PERFORMANCE, FAILURE, REPETITION, AND EPHEMERALITY

“With its focus on the body and its creation of meaning through the open-ended relationship between artists and spectators, performance art shows us that identities and subjectivities are always in construction and are situated in a person’s particular circumstances rather than universally applicable to everyone. Performance art ties identity to the material body and its differences, rather than abstract notions of the human” (Micu 24). 

Much of the work you will see in these 94 experiments is tied to performance as what Taylor posits “is the expression of human experience“ (Performance 76). She suggests that performance is “a wide ranging and difficult practice to define [which] holds many, at times conflicting, meanings and possibilities” (6), often becoming “radically unstable” (36), and that - through these instabilities - we can find the potential for greater transformation. In this sense, performance acknowledges through its very nature that meaning-making and art-creating is complex and multifaceted. Micu states that “[i]n framing something as a performance, distinctions between discrete categories often become blurry” (6). It is this blurriness which allows us to stop seeing things as “either this or that way …. one way or the other” (Enya) and to open up the breadth of possibilities that flourish beyond our notions of categorization.

Many of my performances do not exclusively rely on a human audience. Does performance necessitate an audience? In Performance Studies: The Basics (because why not start with the basics?), Andreea S. Micu asks, “[I]f there is nobody there to see a particular behaviour, is it a performance or is it simply ‘being’? Are we performing any social roles when we are alone? And who is the audience for our gender performances when we are not in front of people? One might argue that there is no performance outside the realm of communication, and that realm involves at least two parties” (54-55). I suggest that these parties, however, could be separate parts of oneself. They could be a single being separated only by time, space, or perspective. They could be non-conscious life forms, or elements, which could unknowingly interact with the work. What happens when one performs for the non-human? For the more-than-human? For a past version of one’s self? For an unknown future audience? What happens when we invite others into a community-based social practice? Are they our audience, our collaborators, or both? These are some of the questions with which I attempt to reckon through my experiments.

The presence of an audience will always add some element of live-ness to the work, as an audience reacts in real time to what they are experiencing. With many kinds of performance, “audiences play a significant and active role in giving meaning to the work” (Micu 22). The participation of an audience in a work contributes to the magical unpredictability of a performance piece, where the liveness is heightened by the presence of the human body (or bodies) in all their instabilities, complexities, and messiness. Like life itself, live performance is unpredictable and there is always a possibility of failure. During the early stages of COVID-19 and the lockdowns that ensued in Nova Scotia and elsewhere, I was fascinated by theatre companies trying to create live performances virtually, in many cases in contexts where - from the audience perspective - there was no way to know if a performance was being presented in a live or pre-recorded format. The only way an audience member would be able to know that something was live was if it failed. If there was some technical lag, some video glitch, something recognizably not happening as it should, the liveness would become evident. As theatre-makers working in a virtual, film-like context, they had the opportunity to perfect their work as a fixed item before showing it to a virtual audience. Yet they made the choice to invite in the possibility of failure, for the sake of live-ness.

In the making of these 94 experiments, I have been compelled by technology’s ability to bring appreciation for and value to the nature of live performance. As Philip Auslander discusses in Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, with the advent of technologies that could reproduce live performance (such as film and video), people started thinking about what made the live performance experience distinct from a pre-recorded one (85). In theatre (and in particular, grant-writing for theatre) there are often discussions about why something is a play and not a film. What is it about the piece that requires it to be theatre? What are the reasons that the work is enhanced by being performed live in shared physical or virtual space? By performing for a camera, the work has opportunity for wider audiences, and is able to create live audience reactions in an unknown future, whereas live performance is confined to the present and the memories of those in attendance - though its effects can be extended through other ways such as written, oral, or other forms of recalling. Is performance “the ephemeral and unique live event that happens in real time and then is forever lost” (Micu 48)? Of course, as Taylor suggests, “a photograph or video of a performance is not the performance” (Performance 187). Thus, recorded film, video, and audio art is the reanimated living dead of the live moment: the archive of a visual and/or audio experience that becomes more about the live reaction of a present audience to a past performance than the live experience of a now static pre-recorded performance. In my series of experiments, I’m interested in working with both the live and the recorded performance.

One of the significant elements of liveness is the possibility that it will not go as planned: the possibility for failure. Failure is a key part of my live performance practice. José Esteban Muñoz asks, “Can performance fail and still produce something good in that very failure?” For Muñoz, performance is an instrument that minoritarian subjects - people whose identities mark them as minorities in society - use as a strategy to distance themselves from dominant values and imagine better futures” (Muñoz quoted in Micu 63).  Kathleen Ritter writes of Canadian performance artist Sylvette Babin’s practice, “[t]he possibility of failure — especially failure to achieve the original intent — is key to Babin’s performances and integral to the conditions that she sets out for herself. It is characteristic of the openness and vulnerability that is at the heart of live performance. It is what forces a performer to be present, make decisions on the fly, and to react and adapt to a situation” (120-122). Whether the presence of failure is an intentional component to a piece, an unintentional hazard of liveness, or something else, it has the potential to teach us, both as artists and audiences. 

Live performance involves making a lot of choices. This means that decision-making is a core element of liveness, particularly when things do not go as planned. And decisions can be incredibly difficult things to make. I don’t believe that there is much that is completely certain in life, and “when you’re in a situation of uncertainty that’s causing you pain … [o]ne thing you can do is increase your certainty, and the other thing you can do is increase your tolerance for uncertainty” (Glouberman with Heti 88). Uncertainty has played a constant and significant role in my life. Even if I feel strongly about something, I know there is a chance I am wrong. In my practice, as in my life, I often rely on a little bit of chance and randomness to guide my decisions. To do this is, to me, a way of leaning into the conditions that we are all living in. Whether utilizing randomization techniques such as dice rolls, committing to happenstance and allowing it to guide the direction of a piece, or simply giving space for - and emphasis on - improvisation, this uncertainty forms a significant component of my practice. There is something about uncertainty that fascinates me, and feels most true to life, where the unknown is always around the corner. Chance allows for play, and randomization opens the door for the unexpected. Ultimately, there’s not much we have control over, and there is much to be unsure about in life. In my 94 experiments, I am often creating from the liminal space of uncertainty. 

Repetition is a key component of many forms of performance. Therefore, as Micu suggests, “to perform an action is to repeat or recreate that action” (45). Performance can, in some cases, become performance simply through the act of repetition. However, it’s also true that “embodied performances are never repeated in exactly the same way” (46). As it is reiterated by a single body through time or repeated by different bodies, “repeated behavior is, in some sense, both different and new each time, both represented and transformed, both the same and different, both old and new. This tension between repetition and difference is at the core of performance” (46). Despite being described through these binaries, my interpretation of what Micu is getting at is that performance defies binaries, holding within its form something beyond polarized categories. Yet, “[w]hile for some performance studies scholars, repetition is what defines performance, for others, performance is precisely that which cannot be repeated” (48). This ephemerality speaks again to the “forever lost” state of live performance which exists in the present moment - the singular now - and thus is non-commodifiable, which is a real treat in a late-stage capitalist society where few things remain that have not been commodified.  Furthermore, “performance, as acts of intervention, can interrupt the circuits of the cultural industries that create products for consumption” (Taylor 51). Whether on personal, cultural, societal, or political levels, performance intervenes. It considers, and it transforms. Thus performance, through its ephemerality, its repetition, and its disruptiveness, can be a force for change.

The ephemerality of performance makes it the most honest of art forms. Rather than pretending that something will last forever, that by using “archival” materials we can extend the life of an artwork in a meaningful way, or that one’s work can ever stay preserved in perpetuity, performance reminds us that the present moment is the only state of being we can truly rely on. The past is a memory, the future is a dream, but where we are now holds the most significance and is the only space from which we can act. This now-ness is at the core of performance and is what I find the most profound about the medium. I’ve noticed humans have the tendency to worry about their impact on the world once they are dead - using monuments and plaques, legacies and descendants as a way to imagine themselves still being resonant in a world without them. It is something which I regularly think about as well. Yet what length of time will satisfy us? To be remembered in our lifetime? To be remembered by our children and grandchildren? Do we want our work to resonate for a few hundred years? More? The further out one zooms, the more laughable it seems. What is enough? Humanity, this recent and brief species (geologically speaking), often bent on taking down so many other life forms in the name of progress (or rather, desire for individual wealth), is anchored to the now. Even looking back a mere 2000 years leaves us mainly with gaps and guesses, blurriness and interpretations. Do we imagine that in 2000 years from now, the vast proliferation of media and artwork created by the eight billion or so of us alive today will be remembered? At this point many of us are just concerned that there will still be a planet habitable by humans at that point. But perhaps I’m getting off track. That happens.  “Am I falling into a depression again / or is this desolation / a realistic response / to the current state of the world” (Goulet 60)? The current state of the world is the same thing as the now that we find ourselves in. It is the live global moment, containing within it vast worlds of complexity and nuance, more multifaceted than anything I can hope to ever be able to comprehend. Does the acknowledgement of a “now” that is precarious in so many ways bring more significance to the actions that we take? Bringhurst and Zwicky argue that “if we accept climate change as inescapable, and everything that this weighty recognition implies for us in this moment, then the question becomes “how do you want to spend today?”(30). And of course, “in performance, context is all“ (Taylor Performance 149). By considering this larger present context when creating ephemeral work, while knowing that I can never fully understand it, I hope to acknowledge the real ephemerality of human beings as a species, and our current moment as fleeting and precious.

EMBODIMENT, IDENTITY, QUEERNESS, AND THE JOURNEY

(WHO I AM IS DEPENDENT ON MY BODY 

IT IS NOT FIXED 

MY BODY IS NOT FIXED

MY IDENTITY IS NOT FIXED

MY BRAIN IS AT THE MERCY OF MY BODY

MY BRAIN IS MY BODY

AND THE BODY IS NOT A BINARY)