E I G H T UNIVERSALS OF PERFORMANCE; OR, AMORTIZING PLAY

Henry James, whose struggle with the theater left performative traces in

the consciousness of his prose, wrote succinctly in one of his prefaces of

the drama as an ado. There is in the brevity of the word an almost

molecular view of performance, like the Freudian fort/da, the child's

game of disappearance and return, played with a spool, in which by the

repetitive deferral of pleasure the reality principle is enjoyed. According

to Freud, the disappearance which is being performed is the departure

of the child's mother. The fortlda is an ado which pivots on an absence.

We know from Shakespeare that it is possible to make, in theater, much

ado about nothing; and we know from Beckett, and Zeami, that it is

possible to perform the seeming absence of an ado as a precise nothing

to be done.

Nothing may come of nothing, but it would also be precise to think

of that replicated nothing as a substantive ado. For there is a crucial

particle of difference-especially where nothing is concerned-between

that and just doing, between just breathing eating sleeping loving and

peiforming those functions of just living; that is, with more or less deliberation,

doing the act of breathing, eating, sleeping, loving, like Didi/

Gogo do the tree in Godot. I t is a difference as distinct as the presence or

absence of punctuation in the previous sentence. The most minimal

performance is a differentiating act: fort (gone)/da (there). It is an act

which introduces (or is introduced by) an element of consciousness in

the function, like "the economic motive"-the yield of pleasure in the

anxiety-of the apparently gratuitous play of Freud's grandson rehearsing

the two-act drama of his wooden reel: the representation of a lack

which is the recovery of a loss. I

What is universal in performance-aside from the ambiguity as to

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which comes first-are the marks of punctuation which are inflections

(or economic indices) of consciousness even in performance which, like

autistic play, speaking in tongues, or Sufi whirling, seems to occur

without it. In those performances which seem more like a raga than a

drama, where the "story" behind it is dispersed, attenuated, or "musicated,"

like the compositions of Steve Reich or Charlemagne Palestine,

or extended over many years like a tribal cycle, you may have to wait

longer to discern it. There seems to me, however, no point in talking

about performance, no less universals of performance, unless you discern

it, although who exactly is doing the discerning-and whether

inside or outside-is so critical an issue in performance that the problem

itself can be considered a universal. To what degree and when the

members of a tribe are aware, in the absence of anthropologists, of the

performative nature of the long space of living between the sacraments,

is a case in point; but we can also see the problem in the most minimal

performance. When, say, Chris Burden announced that he was going to

disappear, and then disappeared, it would have been a quite different

performance if, with no further ado, he simply disappeared without the

announcement, whether or not he returned.

The difference between the ado and just doing would appear to be

self-evident except for the current discourse on performance which,

now refusing, now accepting, more or less obscures the ontological gap

between the actuality of everyday life and the actuality of a performance,

between the ongoing processes of a culture and-with symptoms of

ergotropic behavior: quickened pulse, flaring nostrils, sweat secretion,

eye dilation-the emergence of "dramatic time.,,2 The discourse is inseparable

from the praxis of recent performance which has widened its

parameters to include the activities of everyday life, even while aware of

an opposing tendency: a narrowing asepsis of performance which, by

burning away the signs of ordinary life, seems to widen the ontological

gap. Sometimes the two tendencies are encouraged simultaneously with

no sense of contradiction. We have seen in the strategies of performance

which aspire to Total Theater the desire for more theater and the desire

for less theater, with more or less theatricalized permutations on the

theme of less is more. There appears to be, for instance, in the new

paratheatrical enterprise of Grotowski-what he calls a Theater of

Sources-the somewhat utopian desire to replace the illusion of Total

Theater with the promise of Total Life. Whatever the ontological status

of that quest, we have become attentive in recent years to modes of

Universals of Performance

performance which involve transformations and exchanges in the hereand-

now, more or less ritualized, more or less participatory, more or less

risky and irreversible, more or less "actuals,"s where the doings are ados.

In the study of aboriginal cultures, we have been made aware of the

accretions of everyday life which become, with inflexions of ceremony

but no clear demarcation from just living, occasions of performance.

Conversely, there are accretions of everyday life which are still-in

theater and other cultural practices-felt as impediments to performance.

That accounts in part for the stagings of initiation in ritual process

and, in the marriage of acting craft and spiritual exercises, the stress on

deconditioning, getting rid of the habits, down to the most rudimentary

basis of our actual living. I can hardly think of a technique of performance,

even the most naturalistic, which doesn't reconceive of the

breathing we take for granted as a bodily process to be explored or a

spiritual discipline to be acquired. "Kill the breathing! Kill the rhythm!"

repeats the dancing Master-whether Azuma or Merce Cunninghamtrying

to break the reflexive attachment of the rhythm of respiration,

and thus the movement of the dance, to the measure of the music.4

Whether synchronous or ruptured, the universal movement of performance

is through an equivocating cadence of more or less performance. If

movement, according to The Secret of the Golden Flower, "is only another

name for mastery,,,5 there is nothing named performance which is not,

at the last declension of a shadow's breath, concerned with the degree of

mastery in the movement, and the degree of measure as well.

The Japanese Noh drama, the Tai Chi Ch'uan, the Hevehe cycle of the

Elema in New Guinea, Richard Wagner's or Robert Wilson's operas, a

voodoo ritual or a High Mass seem to require time as the condition for

forgetting it. But how much time, 0 Lord, with timeliness? Take time,

says the director to the actor in a realistic play being rehearsed under an

Equity contract; take time, says the therapist to the patient in an analytical

session which costs sixty dollars an hour. The protraction of time

is in every case, real or illusory, a mode of deconditioning, bringing

performance back to "life." The question always remains, however, as to

how much performance and how long and, in performance as in life, how

much life-and how much apparent or disguised agitation over the

temporality. If you think for an instant about timing in acting, you will

eventually be caught up in a metaphysic. Whether prescribed or felt out,

the determining of time is a universal of performance. It determines in

turn the relations between what seems then familiar and what strange,

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the artificial and the natural, the sense of just being or being someone,

the presentation of a self, a service in time or time-serving, whether

measured by a clock, hypocrisy (the actor's duplicity), or the scruple on

the price of a ticket. That is not only true of theatrical performance. One

may look, as I tend to do, upon a baseball game as the Japanese I\"oh

drama of American culture. I remember the long summer afternoons

with the Bushwicks and the House of David which, even before floodlights

came into the ballpark, seemed hardly subject to time. But once

the networks took over the game, there were two dimensions of time:

one orchestrated with breaks for commercials and the other, when

electronic scoreboards came into the ballpark, a collateral entertainment-

with fireworks, waterfalls, more commercials, and instant replays

on the scene-which is always filling uptime.

Sometimes the accretions of time in everyday life are the accretions of

technique. Aside from the natural tendency to breathe in time to the

music, dancers who had been studying ballet since next to infancy need

to be, when they come to modern dance, saved from the perils of the

barre. Cunningham has always said that he didn't want "steps" in his

technique; Stanislavski did, and didn't. Cunningham, for all his openness,

always shows traces of ballet in his own movement; and Stanislavski,

who was trained in opera at a time when singers were in peril if they

moved, could not entirely have escaped certain reflexes which were, no

doubt, compensated for in the emotional memories of his method. They

were both seeking, through the exactions of technique, forms of natural

movement. It is the distinction, however, between just doing and performing

the doing that made it possible for Stanislavski to say that the

hardest thing for an actor to do on stage, though he has been doing it all

his life, is to walk. It took him time to teach his actors to walk but when

they were deconditioned and started to walk again, he wanted it to seem

as if they were doing it as they had always done.

Doing it as it has always been done seems to be, whether sacred or

profane, a universal of performance, even when it appears to be done as

if for the first time. There has been a serious effort over the last

generation to eliminate the as if, to return performance to unmediated

experience, as with The Living Theater, but with whatever measure of

"truth" or "authenticity" it is at best only appearance. There is nothing

more illusory in performance than the illusion of the unmediated. It can

be a very powerful illusion in the theater, but it is theater, and it is theater,

the truth of illusion, which haunts all performance whether or not it

Universals of Performance

occurs in the theater, where it is more than doubled over. It is, actually,

the unavoidable doubling in life, in a feedback circuit with theater, that

has induced Richard Schechner, after much experiment with actuals

which attempted (more or less) unmediated activity with an emphasis on

the here-and-now, to accede to the "restoration of behavior" which he

now distinguishes as "the main characteristic of performance," from

shamanism and therapy to social drama and aesthetic theater. 6 What

distinguishes the performative ethos of the postmodern-in a time of

recuperation from the illusions of theater-as-life-is not only redoubled

awareness of what is being restored, but an exponential play around the

combinatory sets of stored or past experience which is, since there is

utterly no assurance of an uninterrupted present, all we can make of a

dubious future.

There has been, then, a chastening accession of belatedness in the

dialectic of appearances. And it points to the almost undeniable remembrance

of history that there is something in the nature of theater which

from the very beginning of theater has always resisted being theater. Or "always

already" resisted, as Jacques Derrida might say, if there were no beginning

of theater, and thus no nature but a trace. It is, indeed, the

inevitable reappearance of history in performance which corrects the illusion

of performance that refuses the future of illusion-the reign of

representation-and insists that the theater is life or, if not yet so, that it

must be so. That this insistence can be a historical illusion of apocalyptic

dimensions we have seen in Artaud and can still see in Derrida's essay on

Artaud, "The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation.,,7

If we can imagine, however, a state which is the becoming of theater or

all theater or beyond theater, we can also imagine a state before theater

which would appear to be something other than theater, what we have

sometimes named life, which could not possibly be theater.

For like the sign in a hypothetical simple state, as idea or image or

perception, the theatrical gestus, the signifying element of theater "can

become a sign," as Foucault says, "only on condition that it manifests, in

addition, the relation that links it to what it signifies. It must represent;

but that representation, in turn, must also be represented within it. That

is a condition indispensable to the binary organization of the sign ....

The signifying idea becomes double, since superimposed upon the idea

that is replacing another [the representation within] is also the idea of its

representative power."s Derrida himself has elsewhere pointed out, in

the denial of origins, the origin of doubling: "Representation mingles

166 The Eye of Prey

with what it represents, to the point where one speaks as one writes, one

thinks as if the represented were nothing more than the shadow or

reflection of the representer." Then, in the high melodrama of poststructuralist

theory, which resembles the anxiety over perception in the

Jacobean theater, he speaks of the "dangerous promiscuity and ...

nefarious complicity between the reflection and the reflected which lets

itself be seduced narcissistically. In this play of representation, the point

of origin becomes un graspable .... For what is reflected is split in itself

and not only as an addition to itself of its image. The reflection, the

image, the double, splits what it doubles. The origin of the speculation

becomes a difference. What can look at itself is not one; and the law of

the addition of the origin to its representation, of the thing to its image,

is that one plus one makes at least three."g Which is, at the logocentric

impasse of the Western metaphysical tradition, like performing the Tai

Chi or repeating the Tao which "begot one. lOne begot two. Two begot

three"--out of which arises the created universe, the "ten thousand

things" with their ceaseless play of difference in the exchanges of yin and

yang,IO as if reality were a performance.

The substance of the theatrical in the idea of performance is the critical

question in the act of performance. Nor is it merely a question of the

succession of theatrical forms or modes of performance within those

forms. It has rather to do with the radical critique of representation and,

in the animus of recent thought, an intense distrust of the almost lethal

legacy of a savage god who never meant the theater to reveal itself as

such, nor for representation to show its duplicitous face. The central

figure in this critique, as in the most important theatrical experiment of

the last generation, is Artaud, whose Theater of Cruelty is not a form of

New Theater waiting to be born, but a primordial and juridical power

whose urge, as Derrida shows, is the abolition of representation, which

seals off the division between theater and life as it separates birth from

death. "The void, the place that is empty and waiting for this theater

which has not [as we say] 'begun to exist,' " writes Derrida, "thus measures

only the strange distance which separates us from implacable

necessity, from the present (or rather the contemporary, active) affirmation."

Artaud's theater is not a representation. To the degree that life is

unrepresentable, it is meant to be the equal oflife, "the nonrepresentable

origin of representation ... II

In this mission, the enemy is mimesis, which breeds the lie of humanism,

with its myth of individuation. What we see rather in the image of

Universals of Performance

man is the grotesque offspring of the theater's self-perpetuating enormity:

ego, self, personality, a mere reproductive subject, slave to the ideological

apparatus of reproduction, who must learn to free himself from

false acting by true performance (thus, too, the distinction between the

actor and the performer which has turned up in recent years). So far as

the institution of theater is concerned, if it is ever to be anything except a

part of the apparatus, it must become the designated site of the extermination

of the mimetic. In various zealous, adulterate, radically

innocent, or depleted versions of this thought, innovation and renovation

in the contemporary theater have proceeded. It can obviously be

nothing less than a falling away of thought from the affirmation which,

despite itself, lets itself be evacuated by the doubling and redoubling of a

negation in performance, as if the neural force of representation were

itself the indemnifying Plague. It is the problem that Artaud himself was

never able to resolve, what drove him mad, though he seemed to come at

the finest filament of his nerve-wracked thought as close as humanly

possible to the nonrepresentable origin of performance w here "the true

theater ... is born out of a kind of organized anarchy after philosophical

battles which are the passionate aspect of ... primitive unifications."12

As we become enamored of the unifications which we project upon

"primitive" cultures, we tend to forget that even performances which are

presumed to be outside representation exist within its enclosure. Without

the enclosure, we would find ourselves, so to speak, within a performance

that, whatever it may continue in an uninterrupted present,

had never really begun, since it would only continue as seeming, like a

dream. Denying the enclosure, the "stage edge" of the mise-en-scene of

the unconscious, is to find yourself in Artaud's position, crying out in

dreams, knowing you're dreaming and exerting the will to the point of

madness, whipping your "innateness" so that it might prevail, as Artaud

claimed for himself, on both sides of the dream. It is a noble if manic

ambition. None of us, however, has ever seen a performance which, in

the revulsion against the mimetic, the desire to banish seeming, has not

(the more effective it is) radically increased the quotient of pretense', the

disruption of time by seeming-especially if we have seen it.

As we understand more acutely from the interpretation of dreams,

with their decoys of displacement and secondary revision, it is of the

nature of performance to be seen. (I remember a moment in the presentation

of a Yaqui ritual by the tribal chief-his interpretation of the

Christo Rey ceremony-when he was explaining the origin of the tam168

The Eye of Prey

peleo, the ritual drum. It was part of the saga of his personal creation

myth, and he was very conscious of being studied by those who were

there [all of whom he took to be anthropologists] as he told the story: a

tree was cut, the wood was soaked, and then bent, and soaked some

more, the ends joined. When the drum was sealed, a hole was bored in

the side so the sound could escape, and then another for the emission of

a longer sound and-just as we were forgetting that this version was a

performance-he lifted the drum and looked at us through one of the

holes, demonstrating how the drum might be used as a fixating instrument

of the cruel performing eye. In that look we passed from a

reconstruction of the spirit-world of the huya iniya to the solipsistic world

of post-Genetic performance, where the watchers are watching the

watchers watch .... ) The boundary of performance is a specular boundary,

marked by speculation, the idea of a boundary. So, too, the boundary

of a dream is the condition of the dreamer in the enclosure of sleep

which, admittedly, may blur into the semblance of a waking dream, like

the huya iniya of the Yaquis or like the somnambulistic ambition in the

oneiric performances of Robert Wilson.

So long, however, as there is a performance to be referred to as such it

occurs within a circumference of representation with its tangential,

ecliptic, and encyclical lines of power. What blurs in the immanence of

seeming are the features of that power, which needs to be taken into

account in the current speculation on the state of performance in art and

culture. It is not so much a matter of formalist experiment or behavioral

innovation or ethnological renewal-all of which is taking place-but a

breaking down of the structure of belonging which is, at the same time,

inscribed in the becoming of representations which are, through the

acceleration of cultural exchange, accumulating in a repertoire which is

worldwide. If there is an infusion of energy as cultures cross, it is always

competing with the universal extension of the apparatus of reproduction.

Even as the imagery appears to change, the image-making systems

appear to reflect the implacable and unchangeable image of an imageless

and invisible power. This was a prospect which the theater always

foresaw, from the hallucinations of Cassandra to the fantasies of Genet,

since it was its own living, interminable, and recurring image.

As we think, then, about the future of performance, the questions are

simultaneously technological and metaphysical. It makes no difference

that some performance is far from conceptual and some of it, experimenting

with the abolition of mimesis, next to brainless. The

Universals of Performance

metaphysics comes in, as Artaud and Nietzsche thought, but not always

as they wished, through the skin, into the muscles, epistemically. We

know that Artaud's critique of occidental theater was part of a grander

design for a Final Solution. He wanted to pulverize the contaminated

structure of Western understanding, a contamination which has unfortunately

spread at an alarming rate as we exchange, with whatever

benefits, conceptual diseases with other parts of the world. Most ambitions

in the theater itself, or in other Performance Art, are neither so

rabid nor all-consuming, so venereal as Artaud's. But they are, if tentative

or partial, responses to the same disturbance, at least those that have

any cultural weight. Another villain of the piece, a blood relation of

mimesis, is speech, mark of a theological space of performance where the

primacy of the Logos continues to prevail. It prevails, despite the antiverbal

experiments of the sixties, not merely in the proliferation of

born-again Christians but in the ramified disguises of the Author-Text,

that overpowering absence which unceasingly "regulates the time or the

meaning of representation,"13 not in the intrinsic purity of the actor's

desire but according to the wishes and authority of that anterior force.

The picture has been extensively painted in critical theory, perhaps

over-painted: the idea that we are all in servitude to an interpretation

which gives the illusion of an acting freedom but really comes from

elsewhere. so that what is being performed is, in Artaud's view, the

excrement of another mind.

Any way you look at it-which may be the price of looking-the

theater is the place where nothing is being transacted except what has

been imposed on the disfigured body of thought of an infinite chain of

representation. The missing links of this chain, its structure of disappearance,

wind through the body politic and are strengthened, as

Genet suggested in The Balcony, by the delusions of revolution, which

maintains the chain of servitude intact. We felt something like that after

the sixties (when "the whole world" was "watching"), and it appears to be

no different after every insurrection around the globe. On the stage as

we normally know it, long after the prompter's box disappeared from

view, we still felt a suspect and filthy breath, a vitiating whisper in the

vomitorium. Or there was something in the cellarage or the wings or

muffled in the teasers and tormentors, prescribing the words to be

spoken or the figures of the dance or-even with the representation

musicated or masticated in a participatory theater where dinner is

served-still cooking the stew or calling the tune, like the rather de170

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ranged figure in a theaterwork of my own, The Donner Party, Its Crossing

(whose subject was cannibalism), where the square dance kept turning

and turning in the exhaustive pursuit of a vanishing power. It is against

this power that performance continues to struggle, always coming

round, with no higher aspiration than another reversal of history in the

play of appearances: the liberation of the performer as an actor who,

laminated with appearance, struggles to appear.

By whatever means the actor achieves autonomy-whether through

charisma or flagrancy or transgression of the Text or by sheer power of

apparent understanding (the rarest presence)-the machinery of the

theater quickly disables the appearance and marshals itself around a

space of subversion, so long as there is a performance. 1\'0 seeming

self-denial on the part of an actor, no pretense of immediacy, however

momentarily powerful or time-effacing, can amplify the privileged instant,

for it is only for the instant timeless-and once again the theater

suffuses the truth with its presence, the only presence which is there. It is

then that we realize that approval has been, in our very assent to the

transgression of performance, institutionalized, historicized, on borrowed

time. The theater is a space of amortization. The interest is in the

performance, and there is no performance without interest on a loan

that can never be paid.

What is true of the actor is also true of the regenerative illusion of an

empty space (Peter Brook's term) in which the actor has been seeking

immediacy, usually missing its point. This is all the more true when the

actor goes halfway across the world and rolls out a carpet in an aboriginal

village, presumably to start from scratch, improvisationally, with

elemental stories or something like pure play. No sooner is it looked at

with anything like performance in mind, the empty space is a space of

consciousness, also subject to time, and to the attritions of time, as if

there were nothing but history in the nap. What is thought of as a space

of risk or danger has a relapsable or collapsable edge. The collapse is, if

first into the abyss of wonder (or the exotic), then into the trough of the

commonplace. Even the astonishing quickly becomes-especially in the

world of publicity, adjunct of the image-system (is there another

world?)-a household word.

It is the momentary usurpation of "reality" by the truth of performance

that, like the (cliche) photographic memory it soon becomes,

validates the usurped system theoretically. And it is the system, with its

sense of time (linear or synchronous) which is really the subject of play.

Universals of Performance

It determines the steps or their apparent absence in the dance. It allows

for the propriety of the event, however disturbing or obscene (against

the scene) it may appear to be. The more it appears so by unavoidable

reproduction, the more tautologically assured is the validation. Common

sense tells us that what we experience at a play or other performance is

not so tortuously deceptive as all this, but it is the purpose of common

sense to overcome the real insidiousness of epistemological deceits lest,

in reproducing them mentally-as Hamlet did, or Artaud-we may go

mad. It is the power of Derrida's critique of Foucault on madness that he

demonstrates how even the performance of madness, and its valorizing

discourse, can never move outside the system of speech because "madness

is indeed, especially and generally, silence, stifled speech, within a

caesura and a wound that opens up life as historicity in general," 14 which

prevents madness-the limit of the unmediated-from ever being mad

enough, as we can also see persuasively in King Lear.

To recapitulate: what seems to be confirmed by the pursuit of unmediated

experience through performance is that there is something in

the very nature of performance which, like the repeating spool of the

lortlda (Krapp's extrapolated spoool), implies no first time, no origin, but

only recurrence and reproduction, whether improvised or ritualized,

rehearsed or aleatoric, whether the performance is meant to give the

impression of an unviolated naturalness or the dutiful and hieratic

obedience to a code. That is why a performance seems written even if

there is no Text, for the writing seems imbedded in the conservatism of

the instincts and the linguistic operations of the unconscious. It seems,

moreover, corporeally inscribed, even when there's a performance without

any body, nothing but an absence, like the graffiti on the oncesmooth

body of the only too palpable Ghost.

With all the actable and unactable intricacies of the play within the

play-that palimpsest of performance which breaks down the text in the

image of the Text-Hamlet seems to affirm more than any other play in

the canon that what is universal in performance is the consciousness of performance.

That is nowhere more palpable than at those moments of negative

capability when, after all the rationalizing intemperateness of the

performance, there appears to be a (re)lapse of consciousness and-as if

there were a cultural transference, a metathesis, a genetic crossing of

East and West-there is some respite from the splitting infinitives of

representation (to be or not to be) and only the letting be. When I speak,

therefore, of the consciousness of performance, I am stressing the conThe

Eye of Prey

sciousness in the grain of performance-no outside no inside-which in

certain kinds of performance may appear not to be there but, as in a

topological warp, is there in its appearance, appearing not-to-be.

Even in the resistance to appearance, as in the Verfremdungseffekt

derived by Brecht from Chinese acting, appearance is universal to performance.

What makes it so? Thinking makes it so. Which is to say: the

consciousness of performance. A baby may be performing without consciousness,

or so it appears (Marx insists that the whole history of the

world is in the sensory expression of any moment, and Freud reminds us

that the unconscious is our oldest mental faculty), but what would we

know of performance if the world were full of babies. As with the

disenchantments of the world, so with other states of elapsed consciousness.

It's the falling away from trance, or its doubling in split consciousness,

that makes us aware of trance as performance, as well as the

possibility-engrained in the most skeptical thought of performance, in

performance as a thinking body-that the world may be entranced.

"What, has this thing appeared again tonight?" (Ham., 1.i.21).

Obviously, if it appears there's going to be trouble for the performance.

But if it doesn't appear there will be no performance, or not much worth

mentioning if there is a performance. And that's true I would suppose,

East or West, Or at whatever meridian of performance anywhere in the

world. The thing seems to suggest the almost unnamable form of some

ancestral figure, not only the Hamletic ghost, but the Japanese shite, the

Balinese patih, the shave of the Shona in East-Central Africa, or the God

of Abraham in the Oberammagau Passion Play. Coleridge spoke of the

credibilizing power of the omnibus word thing. Whatever the power is

behind that power-like the power which summons away the Ghost

which came in the Name of the Father-the thing is sufficiently indeterminate

that one feels it has to do with more than the mere physical

presence of a probably improbable ghost, or from what terrestrial direction

the appearance occurs (although in some cultures, true, it won't

appear unless it comes from the right direction, like "The Older Father"

entering the ramada of the Yaquis). What we are anticipating, rather, in

the goings and comings of these ghosts is the ghostliness that moves the

performance. That is universal. Over the long history of performance it

has moved by many names: as Destiny, Providence, Eternal Return,

Oedipus Complex or Viconian Gyre: or as an inspiriting force or influence,

often associated with the breath, such as pneuma, taksu, shahti, hi;

or as some dematerialization of the Text into a fusion of vapor and

Universals of Performance I73

power, like the fiery white letters of the Kabbalah or the smoke from the

shabbath candles that my grandmother, hooded by a napkin, wafted up

her nose in one of the lovelier performances of my childhood; or as the

"complete, sonorous, streaming naked realization,,15 which was, if

Artaud's vision is true, the Orphic writing on the wall behind the Mysteries

of Plato's Cave.

It is to the writing on the wall that, if there is an Eternal Return, the

performance always returns. If it's never quite the same, that's because

there is something mortifying in the mystery. Think again of the space

of amortization. As with the economics of the psyche, it is half in love

with death. Whatever the ghostly thing, there is an abrasion in performance

(the "rub"), some interior resistance to the aboriginal romance of

a pure libidinal flow. That is the real substance of the representational

split which doubles over and over. The splitting occurs, as Freud discerned,

not within the libido alone but, with a kind of activating rigor

mortis, between the libido and death, which solicits and subverts and

precludes representation. It is exactly what goes out of sight that we

most desperately want to see. That's why we find ourselves, at the

uttermost consummation of performance, in the uncanny position of

spectators. It is uncanny because, in some inexplicable way (though Freud

comes uncannily close to explaining it), we are seeing what we saw before.

And that is true not only for those who attend upon the event, spectators

at the start, but for those who become, through the event, participants,

and for those who began as performers, in a kind of reversal of roles. It

is as if, as Artaud says of the power of "true illusion," we are situated

"magically, in real terms . .. between dream and events .. 16-his alternative

to Aristotle's situation of tragedy between philosophy and history. If

repetition is fundamental to performance, it is-after all or to begin

with-death which rejects pure presence and dooms us to repetition. For

Freud, the performance is always already scored in the irreducible

dualism of the drives, although he also saw what Euripides foresaw in

The Bacchae, that presence is not forbidden by some Apollonian power

with whom Dionysus must make his peace; it is always already forbidden

in the Dionysian power itself.

There are two realities meeting, then, at a single vanishing point, life

and death, art and life, the thing itself and its double, which prepares the

ground for performance. I don't want to rehearse all the reasons why we

might think of it as sacred ground, except to say that it is inherent in the

memory imbedded in the ground, like "the uncontrollable mystery on

174 The Eye of Prey

the bestial floor" in Yeats's poem or the Funeral Studio in the brain cell

of Genet's Brothel. Once we think of death as already "at the origin of a

life which can defend itself against death only through an economy of

death, through deferment, repetition, reserve," we may realize how

powerful a force memory is in the life of performance with its intrinsic

secandariness, as it sustains the enigma of a first time. As Derrida explains

in his account of memory as the constituting principle of the psyche in

Freud, it is in the first time-which can only be thought of as a trace of

originary violence and pain, in the contact of life and death-that repetition

has already begun. It was there in the beginning which is always

beginning again.

Whatever course the history of the theater takes afterward, the condition

of theater is an initiatory breach which remembers the primal violence.

That is why Freud-like tragic drama and, so far as I can see,

every major form of theater, with more or less memory of the tragic"

accords a privilege to pain."l7 What we once thought of as catharsis is

an equivocal aversion to an excess of pain which, lest it ruin the psychical

organization, must be deferred, like death, even by those cultures which

extend the deferral through stages (or stagings) of death. We may defer

it by laughter or meditation or random play or trance, or by the dream

of an actual which is a perpetual present, but "Life is already threatened

by the origin of the memory which constitutes it, and by the breaching

which it resists, the effraction which it can contain only be repeating

it.,,18 What is being repeated in the tautological cycle of performancereplay,

reenactment, restoration, the play within the play within-is the

memory of the origin of the memory which is being solicited and resisted.

It is in this recursive way that performance is a testament to a life

which seems to look like death because it is always being left behind.

There are, of course, ceremonial occasions which are joyous, but if

there is in the disappearing space of performance something of a cemetery

too, the wonder is that this world of the dead can tell us as much as it

does about the living. The reason is that it is only in terms of the living

that we imagine the world of the dead. Yet there is a sense in which the

performer is always imagining his own death. He may project it into the

future as another deferral, but it seems to come like memory from

behind, as if it had already happened. That's why, too, there is always

the residue of a lie or a self-deception in the claim of the actor or shaman

or hungan that he is wholly (self)possessed and does not see himself

performing. Shakespeare dwells upon this evasion in the sonnets-a

Universals of Performance 175

virtual manual of performance which is sonorously intimate with possession.

The self-observing voice of the sonnets speaks explicitly at one

point of the "un perfect actor on the stage,/Who with his fear is put besides

his part" (23.1-2, emphasis mine). There are glimpses ofa perfect actor,

but he might as well be an effigy for, "moving others," he is himself "as

stone," pure influence, but subject of an invisible power (94.1-4). If the

actor does not see himself performing, he is nonetheless a spectator

because of this duplicity in the presence of the Other, the familiar, the

double, the formerly buried avatar of a constantly duplicating self. In a

culture which appears to have no such concept as the self, that (un)consecrated

victim of the Word, the repressed appearance will be an

ancestral figure which, whatever case you want to make for the spirit

world, is just as likely to be a figure of speech.

It is, however, in the presence of the seemingly dead that we can

see--as we have come to see in recent years-that the archaic ceremonies

from which the theater was presumably born did not preclude theater;

that is, ritual has no priority. It might indeed have followed theater in the

instituting trace, although the institutions of ritual and theater are coextensive

in time, mirroring and mirrored in the same mystery. Ifwe were

rummaging, though, in the long history of anthropological guesses as to

which ritual form-year-gods, vegetation ceremonies, shamanism, etc.tells

us most about the emergence of theater from whatever was nottheater

(assuming there was an emergence and it was not forever there),

my inclination would be to focus, as Genet so acutely did, on some death

rite or funeral ceremony as primal, a rite of separation rather than a rite

of incorporation (Van Gennep's terms), which would seem to come after

the more primordial fact-just as the cosmic marriage ceremony and the

hymeneal feast came rather arbitarily not only after the tragic drama but

after the disruptions of comedy as well, as in the betrothal of the old fart

Pisthetairos to the young beauty Basileia, Miss Universe, like some deusex

ingenuity to heal an irreparable breach.

The point is, again, that there is no performance without separation

or division, though the nature of performance may preserve, more or

less reverently or irreverently, the memory of a time-the now-famous

illud tempus-when there was no separation. That is another way of

describing the recurring aspiration of performance to efface itself orin

the irresistible shading of performance into theater theater into performance-

whatever it is that is theatrical, the substance of all divisions,

in performance, especially if the ritual is sacred. (I remember being

The Eye of Prey

present at a Eucharist, as an observer, when the communicants went up

to receive the wafer and the wine, and the priest reciting the liturgy

reversed the order of the offering in the repetition of the words. I

believe I was the only one who heard it, maybe not even the priest and

the woman before him when it happened, who was going to be ordained

and with whom, I had reason to suspect, he was having an affair. It is

interesting to speculate about the nature of that performance if I hadn't

been there and-in what appeared to be a "perfect ceremony of love's

rite" (Son. 23.6)-nobody had heard it, though my separating presence

might have induced it by already theatricalizing the event.) Even in

shamanism, there is an altering effect that comes of separation. The

spirit-ancestor, at some indeterminate space of being or nonbeing, perhaps

among the dead, teaches the shaman to dance and sing. Then there

is a synapse where the shamanic soul is released by ancestral powers and,

as if awaking from a dream, remembers what he has been taught. The

dance and song are efforts to rehearse back the hereditary world from

which the shaman is separated. Sometimes the shaman forgets and, as if

some punitive expedition has been ordered from the underworld, spirits

appear and in another separation tear his body apart so he may the

better remember.

In the modern theater, the rites of separation came out of the ethos of

suspicion as a heuristic strategy, as if separation were reflecting on

separation. It is probably just as well, in the gullible order of things, that

there is now and then an intelligence like Brecht's which tries to dispel

the mystery in performance by looking at it from a distance, while not at

all depreciating just how stubborn the mystery is. What is, I think, still

incisive about Brecht's theory of Alienation is that it distrusts not only

the illusions of performance that sponsor a repressive oedipal force in

the infrastructure of our culture, but the antioedipal enchantment as

well, fortified now by the impact of other cultures. If one reads carefully

the essay on Chinese acting, it is clear that it is not the arcanities that

attract him, no more than an unrestricted subconscious in the actor. And

if we think through the charges of the "Short Organum" against the

obfuscating agencies of bourgeois theater, we may also be reminded that

the empowering forces or creative energies of non-Western cultures,

those I've already named, as well as shun toeng, prana, kokoro, and the

metamorphosing versions of ki, are not necessarily divine emanations

but as much historical constructs as sexuality, gender, race, and class,

with all the liabilities of !>uch constructs in the social and political world.

Universals of Performance 177

Ifwe furthermore think for a moment about history, we may recall just

how empowering they can also be. Like the creative energies, they have

been attached to spiritual disciplines, more or less efficacious (and more

or less destructive), as performance must be, whatever the unnamable

force that through the green fuse drives the appearance.

Brecht preferred to stress in performance not the intangible power

but the structure of appearances and the historical gestus: what's happening

and why and who is paying for it at one end or the other of a scale of

victimization, which is another measure of performance., including as it

does the status of the performer and the social cost of a mystifying

energy which pays tribute to other unmoved movers, maybe more

crippling forms of absent power, like dharma. I am not trying to deflate

the alluring and truly creative traditions behind such concepts, which I

don't pretend to understand, though I've spent years studying certain

spiritual techniques and ritual processes as an extension of the art of

acting. What I am trying to do is suggest that there is in any performance

the universal question, spoken or unspoken, of what are we performing

for? (This became a serious issue in my own theaterwork with KRAKEN

when, for instance, we decided to do, in the evolution of a technique

[called ghosting], the Tai Chi Ch'uan rather than Yoga or Aikido or any

other of the martial arts. Why one rather than another? Why a martial

art? Why, in fact, among all the conceivable forms an actor might study,

any particular choice in the definition of a method? Even among Western

techniques of, say, modern dance or mime-whose dance? whose

mime? in respect to what? what for? and what, even in the generation of

a "universal" technique like Grotowski's, what does it preclude?)

We can see in the politics of older cultures that they are also dealing

with the return of the repressed. If we've screened them out, they've

screened us out. To younger people in those cultures, struggling to

retain perhaps (some not) what is generic and life-giving in the long

deformities of traditional order, that may also mean the recognition, as

on the other side of a mutual dream, of creative energies which we are,

in the postindustrial world, only too swiftly dismissing, like the lifegiving

power of another historical construct, quite visible in Brecht, the

indignant brainpower of the rational mind. Which is not what they

mean-in the cybernetic universe which seems to resemble those other,

earlier, or remoter worlds-by software.

In any case, what Brecht asked us to do, confronted with any play of

appearances, is to observe critically, with a reserve of consciousness

The Eye of Prey

outside performance, though he was early on aware that both the instruments

of perception and the ideological structure of perception alter

the appearance of what is seen. He would have been unpersuaded,

surely, by the new doxology of play which suggests, as 1 have done

myself, that it may be impossible to get outside performance in the

illusory structure of World-Play. Brecht readily knew, moreover, that

there was a necessary pretense in an apparently legible structure which

may certainly have, as in his stagings of his own plays, a misleading

enchantment. But what was always important in Brecht-who after all

started his career inspired by Rimbaud, worshipping Baal, going to

nontheatrical performance, and anticipating Genet-was the tireless

effort, not often conspicuous in the solipsism and domesticated shamanism

of postmodern performance, to navigate the fine line between the

visible appearance and the invisible happening, the dream and the

event, the doing and the ado, keeping his eye on the actual in the most

empirical sense, as a distinct matter of historical perception.

On that empirical basis, all performance moves between expectancy

and observance, between attentiveness to what happens and astonishment

at what appears. The performances of a given culture may stress

one more than the other, but no performance is either all happening or

all appearance. And there is no way of resolving which comes first, the

happening or the appearance, no more than there is of performing

some gesture of the Tai Chi and determining as it is performed whether

the chi flowed so that the sparrow's tail could be grasped or whether, in

grasping the sparrow's tail, and only then, illusory as it seems, the chi

flowed, like the lightness which Brecht wanted from his actors when they

left East Germany to play in London. 1 can't imagine a cultural form

which really has anything conclusive to say about the fugitive relationship

between the premonitory act and the actualization, the incipience

and the immanence, whether you make the gesture in order to have the

vision or have the vision so the gesture may be made. And that applies to

other kinds of performance which seem, at first sight, to have little to do

with these subtleties of appearance with their patina of theatricality. 1 am

thinking, for example, of Lynn Swann running the patterns of a passing

route or Nadia Comaneci on a vaulting horse or Philippe Petit on a high

wire between the towers of the World Trade Center or, mixing virtuosity

and appearance in the most self-conscious of performances, Muhammad

Ali in that once audacious ado, dancing like a butterfly and stinging

like a bee. 1 am not sure, all nuances considered, that there is any kind of

Universals of Performance I79

performance that is nonmimetic, since what is being performed is-the

more perilous the performance, like Swann's patterns or Ali's shufflean

image of perfection in the head.

But, returning from such marvels of performance to the theatricalizing

of everyday life, not only the appearance of the actual but, nowadays,

the supplement of reflexive consciousness about that appearance:

if there is no performance without consciousness, there is also the

exercise of consciousness in watching a performance in which those who

seem to be performing are under the illusion that they are merely living.

I say under the illusion because, were they to think about it at all, that

first reflection, they would be susceptible to the vice of performative

consciousness which theatricalizes everything it looks upon, seeing the

living as nothing but performance. As for those who know they're

performing, they may call attention to it, but we know there are also

techniques of performance, not only the Method, designed to make

them forget it. Whether or not the consciousness of performance is to be

forgotten is perhaps the major issue of the history of performance, as it

certainly is of postmodernism. It does not, however, appear to be the

same problem for those cultures which are taken as models of performative

consciousness without self-consciousness about performance, because

they are still perhaps on the aboriginal margins of history.

But, as everybody knows, not for long. It is a curious thing, too, to be

thinking about universals of performance at a time when performance

itself seems to be universal. As we widened the scope of performance to

include not only theater events in theaters or environments or other

dispersed places, we have also had to consider a variety of hybrid

happenings and conceptual events, as well as sports, games, circuses,

rituals, politics, fashion, therapies, sexual practices, private fantasies and

illicit ceremonies, informal gatherings or rehearsed stagings, with or.

without texts, virtuals or actuals, plays not only without plot or character

but with or without people-not to mention those more or less elusive

shadows of the performing self which by disappearing accretions of

performance ~ventually refuse the concepts we associate with people:

personality or presence or a self. We have come to admit within the field

of performance not only behavior(s) in everyday life but what used to be

the disciplines by means of which we approached an understanding of

behavior, what the French call the Human Sciences: philosophy, linguistics,

anthropology, and psychoanalysis, with conceptual crossovers into

the biological domain of genetics, ethology, and brain science.

180 The Eye of Prey

All this gestation of performance in nontheatrical disciplines has been

summoned up and perhaps summarized in the performative virtuosity

of our literature, particularly literary theory.

Along with the valorization of play in the postmodern, we have taken

with considerable seriousness the theatrical notion that all the space of

the world is a stage or, with varying magnitudes and commutations of

illusion, a cosmic manifestation of a universe of play. The play within the

play occurs-more or less "framed," as well as "written"-at every level

of the great chain of being or, in the unchained signifiers of a

polysemous discourse, some recursive or reptilian equivalent. The

uroboric play includes forms of behavior and irruptions of play not

dream able in our philosophy or studied in the fieldwork of ethnograp~ers

or yet available for deconstruction in our theory. As our view of

performance expands almost galactic ally through the infinite space of

thought, we find it curving back like the linguistic and historical constructs

of a performative consciousness, to embrace, tautologically, the

interminable play or chamber drama of the mise-en-scene of the unconSCIOUS.

Granted, then, the bewildering plenitude of performance, if not its

absoluteness, I have tried to pursue-in thinking about what is universal

in performance-the thing which appears in that subjunctive moment

when whatever was there before becomes a performance. Or, so far as it

is imaginable, that which in performance is other than that which is not

performance, the cipher which marks it off from, shall we say, life? or

shall we say, death? There is, within the new dispensation of theatrical izing

consciousness, a surfeit of performance that almost teases us out of

thought. But what I've wanted to approach in this discourse on performance-

and to perceive in the theaterwork I have done-is what in

performance can almost not be seen because it is thought. "Is this not

something more than fantasy?" (Ham., l.i.54). We are not always sure. If

it cannot be seen, it has nevertheless-like the flowers in Eliot's Burnt

Norton or the Japanese ikebena (which makes flowers live)19-the look of

something that is looked at. That is, as an aspect of thought, also

universal in performance. There has always been-not only in Hamlet

and Rousseau, but in other cultures-a dream of performance without

theater, nothing to see and nothing to show, like the Taoist mirror. What

I have been trying to evoke is as delicate and fragile, perhaps, as the

imagined performance of that dream, or like the curtain between the

greenroom and the hashigakari in the N'oh theater, that intimation of a

Universals of Performance 181

diaphanous membrane between the world of spirits and the diurnal

world or, for that matter, gravely, the equally fragile difference between

the Phantasmal Noh and the Present Noh or between the Dramatic Noh

and the Refined Noh, or the state of being in which the actor was before

he appeared (who was he?) on the hashigakari carrying, as it appears

(who is he now?), his ghostly space with him.

I think we are very close then to the most elemental consciousness of

performance which precipitates performance, whatever else it becomes.

That thing is universal in performance, in the ideographic Noh and in

the looser mimetic language of the most realistic of appearances. It has

been said of Eleanora Duse that ther subtlety was a secrecy, the absence

of all rhetoric. She seemed exempt from the Logos even when speaking

words. If legend can be believed, she allowed herself in the very act of

performance to be overlooked. It was not simply humility, rather like a

refusal to appear or to be discovered in performance. She seemed to do

her acting on that selvedge of performance where performance with

anything less would cease to exist. Yet it was not that disguise of performance

in psychological acting which pretends that it is not performing.

Moving others, she was not as stone, but what she was, materially, it

was hard to say. I have always retained (from I know not where) an

image of her wholly alive in perfect stillness, then something passing

over her face like the faintest show of thought, not the play of a nerve,

only thought, and you would suddenly know she was dying. I mean dying

right there, actually, articulating the dying, with a radiance of apprehension

so breathtaking that, in the rhythm of your breathing, you could

hardly escape your own death. Of course, you are dying too, actually,

right there, in the play of thought, though it is overlooked, and it is

likely to be missed if it is in the course of performance merely thought

and not shown-unless you are a Duse, who seemed to show it by merely

thought.

Someone is dying in front of your eyes. That is another universal of

performance. There are, to be sure, a myriad of ways in which the

history of performance has been able to disguise or displace that

elemental fact. You can joke about it, you can laugh it off, you can

perform great feats of physical skill, but the image of it is before your

eyes all the more because you are looking, even if the space is empty.

You can't escape that look even if you close your eyes. Every look is the

Law, which kills, as Kafka knew, who wrote a doomsday book of performance.

The Eye of Prey

Performance occurs in a middle region between the world of transparency

and the world of opacity. There is an ideal vision, such as

Rousseau's, of a fete or carnival in which all the obscurities cease and all

of us are, because outside the realm of exchange and reproduction, no

more than what we appear to be, and no less. We see that world in the

wine harvest of La Nouvelle Hiloise, the unperformed claritas of the open

air, rustic and convivial, without boundaries, classless (or with all classes

participating), a unison of reciprocity and shared being such as utopias

have imagined and probably no culture, even the most rustic and convivial,

has ever approached. It is a mise-en-scene without a gaze, everything

seen and nothing to show. There is nothing remotely like the edge

of a stage, as if repression had been lifted in the unconscious, where

there is always a stage. As we understand from the operations of the

unconscious, there is no way to eliminate the edge which is reconstituted

"elsewhere" in the expenditure of the desire to eliminate it. There may

be some approximation of a spectacle-without-Iooking in the case of an

aboriginal ceremony or in what we think of as high ritual process like a

Mass, where the spectator and the spectacle presumably merge. But then

the coalescence occurs below the gaze of a god or a totem or, trying to

determine the absence of a seeming in what only seems to be there, a

visiting anthropologist, wavering in the pathos of his own performance,

between presence and absence, visibility and invisibility, even with the

end of imperialism, the incorrigible representative of an occupying

power.

When the gaze returns to its source, from the invisible frontier of all

desire, we are back to that other vision of performance, essentially

theatrical, which is made of (dis)appearances and, with various illusions

of other purpose, deploys appearance to no further end but its ceaseless

reappearance. That process reflects a world which, so far as it can be

distinguished, is as endlessly interpretable as a dream-and which is

sometimes marvelously reinterpreted by appearance. All the varieties of

performative experience move between the two imaginings of its real

presence in whatever objective or symbolic forms. But even when

appearance is imagined as absent, it is appearance that dominates the

idea of performance, since it suggests what would not be there, in

performance, if it were merely lived or experienced without distinction.

The ulterior motive, I would suppose, of the desire to identify universals

of performance has been stated by Victor Turner in his recent

Universals of Performance

book From Ritual to Theater. * In concluding his introduction with "an

appeal for global cultural understanding," he mentions the attempts

"being made by a handful of anthropologists and theater scholars and

practitioners to generate an anthropology and theater of experience"

for the purpose of mutual understanding across cultures. "The

ethnographies, literatures, ritual, and theatrical traditions of the world

now lie open to us as the basis for a new transcultural communicative

synthesis through performance. For the first time we may be moving

towards a sharing of cultural experiences, the manifold 'forms of objectivated

mind' restored through performance to something like their pristine

effectual contouring.,,20

I hesitate to be a spoilsport in this admirable mission, but if we are

seeking to perceive universals of performance aside from their outer

show-bodies, space, light, sound, gesture, motion, dress or undress,

more or less dramatic content, coherent or scattered narrative, song and

dance, masking and mimicry, exhibition of skills, shamanic or mimetic,

and an auditory more or less specular or participatory, itself either

gathered or dispersed-then we will inevitably come back to that suspended

moment of a Duse or on the hashigakari, when the ghostly thing

appears, the latent substance of performance which is divisive, solitary,

alien, and apart. Whatever the appearance or actuality of communitas,

performance is a testament to what separates. In the empty space, an

empty solitude. I may be reflecting no more than the escalation of

estrangement in our time, the doubling of separation, when I say that

remains the thing which is most moving in performance, and always was:

its essential aloneness. You can see it in the effectual contours of the

most pristine forms of acting, as on the high wire with Philippe Petit.

For what we think of as stage presence is related to that aloneness, th<7

nature of the performer who, in a primordial substitution or displacement,

is born on the site of the Other. It is the one thing which, if

there is no communicative synthesis at all, nothing but a breach, also

crosses cultures.

We can see it in the resemblance of Zeami's yugen, whether as "trans-

*Victor Turner has died since this was written, the legacy of his manifold learning

reminding us--though I take issue with him here--ofat least a double loss, to anthropology

and to performance theory. As he had drawn theater people to anthropology, he had by

theory and force of example turned anthropologists onto performance, and even caused

some of them to do anthropology by means of performance. Few of them, however, can be

expected to have either his eloquent breadth of knowledge or bis large-hearted exuberance.

The Eye of Prey

cendental phantasm" or "subtle fascination,"21 to Stanislavski's Public

Solitude, which is the rudimentary estrangement of what he elsewhere

calls "charm." It is a substantiating presence which isjust about as elusive

as the "naked charm" and "strangeness" of subatomic physics. (As for

the psychological acting associated with Stanislavski, I want to make

amends for what I said somewhat invidiously before. I should add in all

cultural equity that, while it has had a bad press in our experimental

theater, for its presumptions of ego, its techniques of concentration,

focus, and centering are universal; and their generating sourcesemotional

memory and sense memory-are no more mystifying than and are

equally evocative as their correlatives in the creative energies of other

cultures. As for the ego, despite its bad press in the West, it is being

widely adopted, or some self-reliant facsimile, by people in other cultures

who have never had any social identity but dispossession. Psychological

acting is of course also associated with the vices of the mimetic,

but if there was something wanting in our experimental theater-aside

from a theoretical critique of the valorization of performance to the

detriment of acting-it was the enviable meticulousness of histrionic skill

required for an acute psychological portrayal of what we once thought

of as character.) In considering the principle of yugen recently, Eugenio

Barba emphasized the property of fascination in the temperament of the

performer, as a transition from his remarks on prana or ki-hai ("profound

agreement" of the spirit with the body) to his discussion of shakti,

the creative energy which is genderless but represented in the image of a

woman.22 It is the traditional dispossession of the woman which may

account for this, her apartness which is encompassing, like the womb of

the universe.

And indeed, if one traces it, yugen was originally a poetic term which

suggested a pensiveness arising from estrangement and loneliness, as in

the following twelfth-century haiku of Saigyo: "Insensible as I am, I

share/the loneliness of the autumn dusk/at the Swamp of the Solitarysnipe."

23 By the close of the Kamakura period (1184-1335), yugen carne

to signify a delicate brightness, like a moon-rayon a passing cloud or the

subtle fascination of the glitter of snow falling. But the acquired brightness

is still permeated by loneliness and pensive motion, as in the exquisite

lines of Thomas Nashe about queens dying young and fair and

brightness falling from the air. I believe that here both traditions touch

upon that quality of the performer which is universal, the sense of

removal or distance, however possessed, whether a virtuoso on a trapeze

Universals of Performance

in a circus or, with all the illusions of choral unity, whatever it was that

caused the first actor to separate himself from the communitarian

pathos, knowing perhaps that even surrounded he was essentially alone,

in the Public Solitude which is the precondition of his charm, his fascination,

his representativeness, and his power. It is also the precondition,

like some genetic repercussion in the form, of the appearance of the

second actor, in Aeschylus, and the third actor, in Sophocles, those

incremental separations that led from the seeming harmony of the

Chorus to the equivocal catechism of the dialogue which, even in its

dispersions and lapses through many actors, as in the silences of Chekov's

plays, eventually dominated the theater, along with the hermeneutical

Text, which we have been trying to dissolve back, via Artaud,

into the naked sonorous streaming realization out of which the Chorus

seemed to be born.

Performance may transform the one performing. That it has the

capacity to transform seems to be universal. But at the level of community,

whatever the powers of performance once were, they no longer are.

For one thing, the performative instinct has been so distributed in art

and thought and everyday life that we find it harder to discern the

special value of performance as transformation, when transformation

seems, moreover, in a culture of signs-with the supersaturation of

images in the media-a universal way of life. It is also hard to think, as

Plato did, of performance as something perilous because of the intensity

of its imagining power. We simply do not take the powers of art and

imagination as seriously as Plato did, or as seriously as they take poetry,

say, in the Soviet Union. I suppose it takes some authoritarian political

order to make it seem important, a matter of life and death. When you

go to jail for it, you will listen to it. The transformative threat of

performance seems to require an agency of repression. That agency has

certainly not disappeared, but its invisibility in a world of high visibility,

that is, in a culture of signs, is a qualitatively different problem from that

faced by performance before or elsewhere, say in the "empire of signs"

(Barthes) that gives meaning to the Bunraku or the Japanese tea ceremony.

I also suspect that's a threatened empire.

In any case, performance of that kind is not well served, it would

seem, by the illusions of the democratic. We are still not sure that

performance of any kind was really well served by the illusions of the

sixties, which spread the desublimating gospel of performance and

tried, more or less clumsily, to appropriate the media, the image-making

186 The Eye of Prey

apparatus, whose powers are vast and omniverous and inarguable. The

outcome of all the subversion was a conspiracy with the invisible, all the

more when the theater went underground with the radical politics. What

it succeeded in doing by making everything theater was to thin the

theater out, so that it has had to learn again how to be theater, in the

right proportions with performance. I see no evidence that anything like

that has been accomplished yet.

Where performance remains, in our society, most transformative, it is

hardly an agency of communitas. Think, for instance, of the libertarian

dissonance of rock that turned, in punk, into an anarchistic dispersion of

music like the mimesis of a primal violence. Which was, as with rock

before it, appropriated by the invisible exchange of the trickle-down

economy. There is also, inarguably, the trans formative power of television.

We have mixed feelings about that, as art, as community, since it

debases its technical skills and seems to breed isolation in the home

which is not exactly Public Solitude. It has, moreover, encouraged a

mimetic violence among young people which, after many years of study

of the self-evident, has been recently pretty much confirmed. Sports are

also transformative for those who play and compete, and they still

provide models of emulation for those who watch. We still have nothing

in the theater to correspond to the experience you have in a stadium

during the play of a double reverse, not to mention the stupendous

involvement of spectators all around the world in a championship soccer

match. Yet the highest skills of athletics are also caught up in the new

ruthlessness of entertainment, which is big business even without the

drug traffic, and the community among the spectators is one which

is-as with the patriotism of the halftime ceremonies or the violence of a

football game during the Vietnam War-something more than suspect.

There is an undeniably unifying excitement at a ballgame as at a Broadway

musical, where even the most begrudging of us will admire the

extraordinary abilities of the performers, but it is not exactly the communitas

we have in mind.

We return, then, to the question raised before about not only the

means of performance, the technical skills or procedures which we can

more or less exchange across cultures, but also the ends of performance:

what for? As any good performer knows, that also determines the means.

As Turner suggests, everything seems open and available to us now,

things which were once in the realm of the arcane. But we inevitably

have to ask just what the appropriation of any performance technique

Universals of Performance

from an alien culture will mean, not only in the transformations of

performance, but in the transformations of power by which all performance

is known, even as it reveals that power. The critical question is, as

I've remarked, universal in performance, although we are once again in

a period where little resembling an answer, or even a possible response,

has shown itself persuasively in performance-except for those modes

of performance which may look upon the question as a non sequitur,

like climbing Mt. Everest, which you do because it is there.

That kind of performance, like orbiting in space, may have lost some

of the aura of individual heroism, but it remains an exemplary model of

teamwork or ensemble playing. Such teamwork is not necessarily a

universal of performance, but that there is something exemplary in

performance is still a universal. The problem is that the example, today,

may be read in competing ways. Landing on the moon or climbing Mt.

Everest may also suggest, though remote from the centers of power, the

structure of power which supports the example, and of which we may

not entirely approve. It appears to be the same structure in whichamidst

the profusion of performances, casual or codified-performance

is losing its force as example. We can of course hope that a transfusion of

power from other cultures will reverse this tendency, but there is nothing

so far as I can see which is universal about that. What we may also

want to remember in view of that is that performance is the site-specific

appearance of local initiative and-whatever it acquires as cultures cross

in a worldwide network of appearances-still very much dependent on

the discriminating perceptions of individual will, which may be trained

to accuracy through performance. As for performing in general, Stanislavski

and others have warned against that.

NOT E 5

1. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey, intra.

Gregory Zilboorg (New York: Norton, 1961), pp. 8-9.

2. Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theater: The Human Seriousness of Play (New

York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), pp. 8-9.

3. Richard Schechner, "Actuals: A Look Into Performance Theory (1970),"

Essays on Peiformance Theory, 1970-1976 (New York: Drama Book Specialists,

1977), pp. 3-35.

188 The Eye of Prey

4. The line was actually spoken by Azuma to his pupil Katsuko Azuma, who

took the Master's name, according to tradition. Quoted by Eugenio Barba,

"Theater Anthropology," The Drama Review, 26, no. 2 (1982), 20.

5. Quoted by C. G. J ung, "Commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower," in

Psyche and Symbol: A Selection from the Writings of C. G. Jung, ed. Violet de Laszlo

(New York: Anchor, 1958), p. 322.

6. "Restoration of Behavior," Studies in Visual Communication, 7, no. 3 (1981),

2.

7. Theater, 9, no. 3 (1978), 7-19. The essay is also in Derrida's Writing and

Difference, trans. and intro. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1978), pp. 232-50.

8. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: The Archeology of the Human Sciences

(New York: Vintage, 1973), p. 64.

9. Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 36.

10. Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching, trans Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English (New York:

Vintage, 1972), chap. 42 (no page numbers).

1 1. Theater, p. 8.

12. Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards

(New York: Grove, 1958). p. 51.

13. Derrida, Theater, p. 9.

14. "Cogito and the History of Madness," Writing and Difference, p. 54.

15. Artaud. p. 52.

16. Artaud, p. 93.

17. Derrida, "Freud and the Scene of Writing," Writing and Difference, p. 202.

18. Ibid., p. 202.

19. See Barba, p. 19.

20. Turner, pp. 18-19.

21. Toyoichiro Nogami, Zeami and His TheoTies on Noh, trans. Ryozo Matsumoto

(Tokyo: Tsunetaro Hinoki, Hinoki Shoten, 1955), pp. 51-61.

22. Barba, pp. 28-29.

23. Quoted by Nogami, p. 51.