Within this week’s reading, the theory of performance and its relations to politics became increasingly clear. Art played out through performance is innately political as it displays the potential for transformation. Boal contends that if art is to be sovereign, then it deals with all men, their actions (or inactions), as well as all that is done to them. Performance does so through a catharsis of the senses that shows a correction of humanity and a potential to purify the viewer, or who Taylor would label a spect-actor, highlighting the very active role of an audience member. Performatic theatre then can be called an artistic form of coercion. This is essential if we are to agree with Brecht that theatre in this scientific age should strive for the joys of liberation; liberation from the confines of history; liberation from present conformities of daily life; liberation from squashed potentials of the future. Theatre then, begs its actors to move in the style of a man who wonders as opposed to the man who knows the truth. Judging performance through issues of true/false or those of being/pretend becomes futile; what gives these mediated acts their effectiveness is in their affectations, or even more precisely, the inspiring potential in the emotional weight of their movements.
An integrated spectacle asks who is responsible for what facet of the performance and doesn’t always get a clean-cut answer. Fashion shows, types of performatic spectacles, require the consideration of a variety of actors, innately challenging onlookers to act, to buy, to change. As New York Fashion Week draws to a close, my attention is drawn to a brand whose mission statement has been summed up as inclusivity: Rihanna’s Savage X Fenty show. Streaming exclusively on Amazon Prime, I have included the show’s trailer in this post. The performance reproduces the recognizable concept of a fashion show and turns it on its head, introducing new facets of performativity, alienating its hopes of inclusivity by blowing them up in a colorful display of lingerie, dance, song, and acceptance of a multitude of body types that has been unheard of in the realm of commodified fashion endeavors. This season’s Fenty X Savage show transmits catharsis through Fashion Week’s infamous framework of exclusivity. With its ethos of body positivity strutting throughout a catwalk maximillized for universality, Fenty X Savage reasons with the idea of fashion as a protection from human nature’s more restrictive tendencies in an attempt to promote modern nature (and all its inconsistencies) at its most cathartic.