PADM 9 (2) pp.

363–368 Intellect Limited 2013

International Journal of Performance Arts & Digital Media

Volume 9 Number 2
© 2013 Intellect Ltd Reviews. English language. doi: 10.1386/padm.9.2.363_5

Reviews

Performance Perspectives: A Critical Introduction,

Jonathan Pitches and Sita Popat (eds) (2011)
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 244 pp.,
ISBN: 978-0230243453, p/bk, £18.99/$31.00/ 22.49

Reviewed by Andrew Head, University of Hull – Scarborough Campus

A perhaps unintentional consequence of recent

modifications to the mechanism by which
research output (at least in UK-based univer-
sities) is weighed, valued and consequently
funded has been a subtle reassessment of
the status of the undergraduate textbook as a
measure of ‘fresh insights, effectively shared’.
In the cynical world of the UK’s Research
Excellence Framework (REF) submissions and
‘Impact Statements’ it would seem that one
of the vital functions of the academic profes-
sion is, potentially, becoming overlooked in
terms of its significance within the univer-
sity community. The important, close peda-
gogical interface of mind and subject, student
and academic, is surely high on the list of key
intellectual exchanges which really matter, and it is in the form of the under-
graduate textbook that this kind of exchange is formalized, assembled and
re-presented.
With this in mind, Pitches’ and Popat’s co-edited volume is a welcome
contribution to the field and, in the finest tradition of research-led dialogues
that so often define our exchanges in the seminar room or performance
studio, their stewardship over a rich assembly of ideas and contexts should

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be warmly commended. The delivery of undergraduate courses in Drama,

Theatre or Performance has changed markedly since the early 1960s. In
response to critical and philosophical shifts in thinking around and across
the three disciplines, the articulation of ‘Performance’ as a discreet as well as
flexible, or ‘slippery’ term has required innovative pedagogical responses in
order to accommodate Richard Schechner’s ‘new paradigm’. This book rises to
that challenge in the way that it reflects those levels of innovation and appli-
cation found across the sector in which the separate but intertwined commu-
nities of industry, scholarship and creativity find common ground within an
academic setting.
What is immediately noteworthy about this book is its overall tone. From
the start, Mick Wallis’s foreword and Pitches’ introduction set out a clear
editorial approach for the book whereby the readers’ (specifically, under-
graduate students) experience is placed solidly at the heart of its rationale.
It is a tone that refuses to condescend but which is mindful of its respon-
sibility to address multiple viewpoints and diverse practices in a way that
sustains an accessible engagement for the reader. As an interactive text in
which the reader is invited to ‘to make maps of what is going on […] and
then to generate further maps and narratives as models or engines for future
projects’ (xvii) this onus is gently asserted and what follows is an elegant
structure that unfolds, rather like an intricate piece of origami, from a central
core to a more distant plane.
Framed by Pitches’ own introduction and epilogue, the heart of the book
is a collection of six chapters that move progressively and outwardly, but also
independently. Starting with the fundamentals of corporeal existence (Body)
these early chapters can be seen initially as a nod towards classical aesthetic
models. A second chapter on ‘Space’ is then followed by ‘Time’ before
the debates widen out to consider Technology, Interactivity and, finally,
Organization. In doing so, the book’s structure places a conscious empha-
sis on the inter-connected nature of all six of these categories; however, as
Pitches points out, there is a further distinction to be made between the mate-
rials of performance (Body, Space, Time and Technology) in contrast to the
conditions in which they sit (Interactivity and Organization).
Within each of these chapters the concentricity of the overall structure
is complemented internally with an approach to content wherein a strong
editorial voice sets out and summarizes key concepts and theoretical posi-
tions as well as introducing significant examples of performance prac-
tices that consciously seek to work with or manipulate the topic area under
consideration. The nature and quality of this latter engagement differs
across the chapters: whether it be in the form of the conversation/interview
(e.g., Tony  Gardner and Gregg Whelan – ‘Time’, Alice O’Grady and Matt
Adams – ‘Interactivity’); artist testimony (Wendy Houston – ‘Body’); or spec-
tator testimony (Sita Popat  –‘Technology’), the reader is guided carefully
from sometimes abstracted but rigorously ordered theoretical constructs to
the often chaotic and asymmetrical nature of real-world art-making prac-
tices. It is this consistent approach to the documentation of practice –
whereby the measured and accessible description of a performance work is
given equal value compared with accompanying theoretical analyses – that
provides the reader with not only a useful sense of perspective, but also
an introduction to a body of performance work that might not be accessi-
ble elsewhere. In this regard, Popat’s account (SwanQuake House: A personal
experience) of Igloo’s evocative site-specific work is an analytically austere but

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nonetheless valuable exercise in the use of subjective experience as the basis

for critical writing. In contrast, Gardner’s conversation with Gregg Whelan of
Lone Twin on their durational performance practices is a keystone section in his
chapter on Time, whereby the critical and philosophical concerns of the acad-
emy begin to merge almost seamlessly with the pre-occupations of the artist
in such a way as to accentuate their separate but inter-connected trajectories.
It is richly satisfying to eavesdrop on a dialogue in which two diverse perspec-
tives on an abstracted concept find common ground through the medium of
performance. It is perhaps at this point in the book that the editors’ objectives
become realized.
Throughout, the reader is encouraged to actively generate their own
connections with the structure of the book and linear readings are neither
privileged nor devalued. In much the same way as spectators (spect-actors
or, indeed, inter-actors) negotiate their own engagement with contemporary
performance, an engagement that is characterized by an often embodied inter-
action, through varying time frames, mixed realities and within networked
communities of practice; thus readers are provided with an active or user-
centred approach to this book that affirms its status as collage. As Pitches
points out in his closing epilogue, perhaps a more useful analogue in which
to view these six topic areas is through the intertwined and overlapping petals
of a flower rather than the apparently hierarchical and isolating model of
concentric circles.
The section on ‘Organization’, situated as the final main chapter, in
many ways provides the reader with a vital anchoring point for the book
as a whole. It is rare for a volume that claims to collate a varied range of
critical responses to the slippery and contested field of performance to create
a platform for the traditionally separate worlds of art and aesthetics along-
side industry and entrepreneurship. However, as Ralph Brown points out in
his piece ‘Performance, culture, industry’, it is the new generation of artist-
entrepreneurs who have shuffled off the mantle of ‘eccentric creative’, locked
in mortal combat with a stifling corporate machine, in order that they may
sustain a creative relationship with the practice of performance-making
that advocates an agile, responsive and artist/audience-centred approach to
organization and creativity. Described as one of the chapters that partly deals
with the conditions for performance, it is this section that will be welcomed
by university academics as well as undergraduate students looking to forge
careers in the creative industries which are as much informed by an aware-
ness of the politics of organization and entrepreneurship as they are by an
understanding of the aesthetics of performance. We might indeed have seen
a shift away from the adversarial relationship advocated by B. Kershaw (1992)
in which relations between oppositional practice and the status quo are char-
acterized by a strategic choice between a radicalized resistance to dominant
ideological discourses versus a kind of Faustian ‘debilitating incorporation’
into the mainstream.
Brown seems keen to point out that the terms of engagement have
shifted. A user-centred, user-generated approach to art-making practices in
the twenty-first century, driven by technology and the Internet, has neces-
sitated a more nimble and flexible approach to the ways in which artists and
companies navigate the economics of production and distribution as much
as they negotiate the more traditional contract of performer and spectator.
Readers of this book may be pleased to discover that the inmates are firmly in
the process of taking over the asylum.

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Reference
Kershaw, B. (1992), The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural
Intervention, London: Routledge.
E-mail: a.head@hull.ac.uk

Second Nature: Origins and Originality in Arts, Science,

And New Media, Rolf Hughes and Jenny Sundén (eds) (2011)
Stockholm: Axl, 248 pp.,
ISBN: 978-9197859882, p/bk, £18.00/$28.00/ 21.28

Reviewed by Sue Thomas, Independent scholar

Nature is increasingly fashionable in the digital

realm. It seems that the further we go from
the physical world, the more we stop to look
back over our shoulders and ponder over what
we may have missed. But of course it is not
an either-or choice. After all, only the purist
would say that nature does not include tech-
nology, and in such conditions we would find
ourselves with precious little left – no bower
birds’ nests built solely for the visual pleasure
of potential female partners, no honeyed sticks
for monkeys to use to poke ants from their
hiding places, no nuclear reactors….
The American poet Gary Snyder came up
with a useful double definition of nature. One
he says, is the outdoors –

the physical world, including all living things. Nature by this definition
is a norm of the world that is apart from the features or products of civi-
lization and human will. The machine, the artifact, the devised, or the
extraordinary (like a two-headed calf) is spoken of as ‘unnatural’.
(Snyder 1990: 8)

His other, and preferred, meaning is much broader, taking the first, adding to it
the products of human action and intention, and calling it ‘the material world
or its collective objects and phenomena’. ‘As an agency’, writes Snyder,

nature is defined as the creative and regulative physical power which is

conceived of as operating in the material world and as the immediate
cause of all its phenomena. Science and some sorts of mysticism rightly
propose that everything is natural. By these lights there is nothing
unnatural about New York City, or toxic wastes, or atomic energy, and
nothing – by definition – that we do or experience in life is ‘unnatural’.
(1990: 8)

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In this timely volume, Rolf Hughes and Jenny Sundén take the debate a
step further with a discussion of ‘second nature’. ‘Historically’, they write,
‘the notion of “second nature” has assumed a distinction between nature
and culture – that is, between the pre-existing (animal, vegetable, mineral)
and the wrought (language, images, spectacle, sound and performance)’ (4).
These two seem at first to mirror Snyder’s pair of definitions but, if I under-
stand them correctly, the differential lies not so much in the provenance of
the constructed artefact or idea itself as in what they call its connotation of
alterity, ‘second nature as a step away from a supposedly more natural original
nature’ [original emphasis] (5). This sets the scene for an intriguing collec-
tion of essays whose point of departure is an appreciation that ‘nature and the
natural are always already artificial, yet neither immaterial nor lacking a force
of its own’ (24).
The collection comprises a foreword by Jay David Bolter, followed by
the editors’ very useful introduction, then ten essays covering a broad range
of time periods and topics starting off in sixteenth-century Europe with
John Monk’s analysis of the analogical links between different disciplines
and schools of thought as they strive to answer the question ‘What is life?’
He takes us through eighteenth-century electrical experiments with Torpedo
fish, nineteenth-century investigations into animal electricity, and a number
of other attempts to settle upon suitable analogies for the phenomenon we
call life. Next, Boo Chapple presents a fascinating account of her residency at
Symbiotica, an art and science collaborative research laboratory in the School
of Anatomy and Human Biology at the University of Western Australia,
where she created works using cow bones as audio transducers and collagen
extracted from rats’ tails. Gruesome-sounding, perhaps, but, as she says, ‘a
residency at Symbiotica is one in which both art life and bio(techno)logical
life are called into question’ (76). Ron Broglio continues the animal theme
with a piece about the history of cattle-breeding and animal husbandry. From
the nineteenth-century Durham White Ox to modern genetic modification
and cloning, he makes the point that today we have still not come to grips
with issues of interiority. We continue to ignore the ‘animal-in-itself’ (98).
Maria Chatzichristodoulou gives an account of presence and absence in the
network. She describes Wirefire, a piece of ‘performance/software/netart’
by Entropy8Zuper! that explores the experience of bodily desire in virtual,
networked encounters. As a participant for two years we observe her inside
knowledge of the intense dynamics of what she calls the ‘presence–absence
dialectic’. Distanced now from the project by time, she concludes with her
fading memories of certain Wirefire encounters that resulted in shared body-
scapes where, she quotes Stelarc, ‘here and there, you and me, (were) mean-
ingless distinctions…’. Jenny Sundén examines reproductive technologies
through the lens of techno-corporeality and posthuman feminism as she
describes S575 NoelleTM, a wireless maternal and neonatal computer interac-
tive simulation system. As a birthing machine for the instruction of student
midwives and doctors, Noelle is unable to move away from being flat on its
back. It is, writes Sundén, ‘a prime simulatory performance of female passiv-
ity for trans-national trade and training’(149). Karen Wagner takes a different
approach to reproduction with an analysis of the discourse around gene tech-
nology epitomized in GenoChoice, a parodic web artwork by Virgil Wong. The
site is itself a next-nature artwork. In the next essay, Lapointe and Époque
analyse the use of genetic algorithms (GA) and evolutionary algorithms
(EA) in choreography. Describing their experiments, they conclude that their

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hypothesis could also be applied to other fields of art. ‘What we present’, they
write, ‘is merely a framework for truly becoming post-human artists’ (191).
Timothy Weaver takes us in a different direction with an essay on applied
biomimetics, a design innovation inspired by nature and built on the idea of
copying, or mimicking, natural patterns and behaviours. Acknowledging the
need to examine manifestations of biomimesis in relation to traditional and
post-traditional ecological contexts, Weaver emphasizes the need for a critical
framework for this new field. In the penultimate essay, Rolf Hughes looks at
processes and definitions, and a discussion of William Burroughs’ DNA leads
to a debate about the iconography of Donald Duck and thence to Aristotle,
Agamben and Tallis. But Hughes concludes that the pursuit and critique of
origins is in the end less compelling than the creation of new knowledge and
the creation of ‘the difference that makes the difference’ (230).
The final essay, by Eugene Thacker, comes to the crux of the matter. ‘The
threshold of our understanding is not between human and animal’, he writes,
‘but rather between humanity and animality’ (243). The question of animality
is to ask, for example, what would it be like ‘to be a pack, a swarm, or a flock’,
an attempt to unearth those ‘topologies or patterns that effortlessly cut across
species’ (243). This question is, I think, what drives the ‘next nature’ line of
enquiry. It is not exactly about empathy, but something rather more objec-
tive, an attempt to find out where we fit.
Biologist E. O. Wilson became conscious of this dilemma in the 1960s
when he was studying ants in the forests of Surinam. One day, going about
his usual work, he was suddenly struck with a very deep sense of being part
of the greater whole. He realized that the forest and all the life forms around
him were carrying on their lives in rhythms of which he was not part. ‘The
uncounted products of evolution were gathered there for purposes having
nothing to do with me; their long Cenozoic history was enciphered into a
genetic code I could not understand’ (Wilson 1984: 6) he wrote later. But
far from being afraid, he found the realization – as humans we are in fact
‘transients of no consequence’ on our own planet – unexpectedly calming.
He understood that the living world may be our natural domain, but it had
already evolved for millions of years before we came on the scene. Because we
have never been able to fathom its limits, this ignorance has led to a perpetual
sense of wonder which can only grow over time because the more we learn,
the more mystery we encounter. The ensuing catalytic reaction, which he
believes may be genetically driven, creates a loop which ‘draws us perpetually
forward in a search for new places and new life’ (9). It is this process of attrac-
tion, forever renewing itself, which he would later call ‘biophilia’. This term
was originally coined by Erich Fromm to denote a psychological orientation
towards nature, but it has come to be more closely associated with Wilson’s
hypothesis.
Every essay in this book is threaded with animality and tinged with
biophilia. I found it informative, discursive, and a controversial addition to any
transdisciplinary bookshelf.

References
Snyder, G. (1990), The Practice of the Wild, San Francisco: North Point Press.
Wilson, E. O. (1984), Biophilia, Kindle, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
E-mail: sue.suethomas@gmail.com

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