Performance

Love Taylor's ideas on virtual and actual identity, and how we live in a hybrid space.

great

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Performance is a doing to, a thing done to and with the spectator.Diana Taylor, Performance, 2016, p.86Writer, Activist and NYU University Professor, Diana Taylor, has accomplished an admirable scholarly feat. Her new book Performance (Duke University Press, 2016) presents in accessible language an intelligent and impassioned primer whereby to engage the study of performance - defined as an embodied activity separate from life or “twice performed” for an audience. Intentionally not written as a hegemonic history, Performance provides a kit of discursive tools to analyze contemporary lived experience ranging from protests, demonstrations, theatre, performance art, dance, music, and other forms of public gesture. In being a useful primer for beginning theorists and advanced practionners, the book calibrates its tone towards clarity, bolstered by ample case studies and black & white illustrations, while its’ tenor is one of urgency and timeliness that the very acts of performance that reading, writing, viewing, and taking action entail.Acknowledging the interdisciplinary field within in which she has made a place for herself with reference to John Austin (philosophy), Richard Schechner (theatre), Peggy Phelan (performance studies), José Munoz (queer theory), Judith Butler (critical theory), Jon McKenzie (performance studies) and many more - as well as acknowledging the role of performance artists-activists – Karen Finley, Regina Galindo, Guillermo Gomez Peña, The Yes Men, Marina Abramović to name but a few, Performance is organized around several key concepts constituting a “brief history of performance theory.” As a quiet democratic act which allows for the recognition of performance as theory to glide easily into public conversation – the slipping of a veil of knowledge over the body of life - Performance nonetheless lodges a solid punch prompting readers into action by beginning with the simple question “what can I do?”With performance characterized as “radically unstable” and an experience wherein “breaking norms is the norm,” there is a bent in the works selected towards ones that create political consciousness, if not outright activism and revolutionary thinking. Just shy of a manifesto, Performance resists simplistic definitions and easy generalizations of complex world practices and subtle occurrences to push its readers to think about the specific ways in which things do something in the world and to the world. Performance, the book, and performance, the medium, presents the capacity to render viewers into more active modes, to become “spec-actors.” In wondering if there are always clear lines between art, performance, life, and politics, and how framing can make the same thing different, I think about who this book was written for and its underlying message. In the end, I believe it is for those who wish to make sense of their place in the world as a sentient body and a thinking presence. As Taylor concludes to empower her reader “As an act of imagination, performance allows us to imagine better scenarios and futurities…Performance is world making. We need to understand it.”

O produto veio bem embalado. Embora tenha demorado, a entrega veio correta.