|
|
Essentially, “performative” is an adjective that describes someone or something as having the qualities of performance, that is, being active, presentational, embodied, and often fictive in nature. These qualities may be either viewed as positive or negative, depending on context. Kershaw’s position (2003) is that society itself has become performative, a world where we are all pushed into constant states of performance and spectatorship that are alienating, exhausting, and numbing, leading to a culture with a hugely rich and diversely interconnected surface, but little substance or authenticity. His conclusion that “spectatorial participation and agency are key to activism” (p. 606) conforms to my own, explored throughout these pages.
While chapters 2 and 3 focus on how performance theories, like those of Kershaw, clarify our understanding of audience, I need to examine here an important text by American performance theorist Jon McKenzie (2001). He paints a broad landscape of a performative society that forms a large part of the topical backdrop I am creating in this introductory chapter.
Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (McKenzie, 2001) is an audacious attempt “to rehearse a general theory of performance” (p. 4). To contextualize the impact his work has had on those studying performance, I begin my discussion of this text with reviews from three theatre and performance journals. Sayre (2003) writes,
A second reviewer echoes Sayre: