What is so compelling about performance art?

Amazing is how completely surprised we are at the outcome of our own actions. We don’t even recognize our own creations after our individual activities have accumulated into patterns and cultural rituals. The sociologist Richard Sennett suggests a model, of how public life is constructed, can be extracted from the gestures a performer uses to convey a staged reality for the audience.” The connection between the staging of performance and how we perform the tasks that shape our society is what is so compelling about RoseLee Goldberg’s PERFORMA, an interdisciplinary arts organization committed to the research, development, and presentation of performance by visual artists.* Every other year PERFORMA saturates New York City with performances, panels, and exhibitions for three weeks in November. For two biennials I have assisted with the education panels for PERFORMA as the performances seem to wake up the City and make it aware of itself.

What is so compelling about performance art? Performance studies how gestures, as Sennett suggests, shape our lives, our public spaces, our very thoughts. Performance serves up disorder and conflict in order to expose our willingness to continue to do things the way we have grown accustomed to doing them. It shows us we are making choices. We are agents participating in the creation of what we perceive as real, in the building cities, and in deciding what is important. Performance measures if we are generating or draining energy. It asks what meaning are we attributing to experience. Awareness of performance challenges what Sennett refers to, using de la Boétie’s phrase, as our “voluntary servitude.” It asks us not to foreclose experience, not to cling to certainty and security, but to be open to change, to be alert to potential, and to observe carefully where energy flows.

*Flesh and Stone: The Sociology of Richard Sennett, part one http://castroller.com/podcasts/CbcRadioThe2/1357158

*www.performa-arts.org