knowledges that derive from improvisatory immediacy and presence; performance
is the art of (and the art of valuing) the now:^19
Performance’s only life is the present. Performance cannot be used, recorded,
documented or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of
representations; once it does so it becomes something other than performance.
To the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of repro-
duction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology. Performance’s
being becomes itself through disappearance.
(Phelan 1993: 1 4 6)It follows that performance cannot be seen as (though it may well involve) ‘text’.^20
Although some scholars have written as though performance could be treated
as a form of text... its unique strategic properties are destroyed when it is
considered as, or reduced to, text. To be sure, performances share some
qualities with texts. They have beginnings, middles and ends, they have
internal structure, may refer to themselves, etc. But it is precisely the perfor-
mativity of performances for which there is no analogue in text. Unlike text,
performances are ephemeral. They create their effects and then are gone- leaving their reverberations (fresh insights, reconstituted selves, new struc-
tures, altered realities) behind them. Performances are a living social activity,
by necessity assertive, strategic and not fully predictable. While they refer to
the past and plunge towards the future, they exist only in the present.
(Schieffelin 1998: 198)
In other words, performance conjures up the precarious ‘emptiness’ of the now,
and, in so doing, provides a distinctive force opposed to the representational econ-
omy in which we live. ‘Non-preservable, fluid, full of uncertain architecture and
temporary sets, performance honours the idea that a limited number of people in
a specific time/space frame can have an experience of value which leaves no visible
trace afterward’ (Phelan 1993: 1 7 8 and 1 4 9).
What, then, are the chief characteristics of performance as the art of now?
Six come to mind. First, performance is a heightening of everyday behaviour, rather
than something standing apart from it. It is thereby a construction of a tension
between performance as a more or less continuous presence in the stream of
everyday life and performance as something staged in specific spaces and times. In
Schechner’s (1993) famous phrases it is ‘twice-behaved’ or ‘restored’ behaviour,
but what is being behaved and restored is precisely the issue. Second, performance
is liminal, ‘a mode of embodied activity whose spatial, temporal and symbolic
“awareness” allows for dominant social norms to be superseded, questioned,
played with, transformed’ (McKenzie 199 7 : 218). But ‘liminal’ means more than
this. The term ‘liminal’ comes, of course, from the anthropologist Turner, who
developed it from van Gennep’s The Rites of Passage(1961) and his own study
of Ndembu ritual. In turn, Schechner generalized the notion, spreading it across
Afterwords 135