Performance and the Everyday

Performance and the Everyday

I am very interested in making the connection between the “everyday” and “performance.” I feel that performance has the potential to inform the study of everyday life mainly through tactics of resistance to the reiterative practices we perform everyday often without even thinking about them. As Judith Hamera says: “Central to all such readings are aesthetics, the animating principles of art’s social lives. These principles emerge in the objects and events that aesthetic practice leaves behind, and in the routine transactions of those for whom art making is, and happens in, a neighborhood, a set of corporeal possibilities, comforts and constraints linking private self- and object-fashioning to community practice”(47). Hamera is invoking Dwight Conquergood’s notion to “To move [performance] outside of Aesthetics and situate it at the center of lived experience”(Hamera 46). This positions performance as not solely something that occurs on a stage with an audience but as something that happens in the everyday. It also insinuates that these everyday actions can be artful, beautiful, and aesthetically pleasing. Performance then becomes the way in which we enact in our everyday lives. However, performance isn’t simple, we don’t have endless performances available at our disposal, we only have performances that position us within the discourse as negotiated within society, culture, and history. Hamera allows us to see the ballet studio, ritualized Native American performances, and others as aesthetic performances that are grounded in the everyday, mainly through the body. Our bodies do have constraints within the everyday; we position ourselves and are positioned in culture through our bodies. But I have to believe that to some little extent my body in not devoid of agency but can instead choose to enact a very micro, yet resistive performance. This performance may not be as extravagant as some of the cultural performances Hamera shows us, but they are aesthetic performances that occur in the everyday. I am thinking of Tiffany’s example f being a person of color and nodding at another person of color while waiting for public transportation. This may not seem grandiose, but to me this is an aesthetic person. Although it is not performed on a stage there is some ritualistic element to it, one that says, “I may be the only person to offer this to you today, but I see you, I recognize your humanity,” There is an art form to this, something beautiful in that human connection. Of course I have not had this experience, I can never fully understand it, but I can empathize with it and recognize how it can function as a mode of resistance to dominant ideologies. Sometimes these small processes are what are truly resistive and yet aesthetic at the same time. As Highmore suggests, “If the everyday is that which is most recognizable, then what happens when the world is disturbed and disrupted by the unfamiliar”(Figuring the Everyday)? The unfamiliar becomes those performances that disrupt and challenge the everyday-ness of everyday practices. Sometimes these are grand bodily performances like practicing and performing ballet, sometimes it is a more simplistic head, nod but both performances allow us to have agency in the everyday. I am going to post a link to a video that Arianna posted last year that relates somewhat to what I am writing about but is just a really cool understanding of disruption of the everyday. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EYAUazLI9k&hl=en&fs=1&]XX