"I've been writing on this subject
and for those interested append some stuff below. For those not interested,
press your delete button now."
I'm extremely interested in this debate about performance, as I agree that
it touches upon a craft entirely different to that of the poet's whose
efforts are devoted mainly to the medium of the page.
To say that poetry and performance poetry are interchangeable is a bit like
comparing reading a newspaper to attending a political debate.
Performance itself requires life-long devotion to develop. As a performance
poet, I spend several nights a week rehearsing alone, some days rehearsing
with others (with whom I craft performances) and entirely separate times
writing. Different poems emerge from the rehearsal process which are
sometimes dramatic in form and sometimes not.
Stanislavski's "My life in Art" is a beautiful exposition of the dedication
and purity of heart required of the actor in the studio - which he describes
in reverential terms. Terms which the rehearsal process entirely deserves,
I feel.
To represent a poem in a performance is to re-present it, to make it present
again. This evocation of personal presence is both a spiritual and a
skilled act. It involves both interpretation and personal involvement - as
Simon Callow says " a fusion of the actor and the acted".
This does not necessarily imply that a simple hearted and honest reading
cannot (with enough skill to be audible) count as a performance. Of course
it can. Half the skill of a performer is to learn to "get out of the way"
and let the spirit of the piece emerge. However, as Melvyn Bragg said so
agreably once "It's not simple to be simple". Gods blessings upon those who
can be simple without craft and even more blessings on those who strive for
the art to incarnate with beauty something they or another has written.
But no blessings at all on those who consign performance poetry to the
niche of trendy spectator sport and no blessings either on those who
discount performance as a merely optional adjunct of pagecraft.
Performance poets are not Popup Poets ....... except that this description
already sounds dangerously attractive to a culture besotted with kitch!
There must be a form somewhere with which I could apply for a grant to
become an installation!
Oh where are you now, ancient school of bards? I was born in the wrong
millennium!!
Much love
Sarah de Nordwall
Cabaret Poet!!!
> Original Message-----
> From: [log in to unmask] [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: 07 September 1999 22:22
> To: british-poets
> Subject: RE: Performance(c)
>
> To swerve:
>
> I completely agree with both Billy in that not all poets write for their
> work to be 'sounded'. The idea that all poetry, indeed all writing, is
> benfitted by or intended for reading out loud is as much of a tyrrany as
> we
> might concoct. An 'oral' interpretation *might* or *might not* be
> interesting.
>
> Precisions in respect of oral interpretation provide constraints that can
> be extremely interesting (I'm thinking of the instructions for performance
> given by Jackson MacLow for one example and of his telling me years ago
> with a twinkle in his eye that the welter of instructions for performing
> The Marrying Maiden encouraged indeterminacy through overdetermination).
> And there's no need for a spatialised text to be sounded by one voice in a
> linearity at all - what of the polyphonic fields of sound?
>
> Alison raises the fraught issue of losing useful points of differentiation
> as far performance being a menaingful term is concerned. I share that wish
> to retain its pertinence - its alertness. I've been writing on this
> subject
> and for those interested append some stuff below. For those not
> interested,
> press your delete button now.
>
> love and love
> cris
>
> ____________________________________________
>
> 'Performance', in particular within the emergent field
> of 'performance studies', remains a contested term. [A contested term,
> according to W.B. Gallie's 'Philosophy and the Historical Understanding'
> (1964), involves:
>
> 'Recognition of a given concept as essentially contested implies
> recognition of rival uses of it (such as oneself repudiates) as not only
> logically possible and humanly 'likely', but as of permanent potential
> critical value to one's own use or interpretation of the concept in
> question.' [pp187-88)]
>
> I find Richard Bauman's suggestion [in the International Encyclopedia of
> Communications (Oxford University Press, 1989 ed. Ed Barnouw) (cited by
> Marvin Carlson in his 'Performance: a critical introduction' (Routledge,
> 1996 pp 5)] useful, that:
>
> 'All performance involves a consciousness of doubleness, through which the
> actual execution of an action is placed in mental comparison with a
> potential, an ideal, or a remembered original model of that action . . .
> the double consciousness, not the external observation, is what is most
> central . . . Performance is always performance for someone, some audience
> that recognizes and validates it as performance even when, as is
> occasionally the case, that audience is the self.'
>
> Erving Goffman defines the emergence of performance as
> a process which 'transforms an individual into a stage performer, the
> latter, in turn, being an object that can be looked at in the round and at
> length without offense, and looked to for engaging behaviour, by persons
> in
> an "audience" role'. (p124 Frame Analysis). I find the pejorative use of
> being 'looked to for engaging behaviour' more revealing of a sense of
> 'value' that reeks of rewarding work and of time 'well' spent. But
> Goffman's moment of individual transformation connects powerfully with
> Bauman's 'consciousness of doubleness' to form a re-orientation of
> performance, that brings it firmly into everyday life. Of course that's
> not
> exactly new either. Since the 1960s, in particular, movements in
> 'performance art' have explored both the politics and the poetics of the
> everyday. There has been a vigorous debate, conducted through practice, of
> performance as process and performance as product.[* through what has
> often
> been referred to as non-matrixed or 'task-based' performance] One result
> is
> to particularise differing kinds of performance along Goffman's scale of
> 'purity' (see below), and let each be both discreet and be connected.
> Process and product thus become moments of articulation, as already
> suggested in the examples of photocopying and vocal utterance. Insistence
> as word by word, phrase by phrase, note by note, frame by frame -
> particularisable moment by particularisable moment.
>
> Again, this is not a smokescreen to obscure the
> differences between 'performances'. On the contrary it begins to allow us
> to read the differences, by revealing their specificities. Once the idea
> of
> 'performances' plural, at differing points of engagement within processes
> relating to production and processes relating to consumption of product -
> a detailed dynamic range of arrivals and departures between process and
> product, which can encourage one to unravel into the other and vice versa
> - forms a basis for discussion, it is clear that old hierachies of
> understanding that priveledge the 'live' virtuoso display are necessarily
> challenged.
>
> Goffman goes on to distinguish between performances on
> the basis of what he terms their 'purity', meaning 'according to the
> exclusiveness of the claim of the watchers on the activity they watch'.
> (p125) At the formal end of his purity range he places performances for
> which if there is no audience there is no performance (both within 'arts'
> and 'sports' contexts). At the other end he places "work performances", in
> which 'viewers openly watch persons at work who openly show no regard or
> concern for the dramatic elements of their labor.' (p126) But it's also
> possible within such a scheme, to understand product as becoming process
> through the interpretative transformation, by a performer, of an existing
> composition, at the 'formal' end of Goffman's scale; and by the reverse to
> align process as being product through interpretive transformation of the
> 'witness' at the 'informal' end; vide people stopping on the street to
> watch others who have gathered around a hole that has opened up in the
> ground, and treating those they are watching as "performers", thus turning
> an informal occurrence into a composition.
>
> *
>
> Whilst Goffman wrote such differences up in the 1950s
> and 1960s, contemporary Performance Studies has foregrounded other
> distinctions. The notion of the 'live' has become increasingly
> problematicised. This occurs under another version of the totem of
> 'authenticity', that of ontological integrity. The 'aura' of 'liveness',
> depicted as virtuous, is placed in opposition to the evil of
> mediatization.
> In noting this Philip Auslander argues for a relation of mutual dependence
> and imbrication. For him:
>
> 'The live is, in a sense, only a secondary effect of mediating
> technologies. Prior to the advent of those technologies (e.g. photography,
> telegraphy, phonography) there was no such thing as the "live", for that
> category has meaning only in relation to an opposing possibility. Ancient
> Greek theater, for example, was not live because there was no possibility
> of recording it . . . the "live" has always been defined as that which can
> be recorded.' (perfr * cult stud p 198)
>
> Auslander is careful to make a distinction between 'live' representation,
> such as the voices in Greek theater amplified by architectural means, and
> 'live' repetition, that which is reproduced through 'indirect testimony'.
> His concern is with technological reproduction more than with
> technological
> mediation. But he opens an important line of argument that:
>
> 'nonmatrixed representation provided a beachhead for mediatization within
> artistic practices that resisted mediatization'. (p201)
>
> Using Clint Eastwood's squint, filmed in close-up, as an example of
> nonmatrixed representation, he alerts us to another change in perceptual
> practices. Namely, that audiences have become used to looking for details
> that might previously have passed unnoticed and reading them as
> significant. The importance of this lies in what details an audience might
> then concentrate on, in the context of a 'live' non-mediatized
> performance.
> Also the extent to which such details either are or are not the express
> intention of the performers. That is, audiences might see things that the
> performers are not foregrounding in their performance and bring such
> details to their reading of the performance.
>
>
> *
>
> Writing within a context of contemporary poetics,
> Charles Bernstein points to Goffman's concept of the 'disattend track' as
> of key significance.
>
> [* goffman p 202: 'A significant feature of any strip of activity is the
> capacity of its participants to "disattend" competing events - both in
> fact
> and in appearance']
>
> He suggests that 'focussing attention on a poem's content or form
> typically
> involves putting the audiotext as well as the typography, the look and
> sound of the poem, into the disattend track'. ('Close Listening: Poetry
> and
> the Performed Word' p3 Oxford, May 1998 my emphasis). 'Focus' is an
> omnipresent term in the visually obsessed late twentieth century. It is
> one
> of those words which crosses boundaries between arts and sports and
> sciences, between traditional approaches and those which interrogate
> traditions. Lying in wait, behind the urge to 'focus', is the apprehension
> that too much distraction, and distraction is itself culturally and
> historically specific, can lead to a collapse of the performance 'frame'.
>
> Many contemporary creative writing practitioners are
> engaged with testing the 'frames' of 'performance'; as by including that
> which might have been more conveniently edited out, foregrounding
> extralexical and extrasemantic aspects of 'writing', as well as the
> incidentals of orality (pauses, tonal inflections to pARTs of words,
> stutters, tongue clicks, erms and ums, splutters and so forth [* the poet
> critic Andrew Duncan wrote of the ugliness of such expressions. On the
> contrary they might be read as generosities which render the work more
> humane]. It is precisely those points on the boundaries, or on the frames,
> at which distraction can be seen to be ideologically formed, and at which
> the frame, constructed for absoption, might be induced to collapse, that
> such writers are deliberately at work to reveal. There lies their
> pedagogical intent. Those points at which the 'formal' and 'informal'
> along
> Goffman's scale of purity become interchangeable for the purpose of
> casting
> a provocative reflection. Those moments during a given performance at
> which
> witnesses are unsure as to what is and what is not part of the
> performance.
> Or at which their attention to details has become so challenged that their
> experience is of too much happening, that they can no longer encompass the
> breadth of events, they cannot tell what constitutes distraction, their
> criteria are ruptured and and they are challenged to impose their own
> limitation of interpretations. At such points are 'tastes' and personal
> preferences constructed. Matrices are brought back into the play.
>
>
> end
>
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