Performance Studies Notes

Performance Studies Notes #1: Overview + Coco Fusco

06.17.2002 Performance Studies
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Performance studies marked itself between theater and anthropology. Produced interesting theoretical and practical work. Theater has been a lens to look at other phenomena. (political interactions) Choreography of social interactions—soundscape or musical composition of everyday life. Not just theater as lens. Social choreography in Northern Ireland—political parades, funerals, in connection with Irish dance. Bodies moved [...]

Tagged as: Coco Fusco

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Performance Studies Notes #2: J.L. Austin

06.18.2002 Performance Studies
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J.L. Austin How to do Things with Words, 1962 J.L. Austin (1911-1960 in England, lectures delivered at Harvard) Performance theory deemphasized dramatic textuality and language, so performativity in performance studies is a return to the linguistic—resistant to the notion of text and theater—words spoken in a very particular context. Austin attacks the view that the [...]

Tagged as: J.L. Austin, Performance Studies

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Performance Studies Notes #3: Peggy Phelan

06.18.2002 Performance Studies
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Phelan, Peggy. 1993. “The ontology of performance: representation without reproduction” in Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, Routledge: London and New York. “Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations ofrepresentations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance” [146] Phelan’s first [...]

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Performance Studies Notes #4: Judith Butler

06.18.2002 Performance Studies
4 of 11 in Performance Studies Notes

Judith Butler Butler puts Austin in terms that are provocative. Butler thinks that every constative is somehow performative. It’s a girl! obviously inaugurates a series of acts that creates the girl. Policing acts are put into place in this way. The point is to try to always to remark the political aberrations that are already [...]

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Performance Studies Notes #5: Carmelita Tropicana

06.18.2002 Performance Studies
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Carmalita Tropicana–what is she doing in terms of acting technique. Theatrical, political, and linguistic techniques that come into play in performance studies. Activism is theatrical and theater is activist. How did she become a performance arts… 5000… construction… arteest… manifesto of performance art… (shorthair, she’s shorts Laurie Anderson. Live artist. Hlly Hughes: in the costumes [...]

Tagged as: Carmelita Tropicana

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Performance Studies Notes #6: Interculturalism + Nietzsche

06.19.2002 Performance Studies
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Multiculturalism vs. Interculturalism: Interculturalism tends to be talked about by practitioners in the 1970’s and 1980’s—continues to have a lot of relevance but—Interculturalism: strategies of arts and political activists have changes radically in the last couple of years. Political strategies moved from “melting pot” to privilege notions of diversity. National culture: unified through diversity… troubling [...]

Tagged as: Nietzsche

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Performance Studies Notes #7: Public & Street Performance

06.20.2002 Performance Studies
7 of 11 in Performance Studies Notes

Street Performance post-9/11, the public spaces were used to process trauma. How productive politically and psychologically are these performances for the processing of trauma. Very few street performers are women. Women get heckled and harassed. Vessel, performance group. Use of space: from a scenographic perspective Every space is over-determined space with layers and layers of [...]

Tagged as: Ilê Aiyê, Master Lee, Ngũgĩ

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Performance Studies Notes #8: Bakhtin & the Carnivalesque

06.24.2002 Performance Studies
8 of 11 in Performance Studies Notes

Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975)* Notion of Carnival—literary phenomenon that has a relationship to the spectacle, multiplicity of languages. Term came from Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his World. Rabelais’ draws its energies from the historic practices of carnival which preceded and surrounded it in Renaissance Europe. Carnival rituals are utopian irruption into the workaday world, a time of [...]

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Performance Studies Notes #9: Marti Gras Indians

06.24.2002 Performance Studies
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George Lipsitz // Mardi Gras Indians: Carnival and Counter-Narrative in Black New Orleans Lipsitz refers to many of the ironies of the Marti Gras Indians. Storytelling is the heart of the carnival… they should be questioned and celebrated… Indians talk about literal “in the blood” relationships to African Americans… It juxtaposes African and Native American [...]

Tagged as: Alan Lomax, Carnivalesque, George Lipsitz, Mardi Gras Indians

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Performance Studies Notes #11: ACT UP/OUT

06.25.2002 Performance Studies
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Aestheticizing political issues: does it degrade them? Susan Sontag Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors http://www.susansontag.com/SusanSontag/books/illnessAsMetaphor.shtml She had cancer & wrote about her own experience , drew on moments in history in which certain diseases are metaphors for other things. We must take analysis out of the illness—she wrote AIDS in its Metaphors.. [...]

Tagged as: ACT UP, Susan Sontag

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