Notes from:
Making a Performance. Devising Histories and Contemporary Practices.
By E. Govan, H. Nicholson, K. Normington, London, Roudledge, 2007, pp: 59-72
———————————————————
Autobiographical performance:
A non acting tardition of the modernist avant-garde.
- Space of sharing private stories with a pubblic.
- Reflection on a personal experience.
- Relation between fact and fiction, art and life
- blurred relationship between art and daily life
- Happenings 60’s and 70’s
- Issue of self and identity
- against a masking role
- Reframing the reality
Quote: “We might view it {autobiography} instead as a unique, self-defining mode of self-referential expression”. Renza 1980: 295
Both elements of factual detail and fictional fantasy
- Employment of personal experience to explore sociopolitical situations
- Feminist point of view: the personal is political and employs autobiographical narrative as a means of substantiating and ideological message.
- Working with emphasis on a self -reflexive, creative methodology
- Blending autobiography with fictional narratives
- Memory: a filter: embroidered version of the real
- In relation to the audience: there is a tendency of the audience to make sense of teh narrative and to understand where the reality lies
- Heightening versions of myself
- Self identity and performer: blurred without the mask of character.
- Conflation between real life and performance.
- How selfhood is created?
- History and representation
Audience:
- active listening,
- active engagement,
- witnessing
- a dialogue between performer and audience within the performance
- be here and now
Confession and its performative elements
……………………….
p.96
-performance Birdie!> The performers occupy an ambiguous position on stage which is neither “non-matrixed” nor “characterization”. (Auslander 1985: 95). In other words, they neither perform as characters nor do they act as themeselves purely since a character is on stage.
A playground where everything can happen.
To use fragmented or multidimensional playing areas allowa narratives on stage to be presented simultaneously. For example one viewr may select to watch one scene, while another chooses something completely different.