Philosophy of the Performing Arts

performance ii: audience and embodiment 177
to be explained by reference to the agent’s expectations as to their reception
by an intended audience. While we explain such an agent’s actions in terms
of various goals she is pursuing, we assume that a principal motivation is the
conscious desire to affect her intended audience in a particular way through
their attention to her actions.
But if the difference between performing and mere acting resides in the
kinds of considerations that guide the agent and in terms of which her actions
are to be explained, this implies a number of things that might initially strike
one as counterintuitive. First, there is no reason why one cannot perform for
oneself , that is, be one’s own intended audience. A musician who plays in an
otherwise deserted room may do this. Thus a performance need not be open
in practice to the appraisal of others. What is crucial is that an agent be rightly
describable as guided in how she selects or executes a given course of actions
by her expectations as to how these actions will affect an intended audience.
The musician who plays for herself meets this condition to the extent that a
principal constraint on how she plays is her expectation as to how she herself
will judge what she does. A performer who performs for herself is as open
to disappointment as one who performs for others, and for the same kinds
of reasons. On the one hand, she may be dissatisfied with her playing because
she fails to play in the way her expectations guide her to do. On the other
hand, she may play what she intended but discover that she was wrong in her
expectations as to how she would respond. It is important to stress, however,
that when a musician plays or a dancer dances for pleasure, she does not usu-
ally consciously shape her actions in light of such expectations. She simply
gives herself up to the activity. Thus, while one can perform for oneself, only
some self-directed activity by performing artists counts as performance.
Second, much of what performing artists do in preparing for public
performances also counts as performing. For it is consciously guided by
expectations about the responses of an intended audience – in this cases,
the audience that is expected to attend the public performance of the piece.
This may sound odd, given that we are used to drawing a distinction between
rehearsal and performance. But this oddness is easily dispelled. For the dis-
tinction in question is more accurately described as one between rehearsing
and giving a performance. Performing artists perform both during rehears-
als and when on stage, but only in the latter case do we describe them as
giving a performance. The latter requires the establishment of a perform-
ance setting and performance location in Thom’s sense. The important point,
however, as noted above, is that to treat an agent as performing is to place
her actions in a particular kind of explanatory space, a space as pertinent to
what is done in rehearsal as to what is done on stage.
One final point needs clarification. A performer is guided in her actions
by the ways in which she expects those actions to affect an intended audience.