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In case we think that attending a festival in a city also has to do with learning about the city itself (isn´t it what theater is about?), thing get complicated because there are places and there are the stories of the places. But on the other hand, things became a lot less abstract[2]. Therefore, attending a specific festival becomes really different attending any other festival. And it may not even become a marathon.

Our intention is never to geographically “situate” the only and fixed “origin” of a concept and of a set of practices that seem to unfold in similar ways in different countries [3]. We seek to understand some of the connections between thing and places: in this case, the emergence of performance art, at the end of the 50’s and the specific context of the city of New York (with the emergence of Performance Studies in the 70’s and the post-modern dance experiences of the Judson Church Theatre). Enlightened by this brief contextualization, the idea is that we might be able to better understand the genealogy the biannual festival Performa claims as its own (and thus, it helps to establish).

Performance Art. Nova Iorque, anos 1960s.

In the fall of 1959, in New York, Allan Kaprow peformed his famous 18 Happenings in 6 parts in which the term happening was coined (the remake created by André Lepecki was part of Performa 07).

At the time (the early 60’s), Greenwich Village and Soho were the most “alternative” neighborhoods, a kind of “Mecca of the bohemian” (this was largely due to AIR- Artists in Residence, a program for financial support from the government for artists to rent lofts that spread over downtown). There was an ebullient spirit in the avant-guard scene, an atmosphere of confidence, pleasure and transgression. Everything was linked to the political context in the world in general, and specifically in America, with the protests against the Vietnam war and the general feeling of optimism and hope in a radical political change (a point in which it is stated that “the personal is political”).

The explosion of Pop Art takes place in 1963 and 1964. The Judson Dance Theater was at its height with its experiences of democratization of the dancing body (and it is not by chance that one of their main pieces is about dancing with tennis shoes) and of the movements that could be considered dance (experiences such as Trisha Brown’s roofdances or Yvonne Rainer’s use of daily tasks movements). The Judson Poet’s Theater had won 5 Obie awards (the tribute to Off-broaway handed out by the iconic avant-guard newspaper, The Village Voice). Living Theater was at its golden moment. Andy Warhol started to make pop films, Kenneth Anger made his Scorpio Rising and Jack Smith did Flaming Creatures (films that faced censorship in a democratic society and were defiantly screened, for they were banished from the established circuit).

It is also then that Fluxus arrives at New York and Charlotte Moorman organizes the first avant-guard festival. As Sally Barns tells us, growing expectations begin to feed social and cultural changes. At this point, the Greenwich Village becomes a paradigm of such transformations through art.

The avant-guard artists of the 60’s (who can be summoned into about a hundred and fifty people) sought to build a community through art, an alternative community inspired by folk and popular culture that produced transgressive styles, starting cooperative modes of production, going against the alienation of labor and the values reproduced by the preceding generation of artists, as well as the social-political mainstream. In fact, it was not about reflecting the society they lived in, but changing it, producing a new culture that integrates artistic work and life and blurs the borders between participant and observer.

The happening appears as an expression of freedom, spontaneity, a radical way of combining life and art, disfiguring the hegemony of galleries and museums in the control of artistic production and expression. With Jackson Pollock, the brush strokes had already been freed from the canvas, transforming painting in a performing event by spreading the paint on the canvas (which then becomes an index of action), the consummation of that emotional expression.

It was also in those years that the Black Mountain college becomes preponderant with the experiences of John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Allan Kaprow, Robert Robert Rauschenberg, among others. From painting to assemblage and the environment, the path was influenced by the futurist Italian artists, by Dadaism, by the translation of Artaud’s writings to English, by Zen Buddhism [6]. It conducted artistic matter to sounds, sights, movement, smells, touch. All materials could now be the object of a new art form. Actor and dancer were no longer needed to perform it, once again democratizing. Starting an anti-expressionist movement, the Reuben gallery becomes the downtown center of happening. Also, with George Maciunas publishing the first Fluxus manifests (in fanzine-like editions), a new trend begins, the promotion of live art, an anti-art, a revolution of the substance of art. Along with George Brecht, Dick Higgins, La Monte Young, they move in happening territory and using a Leninist flavored ideology, they started an utopian form of cooperation between artists (in which everyone works with and for everybody).

The process now becomes the center of artistic production. The multiplicity of perspectives and methods flourish. Living Theater had been encouraging collective creation for a while. However, it was at the Judson Dance Theater that group dynamics, the participation and complicity between artists from different areas, becomes the metaphor of true pluralism. This was also when daily actions started to be choreographed, making such movements actual readymades. And this is where women conquer a role of leadership and artistic creation in an equal basis. From a marginal position in the art scene, Judson went on to become the central stage for avant-guard expression. This was where what would later be called post-modern dance emerges (names like Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, Elaine Summers, among many others, most of whom were disciples either of Judd, Cunningham, Anna Halprin, or Martha Graham). A dance based exactly on the abolishment of hierarquies between the bodies that can dance and those that can not and the movements that can be called dance and those that can not. Improvisation then becomes one of the emblematic procedures, a metaphor for freedom of expression, recollecting surrealist techniques of free association, now applied to dance.  In the cafés (caffe Cino, Wha Café, La Mama) they usually sat side by with poets and musicians improvised jazz. Contact-improvisation started here, strongly encouraged by Steve Paxton. [7]

As we’ve said before, the Greenwich Village was also the epicenter of underground films, with Jonas Mekas and his great propeller, “organizing its strength and tactics, a guerilla force”, as he told the Village Voice. Living out of alternative insitutions, they opposed censorship, systematically violating hegemonic values. This is also the area where Off-Off-Broadway theater gathers, namely the Living Theaters that created the most radical political theater, combining through ritualistic Artaudian techniques art with peaceful liberation movements. At a time when realism was the dominant style in theater (Stanislavski, or the Actor’s Studio of his pupil Lee Strasberg), avant-guard theater moves from psychologism to a more concrete physicality, ultra-real (seasoned by Artaud`s abstract ideas and Piscator’s policies) and from personal issues to political ones (here we must add Joseph Chaikin’s Open Theater or  Judson Poets Theater). Trusting in theater’s communitarian quality, they were convinced the world could change through it, through political engagement.

There wasn’t really much money for all this artistic fruition, nor there were great government fundings (despite of AIR- Artists in Residence). Thefore, the projects were deliberately raw, low budget. The paradox seems to be the fact that even though these experiences were often censored, this artistic movement gave the USA (which the artists fiercely criticized) an opportunity to support freedom, in opposition to the castrating and non-innovating Soviet bloc. Maybe that’s why few people were arrested.

It was in such context that performance art started to be outlined as artistic practice and performance (more generically) as concept. That is why a theoretical approach in writing became necessary, as well as a problematization of a world that could be understood in performative terms. Thus, the first department devoted exclusively to performance studies was created by the New York University, in 1979. Beyond a kind of critique subjected to hegemonic criteria, the studies interconnected the time’s theatrical and artistic practice (with its blurring of borders) with a anthropological and theoretical perspective (from linguistic to poststructuralism). A little before this institutional reality came about, the interest in this kind of study started with the combination of Richard Schechner’s (one of the mentors of the Performance Group, which later originated the Wooster Group) theatrical reseach with a more symbolic and interpretative anthopology, specially Victor Turner’s ritual studies. The institutional idea soon spread to other Universities (a performance studies department was created at the Northwestern University of Chicago, in 1984). Integrating different disciplines such as philosophy, linguistics, gender studes, sociology, psychology and the art theories, each and every dynamic interaction that is part of experience. In this case, performance art appears in context, as the territory of choice, able to subvert and criticize not only the mercantilization of artists but also the social and cultural issues they tackle.

Performa Biennial of New Visual Art Performance: a brief incursion into the purposes of the festival

In 2004 art historian and critic RoseLee Goldberg, author of the 1979 book Performance Art: from futurism to present, created Performa, a non-profit Association dedicated to the “exploration of the critical role of performance in the history of art of the 20th century and encourge new paths for performance in the 21th century.”

The creation of an exciting community of international artists for avant-guard performing practices had been the festival’s goal from the beginning, as well as the development of an audience for those practices. The festival has always sought to be deeply anchored in the city, not only aiming to re-live (institutionally) but also to celebrate its ebullience in the 70’s. Thus, Performa is inseperable from what we used to imagine as New York’s artistic life after the 60’s.

Self-entitled Biennial of New Visual Art Performance and choosing to never use the term “performance art”, RoseLee Goldberg states that she intends to avoid a term that has always been problematic in her opinion. She says:

“Nobody is comfortable with it. It is used very generally to describe a broad range of work covering a hundred year history, when in reality the term is more specific to the ‘70s. I wanted to avoid the term, and to show that visual artists have always made performances. I do not call Marina Abramovic or Laurie Anderson performance artists and I doubt it is a term that they use to describe themselves. They are artists who work in many media including  performance. In addition, in bringing this  material to a wider audience, which is the  nature of a biennial, it was important to indicate that we covered a broad range of art and media.”

RoseLee Goldberg in PERFORMA 09, “Keeping History Alive”, article by Cristiane Bouger at Movement Research Performance Jornar nº35

A Biennial to be desired

As we could see by attending this edition of the festival, the past two editions of Performa helped consolidate the festival as an event that is strongly antecipated and much talked about afterwards. In 2005, the biennial took off and in 2007, the already more thematic program focused both on the interconnections between avant-guard dance and the art world and on an effort to “re-imagine the past”, in which the famous remake of Kaprow’s performance was inserted.

Performa condenses in 20 days the artistic ebullience we are used to associate to the city of New York. And it does so through a concious effort to simultaneously insert the history of performance in the city’s life and to foster the future development of performance as an artistic genre. And it works, even if in an institutional way.

For Goldberg, the biennal is very much related to the city of New York and to the revitalization of its artistic and experimental “ethos” and can be defined as a kind of “cultural activism that is a form of urbanism of the 21th century. When confronted with this paradox, she says:

“Performance art has a long history, so it depends which period we are talking about. So does the art market have a long history and the relationship between the two is always changing. In 1920s Paris and Berlin the  market for contemporary art was limited. Dada events attracted art crowds and people paid to see Picabia’s “Relâche” or  Apollinaire’s “Mamelle de Teresias.” Forty years later, in the 1960s, when there was a more vibrant art market (Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art) performance was an anti-market activity that was also a weapon of activism in a social and politically volatile period. In the 1970s, when Conceptual Artists actively protested the art commodity, performance was at its height, the most visible art form in relation to conceptual strategies. In the last ten years, the very strong art market made many established artists working in performance begin to think that it was only fair that their work might have a market too. In addition, museums had to incorporate the ‘70s in their collections, and were forced to recognize that much of the work from that period was performance-based. And finally, the role of the museum has changed radically. They are culture palaces that attract large crowds who are fascinated by proximity to the artist and by live art. Performance is not an art product in the commodity sense of the word, but it can nevertheless cost quite a lot to produce. The question is relevant but the answer is a larger historical one.”

Performa 2009

The program of last year’s edition of the festival was publicly announced in February 2009 (in a Futurist banquet with dishes prepared according to Marinetti’s Futurist Cook Book). The central theme was a tribute to the 100th anniversary of the futurist manifest.

With an organizational structure based either on the choices of programmers of more than 25 venues or those of international independent curators (Goldberg uses the expression “long conversations” to explain a program in which every choice is followed closely, even when it’s not about a premiere), Performa 09 gathered works from more than 80 artists and about 60 institutions, spread over the city’s 5 boroughs.

Thus, amidst exhibitions, presmieres, the 100 years celebration of the futurist manifest (with famous exhibitions and performances, including a concert with Luigi Russolo’s futurist instrument, the Intonarumori) the biennial gathered acclaimed names such as Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods with Auf den Tisch! (At the table!), Deborah Hay with If I Sing to You, Yvonne Rainer with Spiraling Down and Tacita Dean with the 16mm film Craneway Event, a tribute to Merce Cunnigham, or Arto Lindsay with the multidisciplinary parade Somewhere I Read. New-coming artists were also present, like Maria Hassabi, a young Cypriot choreographer, based in New York, who presented Solo Show.

The photomontage at the top was created by Joana Bem-Haja.

Ana Bigotte Vieira is a doctor candidate in Artistic Studies at Universidade Nova de Lisboa and has a FCT scholarship (Visiting Scholar em Performance Studies at NYU – Tisch School of the Arts) and Ricardo Seiça Slagado is a performer and doctor candidate in Anthropology at Instituto Universitáro de Lisboa (Visiting Scholar em Performance Studies at NYU – Tisch School of the Arts). He is also a member of Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia (CRIA).

Read also: ‘Auf den Tisch!’, by Meg Stuart and Trajall Harrel

Futurist conversation between Chamecki and Lerner