Gurudev 1
Siri Gurdev (UT EID: dch2583) Professor Dr. Megan Alrutz Research Methods Performance art in Bogotá: ten postcards Introduction I.
WAJA: a Powerful Organization
Since 2003, unexpected and intriguing events have happened around the central city in Bogotá, Colombia. The ones who facilitate the appearance of this events, the directors of WAJA Foundation, called them “performances.” These performances are politically driven: they address armed conflict in Colombia, forced displacement, gender identities and inequity, re-connection with nature, healing practices, among others. Although not many researchers (besides the directors of WAJA themselves Paola Correa and Gustavo Gutiérrez), have reflected upon the creative process behind this performances, or the meaning and effects in the city and the people involved, they are part of a broader context of performance art in Colombia and Latin-America that is happening since the late 80's. What is unique about WAJA is the fact that Paola and Gustavo are not just interdisciplinary makers, as the well-known contemporary performers in the circuit of art and research such as Tzitzi Barrantes or La Fulminante. WAJA is one of the only alternative spaces that leads creative processes to produce performance pieces in the city. Even though WAJA isn't described as an educational institution, Paola and Gustavo have fostered the reflection and production of performance art through pedagogical processes framed as one or two-month-long workshops. In fact, they have been doing this even before the creation of the Master in Theatre and Live Arts in The National University of Colombia, which is the first program of its kind in Latin-America and
Gurudev 2
who aims to "create a space to reflect upon the new conditions to create and execute contemporary theatrical pieces” (unal.edu.co). WAJA has created this space already.
Part of the outsider character in the circuit of art and research of WAJA Foundation is due to the fact that the directors have tried to be independent of any university, although they have some alliances with Tadeo University and ASAB (Superior Academy of Arts in Bogota). Also, Paola and Gustavo have focused on performances in public spaces rather than in galleries partly because they have been gathering resources from the Ministry of Culture's calls on site-specific art projects in the city. These awards are planned to promote Bogotá's value and heritage. In order to be a sustainable organization, WAJA has related performance practice with the activation and re-interpretation of historical stigmatized spaces in Bogotá. Within the description, analysis, and interpretation of ten performance pieces produced by WAJA in 2014, I start the necessary visibilization of this project as well as my exploration around the idea that performance art is an effective tool for social awareness and social change. I have chosen to start with the showcase in 2014 because I was a participant on it, which gives me an insight that I don't have in other cases. However, this is the first step of an ongoing research about performance art in Bogotá. II.
Wait, what is ‘performance’ anyway?
As my subject of study has to do with experimental contemporary art that sometimes challenges the concept of art as such, it seems important to explain the meaning of ‘performance' that I subscribe here. In doing that, it is possible to go back to the "classics" theorists: Turner, Schechner, or Conquergood. However, more than imposing a foreign definition from a hegemonic system of knowledge (which is the case in the relationship between US and Colombia as an
Gurudev 3
example of the North/South global dynamic), it is more appropriate to see what Paola and Gustavo consider as performance art as well as local definitions available. That doesn't mean that I'm presenting a “pure” exclusively Colombian definition of performance. Colombia is a colonized country that has based its education system and production of knowledge in the European and North American canons. The performance theory that I have chosen comes from Dr. Consuelo Pabón. She is a Colombian philosopher, teacher, and artists who studied in Paris with Deleuze, Lyotard, and Schérer. Consuelo is a pioneer in doing performative lectures in Colombia and also the researcher selected by the Ministry of Culture to recapitulate the work of the most prominent performance art makers Colombia until 2000. WAJA have chosen Consuelo as a voice for their documentary about performance art in Bogotá produced in 2014, which indicates that her philosophy is relevant for them. According to Consuelo, performances are: "Presentations in which bodies appear in a singular space-time experience, proposing through their poetic action occurrences that brake the linearity of what occurs" (my trans. 76). In a posterior essay about the curatorial process that Consuelo did in 2000, she rephrases her definition of performance as follows: I understand by performative action or performative act a sensitive experience by which the body bursts into time and space as an occurrence that brakes the linearity of what is happening, bringing in scape paths that allow us for an instant to “stop the world”, to go into different realities, into other affective universes where the thought can be born. (Pabón, my trans. 122) In order to unpack this definition, Consuelo explains more about the idea of “presentation” and “occurrence”. “Presentation” opposes entirely to the idea of (re)presentation that is essential to
Gurudev 4
classic and modern art. In performance art, the body is in a particular space not representing a character but inventing one "that only exists in the molecules of the artists" (Pabón, my trans. 77). I interpret this idea saying that even though in a performance the body is not in place of a character, it is not itself as in the everyday life. In a performance, I interpret Consuelo, the body is presented as a fictional persona coming from a world that has reclaimed an ephemeral parenthesis in the day to day present reality. ‘Occurrence’, which is a complex concept borrow from Deleuze, has to do precisely with this idea of the interruption of everyday life. According to Consuelo, an occurrence is something that happens to the artists but that the artist doesn’t look for: “occurrence is not what an artist produce: one doesn’t look for the occurrence, the occurrence always arrives” (Pabón, my trans. 77). Choosing those definitions cited before is to say that I acknowledge the status of performance as an occurrence in which the body becomes present through a poetic act. That starting point, to be sure, lay off positions in which performance is not considered as an art. However, I acknowledge that there is a liminal space that performance inhabits between life and art due to the fact that there is a present body in a space-time occurrence. More than the status of performance art, what is a debatable topic is its meaning or effects on the city and the people involved as makers or spectators. Finally, having this definition, I will start my approach to the performance showcase in 2014. But how can I talk about something that is already gone? How can I talk about this somehow mysterious experimental form of art in a compelling what or in a way that makes sense at all? III.
Performative writing: methodological note
Gurudev 5
Contemporary scholars such as Norman Denzin and John Freeman are applying the concept of performance in thinking and writing about the performance itself. They refer to this application in terms of performance ethnography and performative writing respectively. According to Freeman, when thinking performances one must move from writing about performance to writing for performance because addressing a piece that is meant to be a particular and unrepeatable episode (or we can say occurrence) in the past is certainly problematic: In recording time-based work within space-based media, problems inevitably emerge, and writing about performance is an innately flawed endeavor in ways that writing for performance manages to avoid. Where the former corrals the subversive, the latter is able to release it. (12) I will go on with this idea experimenting with performative writing in my research about the ten pieces. The characteristics of performative writing that I will pursue come from Freeman writing exercises and the article of Della Pollock Performative Writing. I compared this two proposals from Freeman and Pollock and came up with my own mix model that I considered useful to try in this particular case. As I don't want to guide excessively the experiences of the audience/reader approaching my text, I will only name the characteristics of my experiment. Performative writing here is: evocative, free, citational, political and relational. From now on, I will consider myself going into a lab in which the space of the blank page is waiting for an occurrence to come. I invite the audience to submerge in this experience. Works cited Freeman, John. New performance / New writing. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Master in Theatre and Live Arts. http://www.facartes.unal.edu.co/fa/maestrias/teatro-artes-vivas/
Gurudev 6
Pabón, Consuelo. “Actos de fabulación”. Investigaciones sobre arte contemporáneo en Colombia: proyecto pentágono, edited by Andrés Gaitán, Ministerio de Cultura, 2000, pp. 68-115. ______________. “Actos de fabulación”. Colección de ensayos sobre el campo del arte, edited by Jaime Cerón, 2005, pp. 118-177.
Gurudev 7
Ten Postcards: texts and explanation
The final “postcards” had the following structure: 1. Q.R. code and description: I decided to use my voice as well as electronic voices to create and audio for the description of each piece. I uploaded that audio to my Podomatic Account https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/takcombative and then I created a Q.R. code that leads to each audio. People can scan the code with their phone camera and the link will immediately be opened. The original name of the piece, the artist and the length of the performance are listed with the code. 2. Photo: a picture (took from WAJA’s website) of each piece. 3. Questions and comments: reflections, critical observations, questions and connections about the meaning and effects of each piece. Also alternative names for each piece that I offer like signs for an alternative path of significance. These comments are displayed in a performative mode that asks for interaction and interpretation about how it is presented. 4. Quotes: one key-quote related to the piece. These quotes are also displayed in a performative mode especially in a relationship with the size of the font. Authors that are women of color have a huge font that occupies some pages that are supposed to unwind. Classic white authors’ quotes are very small and audiences are supposed to use the magnifying lens to read them. There is also some game between form, content, and function with repetitions, change of tracking and a mirror. The final texts were the following: Description
Analysis Path Gabriela Espla Length: 2 hours
Quote
Gurudev 8
One young woman carries a blue bag full of rocks. The rocks have the size of a hand. She puts one, two, three rocks in a pyramidal form on the street. Gabriela comes and goes with her bag of stones through the 7th avenue, right in the middle of a road that used to have cars on it, but that now is only for pedestrians. Four, five, six rocks and the pyramid has been destroyed when she returns from his repetitive walk south to north through the 7th avenue. People stop and look at her. Some laugh, some take pictures. Gabriela uses a white blouse and a tight pair of blue jeans. “And then someone stoles her blue bag haha”, says a homeless old man passing by. It’s raining. People grab some rocks and line them up with the white line of the road. The pyramid is never complete.
Alejandra, in her 30s, embraces the huge tree that lives on the median street right on the famous 19th avenue. She is wearing a long blue skirt with a blue sleeveless t-shirt. Alejandra cleans the mud where the tree grows, it was full of trash. People stop their way to take a video. She fertilizes the earth and seed colorful plants on it. Alejandra weave nests of white wool that surround a big corn, she decorates the frame of the tree with natural pigments and dry orange skin. She adds blue, red, pink, yellow flowers and little rocks and seeds. Her drawing turns into a huge mandala that covers the median street. Cars
Streets are activated by a ritual path. It echoes ancient carns that were supposed to be signals of a river or the top of a mountain, or also burial mounds. Walk for two hours up and down of a road with a bag of stones, too much burden for a woman? Woman as a martyr. Humans as performers of impossible tasks. Two hours feels different when one carries a bag of stones. Titles: Urban carn, Kafkaesque, Queen Sisyphus (?).
She loved the seed Alejandra Muñoz Length: 3h 30 min A performative action turns a normal tree into a piece of colorful art. A beautiful landscape in the middle of a chaotic and dirty city. An intervention of a public space creates an ephemeral brake in the daily life of pedestrians. Women as healers of nature. Women as the ones who clean. Climate justice and feminism! Titles: Earthwife, Earthmaker, Costume of a Tree.
“But the body of the artists can’t be separated of her social context, it is not possible to talk about ‘the body of the woman’ without mentioning social and cultural conditions that determine that body” (Alcázar 348)
“The ritual approach is very important in Latin-American performance. Recovering ancient traditions, religious ceremonies and shamanic acts are themes that are addressed repeatedly” (Alcázar 334).
Gurudev 9
go up and down. She bows to the tree and leaves. Black magic in a secular Country, Colombia Ladyzunga (ABCDEFGHIJK LMNOPQRSTUVEXYZ) R.I.P. Length: 1 hour In less than 60 minutes, the sun will A transwoman that is dead «Onstage, performance go. Ladyzunga, black hood and now performed a satanic act. artists rarely black plastic boots, a woman in her What’s the difference “represent” others. 30s, drops a hoop on the floor of the between a performance art Rather, we allow our Square. In the circle, she puts piece and an instant of life? multiplicity of selves upside down black knifes made of Is a witch a real witch if she and voices to unfold black long candles, small black does her witchcraft as an and enact their fictions candles, a black crystal pyramid, a artistic act? and contradictions in mirror, black dust and a sheet with In some native cultures, front of an audience. symbols. Then she explains to the transgender people are “To ‘re-present’ would audience: "What we are going to do supposed to have magic mean to be ‘different’ is to take out the light we have powers. They call us from what we are inside, to shine it. But here is not "I “Two-spirits”. doing," says Brazilian want this" or “I wish I could have Titles: Praying to Demons, performance artists this”. It is “that thing that I want is Rest in peace, Uganda in Nara Heeman. “Our coming to me now.” “There are Colombia. embodied knowledge some petitions from the audience so and images are only we need to know which demons possible because they we’re focusing on”. “This is a are truly ours”» satanic ritual, not a diabolic one. (Gómez-Peña 35). Diabolic is when one uses blood”. “We want health? Ok, how much does that cost? We need to ask the demon.” The requests are made and the candles are lighted by the audience, she starts a satanic pray to make all the wishes come true. People record the action with their cell phones. Ladyzunga rings a bell. She takes an arrow and crosses the sheet were the pray is written and then she burns it. Audience members sit on the floor and hold hands, praying with their eyes closed. The action is over. The sun is gone. The inhabitants Gina Cruz and Zombie Length: 40 min Gina and Zombie both in her 20s A transgender young man “’Slow Motion Walk’ is
Gurudev 10
are dressed in black. The action starts in the Square of Tadeo University. Zombie has white balloons attached to his body. They chase each other following the paths of the bricks on the floor. Gina bursts all the balloons. It starts raining. They fill a bucket of blue paint. One grabs the bucket facing north, the other facing south. They are connected with a pair of handcuffs. Blue drops spill down while they walk, one step at a time. Zombie and Gina move to a traffic circle where they dance using water bottles with a holey cover, dropping liquid at the rhythm of a live drum and a maraca. The action ends with Gina spreading water from the bottle while zombie acts as a bullfighter using a golden cape.
Okay, that’s me. I’m wearing the white outfit that I use for teaching yoga kundalini. I’m standing in front of the participants, 10 in total. First, I lead a warm-up exercise in pairs touching each other’s bodies from the skin to the bones, each time more deeply, but gently. Then we practice a kundalini meditation in which participants breathe in and then breathe out with a whistle. We start the core of the action, what I named “iterations”, any gesture that expresses a moment in which we felt offended or hurt. I go first. My gesture is saying out-loud “you are like bug repellant” while pointing with the finger in front. I leave my place as “teacher”. The participants one by one take the spot and do their gestures that we all repeat for
plays the role of a bullfighter with a ciswoman playing as the bull. The action could be problematic if read as the reinforcement of a domination practice from men over women. It reminds me that I experienced toxic masculinity coming from transmen in my community. Titles: Circus acts, I don’t Understand this Piece, Maybe I don’t like this Piece.
Iterations Tak Combative (me) Lenght: 1 hour What happen (in the mind, soul, body) when one repeats a gesture for a long time? What happens if that gesture is the signal of a traumatic event? What if a group of people repeats this gesture also? Drama-based healing process. Re-enacting the wound to heal it. Trans Two spirit person as a healer. Yoga and performance. Life, ritual or art? Performance art as an obsession with the past always in the present. Titles: Into the wound, Choreographing the pain, Trauma, and repetition
not a performance piece—it’s purely an exercise from the Marina Abramovic Method, which is a regimen that Marina believes in and performs herself. It is something you do, not watch; there is nothing to buy, only to experience.” (Bailey).
“Repetition may seem to annul the progress of time by constantly returning us to the scene of some previous experience as if one trod water in the river of life" (Howell 36).
Gurudev 11
3 minutes each. Saying “back of” while pushing the air with the arms or saying “you a whore” are other gestures. The final part is a healing meditation in pairs that I lead. We breathe together and the action is over.
It’s a chaotic and noisy Sunday in the center of the city. Daniela (in her 20s) is in the middle of the flea market with a huge plastic bag. There are clothes inside. She starts to put them on, one over the other, pants, t-shirts, pajamas. Then she starts to walk hardly through the 7th avenue. One by one, she takes the clothes off and drops them into the ground. She draws a circle around with a neon green spray. When she is just wearing a psychedelic pair of leggings and a sleeveless pink shirt, bare feet, Daniela starts some kind of dance with the gesture of getting rid of something, as if she were cleaning her body, shaking it with her hands. A lot of people is watching her, maybe 30, it’s the Sunday market! People record her and take her pictures. “Pretty girl”, says a street seller. She leaves the area walking and still keeping small gestures of the previous dance.
Heidy, in her late 20s, uses a very long black dress. In her braided hair, she has the same adornments that are used for the stakes of the bullfighter. She sits in front of the most traditional bull ring of Bogotá
Apparent stripping Daniela Amaya Length: 1 hour Who is the performer when is executing a performance art piece? Is not an actor but is not the same person as in everyday life. Who is it? Re-signifying the action of a woman undressing through comedy and absurd. What happened (in the performer, in the audience and in the space) when one walks a path in a public avenue through a performative art piece? Title: No-Sexy Striping, Get rid of it, Clothes Liberation
Mourning Heidy Muñoz Length: 1 h 45 min What’s the difference between activism and art? How effective could be the art in terms of activism? How we measure this effectiveness?
“Notions of time and space are complicated in performance. We deal with a heightened ‘now,’ and ‘here,’ with the ambiguous space between ‘real time’ and ‘ritual time,’ as opposed to theatrical or fictional time. (…) We deal with ‘presence’ and ‘attitude’ as opposed to ‘representation’ or psychological depth, with ‘being here’ in the space as opposed to ‘acting’” (Gómez-Peña 36).
“Performance artists make clumsy political negotiators and terrible community-organizers. Our great dilemma here is that we often see
Gurudev 12
and starts to cut pieces of black ribbon. She fabricates black small mourning ribbons. She places them in a donut of cardboard that turns out to be a mourning bouquet kind of thing. People watch and pass by. When she finishes the arrangement, she drops it in front of the entry of the bullring.
What is a “bad idea” in performance art? How one can tells? Titles: Funeral, Climate lens, Black flowers.
Muiska Colombian Genuine Stephani Revelo Length: 2 hours 40 min Main Square in front of the Golden A mix raced young woman Museum which hosts indigenous asks about her muiskas goldsmithing. Stephani, in her late ancestors through knitting in 20s, is sitting on the ground dressed a site-specific performance. all in black with a fabric that covers The museum is shyly her entire head and extends beyond activated. How? Performance a meter or two away. The black veil as an indexical. What’s in her face is lighter for her to see pointing out? through it. She is knitting the black But the action is not finished. fabric with golden green and red It ended but it wasn't finished, thread following some drawings the fabric wasn't fully made out of white chalk weaved. Does a performance representing muiska’s iconography. fail when it can't accomplish She raises her sight to be able to the performer's goal? Should thread the needle. Very slowly, the we name it ‘intended drawings start to reveal in the black performance' or just fabric. People stop, look and keep ‘performance' as well? going. Kids are the most interested, Women as the weaver. they look at her with curiosity and The stories of our ancestors in try to see what's beyond the veil. the Americas used to be After 2 hours and a half, she stands transmitted by knitting. Oral up and walks around the museum practices infused into dragging the black fabric. craftwork used to hold our secrets about the origin. Titles: I Thought about Using
ourselves as activist and, as such, we attempt to organize our ethic, gender-based, or professional communities. But the results, bless our hearts, are often poor. Why? Our passion and rage are simply too combative for regulated protest, and we get easily lost in logistics and pragmatic discussions” (Gómez-Peña 38).
“The performance of rituals validates traditional ways of life. The performance embodies the ritual. It is the ritual. In this sense, the performance becomes a form of public pedagogy” (Denzin 7).
Gurudev 13
‘Penelope’ but that’s SO Colonialist, Muiska Lost in Time, Failed knitting act In bed Reinel Arango Length: 1 hours 30 min It’s 7:00 pm in the Square of Tadeo A gay performer drags a University. Reinel starts the wooden bed. His effort could performance assembling the pieces be a penalty or a self-imposed of an old wooden bed. Audience sacrifice. This is a context members help him. He grabs the that audiences/pedestrians wooden structure and drags it don't have. What does it mean through the neighborhood, a a performance art piece for an dangerous neighborhood. audience without context? Sometimes he goes in the street, Is the performance art a where cars pass by, sometimes on secretive action meaningful the sidewalk. The action is loud only for a few? because of the bed skeleton hitting Does part of its power lie on the ground. A homeless person its obscure significance, helps for a while. Reinel almost hits suggesting more than two people with a bike while declaring? walking backward dragging the bed. The more abstract, the more At some point, the bed brakes and apolitical? Reinel fall down. He stands up, Is there an ideal audience grab the wooden pieces of the bed member with all the context and keep walking. (an omniscient god)? We don’t want it! There is no control over the meaning of a performance art piece. Titles: Like Jesus Did, Men in bed, Broken Dreams.
"In theatre, there is a traditional difference between ‘a prop' and ‘the set'. Thus a free-standing table may be merely part of the set since it is not specifically employed by the actors. Performance artists, however, are liable to question this demarcation between utilized objects and objects in the background. (…) Thus, it is often the case that if a performance artist employs a chair, that chair will be manipulated, stood upon, perhaps broken, during the course of the performance" (Howell 63).
El mono de la pila (“The monkey on the sink”) Tixuachía Collective (Darío Camelo and Norma Guerrero) Lenght: 2 hours Hm, bueno, a ver. Darío tiene una <I wasn’t able to relate to this bata negra y se pone una tela negra piece because I think is very que le cubre toda la cabeza. Sus offensive. I decided not to zapatos son alpargatas con la address this problem but just bandera de Colombia. Norma está avoid the curation of the vestida de blanco con un traje de piece. I didn’t even translate cirugía. La acción inicia cuando it into English. I’m ambos caminan hacia la gran fuente experimenting with silence as del parque Santander cargando un a political tool inspired by Jill lienzo de varios metros. Ellos Dolan.>
Gurudev 14
tienden el lienzo en el marco de la fuente. Norma se tiene en el suelo boca abajo y Darío camina sobre ella desde los pies hasta la cabeza literalmente. Luego él camina hacia el lienzo, se sube al borde de la fuente y camina hasta el otro extremo, luego regresa. Norma se tiende de nuevo. Mientras Darío hace su caminata, Norma cuelga en el lienzo una palabra: injusticia, desesperanza, impuestos, etc. Al final, Norma escribe sobre el lienzo “¿Algo huele mal pero muy mal?” y ambos lo levantan y lo extienden como una pancarta. Fin.
Works Cited Alcázar, Josefina. “Mujeres cuerpo y performance en América Latina” [“Women, body, and performance in Latin-America]. Estudios sobre sexualidades en América Latina [Sexuality Studies in Latin-America], edited by Kathya Araujo and Mercedes Prieto, FLACSO, 2008, pp. 331-350. Denzin, Norman K. “The Call to Performance.” Performance ethnography. Sage Publications, 2003, pp. 3-24. Gómez-Peña, Guillermo, and Elaine Peña. “Track two. Pedagogy: A useful guide to the Pocha method.” Ethno-Techno: Writings on Performance, Activism, and Pedagogy. Routledge, 2005, pp. 73-135. Howell, Anthony. The analysis of Performance Art: A guide to its theory and practice. Hardwood Academic Publishers, 1999.
Gurudev 15
Bailey, Brittany. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Why I Took a Short, Slow Walk With Marina Abramovic.â&#x20AC;? Artspace. https://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/perspectives/brittany-bailey-on-s low-walking-with-marina-abramovic-52558
Gurudev 16
Post-experience reflection Meta-situation To talk about my experiment of performative writing that addressed a performance art showcase creates the same contradiction/tension that my object of study presented by itself. How to talk about a unique occurrence that is gone, how to describe it (if at all). What to say, how to talk about it? For this Portfolio, I wasn't sure about how to present the text that was already performed. I didn't know if it was better to include only the object (the book), or a mix of plain text and the Q.R. codes that leads to all the audios that I created or to describe how the text was displayed. I decided to present the final version of the texts with a brief explanation of the structure and the meaning of each section for my own research and because I think they are useful as a framing. I included also the book itself. The second question was, what to do with those pages that were transformed by the audience? Some of them took a form of an ephemeral installation that is gone. I added pictures of them. The third question, I was wondering what will happen with the original pieces that were transformed, should I describe how they looked before? The truth is that one can go endlessly in a chain of performative description of performances. For that reason, I decided to trust the originals as a secret between the audience (the ones that were there and interact with the material). Besides these difficulties/questions, there were some themes that came up thinking about this experience. The following are some learnings that I treasured after doing my research.
Learnings: Light and Darkness Performance Art as Interactive
Gurudev 17
During the research process, moving back and forth between developing and delivering, I was asking myself: what are you doing with this writing? What are these texts, how they are going to be presented? My idea was to make an installation with them, to set a sort of gallery in which people were able to appreciate the analysis of each performance art piece in a group of four performative texts (I did a total of 40 texts). The goal for the entire "exposition" was to activate audience's minds about performance art. Then, I had logistical concerns, like how to display that gallery if it was more like a presentation (something with a beginning and an end in a specific period of time)? What about my cohort group? What about the surprise of this book that I was creating? Facing these questions, I had the idea of the audience helping me to create that gallery, just pulling the pages out of the book. At that point, I thought that if audiences were doing that, I should give them more agency over the piece, they must be able to intervene it! And I went along with that. The issue was how to determine and explain that particular intervention so that people were able to engage with the text in a deeper way, how to activate their minds to think with me about these performances that I was analyzing. Lack of experience and awareness of how to create and communicate instructions for an intervention having a specific outcome (people's reflection about the performance art showcase) was the challenge. When I started to fabricate the book, my creative mind was heightened. I started thinking about ways to display the text for people to actually recreate it by means of reconstructing it. That's why I started cutting the text and making a puzzle of it inside a plastic bag. Also, I put one in a roll with a rubber band, following the concept of asking the audience to make an effort when accessing to the text under the premise that they will be more open to reflect on it. The intervention guide was very specific: discover the content transforming the form.
Gurudev 18
What happened after that was that the text itself started to have a dialogue with me and asking me some demands to present it. There were hours of me engaging with the object, the texts, the glue, the colors, papers; I was submerged in there. When I was holding the quote of slow walk from Abramovic, I felt I needed to increase the tracking of the font to create a slow reading when thinking about slow walking. I thought about repeating a quote that talks about repetition, I did a table folding pieces of paper as the legs and having a text that talks about prompts in theatre vs objects in performance art as the top, and I draw a table to establish the comparison. In that moment, the possible intervention from the audience became extremely opened. I create the option to engage with the material destroying it, change it in any way because it became something about the embodiment of the content. And that was the issue. Suddenly, in this dance between form and content, form and function, I diminished the possibility to awake or activate audienceâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s reflections about the ten pieces of performance art. It became something about craftwork, about using colors, cutting the page sometimes with any sense. In doing that, the object lost some power to be evocative. My takes away from this fact were: (1) the power of a performative piece is very fragile, it can go very easily to silliness as it can be transformative too. The boundary between these two is very thin and every decision counts, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a liminal space hard to pursue. (2) Instructions for intervention are a real deal! Sometimes performance art pieces actually have no instructions at all. Makers take a risk to expose themselves to any kind of interaction, sometimes actually ignoring the spectator who ends up intervening in timid ways. Audiences end up having an experience almost by accident. In my case, as I decided to give a big agency to the spectator, I should have reflected more about how to lead that in order to avoid subverting the power of the material. Framing in Performance Art
Gurudev 19
A big decision when doing a performance art piece has to do with framing, tools in terms of meaning for the audience to engage. How much of that framing is the artist supposed to provide? In relation to the research I did, I observed that in many cases when performances occur in public spaces, people are not able to understand what is going on. If that is the case: why we are doing those pieces? Sometimes the power of the experience is so clear that one can see audiences "captured" by it, but in so many cases the performer created an obscure, secretive piece that only spoke to them or to a few. It is true that the communication in a performance piece is not at all like in a straightforward conversation (not an academic one either), it is embodied and is part of an occurrence. It is evocative more than prescriptive. However, this is a complicated limbo too. At some point, artists are supposed to think about framing and how much to disclose the meaning of its piece. If they disclose the whole meaning, theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re doing a paper, not a piece of art! If they are too obscure they are doingâ&#x20AC;Ś maybe nothing! Nothing transformative for another human being, I mean. One can argue that this is why it makes more sense to do performances in galleries other than in public spaces. In opposition to what happens in public spaces, in a gallery the performance art pieces can be accompanied by a description hanging on the wall. However, the same thing happened. It could be useful for the audience or not. Actually, I wonder if that text that describes the piece is part of the performance itself or if it is just a description of the piece. It seems that this text becomes performative too because it involves artistic decisions in regard to meaning that affect the performance as a whole. That text can completely change the reception of the piece. Likewise, in public spaces, there is also ways of framing, depending on how creative the artists is, ways in which even if the maker is not narrowing the sense of the action, some paths can be provided.
Gurudev 20
At the beginning of my project, I was not thinking about describing anything for the presentation. My idea was to ask for people to pull out the pages and that was it. Through the two rehearsals we had, only explaining a bit to my cohort about what I was about to do, I refine my introduction and I think that the final one was effective, it was simple and clear. However, I decided to brake so much the sequence of the book that was actually organized piece by piece, that my framing was lost, and very little about the actual ten pieces I was addressing was shown or offer to reflect upon. In my perception, what predominated was some questions about performance art in general but not necessarily about the particular pieces that I was trying to explore. Things that Worked Somehow There was a performative conversation between my embodied reflections and the audience. It was interesting because the way audiences engage with the ideas (because it was a real object and their handcraft) was different from an academic conversation, were more impulsive or maybe more honest. This doesn't mean that one must take impulsive emotional positions towards hot topics but it is interesting to see and be aware of the very first impulse that one has of agreement or disagreement. For example, audiences spend a good amount of time with the envelope in which I placed a quote that says that artists are not good activist. Audiences were very emotional about the falsehood of this quote and wrote funny and interesting lines on the envelope like: To: Bull Shit 123 No True Avenue False, World of Testimonies 12345
Gurudev 21
Some of the audience members gave to me (or to someone?) advice: "don't be afraid of including your past" for a line that I wrote: "performance art as an obsession with the past always in the present". Another person added more questions: "What does it mean to play with fire? Who is dangerous? How conscious are our choices?" for the text that talks about witchcraft as a performance. Some others underline the text, highlighting what kept their attention. Besides destroying the material or hanging it on the wall, the other interesting action was drawing. Someone draw a face (mine?) in a reflection about who is the performer when performing a performance art piece (not an actor, not a regular person). For the quote about ritual as an important part of feminine performance art in the Americas, someone draws a ritual knife. A creation of a whole installation also happened. On the top of it was the quote about the prompts and the table. Then there was the reflection about the witch that became a campfire, at the left side was a reflection that I pinned with a hook and down there was the quote about ritual with the ritual knife. The last unexpected thing I noticed was that in my mind (which speaks about the way I approach reality) people were supposed to engage with one page by themselves and move to the next basically isolated. But actually what happened was that they started to interact with each other and also create more things on the material based on other's responses. I think that with more time to interact, other interesting ideas and responses about performance art could have happened. The particular pieces of the showcase were useful for landing those ideas, more than having just theoretical quotes about the topic. But only one audience member engage with the audio description; that information about each piece was not accessed. As I said before, this experiment that I did seems to be more useful to address performance art in a more general and conceptual way but I'm finding very difficult to create
Gurudev 22
appropriate political framings necessary for a respectful discussion about art in my country and keep using performance writing. I have the intuition that politics and a thoughtful discourse about politics maybe need a prescriptive more than traditional structure (!) which means that one needs less openness of interpretation, clearer meaning when interpreting a piece of art. Maybe this is the same for ethics (!). But, then: it is western logic the only way to think about politics and ethics? If it is so, it is because those ideas are part of western logic? Certainly, the separation between religion, science, ethics, art, and politics is a western construction that happened back in the Enlightenment. Is that the reason why we can't address appropriately those dimensions with performative writing? My upcoming research will probably dig deeper into this.
Final thoughts: Generosity of the Practice At a very early stage of my research, I thought about replicating the performative actions I was looking at but here in Austin to apply the concept of performance to the study of performance. When I abandoned the idea, I forgot about the possibility of learning about performance through the practice of it. However, this is exactly what happened. Even if what I did is probably not a performance art but more like an experiment about performative writing, I went through relevant themes in performance art such as interaction with audiences, framing, reception, and preparation. At the end, I was able to reflect upon those topics within a practice, and I can see how these concepts can lead my upcoming research about performance art in my country. Frankly, I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know how to pursue this research conserving the performative writing in the exact sense I tried here, especially because of the requirements that academia and academic research dictates for my scholarship but also because is problematic in terms of ethics and politics. However, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m hoping to find a place to make that happened, to have my performance art practice
Gurudev 23
and my performative writing as evocative, citational, political, and relational (but maybe not that free).