Philosophy of the Performing Arts

174 performance as art
agents to the audience. This, in part, is what is lacking in sporting events, where
the energies and attentions of a player are focused on other players or other
elements of the game, even if there are in fact spectators present. In a per-
formance, this address relates to what the performers are manifestly doing. To
perform is to display something to the audience – a series of actions or sounds,
say – and, in so doing, to address the audience in the following terms: “attend
to this!” (173). Artistic performances differ from other kinds of displays – for
example, a merchant’s display of his wares – in the kind of attention that they
solicit from spectators. A performance in the performing arts demands that
the spectator engage in what Thom terms a “playful beholding” which interprets
what is presented. This “playful beholding” is a feature of the audience’s atten-
tion and can take a number of forms. Audience attention can play “between the
performer’s present actions and recollected past actions or anticipated future
ones,” or “between one performer and another,” or “between content and vehi-
cle,” or “between a particular performance as a whole and another performance
of the same work,” or “between aspects of the performance and aspects of their
own lives,” or “between what occurs inside the performance space and what has
occurred or may occur outside it” (205). The attention solicited is therefore not
merely passive but demands activity on the part of the spectator.
Performing, Thom maintains, takes place in the context of performance
institutions. The latter involve both a performance setting – a space set apart
from the space of everyday life – and a performance occasion – a period of time
structured for the purposes of performance. But, Thom stresses, it is the per-
formance that establishes something as its setting and occasion, rather than – as
on an institutional theory – something’s counting as a performance in virtue of
its being staged in a particular institutional context such as a theater. He cites,
as an example, Trisha Brown’s Roof Piece (1973) which, in being presented on
a mile of rooftops in Manhattan, established this location as its performance
setting. We have performance institutions when we have the concepts of a per-
formance setting and a performance occasion. Given these concepts, we can
find novel ways of instantiating them, as in Brown’s case. Thom also rejects
the suggestion that something becomes a performance by being the object of
“playful attention.” His target here is the view implicit in John Cage’s defini-
tion of theater, as “something that engages both the eye and the ear,” which
would permit everyday life to count as theater if beheld in the right way. Citing
Arthur Danto’s example of a riot that we can attend to as if it were a ballet,
Thom argues that we need to preserve a distinction between something’s being
a performance and our treating it as if it were a performance. The essence of
performance, he insists, lies no more in our manner of attending to actions
than it does in the institutional context in which actions are performed. It lies,
rather, in the particular relationship that obtains between the performers and
the audience, whereby the former address the latter in a particular way.