(Re)Performing the Score
T. Nikki Cesare
David Schotzko performing Vinko Globokar?s ??Corporel (1985). Photo by Bill Durgin.
A man naked from the waist up sits on the stage of the silent auditorium, his face in his hands. When he finally moves, it is to vigorously rub his hands against his face. The sound of flesh tormenting flesh slowly crescendos, and as the man’s eyes follow his hands as if they were strange animals moving of their own accord, it is impossible not to watch. The piece, Vinko Globokar’s 1985 composition Corporel, continues with the performer/percussionist rhythmically striking himself on his head, his chest, his hips and thighs, so that his body becomes the chamber through which the metaphor of torture resonates, accompanied by guttural sounds that are less vocal utterances than expressions of physical exertion.
When the man– in this (re)performance, the New York-based percussionist David Schotzko– finally speaks, it is to recite a text by French poet Ren� Char: "I recently read the following remark: ‘Human history is a long sequence of synonyms for the same word. It is our duty to contradict this.’" ?Corporel challenges conventional notions of musical performance by, as renowned percussionist Steve Schick notes, "insisting on the body." Not only does it manipulate the body in all its sound-making capacities, Corporel also manipulates the spectators imagination through the paradoxical suggestion of two bodies operating within Schotzko’s singular presence. He performs both the roles of torturer and tortured through the eroticized violence he subjects himself to (and it is erotic to watch a beautiful man strike and caress his exposed skin).
Corporel forces the difficult question of how to classify its performance. If the spectator didn’t know that this piece is actually scored with an intricate graphic notation that indicates which parts of his body the percussionist is to attack, and the precise rhythm in which to attack, growl, and finally speak, she might suspect that this was simply performance art. As such, Corporel recalls pieces such as Marina Abramovic and Ulay’s Light/Dark (1977), in which the rhythmic slapping of each other’s faces, amplifies the visually stunning feat of violence and acquiescence. The heightened physical and emotional awareness that results from watching Abramovic and Ulay is not unlike that of witnessing Schotzko’s treatment of his own body, and contemplation of the two pieces reframes considerations of both musical and theatrical performance.
The lines between genres have blurred to a faint shadow over the current imperative toward interdisciplinarity. Think of Matthew Bourne’s recent Play Without Words at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which he named "theatre" even though critical reception would simply call it dance. Or think of The Wooster Group, and the "Sound/Image Event Series" at Rosenberg + Kaufman Fine Art in SoHo. There are plentiful examples of extraordinarily successful genre-mixing. But many interdisciplinary pieces offer only superficial relations between art forms, relying instead upon spectacular juxtapositions. Even in the discipline of performance studies, which defined the genre along the lines of ephemerality and performativity, this postmodern synaesthesia of the overlap of disciplines threatens to dismantle the very structure by which performance is understood.
In 1993, the performance theorist Peggy Phelan wrote "Performance’s only life is in the present." Performance art did not partake of the rehearsal and repetition of theatre; it was all about the ephemeral. Phelan defined performance as a unique experience shared by performer and audience in the initial moment of its presentation. For Phelan, the documentation of the performance was a separate entity composed more of the writer’s experience than the actual original event. However, as performance art has become codified as a genre, and as Abramovic herself participates in this codification by re-presenting now-canonical works in her upcoming performance Seven Easy Pieces at the New York Guggenheim in October, the inherent tenets of the genre of performance art are begging for re-examination. And the genre that haunts performance art is music.
In the recent Guggenheim panel about Seven Easy Pieces, Phelan shunned the idea of "re-performing" and instead offered the idea of "performance covers," that, like covers of popular songs, retain the trace of the original while offering a new interpretation through a different voice. Even Abramovic’s title suggests a relationship to music, referencing, among other works, Bart�k’s Ten Easy Pieces (1908) for piano. In one sense, this recovery of music, suddenly very trendy in performance studies, speaks to the ontology of performance art itself, particularly Cage’s "silent piece" 4’33" (1952). But the possibility of "scoring" performance art– of rendering the body as document on which to base future performance– betrays a certain anxiety as to how one might define a performance as "new."
The composer Mike Batt lost a lawsuit in 2002 for copying silence from Cage in his piece A One-Minute Silence because he, jokingly, co-credited Cage as composer. (Batt claimed that "My silence is an original silence, not a quotation of [Cage’s] silence.") But Abramovic is making sure to get permission from performers like Vito Acconci and Gina Pane before she re-performs their work. Her "performance covers" are a move towards copyrighting performance art to protest Batt-style parodies or unrestricted reproductions. In music, the score is only a suggestion toward performance, and while the composer retains copyright, the individual performances allow for new interpretations. If a woman were to perform Corporel, an audience might read something different in to the piece, but it would still be Globokar’s composition. Yet, when the score is the very body that performed the piece originally, does another body performing it turn into a different score, with new intentions and interpretations?
The danger in this experiment lies in the subtle divide that occurs between composers and performers in Western classical music. That is, even though a woman’s performance of Corporel might offer an entirely different reading of the piece, and even though the "open works" by such canonized composers as Cage, Boulez, Ligeti, and Stockhausen grant the performer more agency, allowing performance art to be defined by its originator rather than the body in the immediate moment of performance might not only compromise the sociopolitical context in which it is (re)performed, but also the autobiographical and intensely personal relationship between piece and performer, and performer and spectator. Perhaps the way to negotiate this divide is to re-evaluate both genres, establishing that the ephemerality that enables performance art to retain its political and personal impact also informs musical and theatrical, and visual art performance. The score, then, like the body, becomes the map by which the audience finds, or loses, their way. Either possibility opens up a Pandora’s Box of opportunity.
