Sitrep 3

 What is performance for? Who is it for? Why do we do this?

These questions keep piercing around my brain like cracks giving way under ice on a lake bed. In my neck of the woods, in performance studies that is housed in Communication Studies, there is a acknowledgment of how life, especially the ways we can communicate, rivals the conventions of storytelling and staging is just as applicable. If that is the case, that what we see in front on stage mirrors the front of stages that we all perform in our personal and professional lives, why do we need to show an audience how "real" the real world is?

From A Street Car Named Desire to Belle Reprieve, or the violence in demonstrated in Blasted, the impulse on one hand to demonstrate a certain level of uncomfortable pain to harm also seems connected to the feelings on the other hand to be sat down and bare witness (or be an accomplice at times). There's a general feeling of wanting to reject something that is real in the world, or in the case of theatre, the shadows of the real. Is it the job of the theatre teacher, the pedagogical imperative, to open a window to a world that isn't insulated from violence that, earnestly, we all associate with and contribute to in some capacity? 

Writing this sitrep has left me with more questions about what constitutes playwriting, staging, and performance. It's 8:22 in the evening, a podcast discussing the reception of Sarah Kane's challenging play Blasted is playing where they point to how much Kane's own interview answers; such as Kane arguing theatricality and theatre shouldn't be an evening past time. That it should be difficult. That it should be uncomfortable. That it is painful. Should theatre, and by extension performing as a act, include theatre as entertaining artform with the challenging search for truth? Is stand-up, for example, artful and intellectually challenging enough as an art genre to be something worth studying along side something Arthur Miller wrote in a theatre course?

In many ways, I'm left in the playwriting seat at the moment. I've ventured back in dismembered time, and living out a uncanny dream where the performative is uncertain and infinite in choices again. Teaching appears Sisyphean. Violence and its cycles appear to be the only consistent placeholder. Maybe Gillespie and Rowan's article and breaking through time as barrier to know about queer theatre could also be used to break apart this cyclical barrier of violence that makes it so much harder for me to resonate with theatre and performance as "real" as the worlds they are trying to display.