View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Queen Mary Research Online Livegraphy performance art, language, and the multiplicity of sense Easton, Léonore The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the author For additional information about this publication click this link. https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/jspui/handle/123456789/501 Information about this research object was correct at the time of download; we occasionally make corrections to records, please therefore check the published record when citing. For more information contact [email protected] LIVEGRAPHY Performance Art, Language, and the Multiplicity of Sense Léonore Easton Queen Mary, University of London PhD 2 Abstract This thesis is constructed in three parts. Each one of them offers a reflection on the common ideas disseminated about Live Art, conceptual dance and postdramatic theatre, i.e. that these practices reject the notion of mimesis as it is supposed to represent reality, they reject text in favour of a phenomenological language and they produce a form of non-sense1 which should be translated into meaning. Each of these statements will be problematized. I will argue that Live Art is producing mimesis even if it works against representation and although its actions are performed for real. It does not represent reality, but neither does it present the Real. It is producing a version of the "Real", which is the definition of mimesis. I will then argue that if these practices create a phenomenological language, it relies on a form of writing that is being produced live by the work. Finally, I will propose that the non-sense constructed by this writing process should not be forced into a meaning, but should be read as a fluid linguistics, which in some instances will be concretely a linguistics of fluids. By this I intend to point out that the meaning of the constructed non-sense will never be fixed nor unique. The work only becomes meaningful because it remains permeable to meanings. These three steps all participate in the "undoing of meaning"; relying on a process involving destruction within construction to then allow reconstruction. Mimesis, logos and sense need to be taken apart before these concepts can be thought anew. It is the rigidity of the conventional systems of apprehension which has to become permeable to allow a fluid multiplicity of meanings. In conclusion I will draw some parallels between performance art and feminism in their appropriation of the concept of mimesis and their approach to language outside the structure of logos and I will suggest that the performances which explore and expose these concepts adopt a feminist philosophical strategy. 1 I chose to use this spelling closer to the French spelling of “non-sens”, which does not have in French the colloquial use it has in English and is more directly related to the philosophical concept. The hyphenated word better translates the idea of a reverse image of the word “sense”. 3 Acknowledgments This research was supported financially by both The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and L‟Université de Lausanne (UNIL) 4 Table of Contents Introduction p. 5 1. Against Logos : Similarities between Live Art, Not-dance and Postdramatic Theatre p. 35 Part I 2. Mimesis p. 61 3. Sensuous Apprehension p. 81 End of Part I p. 97 Part II 4. Writing and Performance p. 100 5. Non-Sense p. 122 6. Livegraphy p. 142 End of Part II p. 161 Part III 7. The “Linguistics of Fluids” p. 163 8. The Materiality of Voice p. 187 End of Part III p. 207 Conclusion p. 209 Bibliography p. 219 DVD Three performances – practice as research 5 Introduction Since the 1990s a range of contemporary performance practices has emerged that is distinguished by a shared interest in the relationship between the body and language. These practices, and here I include my own, are distinct from earlier practices which they sometimes resemble, like, for example, body art of the 1970s. They cross over various existing categorisations, such as Live Art, not-dance or postdramatic theatre. This thesis seeks to identify these practices and to show how they collectively suggest an approach to language and the body that is different from (even if sometimes similar to) more familiar approaches, which have a tendency to represent such work as non-mimetic, non-textual. One pervasive characteristic often attributed to or claimed by performance art, and what is referred to as Live Art, is to be against any kind of representation, against mimesis, thus placing it in opposition to theatre. The theoretical discourses of RoseLee Goldberg,2 Lois Keidan3 and Adrian Heathfield,4 among others, highlight this particular feature of performance art and Live Art as an element which defines them. Similarly regarding the discussion on not-dance where, for example, André Lepecki5 and Johannes Birringer6 both define it as non-representational. Chapter 2 “[Practitioners attracted to performance art] all believed in an art of action – in creating work in which the audience was confronted by the physical presence of the artist in real time – and in an art form which ceased to exist the moment the performance was over.” RoseLee Goldberg, Performance: Live Art since the 60s, (London: Thames and Hundson, 1998), p.15. Referring to the influence performance art had on theatre she writes: “The avant-garde art world of the 1960s was a strong magnet for those in theatre seeking a break from the psychological approach both to the audience and to acting that had been prevalent in the „50s. […] It was clear that this new performance-art theater had nothing whatsoever to do with even the most basic theatrical concerns: no script, no text, no narrative, no director, and especially no actors.” Goldberg, Performance: Live Art since the 60s, p.64.. 3 “Influenced at one extreme by late 20th century Performance Art methodologies where fine artists, in a rejection of objects and markets, turned to their body as the site and material of their practice, and at the other by enquiries where artists broke the traditions of the circumstance and expectations of theatre […] Live Art is a generative force: to destroy pretence, to create sensory immersion, to shock, to break apart traditions of representation, to open different kinds of engagement with meaning. […] Live Art is about immediacy and reality […].” Lois Keidan, www.thisisliveart.co.uk/about_us/what_is_live_art.html [accessed 2009] 4 “The drive to the live has long been the critical concern of performance and Live Art where the embodied event has been employed as a generative force: to shock, to destroy pretence, to break apart traditions of representation, to foreground the experiential, to open different kinds of engagement with meaning, to activate audiences.” Adrian Heathfield, “Alive”, in LIVE: Art and Performance, ed. by A. Heathfield, (London: Tate Publishing, 2004), p.7. 5 “One prevalent concern – particularly significant to the question I would like to tackle in this chapter, that is, the question of a dance that initiates a critique of representation by insisting on the still, on the slow […] – is the interrogation of choreography‟s political ontology. […] The critique of representation is one of the main characteristics of early twentieth-century experimental performance, theatre and 6 One expands on this, giving more details on how not-dance carries forward some features developed by the Judson Church post-modern dance movement, which also claimed to be against any form of representation, as explained by Sally Banes. This characteristic of being against representation generates a tendency to reject text, since text is considered as dictating representation. In this sense, theatrical interpretation is made to look secondary and the rejection of text is seen as a way to give prevalence to the actual performance. Chapter Four raises the issues surrounding the paradigm of text versus performance as identified by W.B. Worthen and attempts to resolve them, such as Hans-Thies Lehmann‟s by broadening of the notion of text to encompass the whole theatre experience. For Lehmann, postdramatic theatre is no longer at the service of the written text, but text may still be embedded in the whole as part of its multiple layers of textualities. The paradigm in which text and performance are opposed to one another derives partly from Artaud, whose claim in his manifesto “The Theatre of Cruelty” that theatre should distance itself from the predominance of text has mainly been read as establishing an opposition between body and language.7 In Chapter Four I reaffirm that Artaud‟s relation to text within the theatre is more paradoxical and problematic than a simple dichotomy opposing body to language. Even if Artaud‟s manifesto goes beyond this dichotomy, it has been taken for granted and recuperated as a model for practices, like performance art, which define themselves in reaction to a traditional theatre of representation. In discourses about performance art and body art it is frequently the dance […].” André Lepecki, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the politics of movement, (New York & London: Routledge, 2006), p.45. 6 “[…] the politically progressive Konzepttanz experimentalists know how to examine the medium of dance, to lay bare the mechanics of the production process and negate its aesthetic modes of representation.” Johannes Birringer, “Dance and Not Dance” in Performing Arts Journal, 80, (2005), 10-27 (p.21). 7 For example, Edward Scheer writes that “Artaud sees actors as brutalised by representation and advises them to hang on to the moment through an „inner force‟ which „sustains‟ them and by which they rejoin „that which survives forms and produces their continuation‟.