Performance and Theatricality: The Subject Demystified

Inherited from surrealist practices in the twenties, as RoseLee Goldberg has shown in her book, Peiformance! artistic performance enjoyed quite a boom in the fifties, especially in the wake of the experiments of Allan Kaprow and John Cage. Conceived as an art-form at the juncture of other signifying practices as varied as dance, music, painting, architecture, and sculpture, performance seems paradoxically to correspond on all counts to the new theatre Performance and Theatricality 171 invoked by Artaud; a theatre of cruelty and violence, of the body and its drives, of displacement and "disruption,'" a non-narrative and non-representational theatre. 1 should like to analyse this experience of a new genre in hopes of revealing its fundamental characteristics as well as the process by which it works. My ultimate objective is to show what practices like these, belonging to the limits of theatre, can tell us about theatricality and its relation to the actor and the stage.