Decomposition

Description

The decomposition of cultural myths.

The fluid nature of performance studies and the widening embrace of the idea of performativity has produced in Decomposition: Post-Disciplinary Performance a collection of great interest that crosses disciplinary lines of academic work. The essays move from the local to the global, from history to sport, from body parts to stage productions, and from race relations to global politics.

Part 1. Conferencing About the Unnatural
1. Introducing UNNATURAL ACTS, 1997 Susan Leigh Foster
2. ACTING UNNATURAL:Interpreting Body Art Amelia Jones
3. Listening to Local Practices: Performance and Identity Politics in Riverside, California Deborah Wong

Part 2. Contesting White Spaces
4. Black Noise / White Mastery Ronald Radano
5. Like a Weed in a Vacant Lot: The Black Artists Group in St. Louis George Lipsitz
6. Yayoi Kusama's Body of Art Kristine C. Kuramitsu
7. "Oh, You Can't Just Let a Man Walk Over You":
Staging Threepenny Opera in Singapore Sue-Ellen Case

Part 3. Acting Manly
8. The Britten Era Philip Brett
9. A Question of Balls: The Sexual Politics of Argentine Soccer Jeffrey Tobin
10. Music at Home, Politics Afar Timothy D. Taylor

Part 4. Talking Vulvas and Other Body Parts
11. Looking Like a Lesbian: Yvonne Rainer's Theory of Probability Catherine Lord
12. Structure, Size, and Play: The Case of the Talking Vulva B.J. Wray

Part 5. De-composing the Unnatural
13. Decomposition Elizabeth Wood

Notes on Contributors
Index

Sujets

• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Película fotográfica
• General officer
• Performing arts
• Cinema
• Anthropology
• General
• Cultural Studies
• Social
• Performance
• Film
• Culture
• Media

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 22 juin 2000
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253028204
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

DECOMPOSITION
Unnatural Acts
Theorizing the Performative
Sue-Ellen Case
Philip Brett
Susan Leigh Foster
The partitioning of performance into obligatory appearances and strict disallowances is a complex social code that was assumed to be “natural” until recent notions of performativity unmasked its operations. Performance partitions, strictly enforced within traditional conceptions of the arts, foreground the gestures of the dancer but ignore those of the orchestra player, assign significance to the elocution of the actor but not to the utterances of the audience. The critical notion of performativity both reveals these partitions as unnatural and opens the way for the consideration of all cultural intercourse as performance. It also exposes the compulsory nature of some orders of performance. The oppressive requirements of systems that organize gender and sexual practices mark who may wear the dress and who may perform the kiss. Further, the fashion of the dress and the colorizing of the skin that dons it are disciplined by systems of class and “race.” These cultural performances are critical sites for study.
The series Unnatural Acts encourages further interrogations of all varieties of performance both in the traditional sense of the term and from the broader perspective provided by performativity.
DECOMPOSITION
Post-Disciplinary Performance
Edited by Sue-Ellen Case, Philip Brett , and Susan Leigh Foster
Indiana University Press Bloomington and Indianapolis
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Decomposition : post-disciplinary performance / edited by Sue-Ellen Case, Philip Brett, and Susan Leigh Foster.         p. cm. — (Unnatural acts)     Includes bibliographical references and index.    ISBN 0-253-33723-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-253-21374-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)     1. Arts, Modern—20th century. 2. Sex in art.   I. Case, Sue-Ellen.   II. Brett, Philip.   III. Foster, Susan Leigh. IV. Series.
NX456 .D43 2000 790—dc21 99-056968
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CONTENTS
PART 1. CONFERENCING ABOUT THE UNNATURAL
1. Introducing Unnatural Acts, 1997 Susan Leigh Foster
2. Acting Unnatural: Interpreting Body Art Amelia Jones
3. Listening to Local Practices: Performance and Identity Politics in Riverside, California Deborah Wong
PART 2. CONTESTING WHITE SPACES
4. Black Noise / White Mastery Ronald Kadano
5. Like a Weed in a Vacant Lot: The Black Artists Group in St. Louis George Lipsitz
6. Yayoi Kusama’s Body of Art Kristine C. Kuramitsu
7. “Oh, You Can’t Just Let a Man Walk over You”: Staging Threepenny Opera in Singapore Sue-Ellen Case
PART 3. ACTING MANLY
8. The Britten Era Philip Brett
9. A Question of Balls: The Sexual Politics of Argentine Soccer Jeffrey Tobin
10. Music at Home, Politics Afar Timothy D. Taylor
PART 4. TALKING VULVAS AND OTHER BODY PARTS
11. Looking like a Lesbian: Yvonne Rainer’s Theory of Probability Catherine Lord
12. Structure, Size, and Play: The Case of the Talking Vulva B. J. Wray
PART 5. DE-COMPOSING THE UNNATURAL
13. Decomposition Elizabeth Wood
CONTRIBUTORS
INDEX
PART 1.
CONFERENCING ABOUT THE UNNATURAL
1.  Introducing Unnatural Acts, 1997
Susan Leigh Foster
A more or less familiar conference ambiance—the halting flow of papers, and the recesses between them shaped by the estranged architectural setting in a converted Ramada Inn, its brick facade, white colonial shutters, and wrought-iron railings enduring reminders of mid-century middle-class hospitality. The adjacent freeway emits a dull roar. (UC Riverside proudly claimed distinction when it was built as the campus within the University of California that sported a freeway running right through it.) At the end of the day we adjourn to the swimming pool, standard Ramada Inn accouterment, where we will enjoy reception food and drink. Milling, talking, munching, and sipping, we become aware at different moments that “a performance” has begun:
Two women in strangely translucent, baggy bodysuits and brilliantly colored sun visors, two each and positioned to form a slit through which to view the world, have appeared in the pool area. They carry a small rubber boat between them, with boom boxes in their other hands. Setting the boat down poolside, they extract from it two small chairs which will host their taped dialogue. Sitting tall and calm, each presses the tape recorder’s On button in turn to produce a question or answer for the other. The voices deliver absurd directions for freeway travel and comment on current events. Seemingly edified by this exchange, they place the boom boxes in the boat and launch it into the pool. A voice not theirs continues on the tape, reciting a collage of quotations concerning bodiliness in cyberspace. Speech having sailed away, the performers resort to gesture, complex sequences of hand-arm-head positionings, etched into the space of the pool’s rim as they inch by. The performers enter a crowded area of the reception; their gestures mingle with those of the viewers. Small adjustments of bodies, shiftings of weight, alterations to shape, the withdrawal of a foot or elbow, a smile, a widening of the eyes, the embarrassed raising of a glass—all announce the crowd’s awareness of these special bodies in its midst. The performers play off these accommodations to their presence, deftly incorporating the viewers’ moves into their own. They mimic, mirror, and expand on these gestures, flowing into spaces vacated, extracting themselves from entanglements they have created. Once past the crowd, they dislodge a long pole from the fence surrounding the pool and row, on land of course, to the other end. Here they exchange one navigation system for another: small mirrors held near their eyes but directed so as to reveal the space behind them as they back their way back toward the crowd. The mirrors locate a table of food, which the performers sample by sending their arms behind them toward the plates. Amidst this repast they locate a spool of yellow tape, the kind used to cordon off construction sites. Tying one end to the fence, they begin to wrap the crowd in tape. As it unfurls we see the bold black lettering BIO-HAZARD: DO NOT ENTER. Their costumes and neutral manner as well as the boat’s voice with its ongoing recitation of cyber-facts, all take on new significance as the crowd itself becomes a bio-hazard. The bodysuits transform into the uniforms used in transporting dangerous chemicals or radioactive substances; the performers’ calm demeanor now evokes, even as it parodies, the anonymous, officious bureaucracy of the state. Is the pool, with its adrift citizen oracularly discoursing on the impending redistribution of corporeality across real and virtual spaces, polluted? Or is it the fountain of youth? Is this social body contaminated, or might it move in a promising direction? All questions raised, all tasks accomplished, the performers exit, leaving the conference-goers to duck under or clamber over the fragile barrier of tape as the boat-voice drones on.
This unnatural performance is a modest event, not a spectacular work of art. Akin to initiatives sustained since the 1960s, this accumulation of choreographic tactics probes boundaries between the theatrical and the quotidian both by using pedestrian movement in the performance and by locating the performance in the midst of pedestrian life. At the same time, it disperses corporeality, dis-integrating the organic melding of peripheral and central body, the functional unity of body as vehicle for expression, and the efficient hierarchization (always momentarily inverted by solemn and precious dancing) of speech and movement. The hand moving backward toward the food constructs a new view of itself. Not the dumb servant of a willful interiority, the hand senses the space through which it moves, deftly calibrating visual and tactile information. It sometimes snacks (these daily motions can attain theatricality), and it moves with intelligence. Through this staging of its own physicality, the hand invites us to bestow upon it a sustained, livelier attention. The hand is touching.
The hand’s success depends, in part, on the precarious status of the voice. Separated from the body since the beginning, the voice is stranded mid-pool, absurdly isolated in such a dinky boat in such a dinky pool. There it continues to deliver prophecies a