The Tool Box - What can Theatre Learn from Performance Art, Danjel Andersson

lecture at the Municipal Theatre

Danjel Anderson gave an exposition of the developement of the Performance Art tradition centred around its implications for theatre. It opened for an approach to the field that would be unavailable from a Visual Art perspective. Four fundamental concept were involved convention, quality, blood, and audience. Performance art needs convention to transgress, or brake it, thus creating a possibility for the audience to experience itself and the act in a new perspective. In this setting the concept of quality is reversed as the teather performance is judged relative to established convention and convention is what should be challenged in the first place. Both convention and quality judgments maintains the aesthetic distance that performance art tends to break down. Blood is a useful mean for that end. It has an immediate impact on people which goes beyond reason. Like in a shock reaction perception is changed by the mere sight of blood. The audience gets involved in the scene in a way that seems characteristic of performance art. The audience is regarded as a witness rather than a distanced spectator.

We ended up at Nybron after the lecture by Danjel Andersson on the fundamental elements of performance art. There had been a lot of talk involving blood and we were pretty upset by some film sequenses from I Apologize, an intriguing work with dolls by Gisèle Vienne and Dennis Cooper. Timing in the work was distorted as blood was poured on the floor before the head ended up in the pool, and the shot was fired even later. Christina Eriksson Fredriksson was enthusiatic over the way time and narrative was handled. It made her see events in her own life in a new way. It reminded me of the spacetime of icons, and the reversed perpective. It had a strong impact on me as well. WE felt lik transported to a surrealist dimension were anything was possible.