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Published on Fashioning the Body: Versions of the Citizen, the Self, and the Subject (http://www2.evergreen.edu/fashioningthebody)

Abstracting performance

By iea
Created 16 Oct 2007 - 8:46am
By abstracting from the immediacy of life (ourselves), and sitting, watching, we see outside ourselves; we see ideas inscribed as others. They move, talk, shift and sometimes eat. A predominance exists at the intersection of various identities, where methods come into conflict and challenge each other (words, body movements, images).  Through establishing the modes of performance, the challenge becomes which to utilize and shape, which to remain stagnate (which constructed idea to establish as inherent an which to inquire into its validity), but ultimately leaving judgment - not meaning - up to the viewer. 

Sight - the words unspoken - acknowledgement of silence - where silence is grasped.  By laying claim to the silence (using images and stage directions), performance enters in. It is here that one becomes another, that the distinction between audience and actor blur.  We connect abstractly, safely into another realm, an image of reality.  The play within play, the form of the form.

The medium of performance acts as the abstraction, imagining a space never made real before. 

Source URL:
http://www2.evergreen.edu/fashioningthebody/fashioningthebody/abstracting-performance