Paradigmatic Performance

December 18th, 2006 Fred McVittie Posted in Art, Crease, Robert, Creativity, Illumination, Performance |

There is a stage in all (creative) processes, including the processes of both art and science, where the practice moves from the preparatory to the actual; from the potential to the the real. In science this is the moment of the experiment (which, as Robert Crease points out, may, if carried out correctly, constitute the performance). In the visual and plastic (and some of the digital) arts, this moment is distributed across a number of moments in the making, and in the performing arts, unsurprisingly, it takes the paradigmatic form of the performance itself. In terms of the processes, whilst there may be differences in form, tradition, histories, and practice, all have this moment. What distinguishes ‘performing’ as a particular artform is not in the fact of its having this evanescent moment, but rather in the access that it gives to this moment. Whereas other creative practices prioritise and give access to the traces of this event, performing arts dramatises the event and includes it as part of the experience. We not only see the event, we see it as an event illuminated by the light of its own (apparent) appearance. A secondary effect is the coincidental placing of this moment with a parallel moment in the mind of the audience, the moment in which the performance is received and realised.