Chapter 4 Performance in its historical context Performance’s new orientation The new interest that developed in “performance studies” during the 1970s was much involved, as the previous chapters have noted, with exploring the concept of “performance” in the social sciences and considered the theo- retical implications of that concept. Two other important aspects of performance studies were more closely related to traditional theatre studies, although in emphasizing physical activity and embodiment rather than the presentation of a literary text (the traditional concern of theatre studies) performance studies opened up different material for study as well as providing new critical tools for this work. Part II of this book will present an overview of these two more theatrically oriented aspects of performance studies, the first dealing with historical and the second with more contemporary work. Even though many of the avant-garde theatre artists of the past century looked (as did avant-garde experimenters in the other arts) to popular and folk forms for inspiration, theatre scholars for the most part continued to neglect such forms even while elevating the avant-garde tradi- tion to a central place in histories of the art. With a few exceptions, most notably the commedia dell’arte, folk and popular forms were sacrificed to the literary and high culture bias of traditional theatre studies. Performance studies, on the contrary, emphasized such folk and popular material, even (some critics of performance studies have asserted) to the neglect of traditional theatre. Thus an alternative historical theatre tradition was made available, based not upon the staging of literary texts, often not even upon mimesis, but on the display of the active body. This chapter will briefly outline the shape of that alternative tradition. In the contemporary world, the rise of performance studies in the academy was paralleled by the rise of a new genre in the art and theatre world called “performance” or “performance art,” which, like the historical study of performance, placed emphasis upon the present body instead of on the absent text of tradi- tional theatre. The development of this new orientation in theatre and art will be the subject of Chapter 5. When this modern “performance” or “performance art” began to be recognized during the 1970s as an artistic mode in its own right, it naturally84 The art of performance began to stimulate an array of secondary material. First came reviews and studies of individual performances, then more general studies of the new approach and attempts to place it within contemporary culture and an historical tradition, even though the protean nature of performance, a char- acteristic of such work from the very beginning, made the task of chroni- clers, commentators and source seekers a difficult one. RoseLee Goldberg, who wrote the first history of “performance” in 1979' and issued a revised and expanded history of “performance art” in 19887 observed that this phe- nomenon “defies precise or easy definition beyond the simple declaration that it is live art by artists.” Goldberg argues that the nutability of such art results from its iconoclastic focus: “The history of performance art in the twentieth century is the history of a permissive, open-ended medium with endless variables, executed by artists impatient with the limitations of more established art forms.”* The avant-garde tradition In the course of her book Goldberg traces this history of revolt and experi- mentation, beginning with futurism, then proceeding to experimental theatre of the Russian Revolution, dada and surrealism, the Bauhaus, Cage and Cun- ningham, happenings, Anna Halprin and the new dance, Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni, and Joseph Beuys, and to body art and madern performance. Except for the more recent manifestations this history is essentially the history of twentieth-century avant-garde theatre, and historians and theorists of performance art have generally followed Goldberg in viewing it withi that tradition, So the authors of Performance: Texts and Contexts (1993) remark that performance art “belongs in the traditions of the avant-garde,” and trace its heritage from futurism through dada, surrealism, happenings and the poem-paintings of Norman Bluhm and Frank O'Hara.’ This heritage clearly influences the authors’ proposed “definition” of performance art. Though they admit that such works “vary widely,” they rather boldly assert that “all share a number of common characteristics” (emphasis mine). These are:° (1) an antiestablishment, provocative, unconventional, often assaultive interventionist or performance stance; (2) opposition to culture’s com- modification of art; (3) a multimedia texture, drawing for its materials not only upon the live bodies of the performers but upon media images, television monitors, projected images, visual images, film, poetry, autobiographical material, narrative, dance, architecture, and ; (4) an interest in the principles of collage, assemblage, and simultaneity; (5) an interest in using “found” as well as “made” mate ials; (6) heavy reliance upon unusual juxtapositions of incongruou: seemingly unrelated images; (7) an interest in the theories of play that we discussed earlier [Huizenga and Caillois], including parody, joke, breaking of rules, and whimsical or strident disruption of surfaces; and (8) open-endedness or undecidability of form.Performance in its historical context 85 Although this is in fact a very useful categorization of a number of fre- quent characteristics of modern performance art, obviously not all perform- ance art shares all these characteristics. Moreover, in Goldberg as well as in others who have followed her model these characteristics are so heavily weighted toward an avant-garde orientation that they are very likely to distort a reader's idea not only of what has been included in modern performance art, but also of how that art is related to performance history. When, for example, Performance discusses Whoopi Goldberg, one of four “performance artists” analyzed in some detail in this book, only passing mention is made of Whoopi Goldberg’s similarity to Ruth Draper, the great monologue artist of the 1930s and 1940s,° and the monologue tradition in which Draper worked is not considered at all even though the futurist, dadaist “background” of modern performance art is carefully traced following the model established by RoseLee Goldberg It could surely be argued, however, that the now standard “experimen- tal” genealogy leading from the futurists through dada and surrealism to the happenings and then to modern performance art is much less relevant to the work of a performer like Whoopi Goldberg than the great twentieth- century monologue tradition in America, including such great women artists as Beatrice Herford, Marjorie Moffett, and especially Draper. It is unquestionably correct to trace a relationship between much modern performance art and the avant-garde tradition in twentieth-century art and theatre, since much performance art has been created and continues to operate within that context. However, to concentrate largely or exclusively upon the avant-garde aspect of modern performance art, as most writers on the subject have done, can limit understanding both of the social function- ing of such art today, and also of how it relates to other performance activ- ity of the past. Therefore, before looking at the relationship of modern performance to the avant-garde tradition let us consider, at least briefly, some of its relationships to other and much older performance activities. Despite her emphasis upon the close relationship between the avant- garde and performance art in the twentieth century, RoseLee Goldberg in her very brief remarks on performance in earlier periods does cite a few examples that might at first seem quite unrelated to performance as she subsequently chronicles it: medieval passion plays, a 1598 mock naval battle, royal entries, and elaborate court spectacles designed by da Vinci in 1490 and Bernini in 1638. Performance in these examples is clearly not based on a concern about “the limitations of existing artistic forms,” and nor does it involve, as much modern performance does, the physical pres- ence of the artist. What it does provide, argues Goldberg, is “a presence for the artist in society,” a presence that can be variously “esoteric, shamanistic, instructive, provocative or entertaining