a much wider range of cultural activities, from rituals to theatre and beyond. More
recently, liminality has become the key concept for theorizing the politics of
performance:
as a mode of embodied activity that transgresses, resists, or challenges social
structures, immediately has been theorised both in terms of the political
demonstrations of the 1960s and 19 7 0s and the political performances of the
1980s and 1990s. Yet the concept has not simply been applied to perfor-
mances; it has also helped construct objects of study.... Performance study
has put liminality to such ends: to delimit its field of objects; to situate its own
problematic passage into a field, a discipline, a paradigm of research and to
circulate its own interdisciplinary, intercultural resistance to the normative
forces of institutionalism.
(McKenzie 199 7 : 218–219)Third, performance is concerned with constructing unstable times. Thus:Part of what performance knows is the impossibility of maintaining the
distinction between temporal tenses, between an absolutely singular beginning
and ending, between living and dying. What performance studies learns most
deeply from performance is the generative force of these ‘betweens’.
(Phelan 1998: 8)This sense of the temporal instability of the event is crucial:
While we can reify the performance as an event that exceeds the labour that
brings it into being, as Herbert Blau has observed, the stability of the event
is elusive, given that what specifically makes any performative moment
disperses as soon as the event is consummated. Hence what opens in the cause
of the performance may be recalled or reinscribed elsewhere, but it leaves no
trace of the constellation of forces that mobilise its appearance in the first
place.
By means of these unstable conditions, performance brackets an internal
and external time off from one another so that the performance appears as
the negative of both its past and its future. On the one hand, what is taken as
central to performance is narratively laid to rest during that performance; on
the other, the momentary combination of forces that make up the perfor-
mance (the gathering and dispersal of forces that yield the sense of immediate
temporal presence) cannot account for itself or its own formation. This arrest
of life to make a show of the living is the crisis that brings the performance
into being and points to its early demise.
(Martin 199 7 : 188–189)Fourth, performance is also concerned with constantly unstable spaces, spaces
of possibility, ‘as-if’ spaces. Such spaces are fleeting, dialogical, and, above all, risky.
136 Part II