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Nomadic Theatre: Mobilising Theory and Practice on the European Stage

Abramović’s participatory performances of passivity, in which the artists famously gave themselves over to the unpredictable actions of others by inviting them to cut off their clothes or, as Abramović instructed, to use a selection of objects on her ‘as desired’ (68). Shalson reads these performances not as examples of artists performing their ‘body-as-object’ to expose their objectification at the hands of a voyeuristic, sexist, aggressive audience (41). Rather, she sees them as works that made audience members endure their own objecthood by experiencing themselves as bodies that are acted upon as they act upon an other. In ‘Enduring Life’, Shalson carefully prises apart the layers of TehchingHsieh’s seemingly minimalist lifeworks to reveal their complex engagements with social, political, and economic systems (prison, industrial capitalism, homelessness, marriage). The recognition that life is regulated by such systems offers for her a corrective to the simplistic celebrations of the blurring of art and life that have been prevalent in discourses on performance art since the 1960s. ‘Enduring Documents’ takes Abramović’s widely discussed reenactments of canonical performances (or, rather, of their documentation) as an invitation to move beyond the prevailing distinction between performance as disappearance or as remains by arguing that both performance and its documents neither disappear nor remain, but instead endure together in an ongoing, mutually dependent relationship that offers them both up for continuing encounters. The remaining chapter, ‘Enduring Protests’ (the second in the order of the book), examines a very different case study, which takes the analysis into the realm of endurance as explicit political protest. Its focus is the so-called lunch-counter sit-ins, a series of protests against racial segregation in the Southern United States in the 1960s, during which the protesters – black women and men and a few white allies – seated themselves at whites only counters and endured a torrent of racist abuse until they were either served or ejected. Shalson considers these endurance acts again as committed embodiments of a plan with uncertain outcome. Informed by her readings of Ono and Abramović, she argues that the protesters refused the dehumanising objectification that was launched against them by, seemingly paradoxically, insisting through endurance on the very objecthood of their bodies. They therefore exposed how racial segregation suppressed the mutual relationality and objecthood that are the fundamental conditions of embodied existence. Shalson makes a strong case for how an analytical approach sharpened by an engagement with artworks can thus be made productive for an understanding of political practices with which they share a formal connection. The reciprocal ways in which those protest practices may in return inform our understanding of performance remains largely unexplored, however, and the chapter, though compelling, sits a little separately from the rest of the book. It is only in the short concluding epilogue, in which she reflects on the continuing importance of endurance, that Shalson briefly returns to examples of political protest, declaring them to be ‘the most striking acts of endurance in recent years’ (184). It is enticing to imagine what she would do analytically with these examples, as perhaps with those – to my mind equally striking – recent performances of endurance by artists such as Tino Sehgal or Ragnar Kjartansson, which address the formal relationship between plan, execution, and outcome in new ways. These are only some of the potential future lines of enquiry that are opened up by the book. What is certain to me is that the distinctive contribution this book makes to performance art discourse will endure.