The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance

Paul Allain, Jen Harvie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317698197
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

What is theatre?

What is performance?

What connects them and how are they different?

What events, people, practices and ideas have shaped theatre and performance in the twentieth and twenty-first century?

The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance offers some answers to these big questions. It provides an analytical, informative and engaging introduction to important people, companies, events, concepts and practices that have defined the complementary fields of theatre and performance studies. This fully updated second edition contains three easy to use alphabetized sections including over 120 revised entries on topics and people ranging from performance artist Ron Athey, to directors Vsevold Meyerhold and Robert Wilson, megamusicals, postdramatic theatre and documentation. Each entry includes crucial historical and contextual information, extensive cross-referencing, detailed analysis and an annotated bibliography.

The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance is a perfect reference guide for the keen student.

Part I

PEOPLE AND COMPANIES

ABRAMOVIĆ, MARINA (SERBIAN PERFORMANCE ARTIST/TEACHER, 1946–)

Calling herself the grandmother of performance art, since the 1970s Abramović has been making work that is intimate, physically and emotionally exposing, dangerous, and which extrapolates such practices of everyday life as walking, screaming and simply being to explore their latent power. In work that bears some resemblance to that of fellow body artists Orlan and Stelarc, she has pushed the limits of her body’s endurance, art practice, and the relationship between performer and audience, consistently investigating the social responsibilities of art, artist and audience.

Some of her earliest work was probably the most dangerous because it invited not only audience participation but potential violence as well. In Rhythm 0 (1974), she invited her audience to do what they wanted to her using a selection of seventy-two available objects, ranging from the relatively benign (a feather, lipstick, honey), to the potentially harmful (matches, scissors, knives, a whip, a saw, an axe), to the potentially lethal (a bullet, a gun). Concerned spectators halted the performance after six hours, by which point all of Abramović’s clothes had been cut off, she had been painted, cleaned, cut and decorated, and a loaded gun had been held to her head. As Richard Schechner’s Performance Group discovered in Dionysus in 69 (1968–69), breaking conventional performer/audience boundaries can produce exciting, unexpected outcomes, but it can also expose the performer to uncontrollable risks.

In subsequent performances, Abramović reduced her audience’s potentially sadistic access to her, but she continued to explore the limits of her endurance as well as her own masochism, her audience’s relationship to it, and the powers of endurance to transform herself and her audiences, physically, emotionally and psychically. Throughout 1975, she performed several body art pieces that tested physical limits: screaming until she lost her voice in Freeing the Voice; running repeatedly into a wall until she collapsed in Interruption in Space; and using a razor to cut a five-pointed star into her stomach, whipping herself, and lying on a cross of ice for thirty minutes in Lips of Thomas. Clearly these works staged violent physical transformations, but they also explored the potential for these somewhat ritualized acts to effect less visible psychic transformation, both for Abramović as performer and for her audience as witness.

From 1976 to 1988, in one of contemporary art’s most famous long-term collaborations, Abramović continued to test the limits of endurance with her partner, the East German artist known as Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen). After a long series of works that continued to explore the endurance of pain, the couple shifted to making pieces that required them more obviously to endure time. In Night Sea Crossing (1981), performed in various locations around the world, they sat still, silent, and without eating, facing each other across a table for seven to twelve hours at a time over several days. The culmination of their collaborative endurance art was The Lovers: Walk on the Great Wall (1988, China). Over ninety days, she walked approximately 2,500 kilometres from the eastern end of the wall, he from the western end, to meet in the middle, where they ended their relationship. Here, they staged endurance in time and space, literally and metaphorically enacting their journey/life together as at once shared, separate and separating.

In the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, Abramović continues to make durational work but often with a much more explicitly social reference than in her earlier work. Balkan Baroque (1997) referred directly to the ethnic cleansing of then-recent wars in her homeland. The installation juxtaposed a triptych of videos showing her parents and herself, three copper vessels, and a pile of 1,500 beef bones. For six hours a day over five days she sat on the bones and scrubbed them with disinfectant. As in her earlier work, Abramović’s enactment explored physical and emotional pain as well as feelings of shame, using video to contextualize her live actions and religious references to suggest confession and the potential of forgiveness. Again, Balkan Baroque challenged her audience to witness and take responsibility for the violence she committed against herself. In a shift from the predominantly personal references of her earlier work, however, Balkan Baroque also challenged her audience to take responsibility for the larger political contexts to which it referred.

In 2002, she performed The House with the Ocean View, living without talking or eating for twelve days in a New York gallery installation of three exposed rooms elevated 1.5m above the floor and ‘approached’ only by ladders with butchers’ knives for rungs. (The piece gained notoriety not least because it featured in the popular HBO television programme Sex and the City in 2003.) Audiences were asked to keep silent but to participate in what Abramović called an ‘energy dialogue’, in which she engaged the gaze of individual audience members one at a time. At the end of the work, she explained that it was a response to the events of 11 September 2001, and was dedicated to the people of New York. Again, she used personally depriving durational work to stage presence as well as personal and social contemplation, reflection and – possibly – transformation. She reiterated these features of intense performer/audience presence and engagement in the very high-profile 2010 retrospective of her work, The Artist Is Present at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art – MoMA’s very first retrospective on performance. Here, daily for three months, for a total of 700 hours, she sat at a table with individual gallery visitors sitting across from her, one by one, engaging her gaze.

While Abramović’s media, strategies and profile may have shifted over the years, she has remained relentlessly committed to exploring art and performance as means for expressing and encountering violence and pain, as media for challenging the limits of conventional performer/audience – or human – boundaries and possibilities of communication, and as ritual acts that can effect personal and social psychic transformation. In the twenty-first century, she has formalized her commitment to preserving and documenting live and durational art. In 2005, she presented Seven Easy Pieces at New York’s prestigious Guggenheim Museum, in which she re-enacted her own and others’ live artworks principally from the 1960s and 1970s. In 2013, she founded the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI) which will open a large premises in Hudson, New York in 2015 dedicated to presenting and preserving long durational art work. This ‘institutionalization’ of live art and of Abramović herself coincides with her ascendance as an icon of live art: she was the focus of Robert Wilson’s spectacular show The Life and Death of Marina Abramović presented at the Manchester International Festival in 2011. It also coincides with her approach to pop cultural household-name status: in 2013, she collaborated with the likes of pop musicians Lady Gaga and Jay-Z who supported her crowd-funding campaign to raise funds for MAI.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abramović’s Artist Body briefly describes her works, illustrates them with photos and provides commentary and biography. Richards’ book is a detailed illustrated review of Abramović’s career. Goldberg and Warr’s books provide useful context. Iles’s book collects several critical articles and is extensively illustrated. The collection, edited by Orrell, documents plans for the MAI premises and Seven Easy Pieces (2005).

Abramović, Marina (1998) Artist Body: Performances 1969–1998, Milan: Charta.

—— (2003) Marina Abramović: The House with the Ocean View, Milan: Charta.

—— and Dobrila De Negri (1998) Performing Body, Milan: Charta.

—— Germano Celant and Sergio Troisi (2001) Public Body, Milan: Charta.

Goldberg, RoseLee (1998) Performance: Live Art Since the 60s, London: Thames and Hudson.

Iles, Chrissie (ed.) (1995) Marina Abramović: Objects, Performance, Video, Sound, Oxford: Museum of Modern Art.

Orrell, Paula (ed.) (2010) Marina Abramović + the Future of Performance Art, Munich, London and New York: Prestel Verlag.

Richards, Mary (2010) Marina Abramović, Abingdon: Routledge.

Warr, Tracey (ed.), survey by Amelia Jones (2000) The Artist’s Body, London: Phaidon.

ANDERSON, LAURIE (AMERICAN MULTIMEDIA PERFORMANCE ARTIST/COMPOSER/MUSICIAN/WRITER/VISUAL ARTIST/FILMMAKER, 1947–)

Laurie Anderson works across a range of media to tell stories in which she observes society and makes social critiques – gently and with humour, but pointedly. She consistently challenges performance’s conventional forms, combining and juxtaposing its media to make theatre/concerts, ‘talking books’ and technological body art. She rejects realism to produce dreamlike disembodied voices, androgynous bodies, large-scale, surreal stage pictures, and postmodern non-linear series of observations, thereby provoking her audiences to look and listen anew. From within her strange but generally calm, even languid, performances, she subtly explores themes of power, gender relations, communication and technological development, often focusing on apparent social contradictions such as her own impulses to be both private (for example, to whisper) and public (to perform), and American culture’s simultaneous propensity for both puritanism and violence.

Although her initial training was in sculpture, Anderson quickly shifted into performance art when she began incorporating sound and herself into her work. In the happening Duets on Ice (1974–75), performed in a variety of public settings, Anderson wore skates embedded in blocks of ice and, until the ice melted, she ran her bow over her self-playing violin, which was fitted with a speaker to play recordings of cowboy songs. Minimalist works like this explored properties of sound, time, site-specificity, balance and contrast, and challenged the autonomy of the art object and artist by opening the piece up to chance and outside influences, like John Cage’s 4′ 33″. It also deliberately placed Anderson outside of the institutions and economies of fine art. Although her subsequent work moved indoors and onstage and took on a larger scale and more technology, it retained the surprise of her early work because it pioneered multimedia performance, combining live performance, video and slide projections, synthesized music, and amplified and/or sonically altered monologues. Her stock of signature eerie and disembodied sounds includes her own voice, deepened an octave, slowed and amplified through a vocoder to produce what she has called ‘the voice of authority’ (subversively mimicking a male voice). Along with sound, her performances characteristically distort space (especially scale), often by placing her as the tiny and lone live performer in an oversized suit on a large stage dominated by outsized furniture or gigantic rear-projected silhouettes or videos. Through sonic and spatial juxtapositions like this, Anderson happily explores technology’s pleasures and potentials but she does not sell out to it, because she simultaneously scrutinizes its dominance over humans, especially in contemporary American culture. She also explores the performativity of identity, speaking and appearing as male and female, human and cyborg. And she simultaneously exploits and challenges the apparent value of liveness by technologically mediating her own performance.

Anderson’s ongoing sonic and spatial experiments further indicate her dedication to exploring new ways of communicating with audiences. While her early small gallery exhibitions and handmade books used intimacy and contact to effect communication, subsequent live shows such as Songs and Stories from Moby Dick (1999) use altered instruments, songs such as ‘O Superman’ (1981) tap into popular music markets, and her internet and CD-ROM work uses electronic and cyberspatial interactivity (for example, the CD-ROM Puppet Motel, 1994). Her foray into popular musical performance probably garnered her biggest audience but nevertheless remained experimental. ‘O Superman’, which she first performed in an early version of the performance United States (1980), reached the Number 2 spot in British pop music charts but was – atypically for the charts – eight minutes long. Her dual commitment to experimentation and communication has led her to collaborate with some of the twentieth century’s most famous innovative artists. For example, she has produced sound for choreographer Trisha Brown’s Set and Reset (1983), Robert Wilson’s production of Alcestis (1986) and Robert Lepage’s solo show The Far Side of the Moon (2000), and she has co-written songs about their respective superpower nations with dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei (2013).

Much of her earliest work was predominantly autobiographical and often explicitly feminist. Throughout her work, Anderson advocates the expression of personal feelings, dreams and aspirations even as she appraises society (for example, American politics and culture from the era of Reagan to that of George W. Bush). Although, as she claims in Stories from the Nerve Bible, she ‘ran out of stories’ and switched from talking about ‘I’ to talking about ‘you’, her work maintains an ethereal, dreamlike quality and intimacy (see psy...