The three readings this week – Boal, Brecht and Taylor – highlight the intentional engagement of the social, particularly with the minoritarian subject. The result of this social engagement solidifies the ways in which we are often unable to understand politics without performance, and vice versa.
Regina José Galindo
“A Regina Galindo lunch break.”
– Diana Taylor, Performance
Boal argues that Aristotelian theatre, which was inherently designed intimidate the audience and eliminate “bad” or illegal tendencies in the audience, “is not the only form of theater” (Boal xiv). His chapter, “Poetics of the Oppressed,” dives heavily into examples of “theatrical” exercises which engaged (in this case) the minoritarian subject in a process of creation and narrative, and by doing so he subverts Aristotle’s Poetics to liberate the oppressed and disrupt the hegemonic ideologies of theatrical form. This engagement in the social is mapped out visually and performatively in Taylor’s book Performance. The concrete examples of performance, accompanied by striking visuals, inextricably linked the political and the performance, the performer and the spectator, and more often than not, the performer transformed the spectator into the “spec-actor” by encouraging (and often forcing) the public to engage in the performance and take responsibility for their action (or reaction). Brecht (who’s rhetoric I struggled the most with this week), in reference to representation on the stage, states that, “All that mattered was the illusion of compelling momentum in the story told…Even today we are happy to overlook such inaccuracies if we can…grasp the immense or splendid feelings of the principal characters of these stories” (Brecht 182). He is relying on the engagement of the social to further our understanding of performance as a tool within a (potential) political arena. Taylor supplements this with a more concrete example, “Political advisers know that performance as STYLE (rather than ACCOMPLISHMENT) generally wins elections. Advisers ask whether a performance is effective or memorable, not whether it corresponds to verifiable facts” (Taylor 90). Taylor’s book is a performance within itself, often directing and diverting the readers’ attention to certain words or passages through spacing, style, and size of the text and visuals. These readings leave me with questions of the power of disbelief, how to make someone believe, the power of transformation, and how important it is to engage the social – to engage the often considered, “subject” – as a necessary method to disrupt hegemonic forms and ideologies in performance.