Plenary session on the interface of performance studies and performance activism at Performing the World 2012, hosted by Dan Friedman and Richard Schechner.

 

“The performance turn is widely acknowledged. The premise that all (or much) of human practices are performed, that humans, through performance, function as the active social constructors of their world is not only embodied in the discipline of performance studies, but has become part of the dialogue in anthropology, linguistics, ethnography, folklore, psychology, sociology, and history. What is generally less recognized, both by scholars and by political activists themselves, is the performance turn in social activism …”

Dan Friedman and Lois Holzman, “Performing the World: The Emergence of Performance Activism,” in Performance Studies in Motion, Atay Citorn et al., eds.(New York: Bloomsbury, 2014)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*******************************************************************************************

 

* We simultaneously live in history (the seamless process of creative human activity) and society (particular institutional formations in history into which we are socialized). In the mid-19th century Karl Marx pointed out the dialectical process of our being both the producers and products of history in the following way: we “make our own history” but “under circumstances … given and transmitted from the past” (‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,’ 1852).

 

* A century later, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would say how proud he was to be part of the “maladjusted” when it came to certain things in society–among these, discrimination, poverty, and violence.

 

* Building on this, and as Newman urged, maybe it is history to which we should be adjusting, not society? In history, we are more free to create; less restricted to replicate. Performing (playing, pretending) who we are not is a way of becoming, developing, growing. It is not a free-for-all, but a way of more self-consciously living simultaneously in society and history.

 

“We understand performance very broadly. From our point of view, performance might have nothing to do with being on the stage. We think you can perform at home, at work, in any social setting … With the proper kind of support, people discover they can, that we can, do things through performance that we never thought we could do … in a sense, we’re trying to broaden each person’s notion of ‘what you’re allowed to do.’”

(F. Newman, introductory remarks to performance of Trouble, an improvised play directed by Newman at Performance of a Lifetime in New York City, June 1, 1996)

 

Performing and Playing in the Warnersville community of Greensboro …

 

 

“What I mean by development is the ability that we have and that we can see in children all of the time of transforming qualitatively who they are into someone else, into from a baby to a toddler, from a toddler to a child, from a child to a teenager, and so on, that we transform the circumstances that we’re in and become bigger and greater and more knowledgeable and more passionate about things and more imaginative. And many of our institutions stifle that, so my passion is to re-initiate development in all those people that it has stopped, and to provide the best for the very young so that they can continue to thrive and develop.”

Lois Holzman, “Using Improvisation and Performativity as Teaching Tools” 

Communities in Greensboro with public housing