SUNDAY VIEW; Performing Art Is Always Theater
By Margo Jefferson
Published: August 6, 1995
A PLAY IS A PLAY, A POEM IS A poem, a dance is a dance (ballet if it's on point, modern or jazz if it's not) and this or that song can be clearly, irrevocably categorized as an art song or a popular song. But what do you call it when a composer lectures from a podium while, simultaneously, a musician plays the piano, a poet seated in the audience starts to talk and laugh at odd, carefully cued intervals, a painter plays a windup Victrola and a choreographer dances? When all of this took place at Black Mountain College in 1952 (the participants were John Cage, David Tudor, Charles Olson, Robert Rauschenberg and Merce Cunningham), it was called a happening.
Twenty some years later, when a plainly dressed man named Spalding Gray pulled a chair up to a table, sat down and began reading from his diaries, or stood up, walked into the audience and began interviewing people, it was called performance art. And when, at about the same time, a group of women in theaters off and on Broadway recited poems and danced, alone or together, to its rhythms as well as to a jazz score, the author of the work, Ntozake Shange, did not call it a play. She called it a choreopoem.
"Theater takes place all the time wherever one is, and art simply facilitates persuading us this is the case." John Cage said that, but artists have been saying it since the century began, and they are not misusing or abusing the word. Military strategists refer to the theater of war; and writing of the crisis that led to the Civil War, the historian W. E. B. Du Bois described the South as "the theater of slavery." Pondering the boundaries of thought and consciousness, the philosopher William James declared, "The mind is at every stage a theater of simultaneous possibilities."
To my mind, every performing art is a theater of simultaneous possibilities. Which means that sometimes a play is a play, a poem a poem and a dance a dance. But much of the time, nowadays, they couple and collaborate, subtly and wantonly, awkwardly or stirringly.
Even when a genre has a clear lineage and definition -- stand-up comedy, say -- certain performers can come along and change the meaning of everything. Stand-up means one thing when you are talking about Milton Berle, Alan King or Phyllis Diller. It means quite another thing when you are talking about Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor or Lily Tomlin: then maybe you had better start talking about stand-up satire, stand-up blasphemy and stand-up fantasy.
Small theaters today present as many kinds of performance in a season as big vaudeville houses used to in a night. (Once it was the juggler, the stilt-walker, the belting songstress, the eccentric dancer, the occasional Sarah Bernhardt or Anna Pavlova. Now it's the staged reading, the music-theater piece, the monologue, the post-modern jugglers and clowns and the deconstructed minstrel show.) They give themselves hyphenated or deliberately ambiguous names: Dance Theater Workshop, P.S. (as in performance space, public school or public space) 122, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, Dixon Place, the Knitting Factory (a jazz and new-music club that now mounts a performance series too), the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church, and the Dia Center for the Arts. Larger complexes like Symphony Space, Lincoln Center and the Brooklyn Academy of Music do the same.
What they all share is a passion for art performed by live artists before live audiences. And that passion includes the fear that live performance is being crushed by the media -- rendered commercially and esthetically obsolete by movies, television, and the various video, recording and computer technologies. That is one reason the performing arts are busy learning one another's ways and borrowing one another's clothes. But they have been collaborating, querying one another, since the start of the century and of the modernism we take such pride in.
This is why Stanislavksy declared that he and Isadora Duncan were after the same thing (emotion conveyed through the utmost gestural economy, honesty and beauty), and why he wanted the dance school she established in Russia to be attached to his Moscow Art Theater School. (It wasn't, because he couldn't finance it.)
This is why the painter and collagist Kurt Schwitters dreamed of a theater in which all branches of the arts would join forces on one stage. (He called it Merz, which meant, he said, "freedom from all fetters.")
The critic Stark Young wrote that theater speaks in three languages: verbal, musical and visual. He described acting (the body's movements, gestures and rhythms) as a form of visual music, and insisted that the sound, tone and tempo of a word was as crucial as its literal meaning. And the visionary actor and director Antonin Artaud decreed that theater must go beyond words, to "everything in the domain of gestures, noises, colors, movements."
Weren't the founding fathers of movie making joining the literature and stagecraft of theater to painting and photography, then adding a musical score? Artists live by stealing from other artists and from life. Where else does theft benefit all the involved parties? I'm certain that the three experimental theater artists who received MacArthur grants in June, Elizabeth LeCompte, Richard Foreman and Meredith Monk, were recognized in good part because of the inventiveness with which they appropriate disparate techniques and technologies.