Dear friends and supporters,

One asks what performance can do—the art and event of performance, in a time of social turmoil and political violence, a time of struggle. The question becomes so necessary that one must ask it daily. In this way, as a practice, one affixes to the question the word, “today.”

In order to ask what performance can do today, another day, one must also ask how. How can performance do what it does, how can it do it today, again, or differently? Other questions follow as sub-questions of how. Where will it do what it might do, and in whose presence, and in whose absence?

I will describe what performance as I know it can do this way. Performance can make patterns apparent in time, can make apparent how time passes, can show how structure does not exist outside of its actualization, can show how patterns pre-exist the human, how the human resembles the non-human, how all life forces manifest as variation, as patterns warping or breaking. Performance can demonstrate that every moment perishes and that beauty arises out of this perishing. Performance can take a form when it does what it does: comic form, tragic form, both of these at once, or alien, material form. Performance can exist beyond struggle and beyond death. It can make a container for echoes of ancestors. It can make infant futures appear as specters fully grown.

I suspect that what performance can do exceeds my knowledge. In any case, when one asks what performance can do, one has in mind what it can do in relation to the violence of the times, as a form of resistance, as a counter-movement. For this I turn to needed friends.

On May 20th Lin Hixson and I gave a talk in Boston at the invitation of the Design Studio for Social Intervention. The event brought me back to certain fundamentals. DS4SI, as they self-abbreviate, now in their twentieth year, have made a study of system design and social justice. They propose that ideas, embedded in social arrangements, produce effects. Rearrangement of the social effectuates a shift in ideas, in possibilities, and in actual relations. They invited Lin and me to speak about our performance practice, how we understand it doing what it does “beyond binaries,” how it comes to know possible and impossible as a non-negating contradiction, an inclusive disjunction. As with all of their events, they convened a gathering of artists, activists, students, teachers, community members, and neighbors. 

DS4SI has stated that artists need not become activists, activists need not aspire to art. Instead the organization arranges a meeting place, in order to reveal what listening to artists talk about their work might awaken in activists regarding their own practice, how any of us might reimagine the possibilities of what our practices can do when we attend to a practice of very different sort. The question of what performance can do must involve not only what it says but also to whom, not only its actions but also its witnesses who will testify to those actions.

This and other arrangements of the social keep DS4SI events vital. They proposed a ten minute break after our talk and before the questions. They then invited collaborative questions devised by paired audience members who only just met at the event. Each volunteer pair posed their question to us, the speakers. We were not required to answer. The free public event included a large, free home-cooked dinner buffet.

DS4SI stalwarts Kenneth Bailey, Lori Lobenstine, Anulfo Baez, and Judith Leemann hosted the event. In a pamphlet they published titled HACK-A-DIAGRAM, Judith frames this science of arrangement in terms of analogical thinking, distinct, she says, from brainstorming.

You could imagine a version of this that seems headed in the same direction in which we say ‘let’s brainstorm a bunch of other ways to explain this problem.’ This may generate ideas, but it’s totally possible that these ideas all stay within the framework of the initial assumption about the problem. There’s no interruption built in to trigger new thought. No grain of sand in the oyster.

The counter-logics of alternate practices—of performance beside activism, for example—provide the interruptions. Thinking by analogy renders thought proportionate to other thought. The invitation they extended to us for our talk included the phrase, “When it feels like we can’t think and we can’t move, we suggest that ‘can’t think’ and ‘can’t move’ are in fact deeply connected.” Choreographer and philosopher converse by way of this connection. One asks what performance might do when what it does unfolds in relation to and in proximity to others who do something else, alongside activists, alongside educators, alongside scientists. One comes to know the invitation and permission to be oneself and not to feel any need to be other than oneself or contribute other than what one knows. The task of performance, of any practice concerned with the violence of the times, doubles: to present as itself resolutely, and to be present in presentation in parallel to practices other than one’s own, however unlikely, in transmission and reception. 

What can performance do? It can accept the impossible as a starting place. And what does that do, in itself and in relation? What direction, what affirmation, might an embrace of the impossible offer in a circuit with others engaged in the urgency of the moment, with creativity, in clarity and kinship? 

Matthew Goulish, dramaturg