Experimental Writing - Performance

Performance is an assortment of interdisciplinary practices that, taken collectively, can be viewed as an emerging genre in creative writing. Although Performance might, at first blush, appear to be most connected to the established creative writing genre of playwriting, the more circumscribed traditions of the stage rarely capture the full range of experimental works that are oriented toward performance. Performance works instead often have roots in Modernist and Postmodernist scenes such as Dada cabarets, Surrealist walks, Futurists entertainments, Bauhaus mechanical ballets, the Happenings at Black Mountain College, FLUXUS hijinks, and countercultural rituals and séances. Today, Performance may be found at the confluence of experimental operas, dance theater, multimedia works, new music concerts, protests, pop-up fashion shows, agitprop, stand-up comedy, radical literary readings, performance art, sound poetry, storytelling events, avant-garde lectures, circus arts, generative workshops, tarot readings, flash mobs, drag, slams, improv, art openings, puppetry, Pecha Kucha, escape rooms, religious ceremonies, film screenings, new media, punk shows, rap battles, and hip-hop spectacles. Although some of these subgenres of Performance may take place on theatrical stages, they’re just as frequently produced in galleries, coffee shops, bookstores, public squares, museums, community centers, street corners, site-specific locations, online, or other venues. Performance not only cuts across other genres of creative writing, both new and established, it also interweaves and cross-pollinates different artistic crafts.

Increasingly, with the incorporation of advanced technologies, Performance works break down the distinction between “live” and “recorded” events. They can also problematize the idea of writing itself since many of them are devised or improvised; the score of a Performance work may be merely a document, video, or transcription. There may not be a singular, unified, authorized “text” of the work, either, because Performance is inherently iterative, existing in different productions, many of which are ephemeral. The written text—if one even exists—is only a single element of a larger enterprise, unable to represent the total work that encompasses gestures, bodies, voices, movements, lights, sounds, environments, and audiences. Often collaborative and process-oriented, Performance thus defies many of the assumptions that undergird the attitudes, methods, and pedagogy espoused in traditional creative writing discourse. Contiguous to these expressions of Performance, we also explore the ability of written texts to use “performative” utterances that enact a social or aesthetic change. Within experimental creative writing, these performative utterances are located in manifestos, which typically embody the styles, processes, politics, aesthetics, and ideals that their texts call for.

Links

● Terrance Hayes, “Arbor for Butch”

● Carla Harryman, “A Voice to Perform”

● Anne LaBaron and Douglas Keanery, Sucktion chamber cyborgopera

● Kenward Elmslie, “Girl Machine” song

● Sibyl Kempson, “12 Shouts to the Ten Forgotten Heavens: Autumnal Equinox 2016”

● Sara Tuss Efrik, excerpt from stage play danse macabre piggies

● Benjamin Garcia, “Ode to the Peacock” video-poem

● Harmony Holiday, “God’s Suicide”

· John Cage, “Lecture on Nothing”

● Samuel Beckett, “Breath” (directed by Damien Hirst)

● Ariana Reines, Reading of “The Artist’s Studio” by Gustave Courbet