Else, perform.
“Performance’ has become one of the key terms for the new century. But what do we mean by ‘performance’? In today’s world, it can refer to experimental art, productivity in the workplace, and the functionality of technological systems. Do these disparate performances bear any historical relation to each other?” — Jon McKenzie, Perform Or Else.
This introduction to Jon Mckenzie's piece on performance study and what it actually consists of hit a chord. Once I had found the term a few years ago and finally decided to pursue it as one of my areas of interest, I kept getting asked what exactly does Performance Studies entail, and what does it mean to combine it with Media studies and the Arts. The latter part of the question is irreducible at this point, but we are going to try and break down Performance studies in the context of what Stage Rabbit is through Mckenzie's text — ‘Performance or Else’
The entire text is available on various digital libraries, due to copyright reasons, we cannot provide the paper itself but can share the links for those who are interested.
With the hope that process becomes more interdisciplinary and accessible, a major point of consideration was brought up by a friend of mine as I explained what stage rabbit was or at least tried. Even though we were looking at raw data of methodologies used by contemporary practitioners, the actual conversation had begun in the first exchange itself. From the time when, someone was approached and asked to be a part of, the dialogue had been initiated, and not just a sales pitch, but a dialogue very specific to their area of work.
When stage rabbit was just an intuition, it emerged in midnight conversations, car drives, thoughts you have in the shower, the affective nature of involuntary memory that gave you that ineffable feeling. It was everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Somewhere even though we were sure that this was to be the approach with any practitioners work, that we wouldn’t interfere in any part of their process or how their mental faculties worked, we had one blind spot. We were still unable to specifically talk about what performance studies had to do with the idea of accessible and applicable methodologies.
For this, we began trying to work with some concepts that allowed us to articulate better, our intuition into more conscious reasoning of what stage rabbit is made up of, and how we see it evolving. The two philosophies we are about to introduce are quite vast and we are still trying to see how ‘stage rabbit’ embodies its spirit. But until it doesn’t, we would like to begin to talk about a few connections through borrowed concepts.
What we take you through is listed below. It is bits of what each of us have come across. It is open to discussion, debate, dissent and dialogue.
Jon Mckenzie’s text ‘ Perform or Else’, one that we won’t even pretend and word in our way, will be presented as the first way of approaching the idea of performance. A thinker, whose interpretation of where performance studies stand seems to be entirely embodied in the topics of our interest, we will share bits and you are free to access the text or some video links online. Since his process itself is a more performative process where he analysis one cover photo of Forbes magazine, we are also open to other interpretations of the same cover or covers that could be unpacked through the idea of performance.
From there we would like to talk a bit about process philosophy and post-humanist studies that have only been translated through sci-fi films, adventure novels, spiritual practices, and academic discourse. Since we also believe in the art of communicating as we would to a 5-year-old or maybe even a 13-year-old, and then maybe with and for someone who can’t understand visual metaphors, or a particular language, in the next few months, we are also going to try and translate through text, images, films, maps and even gifs (we love gifs), the same concepts.
So let us begin by understanding what is Performance
“Perform or Else initiates a challenge, one that links the performances of artists and activists with those of workers and executives, as well as computers and missile systems. From congressional attacks on performance artists to the performance specs of household appliances, from the iterative training of high performance managers to the performativity of everyday speech, performance so permeates US society that it evokes that mysterious circle of mist which Nietzsche said envelops any living thing and without which life becomes “withered, hard, and barren.” “Every people,” the philosopher wrote, “even every man, who wants to become ripe needs such an enveloping madness, such a protective and veiling cloud.” In other words, everything we do, or say we are going to do, or repeatedly do, or think of doing, or have a habit of doing, or pick up a habit of doing, or try to break away from a habit, each and every doing or becoming is a part of performance. How this is used in various creative, corporate, critical, application-based, and goal-driven cultures is secondary.
And for those for who words hold vital importance, language and utterance of things also could signify a certain sense of continuing performance to it. (J.L Austin: How to Do Things with Words.). Although he delves more into the concepts of institutionalised utterances such as proverbs, ritualistic sermons, matrimonial agreements, try to imagine words that you feel annoyed with upon hearing someone utter it. Words that hold a promise of some sort, a promise of continuity and if said at the right time can salvage or reconstruct the memory of that event, but over time begins to be an association to non-action. Few such words we hear constantly in films, novels and even our own experiences are “ I don’t need an apology from you”, “Action speaks louder than words”, “Act on it”. Some of these demands more than an utterance of the word. Butler took this into a different idea of performativity and the repeating of performance, which led the field into the process of becoming rather than just being.
(On a larger range you could read: Jonathan Culler: Fortunes of the performative, Judith Butler. Watch DeKalogue, Queer Eye, Blockhead: the music scene, Interviews with Werner Herzog, Kamal Swaroop. This list is ever increasing and will be accessible on the library soon)
Performance Stratum
Imagine a school bag with books in it. At any given time, it has books of multiple subjects. Or better imagine a section in a library (physical or digital), where the largest umbrella allows a diverse range of topics to come under it. And if you can picture it as the largest umbrella that covers maybe 20 smaller umbrellas, each covering 10 smaller umbrellas, and further, each of those covering 10 even smaller umbrellas. You get the drift.
If we take the largest umbrella, as an all-encompassing, ever-growing, perennial amalgamation here, which Mckenzie calls the Performance Stratum. This contains the largest dialogues, the histories that it comes it, the various contexts and applications. It is made up of smaller, substratum, metastratums, geophysical stratums, cultural and biological stratums, which either come together begin forming larger paradigms (discussed in the next bit) which make up the stratum or break apart in local theory to form the building blocks that fall into the same playing field.
“The general theory of performance is multilayered (Just in the image, you have the colour, the shape, the place, the kind of umbrella illustrated, the history of this particular kind of umbrella). Already it comprises the levels of performance paradigms and performance stratum. In addition, if one wanted a forceful indicator that performance is indeed a contemporary formation of power and knowledge, it might lie in this observation: the stratum’s knowledge forms of statements and practices can readily be understood as, respectively, performatives and performances.”
Performance Paradigms
Through Mckenzie's unpacking of the three main paradigms gf performance and performativity, we began sorting or creating assemblages of various combinations of our topics that could fit into either, two or more paradigms, which only begs to showcase the convoluted and interdisciplinary nature of performance studies.
Organization Performance: Function, Movement Learning
“Perform — or else: be fired, redeployed, institutionally marginalized.”
“What performance is challenged forth by this Forbes cover? And what is its “ — or else”? To commence one reading: From the executive figure and the title “Annual Report on American Industry: Ratings on 1,335 Companies,” to the publication itself and its namesake founder, the cover directs us to the performance of companies, of business management, of economic power. It directs us to the high performance of US corporate executives — and to their occupational risks…..
….The Forbes challenge can thus be paraphrased as “Perform — or else: you’re fired!” The challenge is that posed by organizational performance. And though it seems directed to a rather small but powerful group — the top brass of 1,335 companies — this challenge affects not only all levels of corporate structure, but also workers in a wide variety of organizations, from businesses to non-profit organizations, from government agencies to educational institutions.”
Through organisational performance, he discusses the concepts of hierarchy, power, gender, performance applications through reviews and raises, dispensable resources (technological, human, and information), throughout stating that his theory is extremely US-centric. We got interested in his perspective in context to the rising discontent in the young cultural and creative organisations of India. Instagram saw a flood of stories in 2018–19 where organisations and individuals were called out on misconduct, harassment and exploitative accounts. There were committees trying to make sense of the situation and come up with solutions and methods that could allow the transformation of workspaces. The moment we began a dialogue here though, there is an age-old, more local range of socio-political factors that need to be looked into such as caste, class, gender, region, language, political affiliation etc. For this we are working with Suruchi Pawar, a Cultural Programmer and Co-ordinator, who is going to unpack and try and navigate this uncharted territory in India. While following her thinking and methodology we will also be curating philosophies and sub-cultures that have been emerging worldwide as a response to the current state of work culture. Some of these practitioners tend to walk the lines between organisational and cultural performance or even technological performance.
Cultural Performance: Travel, Movement, Learning, Function
“Cultural sense of performance allows us to cite another challenge. From the perspective of the NEA 4 and those for whom performance means liminality, subversion, and resistance, this challenge reads: Perform — or else: be socially normalized.”
“In contrast to the organizational sense of performance, the activities that once animated the vaudeville stage — music and dance, comedy and melodrama, daring feats of skill — all these can today be read as cultural performances, as the living, embodied the expression of cultural traditions and transformations. Today, the most common uses of this performance concept still come in the contexts of theatre, film, and television, where acting performances are routinely discussed, reviewed, marketed, and consumed. However, cultural performance extends far beyond those genres often considered “mere” entertainment. Over the past five decades, the presentational forms associated with theatrical performance have been transformed into analytical tools, generalized across disciplinary fields, and reinstalled in diverse locations. Anthropologists and folklorists have studied the rituals of both indigenous and diasporic groups as performance, sociologists and communication researchers have analyzed the performance of social interactions and nonverbal communication, while cultural theorists have researched the everyday workings of race, gender, and sexual politics in terms of performance. Here, Richard Schechner’s concept of “restored behaviour” — as the living actualization of socially symbolic systems — has been one of the most widely cited concepts of cultural performance.”
By far the largest area of work, with a large pool of material from an Indian context, performance as the embodied act of cultural and natural forces, looks to analyse, question, debate and provide methodologies that contemporary practitioners have been using on-field. In a time of the shift to words and approaches like collaborative, collective, tribes, coming together, we picked on the ‘Co-‘ and are curating the first series of practitioners that embody this method. We have Arko Mukhopadhyay — an experimental and physical theatre practitioner | Navya Sah — writing, poetry, performing arts | Ankita Shah — writing, spoken and written word poetry | Diya Naidu — movement practice and choreography | Natasha Sharma — Public Art, Urban Interventions and Designing for Underserved Communities. We also have Jaya Ramchandani, whose work we will be unpacking and a special practice that travels all 3 paradigms in its process.
Technological Performance: Travel, Movement, Learning
Perform — or else: you’re outmoded, undereducated, in other words, you’re a dummy!
“What is this performance?” and “How does it function in different scientific and technical fields?”
“What performs? Air fresheners, roofing insulation, bicycles, carpets and rugs, powerboats, wallcoverings, drain panels, cleansing towels, car-stereo equipment, bakeware, aquarium filters, tires, fabric, window film, woodworking knives, automotive timing chains, foil containers, audio antennae, deep- fat fryers, embossing tools, mop handles, music synthesizers, casement windows, and eyeliners — to name just a selection of those products marketed in the US with some form of the word “performance” actually appearing in their names. One industrial giant, Phillips Petroleum, even markets itself as “The Performance Company.”
The most profound enactments of technological performance, however, are those cast and produced within the computer, electronics, and telecommunication industries. To cite the range of performing computers and their users: on one end, the Macintosh Performa, a popular line of computers marketed by Apple in the 1990s; toward another end, the Maui High Performance Computing Center, a facility maintained by the University of New Mexico and the United States Air Force that offers state-of-the-art parallel processing for highly select research projects. The Performa is but a single line of computers, the Maui facility but one of the dozens of high-performance computing centres in the US. The extent of technological performance within the computer industry must be mapped both in terms of its own specific operation there and in light of the computer’s function as a virtual meta technology, a technology used to design, manufacture, and evaluate other technologies. Technologies no longer go back to the drawing board; instead, they go back to the desktop with its CAD or computer-assisted design programs. The computer not only performs, but it also helps produce performances of other products and materials and thereby greatly extends the domain of technological performance, a domain whose reach into our own lives can be grasped in the ubiquity of bar codes.”
Even with a massive cultural and consumerist support to technological performance, this particular field is yet to be entirely understood. One problem we realised was the lack of understanding of technology. Most magazines, journals, tv reviews, podcasts, vlogs, discuss technology outside or isolated from our daily. For those who are ardent followers this doesn’t seem to be a problem, but for the rest and for this particular paradigm to increase the critical discourse around it, beyond “good” and “bad”, needs the conversation and understanding to be communicated like to a 5-year-old. We go back to this constantly because the addition of this topic of travel, movement and learning came into being through a series of incidents. When Nikhil began sharing stories about his bike rides or needed help while he fixed one, or asked for opinion based on what accessory and additional equipment to buy for the aforementioned bike(s), I had no idea what I could contribute. All I was till then and in the preceding years was a pillion. Over time, as he began breaking down the technology for me, there were conversations we could have that entered through the frame of the bike but went beyond into understanding say how the movement of the rider and pillion was defined by the shape of the bikes. IT took me back to all the frustrations I had felt when a certain piece of technology hadn’t functioned like I was told it would, or if a mail wasn’t going through from some reason. I still can’t pinpoint why the wifi stops working sometimes. I can guess but I don’t understand all its nuances. Studying the performance of and through technology, with riders who use simple language and can communicate beyond technical and capitalist lingo, became a vital participant group in this area. This paradigm also connects to Organisational paradigm as well as the Cultural paradigm, while trying to make sense of what all this paradigm entails in everyday use.
Bibliography
Mckenzie Jon. Perform-or Else
Jonathan Culler. The fortunes of performativity
