer’s single gesture through the violent connection of three disjointed spheres. These spheres, when connected, map the gestural differentiation that accom- panies the frenetic movement that the bodies themselves can barely tolerate. As Paul David Young puts it, the performers seem “unable to restrain themselves,” yet their bodies must contain the unrestrainable, resulting in gestures that are both physical paradox and glimpses of potentiality in motion. Danced gesture comprised of kinetic differentiation, therefore, moves according to different goals and guidelines through the work of these three contemporary groups. For Nature Theater, it threads through the variations of pedestrian movements; for Goat Island it unfolds over time; and for Elevator Repair Service it emerges from the divided individual performing body. This opens up the contemporary project of all of these groups as deeply connected to movement as a means for making difference visible. If gesture is as Agamben says, “a display of mediation, the making visible of a means as such,”208 then the “means” that the groups render visible through ges- ture is more than just the transition from one spatial orientation to another. It is 208Agamben, “Notes on Gesture” 155. CHAPTER 3. DANCE AS GESTURE 118 also the untrained body itself, a “means” that makes transition possible. By using the untrained body as means, contemporary groups challenge Agamben’s conceptu- alization of the gestural as separate from the aesthetic. While the movement of the body itself is not aesthetic according to Agamben’s definition, in the sense that it does not contain an endpoint in and of itself, the untrained body as means does con- nect to an aesthetic property: the aesthetic of the untrained and unskilled producer. This suggests that, when we consider the untrained dancing body as a producer of difference, that body as a “means” that supplies deskilled-aesthetic components, is somehow separate from the mediating movement produced by that body. That is, Agamben questions whether or not dance is gestural—disregarding the dancer as pro- ducer of gesture. In order to consider fully the gestural qualities of dance produced by contemporary groups, we must examine the producer of movement as well as the nature and display of movement as such. Contemporary groups trouble the division between body and motion, producer and product, thereby blurring the boundaries between the gestural and the aesthetic. Even as the untrained body makes itself vis- ible as means, through its display of differentiation arising from its unskilled status, it becomes elusive: isn’t the intentional production of gestural differentiation and shapelessness another kind of skill? And if so, is the supposed untrained aesthetic simply another, subtler, expression of virtuosity? Bodies The sluggish run of a non-dancer can be as moving and important as the beautifully extended leap of a dancer. – Jill Johnston209 209Quoted in Sally Banes, Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-garde Performance and the Effervescent Body (1993; Duke University Press Books, 1999) 70. CHAPTER 3. DANCE AS GESTURE 119 Though only Nature Theater’s Poetics claims the title of A Ballet Brˆut, both Goat Island and Elevator Repair Service perform danced gesture that works against historic representations of virtuosic, trained dancing bodies. In each of the perfor- mances discussed here: Poetics, The Lastmaker, and The Sound and the Fury, the groups consciously and deliberately construct choreography to be performed by non- professional dancers. As I discussed in Chapter One, this is not a new phenomenon; groups like Judson Dance Theatre and the San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop cre- ated pieces in the early 1960s that utilized professional bodies performing ordinary movement, aesthetics involving untrained dancers, and spectators as actors. One par- ticular distinction emerges within the work of some contemporary groups, and within Nature Theater’s Poetics in particular. In Poetics, Nature Theater attempts to find nonhierarchical means of displaying both pedestrian and virtuosic bodies, which re- quires establishing a new relationship between trained and untrained performers as they both inhabit the performance space. For example, at both Judson and the San Francisco Dancer’s Workshop, even when pedestrian bodies were visible and folded into composition, whether as per- formers or spectator/actors, they still operated within hegemonic frameworks that separated them from trained dancers. In Democracy’s Body, Sally Banes chronicles the culture of equality that motivated choreographers at Judson Church, citing the use of “a mixture of experienced and inexperienced, trained and untrained dancers” as both practically necessary constraint as well as “an aesthetic and even political choice, allowing for full participation by all the workshop members and giving the works an unpolished, spontaneous, ‘natural’ appearance.”210 Banes, while express- ing the sociopolitical and aesthetic value of untrained dancers, describes pedestrian 210Banes, Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962-1964 xviii. CHAPTER 3. DANCE AS GESTURE 120 bodies in terms of training, and in relation to their virtuosic counterparts. The trained dancers provide the standard of normalcy against which the non-dancers are inevitably compared. Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A, first produced at Judson Church in 1966, mixed dancers and non-dancers, a combination Rainer continued to explore throughout forty years of staging and restaging the dance. However, it wasn’t until 2009 when Rainer worked on the piece at UC Irvine that she placed dancers and non-dancers onstage together. Previously, she had divided the piece, grouping together bodies with like (or lack of) training. By juxtaposing virtuosic and pedestrian bodies, the limitations of the virtuosic bodies became visible. Rainer discovered that, in contrast to the untrained dancers, trained dancers “knew what they could not do, like balance on one leg con- vincingly or roll the head around while doing a difficult side step. . . What they didn’t know and couldn’t project was that sense of precariousness and achievement.”211 Tellingly, the juxtaposition of dancers and non-dancers onstage together, rather than performing successively in separate sections, spurs Rainer to reverse the standards of performance and to describe the trained dancers in terms of their strengths as well as “what they didn’t know and couldn’t project.”212 Anna Halprin’s Myths cycle, first performed at the San Francisco Dancers’ Work- shop in 1968 also used pedestrian performers, in the guise of audience members as spectators/actors. Recalling the makeup of the performing audiences, Halprin writes, “They were a mixture of hippies, student groups from the San Francisco Institute of Art, all types of businessmen, dance students and professionals, architects, city 211Yvonne Rainer, “Trio A: Genealogy, Documentation, Notation,” Dance Research Journal 41.2 (2009): 18. 212Rainer, “Trio A: Genealogy, Documentation, Notation” 18. CHAPTER 3. DANCE AS GESTURE 121 planners, psychotherapists, tourists, and those lured by our reputation for nude per- formances. In short: no pattern.”213 In this model of dance practice, Halprin led au- dience members—with their mixed experience levels—through a series of responses, exercises, and activities that used movement (and language) to foster personal ex- pression and shared action. The performances investigated ways in which audience members could build community through creative acts, and Halprin looked for the moments in which “the individual experience turns into a collective one.”214 Though the Myths cycle sought to build a collective community of equals, even if just for the duration of the evening, there still remained a division between the audience members encountering the Myths for the first time, and the participating members of the Dancers’ Workshop. Halprin and the dancers functioned as guides, ultimately responsible for shaping—or at least initiating—the participation of the untrained audience members. Unlike Trio A, individual movements of Myths were not chore- ographed, but rather scored according to the theme and investigation of the evening (Storytelling, Dreams, Masks, etc). As a score, with improvisation and spontaneity written into the goals of the performance, participating pedestrian bodies did not fail or achieve the mechanics of choreography; there was none. They did, however, enact the goals of the performance as set out by Halprin and the Dancers’ Workshop members, all of whom had a sense of training and leadership that separated them from the spectators/participants. In these two historical examples, Trio A and Myths, the guides/choreographers sought to expose and question the contrast between the trained and untrained body, respectively. Yet both displayed the pedestrian body through dance by transplanting it into a framework that was constructed and initiated, and ultimately controlled by 213Kaplan 130. 214Kaplan 149. CHAPTER 3. DANCE AS GESTURE 122 professionals. In Myths, that authority was part of the performance score, while for four decades of Trio A, the trained choreographer isolated professional dancers from untrained dancers within the stage space. In contrast, contemporary groups delib- erately seek a kind of anti-theatricality, similar to what Sally Banes calls, speaking of Judson Dance Theatre, an “unpolished, spontaneous, ‘natural’ appearance,”215 by reworking the relationship between trained and untrained bodies in performance. El- evator Repair Service and Goat Island eschew the comparison completely, presenting untrained bodies dancing choreography developed by those same untrained dancers. Without any juxtaposition between trained and untrained dancers, these groups cre- ate dance that renders kinetic idiosyncrasies arising from pedestrian bodies as distinct displays, separate from systematized dance training. This amounts to an intentional deskilling, or expansion, of the status of “dancer,” one that we can explore by again turning to Nature Theater’s performance title, A Ballet Brˆut. In addition to the definitions of shapelessness and raggedness already discussed, Brˆut,references the “raw” aesthetic of Art Brˆut,a categorization for visual art pro- duced by artists that are untrained. The term “Art Brˆut” was coined by French artist Jean Dubuffet in the 1940s, following his encounters with—and subsequent exhibitions of—art of the mentally ill. Artistically untrained patients of insane asy- lums, Dubuffet found, created work untouched by influence, as the patients were completely isolated from the work of professional artists and from the world at large. This absence of influence provides the cornerstone for the definition of Art Brˆutas art “produced by persons foreign to culture, and who have not received any information or influence from it.”216 Art Brˆutis often translated in the United States as outsider 215Banes, Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962-1964. 216Jean Dubuffet and Kent Minturn, “In Honor of Savage Values,” RES: Anthropology and Aes- thetics 46 (2004): 259–268. CHAPTER 3. DANCE AS GESTURE 123 art, a term that stems from Roger Cardinal’s 1972 publication by the same name.217 Outsider art can be art produced by anyone removed from the professional art realm; the more removed, the better. Some outsider artists are mentally handicapped, some create work in prison, some create work inspired by their experiences of visions they call divine, some are hermits who choose to live apart from society. Contemporary groups borrow from principles of Art Brˆutas art produced by those unshaped by training or education in the artistic discipline (in contemporary cases, dance), and transplant these principles into processes that integrate, rather than isolate, the work from their surrounding culture and everyday world. Contemporary groups create ki- netic representations situated simultaneously inside (culture) and outside (training). This inside/outside perspective results in performance that combines the perfor- mance aesthetics of untrained bodies with conceptual intention. Dubuffet discusses the “completely spontaneous and immediate” impulses of Art Brˆutartists, added to the fact that they were completely uninterested—and oftentimes unaware—of orga- nized exhibitions of their work.218 In contrast, Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and Nature Theater deliberately cultivate instances in which the kinetic presence of untrained bodies is not simply experienced or enacted, but purposefully displayed. They manipulate the “rawness” of unskilled, brut art, into consciously constructed presentation. In The Intangibilities of Form, John Roberts discusses the deskilling of art in the post-Duchamp age of readymade and replicable art objects. This cli- mate, Roberts claims, produces not only a deskilling of art, but its eventual reskilling, though recognizing this reskilling requires new frameworks of critical interpretation, “Artistic skills find their application in the demonstration of conceptual acuity, not 217Roger Cardinal, Outsider Art (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1972). 218Dubuffet and Minturn 259. CHAPTER 3. DANCE AS GESTURE 124 in the execution of forms of expressive mimeticism.”219 There is, then, a space for the work of untrained, contemporary collaborative performance-makers, situated be- tween the spontaneous, raw expression of Art Brˆutand the reductive artistic skill Roberts redefines as “conceptual acuity.”220 In performance, the untrained bodies of contemporary groups display themselves as untrained, which, though it connects to the Art Brˆutaesthetic, is different from spontaneous, raw expression. This display, which stages the contemporary untrained performer as representation—a symbol of rawness—gestures toward the “conceptual acuity” of the whole. The display of “brut” movement is a means that enables the intentionally developed, and non-hierarchically presented, kinetic differentiation of gesture to emerge. For Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and Nature Theater of Oklahoma, their contemporary concepts of nonhierarchical choreographic expression hinge on the un- trained body as representation engaged in the deskilling/reskilling of particular kinds of work. In Chapter Two, we discussed ways in which the employee (and especially the temporary employee) contributes to economies that deskill the labor of the office worker by requiring the employee to perform productivity, in place of actually pro- ducing. Here, we can extend this argument to include ways in which contemporary groups explore the deskilling of dance. Yet, these groups present deskilled dance as productive rather than reductive; there is nothing in their performance that presents an ontological threat to skilled dance, only to the hierarchical status bestowed on virtuosity. Scholar Kristin Ross reflects on the work of Jacques Ranci`ere,and cites a 1978 essay in which Ranci`erewrote, “The worker who had never learned how to write and yet tried to compose verse to suit the taste of his times, was perhaps more of a 219John Roberts, The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade (London: Verso, 2007) 3. 220Roberts 3. CHAPTER 3. DANCE AS GESTURE 125 danger to the prevailing ideological order than a worker who performed revolutionary songs.”221 The heart of the danger, in Ranci`ere’s example, concerns the function of the worker, his identity as it exists within the “prevailing ideological order.”222 The order, as Ranci`eresketches it, is a structure that, in order to remain intact, relies on the foundations of strict social roles. This order can imagine the role of worker as one who produces or revolts; but not one who thinks and acts outside these schema. Likewise, we can imagine the untrained dancers of contemporary collaborative groups as ideo- logically revolutionary because they construct a new function for the dancer: they do not dance as professionals, as isolationists/outsiders, or as performance-makers exclu- sively driven by conceptual concerns. They dance as representations of the unskilled, reskilling the untrained body by transforming its physical displays—and not merely the conceptual framework driving the displays—into gestural displays of difference. These displays of difference approach movement as a terrain ripe for democratization, dance as an action that belongs as much to the untrained as to the trained dancer. In this way, though our three case studies appear to be utilizing an untrained/unskilled aesthetic, we might better interpret their work as enacting a new function of dance: as a series of attempts in keeping with the limitations and possibilities of the body dancing. Though the directors of Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and Nature Theater find various ways to throw performers off-balance, to keep them forever unfa- miliar and focused on difficult tasks in performance, inevitably these attempts reach their limitations. This causes the materiality of the untrained body as “means,” to shift and change. Performing the same piece, again and again, is a form of training; untrained bodies cannot help but become accustomed to movement repeated over 221Jacques Ranci`ereas quoted in Ross 254. 222Jacques Ranci`ereas quoted in Ross 254. CHAPTER 3. DANCE AS GESTURE 126 time. It is, however, “training” that is very different from dance training in the clas- sical or technical sense; it is more akin to cumulative familiarity. This is not counter to the new function of the dancer; it does underscore the importance of understanding the untrained/deskilled aesthetic of contemporary groups as representational. By em- bracing the untrained body as representation, Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and Nature Theater keep similar overarching concepts secure: dance can be produced by any body. In Poetics, Nature Theater creates a complex framework that represents both trained and untrained dancing bodies, directly challenging hierarchical relationships, present even in postmodern dance experiments, between professional/unskilled danc- ing bodies in performance. They do this by transplanting the professional dancing body, in the form of a ballerina, into the pedestrian arena, rather than vice versa. Nearly an hour into Poetics, the four untrained Nature Theater dancers exit the stage and the curtain closes. It swiftly reopens to a new and drastically different scene: a ballerina in a sparking tutu moves across the stage under a blue light. She dances to the slow, lyrical, opening strains of Donna Summer’s “Last Dance”; a 1 minute, 20 second solo punctuated by audible “ahhhs” from the audience. Every gesture is fluid and precise, deliberately supported by her underlying (trained) muscle strength. The sequins on the skirt of her tutu catch the light as she travels en pointe, and the audience “ahhhs” again; it is as though an impressive adult has finally entered the space. Then, unexpectedly, aberrant gestures map on to the ballerina’s body, inserted between her glissades and arabesques. She gives herself bunny ears, mimes cigarette smoking, hails a cab. The audience’s “ahhhs” give way to giggles. Unexpectedly, this adult inserts an air of absurdity; the beauty of her controlled ballet is brief, perhaps only a figment. CHAPTER 3. DANCE AS GESTURE 127 By the time the ballerina appears, the untrained dancers have completely and effectively claimed the stage as their territory, introducing an everyday gestural vo- cabulary that frames ordinary movements as dance. The body of the ballerina initially destabilizes this territory on two levels: through her physical body as product of years of dance training, and through the new standard of virtuosic movement she provides to a chorus of audience “oohs” and “ahhs”. Physically, the body of the ballerina represents a set of values that challenge Agamben’s definition of dance as gesture only in terms of its “display of mediation.” These values include, as Sally Ann Ness writes in Migrations of Gesture, the moments of stillness realized by the ballerina’s phenomenal sense of balance. Ness writes, “Ballet’s performative term. . . is linked most basically not to the idea of mobility but to that of stability, to the maintenance of motionlessness, and to the apparent prolonging of stillness.”223 By exalting stability and (apparent) stillness, classical ballet, as a form, approaches the ideal of rendering the body as a frozen image, unpolluted by the extensive physical variations (unplanned shudders, shakes, wobbles, trips, etc) of untrained dancers. This link to motionlessness is, Ness goes on to argue, inscribed in the musculature of the ballet dancer; written under her skin and into the structure of her anatomy, as shaped by years of practice. The body of the ballerina, then, represents an ontology of dance that is antithetical to dance as gesture, as the display of “mediating nature.” The motionless and balanced body is a body that focuses attention on arrival; arrival at a pose, arrival at the maximum vertical point in the arc of a leap, arrival at a point of balance. Also, the notion of “gesture” inscribed in the ballerina’s muscles, written into her physique, suggest a level of permanence— even if the ballerina must trace and strengthen that inscription with continued daily 223Ness 16. CHAPTER 3. DANCE AS GESTURE 128 training—at odds with the ephemerality of gesture as transition. As a body that is, by virtue of her training, both imagistic and textual—the ballerina is a presence that offers both hierarchical and non-gestural qualities. After offering the audience a brief glimpse of the ballerina’s body as an expres- sion of virtuosity and movement ontology as “maintenance of motionlessness,” the progression of the performance quickly corrupts her symbolic status; Nature Theater supplants the ballerina’s dance steps with ordinary gesture. This renders the bal- lerina’s body, with its spectacular potential, transplanted into the gestural world of dancers that lack formal technique. In this world, with its relatively simple choreo- graphic configurations, Nature Theater rewrites the sense of what it means to “dance.” Dance becomes, rather than a matter of execution that requires particular aim, flexi- bility, and grace; solely a matter of esprit. In the dancing pedestrian world, balance and stillness have no operative virtue; lifting the arm into the pose of hailing a cab, and then holding it there, is not particularly impressive. It is difficult to display virtuosic physical ability within the vocabulary of pedestrian movement, as pedes- trian movement offers few opportunities for hierarchies of ability to assert themselves between performers, or between performers and audience. Therefore, as soon as the ballerina lets her extraordinary motion fall away, her body becomes—as a perform- ing apparatus- stripped of virtuosity. Though she retains her potential for what Jill Johnston called “the beautifully extended leap of the dancer,”224 that potential is rendered inert as hegemonic division: she steps outside the authority of her discipline and into a gestural performance space. Her graceful bunny ears comprise, in com- parison to four untrained Nature Theater dancers, simply another representation of kinetic differentiation; gesture expressed through intentionally disrupted simultaneity. 224Banes, Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-garde Performance and the Effervescent Body 70. CHAPTER 3. DANCE AS GESTURE 129 It is possible to read this subversion of classical ballet as an instance of perfor- mative violence, A Ballet Brˆut as a brutal stance toward formal dance practice: the performance does, after all, dismantle the virtuosity and grace generally synonymous with ballet. However, Nature Theater sequences the choreography of the piece in such a way as to stage inclusion and acceptance. Though pedestrian gesture displays the ballerina’s body as a symbol of potential rather than virtuosity, this display comes only after the ballerina dances a classical solo. The ordinary gestures do not change, or undercut, the virtuosic expression of those movements. The “oohs” of the audience are not stained by their later giggles; the two responses remain precisely focused on individual performance moments. The ballerina is not an object of humor until she reveals her willingness to move into the pedestrian world. And then, she leads the way to laughter. By folding her training into their expression of dance as a “the display of mediation,” Nature Theater does not judge or deny the ballerina’s body as a symbol of training and capability. Rather, they display and celebrate her ability, and then dismantle “ability” as a hierarchy-inducing standard. It is also important to note that due to the practicalities of producing Poetics, even the initial image of the ballerina, pirouetting to the hum of a fog machine, is a marginalized figure made visible. Though Poetics was first produced in Nature The- ater’s hometown of New York City, most performances take place on tour, throughout the U.S. and Eastern and Western Europe. On tour, the group travels with the four primary (untrained) dancers, and hires a new ballerina on a city-by-city basis. Due to availability and budgetary constraints (the ballerina must be willing to dance for free) the ballerinas who tend to participate in performances of Poetics are amateurs or former professionals. Kelly Copper describes the history of ballerinas who have performed in the show, saying that “most of the people that we get to work with are CHAPTER 3. DANCE AS GESTURE 130 people that either had to give up ballet due to some kind of injury or they turned older.”225 With a laugh, Copper recalls a series of ballet students who performed with Nature Theater that were “squat, muscular girls” and were “maybe not as technically perfect.”226 She also remembers a contrasting ballerina at a performance in Hamburg, Germany, who was a virtuoso just past her professional days. The Hamburg ballerina was, . . . pretty much retired. She was thirty-five, and she had a five-year-old daughter that she wanted to have see her dance one last time. And so, you know, it was great for us because she came to the theater to warm up for three hours before the show, she did a great one minute turn onstage, and then, you know, she would go home. She was like a real ballerina who just wanted to do it one last time.227 Though the ballerinas embody the character of a dancing ideal, as performers in the world of classical ballet outside Poetics, they are marginalized or otherwise forgotten figures. As Copper says, for many of these ballerinas their 80 seconds of spotlight in Poetics is “maybe the only time they would be wearing a tutu.”228 If nonhierarchical gestures are those that liberate the unseen and overlooked, then these amateur and retired ballerinas remake every dance step, both classical and everyday into means for advancing the show’s gestus: to make the ordinary and overlooked visible. This also redefines the ballerina’s entrance, even before she drops the formality of her classical choreography, as a nonhierarchical display. Though she enters in the midst of motion, the ballerina as a symbol is oriented toward (non-gestural) motion- lessness. Yet, as a semiotic reference point, the actual performer is suspect. She is not just “ballerina,” she is a specific individual with her own historical relationship 225Kelly Copper. Phone interview with author, April 24th, 2008. 226Kelly Copper. Phone interview with author, April 24th, 2008. 227Kelly Copper. Phone interview with author, April 24th, 2008. 228Kelly Copper. Phone interview with author, April 24th, 2008. CHAPTER 3. DANCE AS GESTURE 131 to the hierarchical demands of her discipline. As Kelly Copper mentions, most of the ballerinas who perform with Nature Theater are hardly examples of the physical balletic ideal. They might have unusual physical proportions, or are otherwise past their prime. In Poetics, the ballerina tends to be performed, quite simply, by a dancer unlikely to appear in a professional ballet. As such, despite her training, her body references both virtuosity and its own limitations. Like the untrained Nature Theater dancers, she encapsulates the esprit Yvonne Rainer noted in the 2009 performance of Trio A at UC San Diego. Though Nature Theater juxtaposes trained and untrained bodies, they perform on an equalized plane of dance. The bodies project different levels, different “sense(s) of precariousness and achievement”229 but regardless of the capabilities of individual bodies, they all have something to achieve, and some way in which they are precarious. Obstacle and Composition Ideas are one thing and what happens another. – John Cage230 In order to develop that sense of precariousness and achievement throughout their dance sequences, contemporary groups utilize, as we began discussing in the first chap- ter, choreographic strategies that exploit the creative potential of the obstacle. The performers, whose pedestrian bodies are one of the gestural “means” that encounter these obstacles, do so according to specific (and different) compositional processes. Nature Theater transplants recognizable everyday gestures into a performance/dance 229Rainer, “Trio A: Genealogy, Documentation, Notation” 18. 230John Cage as quoted in Lucy R. Lippard, Pop Art: With Contributions by Lawrence Alloway, Nancy Marmer, Nicolas Calas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966) 24. CHAPTER 3. DANCE AS GESTURE 132 framework. Goat Island and Elevator Repair Service mine their movements from a host of sources: cartoons, television, film, photographs, buildings, task-based re- hearsal directives, etc. Like Nature Theater, Goat Island use dance as part of a meticulous performance structure. In The Lastmaker, for example, the major dance segments sits, as director Lin Hixson remarked during a post-show discussion, like a “lake” in the middle of the piece.231 The dance has its own rules, its own boundaries, and its own stance toward the audience; the five performers stand in a line and si- multaneously dance a series of gestures inspired by the architecture of a Byzantine dome in Zagreb, Croatia. Goat Island choreograph an intricate looping series of mo- tions, mirror the geometric shapes they associate with the dome’s structure. The dance, which lasts for approximately one third of The Lastmaker’s total length, tests the performers’ physical endurance as well as the patience and attentiveness of the audience. The state of encountering obstacle, as a state that sparks the transitioning or mediating nature of gesture, operates on a scale across contemporary groups. Par- ticular groups tend toward or away obstacle as a generator of gesture, and with it creative material. I would describe Nature Theater as occupying a position along this trajectory that tends toward obstacle, though both Elevator Repair Service or Goat Island begin from states that are even further along in that direction. Whereas Na- ture Theater “deal(s) with everything as material and not obstacles,” ERS and Goat Island consciously delve into danced gesture as a display of mediation between the possible and the impossible. For both groups, performers transition between impos- sible attempts and the possible outcomes; the performer’s body struggles to enact an (intentionally) impossible directive, even while the capability of her body—her level 231Discussion following performance of The Lastmaker on November 15, 2008 at PS 122 in New York. CHAPTER 3. DANCE AS GESTURE 133 of training, the discipline of her muscles, her subservience to physical laws—ties her to the sphere of the possible. The constant mediation, or movement between these two states (attempt and outcome) is another element of dance, as these groups stage it, in which we can locate the gestural. Goat Island embraces this, referring to their movement sequences as “impossible dances,” a term that causes ERS director John Collins to exclaim, “Too bad that name is taken!”232 For both groups, mediating between the possible and impossible enables them to utilize the generative capacity of failure. Sara Jane Bailes describes this in Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure, “Whilst an intended outcome imagines only one result, the ways in which it might not achieve that outcome are indeterminate.”233 The practical strategies for not achieving occur, for both ERS and Goat Island, through the directives that generate movement. For example, Goat Island might initiate movement according to a given task that is clearly impossible to enact: Tie a knot in a rope of water, or Watch the back of your head.234 ERS might approach their dances through directives that ask performers to replicate the un-replicable, such as mapping movements from cartoons onto their flesh and blood bodies, so that they can “fail to do it and find out what we’re left with.”235 While the creative potential for failure is interesting and useful from a staging point of view, I am particularly interested in the movement between the possible and impossible such processes entail. Before the groups, as Collins says, “find out what we’re left with,”236 they encounter the process of failing. Failing, however, is only intentional from the director’s point of view. From the point of view of the performer, failed movement is that which transpires without an endpoint in 232Bailes, “This America: A Conversation with John Collins about Elevator Repair Service”. 233Sara Jane Bailes, Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure (New York: Routledge, 2011) 2. 234Goat Island, “Schoolbook 2” (2000): 10. 235Bailes, “This America: A Conversation with John Collins about Elevator Repair Service”. 236Bailes, “This America: A Conversation with John Collins about Elevator Repair Service”. CHAPTER 3. DANCE AS GESTURE 134 mind; no concrete direction/end takes the place of the “impossible” kinetic goal. By failing, performers inscribe their bodies with unintentionally discovered movement, consequences of pure attempt. ERS and Goat Island, therefore, use the impossible in order to open up the per- former’s ability to display the mediation between the attempt and the possible, cog- nizant of the fact that a stated “impossible” goal serves as a means of very realizable movement discovery. Instead, Nature Theater incorporates the obstacles of daily re- hearsal realities into their movement scores, which helps us to categorize two stances toward creating danced gesture: provocative, which utilizes impossible tasks to create new forms of movement; and subsuming, which includes the obstacle in choreographic expression. These approaches, provoking and subsuming, produce distinctly different qualities of movement. Goat Island and Elevator Repair Service, for all their impor- tant choreographic differences, stage unexpected kinetic forms, largely unrecognizable and alien to the audience. Nature Theater utilizes movement that is familiar, that strikes chords of recognition. Yet, both approaches constitute new gestural forms. All three groups, beginning from states that orient differently toward the creative potential of obstacle, contend with their identities as performance groups that enact forms that transition between—or stage the intersection of -dance and theater. Occu- pying intermediary gestural space carved by the unpredictability of untrained dancing bodies, these groups create forms of dance that are confusingly unpolished, which is not always critically welcome. New Yorker theater critic Hilton Als is yet another voice that finds ERS’s dance sequences to be derivative of The Wooster Group, and notes that in The Sound and the Fury “this influence is especially apparent early in CHAPTER 3. DANCE AS GESTURE 135 the evening, when the piece is broken up by hokey dance numbers.”237 Nature The- ater of Oklahoma draws individual gestures from everyday urban life, which—as the movements themselves are accessible and mundane— creates a different challenge in terms of the acceptance of their work as dance. Writing of Poetics as it was performed at Vancouver’s PuSh International Performing Arts Festival in January 2010, dance critic Janet Smith was frustrated by the choreography that seemed “scattered into an illogical, awkward ballet.”238 Similarly, critic Henry Sayre describes Goat Island’s How Dear to Me the Hour When Daylight Dies (1996) as “a ballet gone awkward.”239 Taking these critical responses together, an interesting series of adjectives, all related to dance as it transpires in these pieces, takes shape: hokey, illogical, awkward. While these critics seem to indict the quality and validity of dance as it appears within contemporary group work, I would like to retain the words of these reviews as critically generative descriptions. If dance appears throughout the work of Nature Theater, ERS, and Goat Island, as gestural through its nature as both display and mediation, questions persist: what kind of gesture? And how, exactly, might this as-yet-unnamed kind of gesture, perceived as hokey, illogical, and awkward; open up our understanding of what these particular groups, with their particular performing members, seek to achieve? 237Als Hilton, “Intruder in the Wings: A Staging of William Faulkner’s ‘The Sound and the Fury’,” The New Yorker (May 26, 2008). 238Janet Smith, “Poetics: A Ballet Brut is a Frustrating Experience” (Accessed on October 19th, 2010), 0 0 Pure Gesture and Gestus Consigned to their supreme gesture, works live on. . . – Giorgio Agamben240 In order to address these questions, I return again to Agamben, this time con- sidering the unique applicability of his writing on pure gesture in Kommerell, or On Gesture. Agamben quotes writer and scholar Max Kommerell, who describes pure gesture as a phenomenon that resides “Beyond the gestures of the soul and the ges- tures of nature.”241 In this sphere of pure gesture, “Wordly wisdom, piety and art are indistinguishable.”242 For Agamben, Kommerell’s characterizations of pure gesture “call to mind the redeemed world, whose uncertain gestures Walter Benjamin, in the same years, discerned in Kafka’s ‘Oklahoma Nature Theater.” In his Illuminations, Benjamin interpreted Kafka’s Nature Theater as follows, One of the most significant functions of this theater is to dissolve happen- ings into their gestic components. . . Kafka’s entire work constitutes a code of gestures which surely had no definite symbolic meaning for the author from the outset; rather, the author tried to derive such a meaning from them in ever-changing contexts and experimental groupings. The theater is the logical place for such groupings.”243 For Agamben, Kafka’s Oklahoma Nature Theater (or Nature Theater of Oklahoma) occupies Kommerell’s description of a special “sphere, which one may call pure ges- tures.”244 This not only identifies Kafka’s Nature Theater, the inspiration for New York’s Nature Theater of Oklahoma, as a purveyor of pure gesture; it also opens up performance as the natural home for its expression. As Benjamin writes, “the theater 240Agamben, “Kommerell, or On Gesture” 80. 241Kommerell as quoted in (Agamben, “Kommerell, or On Gesture” 79). 242Kommerell as quoted in (Agamben, “Kommerell, or On Gesture” 79). 243Walter Benjamin, “Illuminations,” trans. Harry Zohn (1986): 120. 244Kommerell as quoted in (Agamben, “Kommerell, or On Gesture” 79). CHAPTER 3. DANCE AS GESTURE 137 is the logical place.”245 Theater, then, is especially endowed with the potential to gen- erate, or display what Benjamin calls an, “ever-changing contexts and experimental groupings”246 of gestic components that, together, form the modality of pure gesture. Yet not every collection of ever-transitioning contexts and gestic groupings consti- tutes pure gesture as Kommerell defines it. The gestic components must have unique characteristics, that Agamben claims come to fruition in Kafka’s Nature Theater in particular. Their realization in the Nature Theater is a consequence, as Benjamin describes it, of the inevitable and unforeseen pattern that forms Kafka’s particular “code of gestures.”247 But how, and why? I suggest that pure gesture, as Agamben describes it with the aid of Kommerell and Benjamin, connects to the series of qualities critics have ascribed to the dance sequences of Nature Theater, Goat Island, and ERS: awkward, clumsy, etc. In order to bridge the concept of pure gesture with these words, intended to disparage or malign, I turn again to Kafka’s literary depiction of the Nature Theater. Having claimed Kafka’s Nature Theater, an admittedly unseen spector of the writer (and reader’s) imagination, as a stage onto which “pure gesture” unfolds, Agamben does not describe this theater in further concrete detail. It is as though Kafka’s Nature Theater floats on the utopian auspices assumed throughout the course of the novel: it is a theater that advertises its enthusiasm to give anyone and everyone a job, yet is unreachable by both reader and character. As we briefly discussed in Chapter Two, the novel ends as Kafka’s protangonist Karl Rossman rides a train through mountains and over bridges, en route to the Nature Theater—perfect paradigm of acceptance—that Kafka’s unfinished novel yields only as a promise. 245Benjamin, “Illuminations” 120. 246Benjamin, “Illuminations” 120. 247Benjamin, “Illuminations” 120. CHAPTER 3. DANCE AS GESTURE 138 However, what happens if we imagine “pure gesture” not as a sphere suggested by the potential of Kafka’s Nature Theater, but as the sphere constructed by encounters with the Theater that actually take place within the novel? These encounters are not majestic utopian imaginings, but practicalities and performances that Rossman stumbles into, as we discussed in Chapter Two, as he approaches Nature Theater’s representatives in pursuit of employment. Previously, we analyzed only the general arc of this literary scene. However, when we look more precisely at the details, a pat- tern of differentiated gesture begins to emerge. At the Nature Theater’s recruitment center, Rossman first encounters play-acting angels who produce “a confused noise, the trumpets weren’t playing in tune, there was just wild playing.”248 Other people stand about in front of the angels, similarly unsure about how to proceed, “They admired the performance, but you could see they were disappointed too. They were probably expecting to find a work opportunity, and were confused by the trumpet- ing.”249 Eventually, Rossman awkwardly makes his way past the angels and into the recruitment center, and abruptly finds himself in the midst of the everyday bureau- cracy we introduced in the previous chapter. He waits in line with other job candidates as “the youths at first barged and shoved each other” as the head of personnel speaks to them, saying “‘On behalf of the Theatre of Oklahoma, I’d like to welcome you. You’ve come early’-actually it was almost noon.”250 Only after several misdirections, multiple scoldings about misreading signs and failing to bring the proper papers, does Rossman find himself hired and ready to ship off to Oklahoma. Kafka’s first images of his Nature Theater of Oklahoma are, therefore, littered with fits, starts, and confu- sions; ushered in by tuneless trumpeters. Previously, we considered these encounters 248Kafka 203. 249Kafka 204. 250Kafka 207. CHAPTER 3. DANCE AS GESTURE 139 as pitfalls of everyday employment within bureaucratic systems, imbedded in the literary foundations of New York’s Nature Theater of Oklahoma. However, we can expand our interpretation to consider these instances as the gestic components that, together, make up the sphere of “pure gesture” Kafka’s Nature Theater inhabits. Rossman’s first encounters with the Nature Theater are as uncoordinated as the five Goat Island performers, as they stand close to one another during The Lastmaker and make stuttering attempts at 360 degree jumps. We might describe Amerika’s characters: performers hired to play angels, other prospective employees, and the recruitment personnel, with the same adjectives used to describe dance as it ap- pears in contemporary group performance: hokey, illogical, awkward. The trumpet- ing angels are, like contemporary performers, enthusiastic but untrained, engaged in performance production that falls far short of virtuosity. Though they operate under an aesthetic different from contemporary minimalist experiments, enacting a celestial-inspired spectacle, their spectacle produces only the strange cacophony that is their “confused noise.”251 This confusion, which Kafka describes by painting an image of mismatched aural tones emanating from trumpets that “weren’t playing in tune,” uses music as a means of creating gestural differentiation: each robed per- former contributes, through their individuated inability to play synchronous tones, to the intricate variations of “wild playing.”252 Like the scarcely-containable passionate dancing of ERS, the durational exhaustion of Goat Island, and the ecstatic everyday movement of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Kafka’s theater, in its first performative moment, defies synchronicity. In the place of a single tune, a single gesture, the chorus of angels produce near-infinite aural combinations, a dizzying array of what Benjamin calls gestic components. 251Kafka 203. 252Kafka 203. CHAPTER 3. DANCE AS GESTURE 140 In Benjamin’s reading, Kafka juggles possible symbolic structures for his gestic components in place of a clear sense of the gestus. Benjamin writes, “What Kafka could fathom least of all was the gestus. Each gesture is an event—one might even say a drama- in itself.”253 According to Benjamin, who describes Kafka’s literary choreography almost as one might describe a theater director with improvisatory leanings, Kafka develops drama within individual components and then makes mean- ing retroactively, “in ever-changing contexts and experimental groupings.”254 These changing contexts and groupings posit Kafka’s literary stage as a kind of laboratory setting, in which gestus appears only later, as a consequence of unplanned associa- tions. From this perspective, the audience (or reader) watches a never-ending process of combination, of encounter, and gauges how Kafka’s “experimental groupings” grad- ually assemble gestus almost accidentally. In Amerika there is no endpoint to the accident; the novel concludes with Rossman forever on the train, frozen in the process of transition. This the literary gesture of Kafka’s novel, always mediating and never arriving. However, Benjamin’s division between gestus and gestic components requires us to develop a more detailed concept of gestus. As we have seen, broad meanings of gesture sharpen as the term appears in theoretical writing, as it does in Agamben’s essays that lay the groundwork for gesture as an arm of the political. Gestus has roots that are more concretely tied to the practical world of performance; specifically to Bertolt Brecht’s epic theater productions. Even in its Brechtian sense, gestus is slippery, and can refer to the craft of the performer, to music, and to the theatrical piece as a whole. Theater director and Brecht scholar Carl Weber describes the 253Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,” Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, 1927–1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). 254Agamben, “Notes on Gesture” 80. CHAPTER 3. DANCE AS GESTURE 141 applicability of gestus to the actor, saying “It is an ensemble of the body and its movements and gestures, the face and its mimetic patterns and rhythms, costume, makeup, props, and whatever else the actor employs to achieve the complete image of the role he/she is performing.”255 The “complete image of the role” rests on a series of components, all of which refer back to the character’s action/function/identity within a social atmosphere. In Languages of the Stage, Patrice Pavis invokes Mother Courage as a well-known example of this; when she bites a coin to test its worth, she “carries out a social Gestus which is quite precise. The act of biting on the coin establishes a whole fund of social dependencies (future clients, the producers of money and goods, authors and victims of fraudulent practices, etc.).”256 Therefore, when we discuss gestus in terms of the performer, we are considering the performer as a microcosm of social relationships—which include, as Pavis indicates through Mother Courage, economic relationships. When Weber describes the gestus of the actor as “an ensemble of the body and its movements and gestures,”257 “ensemble” at once refers to the splitting of the performer’s craft into a series of components (body, movement, gesture) and the collection of these into a social gestus that resides in the materiality of the performer’s presence and stage action. This gestus encompasses the gaps and slippages between performer and character, as both partake in the “ensemble” that references two distinct social worlds, that of performer and that of character, and direct both toward the expression of socially encoded movement and gesture that represent the character’s world, while taking place in the context of the performer’s. Therefore, the gestus of the performer unites actual context, the social 255Carl Weber, “Brecht’s Concept of Gestus and the American Performance Tradition,” Brecht Sourcebook, ed. Carol Martin and Henry Bial (London: Routledge, 1999) 43–49. 256Patrice Pavis, Languages of the Stage (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982) 41. 257Weber 43. CHAPTER 3. DANCE AS GESTURE 142 world within which the actor crafts her performance, with representation—the precise execution of a character. Whether applied to the work of the actor or to the work of the performance as a whole, gestus references, and indeed is made up of, the social. Taken as a reference to the whole, gestus encompasses the performer into an even wider socially-based ensemble that includes the mise-en-sc`ene,performer interactions, choreography of performers onstage; every element of production in service to the story. In his writ- ing on Brecht, John Willett reminds us,“. . . there is no single word by which Gestus can be translated. It is at once gesture and gist, attitude and point: one aspect of the relation between two people, studied singly, cut to essentials and physically or verbally expressed. . . ”258 For Weber, gestus is an ensemble; for Willett it is rooted in relation. Both interpretations open up gestus as the consequence of a collaborative act: either components of performer and craft link and intertwine to create a whole character (ensemble), or performers collaboratively develop characters as represen- tative of particular relations (whatever those relations happen to consist of). Pavis further opens up gestus as inherently social by dissolving divisions between individ- ual and social or group gesture, “The distinction between an individual gesture and a socially encoded one is also quite irrelevant to Gestus. For Brecht, gesture. . . belongs and refers to a group, a class, a milieu.”259 In Brecht’s works, the gestus of the actor contributes to the gestus of the whole work—and both constitute an arrangement of socially generated actions and behaviors that Brecht offers up through stylistic strategies intended to invigorate the audience’s objectivity and critique.260 Gestus 258John Willett, The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht: A Study From Eight Aspects (London: Methuen, 1967) 175. 259Pavis 44, italics present in original publication. 260For example, strategies of alienation: making clear the difference between actor and character toward a form of theater that encourages the audience’s logic and reason. CHAPTER 3. DANCE AS GESTURE 143 is both the means and the meaning of making a particular set of behavioral codes visible. Perhaps, though Benjamin claims that Kafka’s grasp on gestus is slight, Kafka’s gestic components fuse into a cohesive gestural project throughout Amerika, which ultimately finds fruition in the Nature Theater of Oklahoma. For, as Benjamin notes: Kafka’s world is a world theater. For him, man is on stage from the very beginning. The proof is the fact that everyone is hired by the Nature Theater of Oklahoma. What the standards are for admission cannot be determined. Dramatic talent, the most obvious criterion, seems to be of no importance. But this can be expressed in another way: all that is expected of the applicants is the ability to play themselves.261 I would like to extend Benjamin’s characterization of the Nature Theater’s criterion. In the Nature Theater, all that is expected of the applications is the ability to play themselves as performers. When Rossman encounters the awkward chorus of angels, the performers as angels do not have dramatic or musical talent, but neither are the performers simply standing in as pedestrians. They have costumes, props, pedestals, and behave within a theatrical frame that marks them as symbolic. Even if the slippage between performer and character (angel) is significant, that slippage is part of their gestural vocabulary as performers. To put it another way, there is no slippage, no attempt, until the applicants are situated as performers. The gestus of the Nature Theater involves not only open criterion for its applicants, but also the Theater’s unspoken criterion, perhaps because it is so obvious: willingness to perform in an unskilled fashion, to allow oneself to be framed as a representation of the untrained. While Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and Nature Theater experiment with variations of movement mapped onto untrained bodies, Kafka’s Nature Theater 261Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death” 804. CHAPTER 3. DANCE AS GESTURE 144 emerges as a stage on which “gesture” appears within the essential variations resulting from untrained individuals finding themselves in unfamiliar situations. Rather than foregrounding the bodies, Kafka focuses on awkward encounters. The encounter, the gestic component, is where awkwardness and illogic arise to color the gestus of the whole work. In this context, we might view the untrained bodies of contemporary performance as material extensions of gesture as it transpires within Kafka’s Na- ture Theater of Oklahoma. Kafka imagines gestus as a combination of practical and utopian. The utopian ideal of the unseen Nature Theater, that accepts untrained and amateur alike, combines with the pragmatic offshoots of this project. If the Theater accepts and employs everyone, then it stands to reason that not everyone will be equally good at their job. Though not everyone in Kafka’s Nature Theater can play a trumpet or act as an engineer, they must (and do) try. In place of the virtuosity as an ideal value, Kafka’s Nature Theater presents gestus composed of encounters that prompt attempts rather than achievements. Likewise, the intentionally untrained performers of Nature Theater, Goat Island, and ERS choreograph and perform dance that uses formal structure in order to express and display differentiated movement. Within that differentiated movement, which may be awkward, clumsy, and blocky at times, we see the possibilities and limits of the performer’s task, to develop “the ability to play themselves.262 We might, then, interpret the misalignments and unco- ordinated motion of this kind of contemporary choreography as far more than failures to achieve a certain standard of dance. Rather, they are slippages that reference a sphere of potentiality, in which pure gesture resides as an expression of the attempt. Unlike the characters connected to Kafka’s Nature Theater, these contemporary per- formance groups express that attempt again and again, in repeated performances that 262Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death” 804. CHAPTER 3. DANCE AS GESTURE 145 tour across the United States and throughout the world. The gestus of this kind of work is different from that of Kafka’s Nature Theater; it is socially-motivated repre- sentation that challenges what kinds of bodies and gestures deserve representation, and displays the impossibility of playing oneself. Through repeated performance and intentionally constructed precariousness, which reskills their aesthetic deskilling, even “authentic” gestural differentiation becomes self-consciously representational. The representational element of the gestus of contemporary performance is part of what supports claims for the social and political relevance of this kind of work. Movement and gesture in The Lastmaker, The Sound and the Fury, and Poetics: A Ballet Brˆut become gestural, as Agamben describes it, because of active emphasis on the capabilities of untrained bodies, and the display of these bodies as means engaged in a constant process of transformation, mediating between spatial orienta- tions organized to foreground the difference—the ragged shapelessness—offered by dancing bodies that are not virtuosic. In this paradigm of gesture, a deskilled aes- thetic arises from the groups’ consistent kinetic goal: to make an attempt. While these attempts communicate a supreme gesture, or Gestus, of acceptance, they do so according to gestic components that are, like Kafka’s components within the final chapter of Amerika, dramas in and of themselves. For performers, whose individual gestus transforms over time as their deskilled dance is reskilled, thereby widening the divide between performer-as-self and performer-as-representation, gestic components become increasingly immersed in the social. This occurs because the “ensemble of the body and its movements and gestures”263 becomes increasingly complex over time as the “ability to play themselves”264 morphs into another kind of ability: to play themselves as performers that grow and change over time. 263Weber 41. 264Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death” 804. CHAPTER 3. DANCE AS GESTURE 146 Having discussed collaborative performance-making strategies that draw from the everyday, and forms of danced gesture that result from these processes, I next move to explore the political implications, including economic and ethical, of collaborative work as it develops from method into performance. Tied to the social world from their investigation of the everyday, through gestural forms of movement, as well as individual and supreme gestus that invokes the performer and the work as ensembles of social relations, these groups produce forms of performance that, finally, threaten to elude Agamben’s conceptualization of both the gestural and the political as means without ends. There are ends for these groups, subtly imbedded in the slow process of making work as well as in the ragged, differentiated, representational performances themselves: to model the time-taking of collaborative process, to advocate for accep- tance that makes space for the individual within the group, to use representation to dismantle the power dynamics of hierarchy. In this way, Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and Nature Theater produce performance that is ethically engaged because, simply by offering a way of living and making work, these groups also “propose to the audience a way of living.”265 265Benson 51. Chapter 4 The Ethics of Velocities The controversy is centred on the question whether it is the ‘beauty of speed’ or the ‘discovery of slowness‘. . . that could lead us and the other coinhabitants of our common surroundings to a good, just and flourishing life. – Sigurd Bergmann266 Many contemporary experimental devising groups appear, especially in contrast with their social protest counterparts, to be apolitical. We can see this in the work of Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and Nature Theater of Oklahoma: these three groups engage more with formalist structure and aesthetics than with active attempts to sway the audience in particular ideological directions. Some groups—like Elevator Repair Service—even outright deny the presence of political agendas in their work. In a 2002 interview, John Collins stated “We don’t see ourselves as a public service orga- nization, as a political organization. . . It minimizes and diminishes theater when you 266Sigurd Bergmann and Tore Sager, eds., The Ethics of Mobilities: Rethinking Place, Exclusion, Freedom and Environment (Aldershot, Hampshire, England; Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2008) 15. 147 CHAPTER 4. THE ETHICS OF VELOCITIES 148 use it to communicate your political ideas.”267 Yet, despite Collins’ rejection of polit- ical vocabulary, there do seem to be qualities, process-based as well as aesthetic, that mark contemporary collaborative work as politically engaged. These qualities center around the slow processual foundation all these groups share as they make perfor- mance: they proceed from a basis of collective creation, an ethos of coordination and collaboration that takes time. These groups, who all take between one and two years on average to create a single performance, invite consideration of the relative slowness of their performance making methodologies, and the politics contained therein. Re- marking on the work of companies including Britain’s Forced Entertainment as well as Goat Island, Peggy Phelan writes that these companies, their performance as well as their way of making performance, “suggests that performance might be an arena in which to investigate a new political ethics in the dying days of this century.”268 Goat Island’s Bryan Saner reinforces this sentiment by referencing his group’s pro- cess, saying “Probably the greatest political statement that Goat Island makes is that it’s a collaborative group.”269 In this chapter, I take up Phelan’s invitation to explore the “new political ethics”270 that emerges in the contemporary work of Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and Nature Theater of Oklahoma, as a consequence of these groups’ explorations of speeds. Further, I claim that these speeds can help to outline an ethics that emerges from method—from collective creation—and is a particular consequence of acts of slowing and expanding the process of performance-making. There is a certain tension between John Collins’ rejection of a political identity for his group, and Saner’s open acknowledgment of collaboration as politically charged. 267John Collins, “American Theaters Reflect on the Events of September 11,” Theater 32.1 (2002): 1–21. 268Peggy Phelan, “Introduction,” Certain Fragments: Contemporary Performance and Forced En- tertainment (Routledge, 1999) 10. 269Saner in (Bottoms and Goulish 144). 270Phelan 10. CHAPTER 4. THE ETHICS OF VELOCITIES 149 This tension arises from problems of perception concerning what counts as “politi- cal,” and how that manifests in performance. Throughout this chapter, I will consider ways in which Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and Nature Theater enter into the political realm through the avenues of economics and ethics, advanced through speed-related aesthetics. Without didacticism, indeed even through performance that excises dogmatic content, these groups nonetheless make ethical claims by modeling and staging ways of living. As Nature Theater’s Pavol Liska reminds us, these ethical claims make their way to the audience in the form of proposals.271 These proposals, even when embroiled in inner tensions and contradictions, offer a new ways of con- ceiving of “the political” in contemporary performance: as a product of slownesses and speeds. Collective Creation and Velocities of Being . . . ethics emerges as the immanent force of philosophy, as a radical mode of composing the infinite velocities and slownesses of being. The task of philosophy becomes one of composing modes of living. . . – Andr´eLepecki272 Towards a politics of speed, I would like to first establish the stakes of this in- vestigation by making a concrete link between ethics and collective creation; whereas any form of performance may produce an ethics, I claim that the process of collec- tively creating work is itself foundationally ethical. I approach this claim with the aid of Andr´eLepecki’s above definition of ethics: both ethics and collective creation are modes of composition, both are concerned with composing “the infinite velocities 271Benson 51. 272Lepecki, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement 122. CHAPTER 4. THE ETHICS OF VELOCITIES 150 and slownesses of being.”273 That is, both create frameworks (through their processes of composition) that organize and categorize that variety of speeds associated with being in the world.274 For collective creation groups, the experience of being in the world is deeply connected to their ongoing processes of making performance in the world. It is perhaps easier to make this speed-based connection to collectively created work; acknowledged slowness threads through the process and performance aesthet- ics of Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and Nature Theater of Oklahoma. Goat Island and Elevator Repair Service describe processes that are “glacial,”275 or involve tendencies to “work on a project on and off for eighteen months”276, respectively. Na- ture Theater implicitly communicates work ethics that unfold according to similarly gradual pacing; they composed the text of their productions No Dice and Romeo and Juliet out of over 100 hours of recorded phone conversations, each.277 Consciously or unconsciously, this ideal of slowness filters into the aesthetics of the performance works themselves. Goat Island are known for lengthy durational dance segments, like the dance in the middle of The Lastmaker, that challenge the audience’s patience and ability to be present in the moment. Nature Theater and Elevator Repair Service are less likely to include lengthened gestures or segments; however, both groups produce whole works that operate in this vein. For example, Nature Theater’s No Dice takes over four hours to perform, while ERS’s Gatz takes approximately six. There is a clear penchant for slowness that feeds through the processes of these groups, and into 273Lepecki, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement 122. 274I am not conceiving of “being in the world” as Heidegger’s concept of Dasein. Rather, I consider being in the world in its most prosaic form, as a collection of human actions. These actions, whether visible (mapped onto the external body) or invisible (taking place internally) unfold at particular paces. At this point, therefore, I am treating speed objectively as external measurement rather than phenomenologically. 275Bottoms and Goulish xiv. 276Kelly Copper. Phone interview with author, April 24th, 2008. 277The Nature Theater of Oklahoma Introduction. CHAPTER 4. THE ETHICS OF VELOCITIES 151 their performance, but what does this slowness signify? When Lepecki describes the task of ethics as composing the “infinite velocities and slownesses of being,”278 he uses the term “infinite” to designate the collective quantity of both velocities and slownesses, not to name the limitless potential of each. In their infinite expression, high and low speeds both tend toward the same result of stasis, of motionlessness.279 At first glance, Lepecki seems to oppose velocity—an expression of fastness- with slowness. However, the scientific definition of velocity opens up a different comparison; in physics, velocity is a vector. In the previous chapter, we discussed contemporary work as gestural (according to Agamben’s characterization of gesture), a claim which rested on an analysis of the work’s mediating nature and its display of movement not directed toward a particular endpoint. As a vector, we define velocity in terms of its speed (rate of travel) as well as its position: by definition, velocity connotes movement towards. It is a vector traveling at a certain pace, in a specific direction. This suggests a new interpretation of Lepecki’s terminology. Perhaps the “infinite velocities and slownesses of being” that we experience and that coalesce into ethical standards, refer to direction as well as to speed, and oppose the non-gestural (directional) with the gestural (nondirectional). If we consider both ethics and collective creation as modes of composition con- cerned with gestural possibilities, this reconnects us to the political via Agamben’s writings. Gesture, as Agamben describes it, is immanent to his larger project of in- vestigating the political. He writes, “Politics is the sphere of pure means, that is, of 278Lepecki, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement 122. 279This is clearer with slowness: the slower one gets, the closer one comes to stopping. In terms of speed: imagine a world in which technology is instantaneous and frictionless; the only physical movement needed would be the invisible movement within the human brain. If the speed of digital transfer was fast enough and complex enough, virtual reality could substitute for the movement of the physical body. Films like The Matrix (1999) and Surrogates (2009) explore these possible futures. CHAPTER 4. THE ETHICS OF VELOCITIES 152 the absolute and complete gesturality of human beings.”280 Politics, as Agamben con- ceives of it, refers to a sphere that is, as “pure means” allied with the self-perpetuating and justifying machine that is the society of the spectacle—a concept to which we shall return shortly. This self-perpetuating machine opens up speed, as well as direction, as qualities that help us to orient toward the political. In Desert Screen, Paul Virilio suggests that “politics” has more to do with pace than with movement without ends. Responding to a question regarding the threat of increasing technological speed, Virilio says: No politics is possible at the scale of the speed of light. Politics depends on upon having time for reflection. Today, we no longer have time to reflect, the things that we see have already happened. And it is necessary to react immediately. Is a real-time democracy possible? An authoritarian politics, yes. But what defines democracy is the sharing of power. When there is not time to share, what will be shared? Emotions.281 Virilio claims politics as an arena of collective governance, of choice-making that re- quires both reflection and time in which to practice that reflection. By allying politics with “the sharing of power,”282 he erects an ethics organized around the principle of taking time. This is significant because, as ethics is a sphere concerned with how humans ought to conduct themselves in the world, Virilio reinvigorates thinking as a manner of conduct. Further, he defines thinking as conduct that requires a certain slowness. Whereas gut response and immediate reaction can occur almost instantly, thinking—and especially thinking in concert with others—takes time. Virilio’s char- acterization of politics, like the shared authority/creativity that defines collective creation, is predicated on the ethical foundation that in order to share power, there 280Agamben, “Notes on Gesture” 60. 281Virilio, Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light 32. 282Virilio, Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light 32. CHAPTER 4. THE ETHICS OF VELOCITIES 153 must be “time to share.”283 Of the three contemporary groups discussed in this project, Goat Island takes the most time, and most integrates directorship and authorship into the creative action of the group as a whole. Theirs is an immanent process, in Deleuze’s sense of immanence, which enfolds creativity within the group throughout their act of making.284 Goat Island’s degree of immanent process is one way of describing the group’s collaborative ethos. They claim that ethos as a political one, which returns us to performer Bryan Saner’s statement that “Probably the greatest political statement that Goat Island makes is that it’s a collaborative group.”285 This suggests that there is a connection between the immanent and the political. To be fully “within” takes time, and taking time constitutes a political stance or proposal. Therefore, by virtue of its tendencies toward immanence, collective creation also tends toward political engagement; it models a sharing of power, according to which there must be “time to share”.286 This connection between collaboration and poli- tics is somewhat counterintuitive, considering our western political structures that seem to have more in common with transcendent models in which an authority fig- ure exerts control from some external position. However, I am conceiving of “the political” in performance as responses to dominant political structures, rather than reflections of them. I interpret political engagement, in this case, through difference. 283Virilio, Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light 32. 284Scholar Laura Cull offers a useful summary of Deleuze’s concepts of immanence and transcen- dence. In “Collective Creation as a Theatre of Immanence: Deleuze and the Living Theatre,” she writes: “From the point of view of immanence (which Deleuze professes to hold), there is nothing ‘outside’ this process: no creator, for instance, upon whom creativity is dependent, or by whom, creativity is controlled from some external (authoritative and authorial) position. In contrast, an extreme transcendent perspective would posit a ‘two worlds view’ in which it is possible for some being—whether in the form of a transcendent God or Subject—to occupy a realm outside the ma- terial world.” 285Saner in (Bottoms and Goulish 144). 286Virilio, Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light 32. CHAPTER 4. THE ETHICS OF VELOCITIES 154 In turn, this suggests that those groups that tend most towards immanent processes, like Goat Island, tend most toward an interrogation of hierarchical politics. Addi- tionally, Nature Theater and Elevator Repair Service, who also embrace collaborative processes—but to a lesser degree than some of their contemporary counterparts—tend more towards political interrogation (if we conceive of dominant political structures as aligning with transcendent models) than groups creating through processes that create divisions of creative authority. This opens up a new way of conceiving of “the political” in contemporary performance, as a property based on process and emerg- ing aesthetics, and the relationship of these to immanently structured—and therefore revolutionary—methods. This allows us to examine these elements of performance and performance-making as sub-textual, but very present, political statements in contemporary collaborative work. Thus far, I have claimed that collective creation and ethics are isomorphic systems that compose modes of living, and that these modes of living consist of “velocities and slownesses of being”287 that are, by virtue of their expression of gesture and speed, tied to the political. This sets up an interpretive framework that allows us to perceive work produced by collective creation practices according to imbedded ethical standards, leading us toward the next logical avenue of inquiry: what are those standards- and how do contemporary groups express them? In order to unravel those standards, we must more fully address slowness, a clear aesthetic that threads the work of contemporary collaborative groups from process into performance, as a means for structuring ethical proposals to the audience. 287Lepecki, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement 122. CHAPTER 4. THE ETHICS OF VELOCITIES 155 Efficiencies of Slowness Of course, as we discussed in Chapter One, collective creation groups are not utopias; they are products of the pushes and pulls, dissents and alignments that characterize any group-oriented endeavor. Within these realities, however, there does seem to be a certain principle that validates the importance of process along with product. While slowness is inescapably subjective, I do claim that by focusing on process, and by enabling the process of performance making to continue for a matter of years, Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and Nature Theater validate - and seek out - slowness as an important aspect of their method. Recognizing the presence of relative slowness in these groups’ collaborative work, it is tempting to posit this quality as indicative of a desire to embrace simplicity, to preference a way of living (and making work) in competition with, or in radical resistance to, technological progress. There is a measure of truth here; Goat Island adopt Taoist approaches to rehearsal that are almost maddeningly unhurried, as though they live every moment of process according to the Tao Te Jing proverb, “He who strides cannot maintain the pace.”288 Yet, even a “glacial” process of performance creation moves toward a moment of presentation, when the velocities of making coalesce into a compressed model of being. For groups that present work to an audience, there is always a product, however much the performance continues to adapt and change over time. Because of the inevitable relationship between process and product, speed and slowness emerge in our contemporary case studies as interplaying—and sometimes competing—forces. Though a Goat Island process lasts for two years, none of their works take more than two hours to perform. In durational pieces such as No Dice, Nature Theater of Oklahoma breaks up the four hour performance for the audience: 288Bottoms and Goulish xiv. CHAPTER 4. THE ETHICS OF VELOCITIES 156 ecstatic dances and flashing lights regularly interrupt dialogue spoken at an unnatu- rally slow pace. The performances of Elevator Repair Service display a similar tension; the gradually unfolding dialogue of The Sound and the Fury fractures as the group inserts crazed allegro musical excerpts and floods the stage with performers churning in motion. Slowness is, therefore, an aesthetic in tense partnership with speed: a contemporary ethics arises out of these intermingling complexities. This reminds us that we must resist romanticizing the exclusive value of slowness, for this would affix the stakes of contemporary collective creation to outmoded foundations. The Paris-based group Th´eˆatredu Soleil, for example, exemplifies the 1960s use of slowness and inefficiency as means for combating inequitable economic conditions. They created work with anti-capitalist content that partnered students and oppressed workers together throughout the protests and workers strikes of 1968. Th´eˆatredu Soleil’s public performances sought to transplant theater out of its bourgeois purview and into the everyday world of the workers. In general, this made theater available to the people as a means of protest; specifically, this consisted of using performance to combat dominant economic power structures that exploited the labor of the workers. French factory workers of the late 60s, in response to economic crunches that promised them longer hours without pay increases, challenged the “efficiency” of these wors- ening work conditions. In one French automotive factory, workers extended the 1968 protests by organizing a careful sabotage; they created dents in the doorframes of cars passing on the assembly line, ensuring that each unit would need to be redone and repaired before sale.289 This significantly slowed the output of automobile production during the course of the sabotage, creating a rebellious economy of inefficiency. The workers were able to construct this economy within the capitalist structure, due to 289Xavier Vigna, L’insubordination ouvri`ere dans les ann´ees68: Essai d’histoire politique des usines (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2007) 98. CHAPTER 4. THE ETHICS OF VELOCITIES 157 the fact that the quality of labor hours is, ultimately, at the discretion of the worker. The worker must agree to support the production system in order for that system to continue efficiently. For a company, or larger economic system, to acquire that agreement, they must make the enactment of speed and efficiency more appealing than the enactment of slowness and inefficiency. To adopt a Marxist vocabulary, workers could control the production potential of their labor hours, by adjusting the speed with which they created commodities. When the workers dented the doors, they spent the time of an average work day on the floor of factory. This time was, however, unproductive, necessitating more labor hours in order to accomplish the same levels of use-value and exchange-value in the product. On the one hand, these factory workers worked in resistance to the negative impact of “efficiency” accord- ing to the factory owner; from another perspective, they did so according to highly efficient strategies of sabotage. In her article, “Production,” Maria Gough discusses the world-wide labor impact of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s 1911 book The Principles of Scientific Management. Taylor was an efficiency expert; he divided the actions of workers into small components with the goal of “eliminating arbitrary or inefficient motions. . . (towards) increased production and reduced operating costs, thereby lead- ing to greater profits for the factory owner.”290 Taylor’s studies into efficiency also impacted theatrical explorations of the time, including Meyerhold’s development of his system of biomechanics, which investigated the potential for the human body to divide its capacity for movement into precise, efficient, and replicable kinetic com- ponents.291 Interestingly, French automotive workers crafted a form of resistance in keeping with Taylor’s teachings, and maintained a high level of efficient action as 290Maria Gough, “Production,” Speed Limits, ed. Jeffrey T. Schnapp (Wolfsonian-Florida Interna- tional University, 2009) 104–121. 291For a more in-depth analysis of Meyerhold’s methods, see Alma Law and Mel Gordon’s book, Meyerhold, Eisenstein, and Biomechanics: Actor Training in Revolutionary Russia. CHAPTER 4. THE ETHICS OF VELOCITIES 158 they subtly dented car doors. They thereby used the tools of the capitalist system as means of resistance. In the midst of these labor protests of the late 1960s, Th´eˆatredu Soleil took these and other worker experiences as inspirations for their devised work: work made according to the deliberately slow method of collective creation, detailing strategies for using slowness and inefficiency as weapons of economic combat. For the times, efficiency was the negative tool of the dominant capitalist system, and “progress” meant a commitment to increased industrialization, and to perpetually greater scales of commodification. In contrast to work like Th´eˆatredu Soleil’s of the late 1960s, “labor” in the work of Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and Nature Theater does not manifest as the tool of the worker, in opposition to the bourgeoisie. Instead, physical labor appears as a means for modeling attentiveness to a task and to the everyday components of the material world, to what Nature Theater calls “the cosmic murmur”292 that surrounds us. Pavol Liska remarks that he provides obstacles, perhaps in the form of complex choreography or difficult accents, in order to increase the number of things the Nature Theater performers must remain aware of, “I as a human being want to increase the number of things that I pay attention to around me, and that’s what I want my actors to do.”293 Lin Hixson of Goat Island writes of the importance of fidelity to the task as a tool for creating equal presences onstage, saying “I find the relationships between the performers to be non-hierarchical when all the performers are equally required to complete a task.”294 The performers of Elevator Repair Service must stay immersed and engaged throughout the marathon six-hour performance of Gatz, foregrounding 292The Nature Theater of Oklahoma 29. 293Benson 51. 294Bottoms and Goulish 70. CHAPTER 4. THE ETHICS OF VELOCITIES 159 not only the labor of the performer but also the labor of Fitzgerald as writer, and the labor of bringing the two together. We have already introduced the white collar backdrops of both No Dice and Gatz: the action and choreography of performance unfolds within the contemporary environment of the 9 to 5 office job. In both productions, the staged “labor” that takes place in the office consists only partially of the paperwork and computer work demanded by the employee’s position. Physical labor is, in this environment, even sparser. More importantly, both performances display the labor of remaining atten- tive, closely examining everyday experience as a method for combating boredom and for immersing oneself in the moment. In Chapter Two, we discussed this labor as an internal rather than as a physical process, an internal mode of resistance that con- structs of new economies of performance. Nature Theater presents the pleasurable aspects of performing labor in such an environment, by finding hilarity in the tiny objects and moments of the office: meandering conversations, low-stakes paperclip theft, the joy of free sodas, etc. Elevator Repair Service displays the movement of the office symphonically: each performer is an instrument with a distinctive quality and tempo, each is as lyrical and as present as the spoken text of The Great Gatsby. For ERS, translating the labor of the office becomes labor in the form of almost musical composition. In the performances of these three groups, “labor” can be fast or slow; it is evident not only through the sweat and heavy breathing that accompanies intense physical exertion, but also through the subtler mental exercise of paying attention. Slowness, therefore, does not correspond to the simple and single function of impeding progress. In Moments in Time: On Narration and Slowness, art theorist Matthias Gaertner discusses a branch of slowness he calls “technological” that actually contributes to CHAPTER 4. THE ETHICS OF VELOCITIES 160 efficiency. He argues that slow action does not necessarily provide the individual with relaxing experience; with, so to speak, a break from the hectic pace of everyday life. Instead, he acknowledges that slow labor brings about an intensification of focus that is very much in keeping with the production demands of industry, “working more slowly means working with a higher degree of concentration so that fewer things will be overlooked and less waste produced.”295 This discussion of technological slowness aids this project in two key ways. Firstly, it makes a place for slowness within a world (rather than opposed to a world) geared toward technological progress. Secondly, it opens up the way slowness operates as an aesthetic in contemporary work. Slow attentiveness, modeled by contemporary companies, is not intended to bore or shock the audience. Rather, it is an aesthetic very much tied to efficiency, in the sense of producing less waste, rather than in the sense of producing more products. Gaertner suggests that “working with a higher degree of concentration”296 effec- tively covers more ground; he equates slow work with thorough work. This assumes an additional quality, the manner of slowness, in keeping with the ethics of contempo- rary groups: care. Slow work and slow thinking both have the potential to be either efficient or inefficient, depending entirely on the level of care taken on the part of the worker or thinker. If one reads a page from a book in an hour or in a minute, the perceptual difference depends on the level of attentiveness and care: in the instance of reading a page in an hour, does the eye traverse the same terrain as in a minute, or does it move with greater focus and admit greater detail into its mode of perception? I would amend Gaertner’s definition of technological slowness to add that slow work and slow thinking have the potential to include higher levels of concentration. The 295Matthias Gaertner, “Thinking Slowness,” Moments in Time: On Narration and Slowness, ed. Helmut Freidel (Stuttgart: Cantz Editions, 2000) 22. 296Gaertner 22. CHAPTER 4. THE ETHICS OF VELOCITIES 161 elements missing in his definition are the discretion and intention of the individual. Slowness and Care In contemporary collaborative performance, slowness is action entrusted to individu- als that model their choice to take care “so that fewer things will be overlooked.”297 By including source material drawn from the stories, literature, and conversations of the everyday world around them, Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and Nature Theater make efficient use of the resources at their disposal. They see and restore use- value to even the most unlikely words and objects. In Goat Island’s The Lastmaker, the audience watches as performer Mark Jeffries, dressed as St. Francis of Assisi, handles tiny plastic toy birds with reverence, taking his time as he sets them on the ground and winds them into motion. In Nature Theater’s Romeo and Juliet, per- formers enunciate everyday speech with relish: filler words become operative words, resulting in a comparatively extended performance text that delights in including “Um”s, “Uhhh”s, “Sorta”s and “I’m pretty sure”s. Elevator Repair Service unhur- riedly choreographs to the entire text of The Great Gatsby; in the six-hour Gatz, not one of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s words goes unspoken or unheard. Each of these is an ex- ample of care-taking in performance, and care-taking directly related to the pacing of the work. The toy birds, lightweight and delicately balanced on two plastic legs, must make contact with the floor in an exact location so as remain upright. The “umms” of Nature Theater’s Romeo and Juliet, transplanted into performance from actual recorded phone calls, stretch out the length of each sentence; the group chooses to foreground—rather than edit—everyday spoken language. Fitzgerald’s written text, 297Gaertner 22. CHAPTER 4. THE ETHICS OF VELOCITIES 162 spoken aloud, anchors the movement of ERS as the action of the piece, set in an office, ebbs and flows with the pace of the words. All of these: handling the birds, recouping filler words into dialog, and reading a novel word-for-word; is a task. As such, the performers approach the action with the concrete goal of thorough completion. Thoroughness enables each group to communicate respect for their source mate- rial. For Goat Island especially, this respect is focused on the everyday world from which they lift that material. Although the toy birds are only plastic representations, Goat Island handles them with deliberate care we do not often bestow on humble ob- jects. The resulting performance aesthetic, which pits the everyday exchange-value of the object against its use-value expressed in performance, reverses and questions the usual economy. Windup toys, each of which likely cost less than a dollar, are de- signed to be temporary. They are not built to last, yet they figure strikingly in Goat Island’s performance that investigates lastness. Unique even among the other modest materials of The Lastmaker: boards, boomboxes, shoes, stepladders, and saws; the toy birds do not have a use-value beyond the performance. They are, therefore, in the midst of this performance, the smallest, cheapest, and most fragile of objects. Yet Goat Island chooses to frame their presence, and Jeffries consciously handles them delicately, prolonging their life as poorly constructed mechanisms. This care, evident through the performer’s slow and deliberate contact, effectively re-constructs the use- value of the object. Though easily overlooked, violently wound, or quickly discarded in everyday life, the toy birds contribute to an enduring ethical system through their aesthetic presence in Goat Island’s work: they elevate smallness, slowness, and care. They contribute to a new performance economy that measures value through use rather than exchange. Eric Paul Meljac interprets a related economy in his article “The Poetics of CHAPTER 4. THE ETHICS OF VELOCITIES 163 Dwelling: A Consideration of Heidegger, Kafka, and Michael K.,” by linking Hei- degger’s writings on care with the process of constructing dwelling places in works by Franz Kafka and J.M. Coetzee. In Michael K., the protagonist builds a modest dwelling that is unimpressive from the outside, but highly functional and more im- portantly, a product of careful consideration. Meljac writes that, in the protagonist’s gesture of construction, “one finds the manifestation of care in its purest sense, that of the Old English caru, sorrow, anxiety, and grief, as well as ‘serious mental attention.’ Yet the word ‘care’ also reminds one of a state of grace, of kindness (charis).”298 Though Michael K.’s burrow offers little in the way of exchange-value, as a dwelling it is an embodiment of contemplative action. It is not an exchangeable dwelling; it would not suit another, nor would another suit Michael K. Goat Island’s toy birds occupy a position in performance that is nearly the inverse of this: they are cheap symbols that stand in for the importance of care and kindness to even the most common and replicable objects. Whereas Michael K.‘s burrow is one of a kind, a product of his own considered labor, the birds are offshoots of a spectacular economy that erases evidence of individual labor in an age of mass production. Contempo- rary groups create use-value through strategies similar to the Situationist project of detournement: working within and manipulating existing economic structures to op- posite ends. The economy of use, therefore, can take a multitude of different forms. It might, as in the case of Michael K., emerge from a quality of care that links the dwelling place irrevocably with an individual who imagines it and enacts its con- struction. It might, as it does in contemporary performance, juxtapose images of the speed of production (birds) with the consciousness of speed that care requires. To 298Eric Paul Meljac, “The Poetics of Dwelling: A Consideration of Heidegger, Kafka, and Michael K.” Journal of Modern Literature 32.1 (2008): 69–76. CHAPTER 4. THE ETHICS OF VELOCITIES 164 manifest care as “serious mental attention” or as “a state of grace, of kindness”299 as Meljac suggests via Heidegger, one must take time: time to carve out the dirt that gives birth to one’s dwelling place, or time to notice, re-evaluate, and then frame a new use-value for objects that others consider disposable. We can consider care, therefore, as the antithesis of disposability. Lisa Campolo notes that Heidegger’s concept of care shifts and grows throughout his writings, but she continuously returns to care as an element of his critique of technology. He op- poses the careful mind with the technological mind, for “To the technological mind, everything is subject to calculation and valuation in terms of profit or return on an investment.”300 In contrast, as Campolo characterizes Heidegger’s use of care in his earlier writings as “composed of understanding, state-of-mind, falling, and dis- course. . . Heidegger finds that the ontological meaning of care as the structure of Dasein is temporality.”301 This last statement, connecting the care of Dasein to tem- porality, leads toward Heidegger’s work Being and Time. While it is not within the scope of this project to fully explore Heidegger’s connection between care and time, I introduce the link simply to mark its relevance for future exploration. Care, in Heidegger’s terms, becomes a method of contemplation, a term that references a di- alectical project that examines “the infinite velocities and slownesses of being.”302 To care is to operate within a state of being that is not “subject to calculation and valuation in terms of profit or return on an investment.”303 In short, to care implies a resistance of capitalist structures, and the creation of new economic perspectives derived from method. 299Meljac. 300Lisa D. Campolo, “Derrida and Heidegger: The Critique of Technology and the Call to Care,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 53.3 (1985): 431–448. 301Campolo. 302Lepecki, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement 122. 303Campolo 435. CHAPTER 4. THE ETHICS OF VELOCITIES 165 Care need not necessarily describe a physical relationship between performer and object; Nature Theater—who have devised five shows to date that derive dialog from unrehearsed, recorded conversations—primarily use language as their medium of ex- pressing care through slowness. Poetics: A Ballet Brˆut is an anomaly in this respect, using danced gesture, rather than language, as a starting point for performance. Through their investigation of everyday conversation, Nature Theater indicates that slowness is, as a proposal for the audience, a way of living intricately connected to perception. Kelly Copper cites John Cage, saying “Art is everywhere. It’s only seeing that stops now and then.”304 There is, as we have seen in previous chapters, strong links between this sentiment and the staging of the everyday. By lifting everyday lan- guage, gesture, and bodies out of the background and onto the stage, all the groups discussed here stage ways of living that involve attentive perception. Velocities of Destruction Slowness is a way of seeing that increases the number of perceptible details, thereby expanding space as well as lengthening the time experienced by the observer; this has the potential to be either a destructive or constructive process. Does slowness construct new worlds and new performances, or consume them? A slow gaze admits additional complexities into view, which augments the amount of physical terrain the eye traverses. In addition to covering more ground, slow and attentive perception also enables the observer to engage in additional—and even unforeseen—actions. For example, if one opens a door to an office and briefly glances inside, what is visible? Perhaps a sense of general architecture and arrangement: a table, chairs, windows, 304Amber Reed, “Introduction,” No Dice (2007) iii. CHAPTER 4. THE ETHICS OF VELOCITIES 166 impressions of colors and light. But if one lingers in the doorway and carefully observes for an hour, new actions are born. The observer might read the spines of the books in the bookshelves and allow those titles to spur ideas or avenues of thought. She might see the pattern on the rug for the first time, or the family photos on the desk and posters on the wall. She might find other senses engaged, as the sounds of the air conditioning or leaf blower outside enter into her awareness. This mode of perception, attentively tied into the observation of the everyday, is closely connected to early experiments by John Cage. He is an undeniably strong inspiration for Nature Theater of Oklahoma and indeed for all contemporary groups that draw material from everyday sources. Cage sparked and influenced the perception revolution that sought to uncover the sound in the silence, and expose that “Art is everywhere.”305 Yet this kind of slowness, that expands the visible and sensory terrain, is not without ethical controversy. On the one hand, slow gazes and patient perception implicitly challenge hierarchical power structures. They make the invisible visible, equalizing the field of representation. On the other hand, they insulate the observer into the role of individualistic consumer, potentially enmeshed in (and contributing to) the society of the spectacle. One such consumer is the flˆaneurthat strolls the Paris streets of Walter Ben- jamin’s Arcades Project; a creature of the society of the spectacle who, through slowness, reinforces the spectacular split between product and labor. Guy Debord describes this split as one of the bases of the society of the spectacle, “whose product is separation itself. . . ”306 Further, “The spectacle’s function in society is the concrete manufacture of alienation.”307 These characteristics of the society of the spectacle 305Reed. 306Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Rebel Press, 1983) 21. 307Debord 21. CHAPTER 4. THE ETHICS OF VELOCITIES 167 as Debord identifies in his 1967 political treatise, seem to make use of mobilities different from Benjamin’s flˆaneur,a creature of the industrial mid-1800s. The key economic element of the society of the spectacle is its propensity for mass produc- tion, for manufacture that erases the consumer’s sense of the labor of production, and substitutes exchange-value for use-value. One of the means of producing alien- ation, a result of society’s propensity for mass consumption, and which Debord calls the “real product” of the society of the spectacle, is through speed. As part of the process of mass creating consumable goods, speed and efficiency necessitate sameness in the products produced; sameness, in turn, alienates the consumer from the labor that produces the object. The marks of labor, of craftsmanship, disappear from com- modities. Also, as the speed of production increases, and assuming that the rate of production remains constant, the number of commodities proportionally increases. An extreme example might place a toymaker who carves each toy by hand, at one end of the spectrum. Each of the toymaker’s creations—even if made from the same pattern—would be slightly different from one another, bearing unique edges from a hand-driven planer or sander. At the other extremity, toys march down an assembly line, exactly alike or nearly so, untouched by human hands, at a rate of thousands per day. The “alienation” effect that drives Debord’s impassioned indictment of the society of the spectacle is an effect that, through fast-paced and incessant replication, separates the consumer from the laborer, individuals from one another, and finally the individual from awareness. To be fully integrated into the society of the spectacle is to be indistinguishable, surrounded by the undistinguished. In contrast, the flˆaneuris the embodiment of slowness. Benjamin writes, “Around 1840 it was briefly fashionable to take turtles for a walk in the arcades. The flˆaneurs CHAPTER 4. THE ETHICS OF VELOCITIES 168 like to have the turtles set the pace for them.”308 The flˆaneur comes into focus through Benjamin’s writing as a kind of eternal detective, examining the faces of the crowd and the trinkets lining the stalls of the arcades at the literal speed of a turtle. How- ever, while the flˆaneur lengthens the space he moves through by slowing his speed and taking in details, he contributes to spectacular society in ways similar to the production speed Guy Debord deplores. He institutes himself as a microcosm of con- sumption that simultaneously feeds into the spectacular society’s thirst for the exotic and the novel. While he visually consumes the objects for sale that line the arcade, he transforms himself into an ostentatious enactment of slowness, so at odds with the pace around him that he becomes another image of a curiosity to be consumed. He fuses with the society of the spectacle despite the fact that the velocity of the flˆaneur and the velocity of the spectacle appear to be at odds. As Benjamin remarks, again speaking of the curious image of the flˆaneurwalking the arcades with a tortoise on a leash, “If they had had their way, progress would have been obliged to accommodate itself to this pace.”309 Yet, as evidence of labor disappears within the spectacular economy, so it does with the flˆaneur. He is a representation of idleness, a consumer who ingests com- modity at an excruciatingly detailed pace; the turtle is a conspicuous display of this consumption. The flˆaneur,by comparison to the surging crowd around him, labors under having no labor. If the flˆaneuris nothing but a conglomeration of sensory input from the people and objects that surround him, there is nothing that it is like to be him; his slowness, exercised with idleness rather than with care, blurs his status as individual. That is the threat of the spectacular economy, to veil the human action 308Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938–1940 (Cambridge: Har- vard University Press, 2003) 31. 309Benjamin, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938–1940 31. CHAPTER 4. THE ETHICS OF VELOCITIES 169 that constitutes not only labor, but also ethical standards. If action is obstructed, either through excessive speed and replication, or through slow and single-minded consumption, there is nothing but the self-perpetuating—and destructive—product. The destructive ethics of the society of the spectacle is at least partially forged by speeds of being, and may be expressed through either fastness or slowness. In the society of the spectacle, the attentiveness of the individual is suppressed through an economy that dictates idleness and feeds off of product and replication. These qualities then—according to respective aesthetics of slowness and speed—stand in for the labor and care exercised (and recognized) by individuals. We might, therefore, understand the political project of some contemporary devising groups, represented in this investigation by three case studies, as being the restoration of the “I” that the society of the spectacle erases, through its ability to create willing members of society who partake in the spectacle’s never-ending parade of self-perpetuating separation and consumption. Velocities of Construction As they restore value to awareness—through everyday source materials and bodies that coalesce into aesthetics of individuation (awkwardness, amateurism, etc) as dis- cussed in the previous chapter—Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and Nature Theater participate in acts of construction. They reassemble and perform individ- ualism, but they do so with an eye towards immanent processes and presentation. They seek a balance that preserves the individual but does so without elevating the individual to a transcendent position. Andr´eLepecki identifies this balance as the cornerstone of contemporary performance. Speaking of dance and choreography, he CHAPTER 4. THE ETHICS OF VELOCITIES 170 writes: No other art form in modernity has been responsible for physically creat- ing a cohort of absolute ‘I’s’ as much as choreography—an ‘I’ so absolute that it becomes transcendental, as in the traditional corps de ballet, where, quite tellingly, its anonymous members, relegated to the forces of a col- lective body where no one can be differentiated, i.e., no one can dance in his or her own name, are called, in French, sujets (subjects). And it is precisely for this very same reason that contemporary choreography has claimed for itself the task of dismantling the power of securing this absolute and absolutist ‘I.’310 Lepecki enters into the discussion of the dangers of a spectacular society from a dif- ferent direction; he cites the destruction of the individual underneath the weighty influence of “an ‘I’ so absolute that it becomes transcendental.”311 He identifies con- temporary choreography as seeking movement forms that enable the dancer to “dance in his or her own name,” which is to dance neither as an absolutist “I”, nor as part of an anonymous backdrop. If we consider Lepecki’s argument in light of contemporary performance that is collaboratively created and not exclusively choreographed, we must alter his emphasis and clarify what it means for a performer to “dance in his or her own name.” Lepecki describes the task of contemporary choreographers, which involves “dismantling the power of securing this absolute and absolutist ‘I.’”312 However, to dismantle implies a kind of violence, a destruction arising from a conscious and deliberate ideological stance. Instead, I argue that contemporary groups eschew destruction in favor of two levels of construction: composing a group of individuals into a collaborative body, and composing the source material and aesthetics resulting from that junction into devised 310Andr´eLepecki, “Machines, Faces, Neurons: Towards an Ethics of Dance,” TDR: The Drama Review 51.3 (2007): 120. 311Lepecki, “Machines, Faces, Neurons: Towards an Ethics of Dance” 120. 312Lepecki, “Machines, Faces, Neurons: Towards an Ethics of Dance” 120. CHAPTER 4. THE ETHICS OF VELOCITIES 171 performance. In contrast to collaborative models, Lepecki discusses two spheres that tend toward extremes of identity: the traditional corps de ballet as inclusive of both anonymous collective and absolutist “I”, and contemporary choreography that abol- ishes this relationship entirely. However, I propose that it is more useful to imagine ways in which Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and Nature Theater constitute three contemporary models that restructure and redefine both “I” and “collective”, as well as the relationship between the two. Contemporary groups with collaborative foundations must navigate group-oriented processes and performances together with ethics and aesthetics that foreground the differentiation of the individual. For this kind of performance, to “dance in his or her own name” is not independent of the collective or of the absolutist “I”. It is, rather, an attempt to bring these two identities together in order to create a third alternative. We might imagine this as a process of transplanting the absolutist “I” into immanent ways of being, or recomposing the two worlds view—with the transcendent subject outside the material world—into a single domain made up of many equivalent, col- laborating subjects. This clarifies one angle on the ethical and political project of collective creation at large: to preserve both the “I” and the collective nature of the group, while transforming the absolutist and transcendent model into an immanent one, and while restoring subjectivity and individuation to the anonymous corps. The language that emerges from this discussion, including restoration, preserva- tion, transformation, and transplanting, references ways of approaching performance from the perspective of its constructive potential. This is the language of building, not only performance itself but also—through performance—new ways of seeing, new modes of perception. These ways of seeing, so easily described through construction- based language, unfold according to particular velocities. CHAPTER 4. THE ETHICS OF VELOCITIES 172 In the introduction to Small Acts of Repair, scholar Stephen Bottoms draws lines between ways of seeing, pointing to dominant modes of perception that Goat Is- land’s performances address. He writes, “Confrontation is more fun to watch than co-operation, destruction more exciting than repair.”313 Though Bottoms does not precisely say so, there is a sense in which he seems to be crafting a velocity-based interpretation of audience response. In his view, confrontation and destruction are “more fun to watch”; they are “more exciting.” They are, he seems to imply, “more”, in comparison to co-operation and repair, provoking products in the form of audience response: excitement and fun. These products, Bottoms suggests, do not fall within the purview of Goat Island’s works. Goat Island is a group of slowness and patience, of repair and co-operation—theirs is not an aesthetic of fun and excitement. This re- inforces the binary between slowness and speed, mapping the positives of co-operation and repair at one end of the spectrum of velocities, and the negatives of confrontation and destruction at the other. Bottoms’ argument also has ethical consequences: he claims a particular ethic for Goat Island, advanced through aesthetics that foreground repair and co-operation, two properties that model slownesses of being and working. He presents these slow- nesses as the qualities that mold Goat Island’s approach to perception, suggesting that because they work in modes that are less fun, and less exciting, the group shapes an audience with new—and slower—ways of seeing. I believe, however, that the interplay between velocities is less straightforward in contemporary work. While the undercurrent of slow watching and slow being persists as a consequence of slow ways of working, contemporary groups mix velocities in the production of their aesthetics, as though in conscious avoidance of a singular ethic. 313Bottoms and Goulish 23. CHAPTER 4. THE ETHICS OF VELOCITIES 173 Returning to the example of Goat Island; rhythmic, durational movement sequences combine with brief flashes of speed. The group mixes tempos. In The Lastmaker, there are moments when performers leap suddenly into the air, or rush onto the stage and tag the ground before running offstage again. There are also moments when performers balance on 2x4’s held four feet off the stage floor in parallel to the ground; the act of balancing while other performers hold the ends of the lumber, slipping stepladders under the edges to help hold the weight, cannot be rushed. There is, then, an ethic at play in performance that makes room for both slownesses and speed. The subject, whether witnessing or performing, needs both. It is not a matter of pitting co-operation and repair (slow) against excitement and fun (fast), but of creating a performance space that acknowledges a time and place for each. We must have both, Goat Island seems to say, in order to achieve the contrast that makes both visible. However, Paul Virilio reminds us of the potential for blindness that is implicit in the experience of high speeds. In The Aesthetics of Disappearance he explores the progressive inertia made possible by increasing technological capabilities, and considers how, the closer we come to speeds approaching instantaneouness, the less we see. He cites militaristic uses of speed, saying that countries of the contempo- rary world seek power through “the ubiquity, the suddenness of military presence, a pure phenomenon of speed, a phenomenon on its way to the realization of its ab- solute essence.”314 Virilio describes the epileptic consequences of living in world in which speed is ever-increasing; our minds drop out of consciousness, accustomed to the moments of blindness engendered by our experience of speed as “a phenomenon on its way to the realization of its absolute essence.”315 In keeping with Virilio’s 314Paul Virilio, “The Aesthetics of Disappearance,” trans. Philip Beitchman, Semiotext (2009): 53. 315Virilio, “The Aesthetics of Disappearance” 53. CHAPTER 4. THE ETHICS OF VELOCITIES 174 identification of pervasive blindness, there must, then, be something at work in the ethics of contemporary performance groups—considering their preoccupation with the everyday—that makes use, not only of the excitement of sudden speeds, but of the blindness these speeds create. What does it mean to produce a way of seeing that deliberately includes moments of not seeing? Ethical Implications of Blinding the Audience In Elevator Repair Service’s Sound and the Fury, all the action surrounds Benjy; Faulkner writes his first chapter from Benjy’s jumbled, autistic perspective. In ERS’s production, Benjy spends most of his time centerstage, his movement confined to spasms and darting gazes he can accomplish while sitting in a wooden chair. Hemmed in by the dialogue, all drawn word for word from Faulkner’s text, as well as the soundscapes that surround him, Benjy is the only character who does not speak. Instead, he sits as at a center of the storm of the household, recalling events and people through a series of overlapping and temporally distorted impressions; his is not a linear memory, and it plays out in starts and stops through the bodies of others. In the midst of the chaos that surrounds him, the twitching and oppressed Benjy seems an ironic figure of stability; while all the other ERS actors alternate between characters, Susie Sokol, playing the character of Benjy, is a constant. This life-vest of constancy, however, doesn’t last. Approximately halfway through the performance, Benjy’s tension and anxiety, embodied by family members that mill around him onstage, boils over into a kinetic and aural explosion. Frenetic fiddling combines with recorded mooing, the sound of radio static, and the fast-pace onstage dialogue of an argument between two of CHAPTER 4. THE ETHICS OF VELOCITIES 175 Benjy’s family members. Two performers, Mike Iveson and Ben Williams, begin their downstage flatfoot dance. Twelve people swarm the stage, divided into groups that stomp and clap their hands, twirl their heads around, join in pieces of Iveson and Williams’ dance, chase each other across the stage, etc. It is impossible to know where to look; every corner of the stage is alive with unanticipated motion. It is an enactment of one of ERS director John Collins’ desire for vibrancy and confusion, muttered during a rehearsal in the late 1990s of Cab Legs, “I’ve got to shake things up somehow or I’m gonna go crazy.”316 Indeed, it does seem as though Collins’ hand, unseen and larger than life, has grabbed ahold of the stage and shaken it like a snow globe. After a few moments, just as suddenly as the sound and movement began, they re- cede and the energy settles. The bright stage lights focus down to Benjy’s chair, now startlingly occupied by Aaron Landsman—not Susie Sokol—wearing Benjy’s iden- tifying red jersey. The clash of sound evens out to the steady blowing of wind, accompanied by the echoes of a woman’s voice that might only be our imagination. Landsman, as Benjy, pants and sweats; several performers cluster close around his chair as they wipe his forehead and bring a teacup to his lips. Perhaps the chaotic movement staged Benjy’s dream, or perhaps a fit? Perhaps it does not map onto any actual event, but is just another impression. Whatever it was, it changed Benjy— literally substituting one person for another—right in front of our eyes, yet the change was almost impossible to see. In this brief scene, ERS uses speed as a means of masking changing states, in this case changing actors who play the same character, and slowness as a way of 316Margot Ebling. “Elevator Repair Service Shakes the House.” Village Voice September 16th, 1997 (Accessed on January 4th, 2011). Landsman (as Benjy) underscores the labor of the change, for the audience as well as the performer. But what does this do, the use of contrasting velocities that hide the moment of transformation, the instant of change? ERS contrasts velocities within performance in order to build toward tension that, with the explosion and rapid return to slowness and restfulness, constructs cathar- sis. The release of energy, through the movement of a chorus of performers, is an expulsion that purges the audience of impatience, of anxiety, and vicariously allows us to experience the ecstasy of chaos in motion. This purging occurs purely as a consequence of formal structure; of layering of elements (sound, movement, light) in such a way the velocity of performance increases, bubbles over, and then calms. In Theatre of the Oppressed, Augusto Boal calls catharsis into question, arguing that it functions as a formal mechanism for purging the audience of their political selves, of their revolutionary spirit. He writes that catharsis according to Aristotle purges not only pity and fear but also an additional impurity in the audience’s consciousness via the flaws of the hero; it is “purgation of the extraneous, undesirable element which prevents the character from achieving his ends. The extraneous element is contrary to the law, it is a social fault, a political deficiency.”317 In Boal’s critique of Aristotle’s model of catharsis, the audience empathizes with the hero and, through catharsis, purges the flaw of the hero’s lawnessness (or similar lack of virtue) that ultimately brings about his tragic end. By purging the element that is “contrary to the law,” catharsis reinforces the will of the state and oppresses the voice of the people, the 317Augusto Boal, “Theatre of the Oppressed,” trans. Charles A. & Maria-Odilia Leal McBride, Theatre Communications Group (1985): 32. CHAPTER 4. THE ETHICS OF VELOCITIES 177 audience. But what happens if we consider oppression, not of a member of the audience, but of the performer, of the co-operating maker who seeks to “dance in his or her own name”?318 If we make this leap, then we might see the catharsis of contrasted velocities as a means for liberating the oppressed performer, for creating an open- ing in performance that allows them to escape not only the transcendent “I” that implicitly occupies the apex of hierachical working and performance structures, but also the transcendent “eye” of the audience. As discussed in the previous chap- ter, one way that contemporary performers combat virtuosity-based hierarchy is to render gesture, differentiated through the untrained and undisciplined extremities of untrained bodies, as means not directed toward a particular endpoint. In the contem- porary performance examples of this phenomenon, including the dance segments of Goat Island, ERS, and Nature Theater of Oklahoma, these gestures are visible (and consumable) under the slow gaze of the audience. In moments, such as the instant when Susie Sokol and Aaron Landsman exchange the character of Benjy, catharsis occurs at the instant of invisibility, the instant when the performer is unavailable— and unconsumable—as representation. Paul Virilio describes the attempts of Howard Hughes to achieve this same status, to retreat from the world into a hotel room where, perhaps, he will successfully disappear, convince himself that he was “everywhere and nowhere, yesterday and tomorrow, since all points of reference to astronomical space or time were eliminated.”319 Virilio interprets Hughes’ actions as means of resisting his unquenchable thirst for inertia, as a simultaneous rejection and fulfillment of ex- treme movement and speed. Whereas Hughes achieves a kind of “infinite velocity” in the form of frozen motionlessness, cut off from the world, Goat Island, Elevator 318Lepecki, “Machines, Faces, Neurons: Towards an Ethics of Dance” 120. 319Virilio, “The Aesthetics of Disappearance” 36. CHAPTER 4. THE ETHICS OF VELOCITIES 178 Repair Service, and Nature Theater formally structure a series of slownesses paired with speeds. It is the combination of these velocities, which include relatively slow performance making processes, and performances that include cathartic instants of invisibility, that these groups make use of towards engagement with the political. Instead of purging the audience of their revolutionary selves, catharsis reinforces the notion that subjects of the material world are not entirely available for consumption. Rather than using speed as an economic strategy for mass production, these groups use speed to resist the commodification of the performer. Of course, Boal’s critique centers on the politically coercive systems of tragedy, a genre quite different from the formal aesthetics and anti-didactic tendencies of the contemporary collaborative work we discuss here. In place of virtue and law, Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and Nature Theater valorize the everyday— political through the project of liberating the oppressed. This occurs, as we have discussed, through the liberation of both pedestrian objects and individuals: modest commodities regain use value through their presence in performance, the performer navigates immanent creative spaces with care and attentiveness. These models are embedded into the fabric of contemporary collaborative performance, complicating the assertion of ERS’s artistic director that it “minimizes and diminishes theater when you use it to communicate your political ideas.”320 For Goat Island, ERS, and Nature Theater derive source material, both textual and choreographic, from the everyday world that surrounds them. And the everyday, formed of competing velocities each with distinct capacities for construction and destruction, is the political realm of materiality. This materiality is more than economic, it is the materiality of ongoing human action that composes ethical models. 320Collins, “American Theaters Reflect on the Events of September 11”. CHAPTER 4. THE ETHICS OF VELOCITIES 179 Admittedly, the project of claiming the contemporary collaborative experiments as political is an ambitious one. But I hope, in place of neat conclusions, to make a space for continuing avenues of inquiry. If we accept Bryan Saner’s statement that “Probably the greatest political statement that Goat Island makes is that it’s a collaborative group,”321 then we must examine collaboration as a politically engaged act, not only due to its aspirations to achieve nonhierarchical working models, but also because of the emerging aesthetics that reference the everyday world. These aesthetics of slowness and speed, in the contemporary work of these three collective creation groups, prompt ways of seeing that account for their competing velocities, for ethical proposals that Andr´eLepecki describes in terms of “the infinite velocities and slownesses of being.”322 This contemporary work pursues construction, and as such works against common binaries of slowness and speed, didactic and apolitical, or the individual and group. Velocities become means for uniting these binaries into the immanent mode of collective creation. The resulting contemporary ethic of construction is a proposal of making, a modeled process of composition that invites the political into collaborative ways of working, performing, and living. 321Saner in (Bottoms and Goulish 144). 322Lepecki, “Machines, Faces, Neurons: Towards an Ethics of Dance” 120. Conclusion When we analyze these three contemporary collective creation methodologies within the context of historical models, as producers of performative economy, through ges- tural forms, and in relation to speeds and velocities, a central argument develops: methodology is itself both political and performative. As we investigate processes of collective creation, we can begin to conceptualize performance making methodologies in general as both shifting and discursive, responsive to their surrounding world and their own evolving history. In contemporary manifestations, these processes give rise to performance that shifts from an emphasis on content to a kind of inauguration of form, in which “form” is the performed conjunction of process and aesthetic. Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and Nature Theater of Oklahoma create in the wake of their predecessors, but transform utopian ideals of collectivity into non- hierarchical models that grasp for sustainable, concrete organizational spaces. These spaces, within which these groups craft processes shaped by ideologies and formed into performance aesthetics, sanctify individual roles within a creative process to- wards methods of “collaboration” that are free to explore contradiction and combat. Resulting performance is then open to engage with the dialectical tension of the ev- eryday, as it relates to groups’ everyday experience of performance-making, as well as to their everyday experience of employment. Employment, which is not a vocation or 180 CONCLUSION 181 career but rather a practical means for the individual artist to support herself, pro- vides the everyday source material through which contemporary performance-makers craft new economies of performances, systems of exchange that restore productivity to employee’s everyday task of “seeming busy.” As they interrogate productivity as a consequence of perception, these three con- temporary groups also ask the questions: who is the producing body, and what do they produce? Offering displays of untrained dancing bodies, these groups deskill the role of dancer and then reskill that role by validating gestural differentiation provided by the individual. Individual differentiation, prompted by the untrained and laboring body, allows groups to dismantle hierarchies imposed by virtuosity, and to render any movement—regardless of the performing body or the social roles associated with that body—free domain. Returning to an assumption I articulated in the introduction, I would like to re- iterate, method matters. Within collective creation methodology, we can locate a politics that emerges as a consequence of the economies constructed and the ethics posed by contemporary groups. Through both economy and ethics, contemporary groups display the everyday, with the economic cycles, gestures, speeds, and veloci- ties contained therein, in a light of awareness and attentiveness. They do not stage the political as ideology readily consumed by an audience, but as a process of resisting everyday stasis through transformation, though creative and imaginative adaptation to given conditions. This suggests that we might redefine “the political” in perfor- mance in conversation with methodology, not as content mapped onto process or performance, but as a quality inherent in method itself. Re-shaping our conceptions of “political” to include method as both mean-making and relevant within the broad scope of performance scholarship, is a project with CONCLUSION 182 wide reaching consequences. While I have intimated a politics through example, it is a politics that still eludes engagement with important theories and requires future research. Hannah Arendt’s writings on labor, action, and work, for example, might help to shape future projects, as well as Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political. Schmitt claims that ethics and economy are antithetical to politics, and threaten to drain the political of the antagonism central to its efficacy.323 Putting the political, with its connections to both economies and ethics intact, in dialogue with Schmitt’s objections might well aid the development of a more precise, and more universally applicable, abstraction. Politics is also, as Paul Virilio reminds us, increasingly tied to the expressions and experiences of speed that make up our access to information and chart the dy- namics by which we define systems of government. Virilio discusses speed in relation to performance on a global scale, enacted militaristically as our tools of war, and our consumption of images of war, develop at pace with our technology capacity. But speeds and velocities, like democracy, have small-scale manifestations that are nonetheless socially and culturally important. The Slow Food Movement, for exam- ple, suggests that within our most sensual and individualized acts of consumption, we have the opportunity to experience and to live according to a (slow) speed-based philosophy of life. The related Slow Internet Movement, a product of the so-called hipster culture in the Northwest United States, reimagines the benefits of returning to dial-up internet as part of the coffee house experience, in place of fast and readily available WiFi. These movements are only two examples of ways in which speeds form the apex of current social questions—within coffee houses, at the dinner table, or in the nearly-invisible process of making experimental collectively created performance. 323Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (1932; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). CONCLUSION 183 These movements also remind us that speed is relative: “slow internet” occurs in com- parison to the fastest technology available, rather than to no internet at all. “Slow food” is a process of consumption designed to heighten the consumer’s awareness of the labor of growing and the sensuality of eating; it also takes place within a single evening out. Like the enactment of power-sharing, which easily tip into mythologized practices and idealized claims touting the absence of hierarchy, pacing is subjective. Perhaps, as we examine the contemporary work of Goat Island, Elevator Repair Ser- vice, and Nature Theater, we can recognize relativity and subjectivity as inherent aspects of their methods and aesthetics. This is part of a necessary tension: collab- oration, as they stage it and live it, has no smooth edges, nor do the properties and consequences of awareness and attention. For this reason, the politics of making per- formance, the politics of method, continually shift to reflect changing contexts. These politics are, in every context, windows into process as both reflective and responsive to existing environments. 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