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By Richard Schechner<\/strong><\/p>\n 196 pp. London and New York: Routledge<\/strong><\/p>\n Reviewed by Don Rubin<\/strong> [1]<\/sup><\/a> (Canada)<\/p>\n In the often solitudinous worlds of Theatre and Theatre Scholarship there is a giant figure of a man who has made an unusually impressive international footprint in both fields of endeavor. I am speaking, of course, of the American Richard Schechner, director and editor, intellectual and theatrical provocateur, distinguished professor at New York University. A past winner of the IATC\u2019s Thalia Award for his influential writings on theatre, his work\u2014especially in the area of \u201cperformance studies\u201d (a discipline he basically invented)\u2014also tends to polarize many in both professions.<\/p>\n That is to say, whether you are a working theatre scholar or simply a theatre worker, you tend either to love the culturally wide-ranging Schechner or you tend to hate his theoretical and visionary ramblings. Few in these two theatre worlds are neutral towards him. But whatever one\u2019s position, it is certainly clear that he has made both sides think about both performance and the \u201cperformative\u201d in new ways.<\/p>\n And hopefully both communities will be reading this latest book by the great Ship of State himself, Performed Imaginaries, <\/em>a collection of essays from the last decade or two. It\u2019s a summing up of sorts for Schechner, a working out of his own legacy. Now approaching 80, he is trying to separate the useful in his work from the not so useful. Unsettled by a world still filled with ongoing wars, by the events of 9\/11 as well as by violence and real blood in the aesthetic theatre, Schechner is seeking here to come to grips with both his own ongoingness as conscience to the world\u2019s theatrical avant-garde as well as his role as godfather to those deeply into Performance Studies.<\/p>\n Schechner has been pushing since the 1980s for a new way of thinking and seeing the performative. He calls in one essay for a \u201cThird World\u201d of \u201cartists, activists, and scholars\u201d who can be united by \u201ca mode of inquiry \u2026 a sense of being other.\u201d In case you are not sure who this Third World really is he tells us directly that in a sense it is all of us who write about the art though \u201cthe vanguard of this New Third World \u2026 are performance theorists and artists, who practice collaborative performance research, persons who know that playing deeply is a way of finding and embodying new knowledge, renewing energy, and relating on a performance rather than ideological basis.\u201d<\/p>\n In the six essays published in this volume, Schechner is wrestling with his most continuing utopian visions. The pieces range from the long and anthropological (a 60 page monster called \u201cThe Ramlila of Ramnagar\u201d) to three pieces looking at the world through a variety of avant-garde lenses. He also looks at the events of 9\/11 as symbolic art and at the work of several recent artists who have chosen to shed their own blood in both public and semi-private performances (ranging from someone who has a bullet shot through his arm to a woman who sews a condom-covered plastic icon of Jesus into her own vulva). There is as well a long 2009 interview with Schechner which covers many of the same ideas in a less formal way.<\/p>\n Not that Schechner\u2019s style is ever really formal (it may be complex and overly self-referential but it is always relaxed and surprisingly accessible). A charming and perceptive writer, he does with ease what very few of his followers seem interested in doing at all: communicating with his audience.<\/p>\n In his essay \u201cThe Conservative Avant-Garde,\u201d he argues\u2014jargon free\u2014that the internet has changed the fundamental rules of the game for artists. \u201cWhat we have today,\u201d he says, \u201cis a triangular \u2026 tension among the avant-garde, the mainstream, and the social media. Works of a particular kind can and do show up under any of these categories, sometimes sliding easily from one to the other.\u201d Terming the traditional theatrical experimenters \u201cniche-garde\u201d because their styles of experiment are now simply well-known brands, \u201ca tradition replete with identifiable styles, themes and lineages\u2026. In the reperformances of the niche-garde, the audacity of the original gives over to the nostalgia of the repeat.\u201d His neat conclusion? \u201cThe avant-garde no longer lives in the future.\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n Schechner is very open about how his own ideas have changed. In a long 2009 interview here (revised in 2014), he recalls the kind of theatrical work he did through the 1960s and 1970s. \u201cWe took \u2018authority\u2019\u2014the power of being the author\u2014away from the playwright and gave it to the directors, actors, designers \u2026 the people there doing the work. Even to the audience\u2026. Later on, I retreated from such a radical and total rejection of the playwright. I staged plays according to the principles of environmental theatre\u2026 But I did these plays in ways they had not been done before. I very radically changed how these plays looked, how they were experienced\u2014maybe, even what they meant.\u201d<\/p>\n Perhaps Schechner\u2019s most insightful essay is \u201c9\/11 as Avant-Garde Art?\u201d which looks at the terror attacks of 9\/11 as a \u201cperformance\u201d planned, rehearsed, staged, and intended \u201cboth to wound the USA materially and to affect and infect the imagination\u2026. A performance surely, but,\u201d he asks, is it \u201cart?\u201d Putting on his historian\u2019s hat, he suggests that the attacks were in a direct line of succession from Futurist, anarchist and other avant-garde manifestos and actions. \u201cTo those opposing Al-Qaeda,\u201d he adds, \u201c9\/11 was \u2018bad art\u2019 in the ethical and moral sense. It was \u2018illegal Art\u2019 from the point of view of international law because it targeted civilians\u2026.\u201d But he brilliantly concludes that \u201cLooked at in these ways\u2014as event, shock, avant-garde, art, tragedy and\/or vengeance\u20149\/11 performs Artaud\u2019s uncanny assertion from the 1938 essay \u2018No More Masterpieces\u2019:<\/p>\n \u2018We are not free. And they sky can still fall on our heads. And the theatre has been created to teach us that first of all.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Schechner continues to be disturbed by the state of the avant-garde in his essay on \u201cblood\u201d in performance, \u201cSelf-Inflicted Wounds: Art, Ritual, Popular Culture.\u201d He links those working in this way as \u201cthrowbacks, archaic more than avant-garde, recuperating sacrificial violence and sacred terror. In performing their ordeals, they share with audiences something akin to initiation rites, mystical experiences, and sacrifice.\u201d<\/p>\n He then asks if this kind of art is really acceptable in \u201ccivilized\u201d society and if not, why not? His conclusion is open-ended. \u201cAt the level of performance theory, these acts test the limits of representation. They are non-mimetic. Real blood is really flowing, the performers are not pretending \u2026 in the kind of blood performances I am discussing \u2026 a Rubicon was crossed more than a half-century ago by the Vienna Actionists \u2026 it is not stage blood that [Ron] Athey and Franko B. shed; those aren\u2019t fake labia that [Rocio] Boliver is putting a thick needle through; that is ORLAN\u2019s face being opened surgically \u2026 blood art and body modification confronts theory with a dilemma\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhen someone actually cuts, pierces, or sews herself, when real blood flows, when the performance persona is the person himself and not a fictional character, what is going on?… if a person wants to sew up her labia, then let her\u2014I can accept that, up to a point. The point being deciding when a person actually has the agency she is presumed to have, even the agency she claims she has. But if an artist\u2019s claim of having made an independent judgment is to be questioned, who has the wisdom or presumption to decide for or against the artist? Does one by purchasing a ticket or attending a performance endorse the acts performed?… I cannot at present work myself out of this dilemma: I am on both sides of the question.\u201d<\/p>\n That is to say, Schechner admits sometimes he doesn\u2019t know. True wisdom. He even admits that sometimes his creation\u2014Performance Studies\u2014is simply one more lens by which societies and groups and individuals can be understood and that it doesn\u2019t have answers for everything.<\/p>\n \u201cAs I theorize it,\u201d says Schechner, \u201csomething \u2018is\u2019 performance when, according to the conventions, common usages, and\/or traditions of a specific culture or social unit at a given historical time, an action or event is called a \u2018performance\u2019\u2026. Over the past seventy-five years (at least) what performance \u2018is\u2019 has been stretched, tested and expanded. This expansion was first driven by the avant-garde and by interactions between non-Western and Western cultures. Later, the expansion was also driven by the internet, with a resulting blurring of boundaries between the actual and the virtual, between so-called \u2018art\u2019 and so-called life.\u201d<\/p>\n In his concluding essay, \u201cPoints of Contact Revisited,\u201d Schechner recalls that in his earlier writings he defined performance as a \u201cbroad spectrum of activities, ranging from ritual and play \u2026 to popular entertainments, celebrations, activities of everyday life, business, medicine, and the aesthetic genres of theatre, dance and music \u2026 each had qualities that could be effectively analyzed \u2018as\u2019 performance while what \u2018is\u2019 performance\u2014a much more limited domain\u2014could only be determined within specific cultural contexts located within specific points or ranges of time.\u201d<\/p>\n His major addition to this earlier position seems now to be a growing sense that performance is more than anything \u201ctwice-behaved behavior, restored behavior \u2026 a broad spectrum of entertainments, arts, rituals politics, economics, and person-to-person interactions.\u201d At root is his belief\u2014still the bedrock of Performance Studies\u2014that \u201ceverything and anything can be studied \u2018as\u2019 performance.\u201d<\/p>\n Which is to say that it is the descriptions and analyses of one\u2019s own experiences that are more important in this field than judgements. For Schechner, the role of the performance analyst is to be an intermediary between different worlds, and specifically to \u201cfoster actual and respectful communication\u201d between what we traditionally think of as the world of artists (as Schechner puts it poetically, \u201cthose possessed by the orishas\u201d) and the world of all the others, up to and including the arcane world of sub-atomic particles such as the Higgs Bosun (as Schechner puts it, \u201cthose possessed by the Large Hadron Collider.\u201d)<\/p>\n In the end, an important series of public musings for all of us in the theatre communications business.<\/a><\/p>\n
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