In contemporary theatre we often here the question ‘what constitutes a performance?’ and ‘how must we define it?’
Erving Goffman, cited in Performance Studies: an Introduction, defines performance as “all the activity of a given participant on a given occasion which serves to influence in any way of the other participants” (Schechner 2002, p. 29). A performance can be a variety of things, such as playing a sport, putting on a show, simply carrying out a daily routine or ritual, and even having sex can be categorised as a performance. It is essentially something you aim to succeed in, an action to be carried out in front of an audience. It may be durational or last for only a short period of time. Many performance theorists argue that everyday life is performance as “at present, there is hardly any human activity that is not a performance for someone somewhere” (Schechner 2002, p. 40), whether it may be someone getting dressed or making their journey to work. These everyday routines can be classed as ‘restored behaviour’ because they are actions which will have being repeated more than once during your life time, as a result performances that consist of actions within a daily routine may be more interesting to an audience as they recognise them as their everyday life . What is interesting is that though all of it is considered artistic what may be performance to one person could perhaps not be thought as performance to another.
In relation to this, in class we undertook an experiment that when it was first described to us what we were to take part in, generally most of us did not think it could be branded as performance. We first talked about Marina Abramovic’s performance The Artist is Present, where every day for three months, she sat for seven and a half hours on a chair, staring into the eyes of audience members who sat opposite her staring back. Below is a video of this performance:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS0Tg0IjCp4#t=62
(MiticoMazz 2012)
Throughout the process she was present and completely focused on the person sat opposite her. Being so motionless made her as a performer more vulnerable to the audience, there was no barrier between them, just herself. For Abramovic it was a strong form of communication, it was able to bring up emotions that might not have been unexplored or supressed in the audience members and also Abramovic herself. To investigate this theory, we undertook an experiment that closely resembled her performance. We were told to take a chair and sit opposite someone, creating two rows in the middle of the room. We were then told that for 10 minutes we had to stare back at the person opposite us, emotionless. Those 10 minutes, for me personally, dragged for what appeared to be a very long time. I had cleared my mind of anything so I was completely present and I just stared back completely still. Once the time was up we were told to stay where we were, to everyone’s dismay, and that this experiment was going to last for another hour and a half. No time was given to absorb the shock; instead we had to focus back on the person opposite us. If those first 10 minutes felt like hours, the next hour and a half felt like a life time. Being able to completely focus yourself on one person for a short amount of time was not too hard, but as the time goes on your mind starts to wander, there appears to be a limit of how long you can keep it blank. You start to run things through your head such as shopping lists or something that you are worried about. The person sat opposite me was very successful in this experiment, they did not move or fidget once, and because of such deep concentration there became a very powerful atmosphere between us. I on the other hand found it very difficult, focusing so hard caused my eyes to tear up and strain. It became physically painful and tiring to keep them open. On a few occasions I felt myself fall to sleep as I just couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer.
For me, this may not have worked as well as Marina Abramovic’s because there were many of us in the same room undertaking the same experiment. Or maybe it was because we hadn’t prepared ourselves for something so intense. What at first glance appeared to be such a simple and motionless task was actually unbelievably physically and emotionally challenging. Such results will come in use when thinking about what other tasks we could experiment with.
Works cited
MiticoMazz (2012) Marina Abramovic e Ulay – MoMA 2010 [Online Video] Available from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS0Tg0IjCp4#t=62 [Accessed 9 November 2013]
Schechner, R (2002) Performance Studies: an Introduction (2nd Ed.), London and New York: Routledge