Performance Is The Thing | Issue 57 | Philosophy Now - 1 views
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The definition of philosophy is pretty much set – love of wisdom, the rational investigation of questions about existence and knowledge and ethics, the application of reason towards a more enlightened way of life. How can we understand performance in equally clear terms? Also, what are the responsibilities of the performer?
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How can my performances enrich my life and the lives of my audiences? What is my own personal philosophy of performance?
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Performance can fundamentally be said to be a transformation of ideas and dreams and all those other little understood human impulses into outward action. In this very basic sense performance happens with every word and gesture. It also presupposes a process of evaluation by a spectator.
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There’s one very basic thing I learnt that day: never take your writing on stage on a flimsy bit of paper. Always use something hardbacked. Even if your hands start shaking, it won’t be so noticeable.
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I determined that I was going to break through whatever it was that made me so anxious to stand up in front of a room full of people, and simply be. But I also learnt some other more complex philosophical lessons too, which became clearer over time. In fact, whatever philosophy I have developed about performance has stemmed from that moment.
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When I am performing, there’s a desire I can taste to bridge the gap in understanding between me and my audience. I want to find new ways, new language, verbal and non-verbal to express universal truths. I want to push the challenge of understanding deeper, for me and my audience.
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Romantic aestheticians would have it that art, and by extension, performance, is a heightening of the common human activity of expressing emotions to the point where they are experienced and rendered lucid to the performer and audience in a way that is rarely seen in everyday life.
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I say ‘I am a writer, poet, performer,’ but this self-definition is in itself a kind of performance.
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One philosophical problem is that performance on the stage of life doesn’t have a beginning, middle and end in the way it does in the theatre. So after a stage performance, when we discard the magnifying glass for the clutter of the quotidian, it’s all too easy to forget to zero in – to forget that we are still and are always performing, and that life is constantly a performance: that we are, in fact, only performing from moment to moment.
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understanding process can add to our understanding of how we can live our lives for the better and, dare I say, the greater good.