Translating Performance

Author(s): Diana Taylor

Reviewed work(s):
Source: Profession, (2002), pp. 44-50
Published by: Modern Language Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25595729 .
Accessed: 19/07/2012 18:35

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Modern Language Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Profession.

http://www.jstor.org
 Translating Performance

DIANA TAYLOR

From 14 to 23 June 2001 theHemispheric Institute of Performance and Poli

tics convened artists, activists, and scholars from theAmericas inMonterrey,
Mexico, for its Second Annual Encuentro to share the ways our work uses
to intervene in the
performance political scenarios we care about.1 Everyone
understood the politics; understanding performance was more difficult. For
some artists,
performance (as it is called inLatin America) referred to perfor
mance art.Others
played with the term. Jesusa Rodriguez, Mexico's most
outrageous and powerful cabaret-performance artist, referred to the three
hundred participants asperformenzos (menzosmeans "idiots"). "Performnuts"

might be the best translation, and most of her spectators would agree you
have to be crazy to do what she does, confronting theMexican state and the
Catholic Church head-on. Tito Vasconcelos, one of the firstout gay
perform
ers from the came onstage asMarta
early 1980s inMexico, Sahagun, then
lover, now wife, ofMexico's president, Vicente Fox. In her white suit and
matching pumps, she welcomed the audience to the conference of "per
fumance." Smiling, she admitted she didn't understand what itwas about and
a we did, but shewelcomed
acknowledged thatnobody gave damn about what
us to do it anyway. "Per forwhat?" the confused woman inDiana Raznovich's
cartoon asks. The jokes and puns, while good-humored, revealed both an

anxiety of definition and the promise of a new arena for further interventions.
Performances function as vital acts of transfer,2transmitting social knowl
a sense of identity or what Richard
edge, memory, and through reiterated

The author isProfessor ofPerformance Studies and Spanish at New York University. A ver
sion of this paper was presented at the 2001 MLA convention inNew Orleans.

Profession 2002 44
 DIANA TAYLOR |||45

Schechner has called "twice-behaved" behavior (36). Performance, on one

level, is the object of analysis in performance studies, that is, themany prac
tices and events?dance, theater, ritual, political rallies, funerals?that involve
theatrical, rehearsed, or conventional or event-appropriate behaviors. These
practices are usually bracketed from those around them to constitute discrete
objects of analysis. Sometimes, that framing is part of the nature of the event
itself?a particular dance or a rally has a beginning and an end. It does not run
or
continuously seamlessly into other forms of cultural expression. To say that
a
something is performance amounts to an ontological affirmation.
On another level, performance also functions as themethodological lens
as
that enables scholars to analyze events performance.3 Civic obedience, re
sistance, citizenship, gender, ethnic
exam
identity, and sexual identity, for
are rehearsed and
ple, performed daily
in the public sphere. To understand
these as performance suggests that
performance also functions epistemo
logically. Embodied practice, along
with and bound up with cultural dis
courses, offers away of knowing. The
is-as distinction underlines the un
as simul
derstanding of performance
a
taneously real and constructed, as
practice that brings together what have
as dis
historically been kept separate
crete, supposedly free-standing, onto
logical and epistemological discourses.
The many uses of the word per
Cartoon by Diana Raznovich.
seem
Used courtesy of the artist formance point to the complex,
and at times
ingly contradictory,
mutually sustaining layers of referentiality. Victor Turner bases his under
on the French
standing etymological rootparfournir, to "furnish forth," "to
or "to carry out
complete," thoroughly" (13). For Turner, writing in the
1960s and 1970s, performances revealed culture's deepest, truest, and most
individual character. Guided a belief in their
by universality and relative
transparency, he claimed that populations could grow to understand one an
other through their performances.4 For others performance means just the

opposite: the constructedness of performance signals its artificiality?it is

put on, antithetical to the real and true.
While an on the construct
emphasis
edness of performance may sometimes reveal an antitheatrical prejudice, in
more as coterminous with
complex readings the constructed is recognized
 46 III
TRANSLATING PERFORMANCE

the real. That a dance, a ritual, or a political demonstration requires bracket

or
ing framing that differentiates itfrom other social practices surrounding
it does not imply that the performance is not real or true. On the contrary,
the idea that performance distills a truer truth than life itself runs from Aris
totle, through Shakespeare and Calderon de la Barca, through Antonin Ar
taud and Jerzy Grotowski, and into the present. People in business fields
seem to use the term more than anyone else,
performance though usually they
mean a or more often a thing, acts to potential (see
by it that person,
McKenzie). Supervisors evaluate workers' performance on the job; cars,
computers, and markets vie to outperform their rivals. Political consultants
understand that performance as style rather than as carrying through or ac
a ex
complishing often determines political outcome. Science too has begun
ploration into reiterated human behavior and expressive culture through
memes, which "are stories, songs, habits, skills, inventions, and ways of
we copy from person to person by imitation" (Blackmore
doing things that
65)?in short, the reiterative acts that I have been calling performance,
not necessarily involve mimetic behavior.
though clearly performance does
In performance studies, notions about the role and function of perfor
mance also vary widely. Some scholars accept the ephemerality of perfor
mance, given that no form of documentation or reproduction can capture
the live.5Others extend the scope of performance by making it cotermi
nous with memory and history. As such, it participates in the transfer and

continuity of knowledge.6
as J. L. Austin,
Scholars coming from philosophy and rhetoric (such
terms such as performative
Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler) have coined
and performativity.A performative, forAustin, refers to cases inwhich "the
an action" (6). The reiteration
issuing of the utterance is the performing of
and bracketing I associate above with performance are clear: it iswithin the
conventional framework of a marriage ceremony that the words "I do"
carry legal weight. Others have continued to develop Austin's notion of the
in
performative in diverse ways. Derrida, for example, goes further under
the importance of the citationality and iterability in the "event of
lining
statement [could] succeed if its for
speech," questioning if "a performative
mulation did not repeat a 'coded' or iterable statement" (326). However,
the framing that sustains Butler's use of performativity?the process of so
cialization whereby gender and sexuality identities (for example) are pro
duced through regulating and citational practices?is harder to identify,
because normalization has rendered performativity invisible. While in
Austin performative points to language that acts, in Butler it goes in the op
into normative
posite direction, subsuming subjectivity and cultural agency
discursive practice. In this trajectory, the performative becomes less a qual
 DIANA TAYLOR III47

ity (or adjective) of performance than of discourse. While itmay be too late
to reclaim performative for the nondiscursive realm of performance, I sug

gest that we borrow a word from the contemporary Spanish usage of per
formance?performdtico, or "performatic" inEnglish?to denote it.
One of the problems inusing performance, and its false cognates performa
tive and performativity, comes from the extraordinarily broad range of behav
iors it covers?from the discrete dance to conventional cultural behavior.
However, theword's multilayeredness indicates the deep interconnections of
all these systems of intelligibility and the productive frictions among them. As
itsdifferent uses?scholarly, en
political, scientific, business-related?rarely
gage one a
another directly,performance also has history of untranslatability. It
has been locked ironically into the disciplinary and geographic boxes itdefies,
denied the universality and transparency that some claim itpromises its ob
jects of analysis. These many points of untranslatability are of course what
make the term and the practices theoretically enabling and culturally reveal
as access and in
ing.While performances may not, Turner has hoped, give us
into another culture, they certainly tell us a great deal about our desire
sight
for efficacy and access, not tomention the politics of our interpretations.
In Latin America, where the term finds no satisfactory equivalent in
either Spanish or Portuguese, performance has commonly referred to per
formance art.Translated simply but nonetheless ambiguously as "el perfor
mance" or "la performance," a linguistic cross-dressing that invites English

speakers to think about the sex or gender of performance, theword is begin

ning to be used more broadly to talk about social dramas and embodied
refer now to "lo as that
practices.7 People quite commonly performatico"
which is related to performance in the broadest sense.8 Despite charges that
an
performance is Anglo word and that there is no way of making it sound
comfortable in either Spanish or Portuguese, scholars and practitioners are

beginning to appreciate itsmultivocal and strategic qualities. The word

may be foreign and untranslatable, but the debates, decrees, and strategies
arising from the many traditions of embodied practice and corporeal
are
knowledge deeply rooted and embattled in the Americas. The language
referring to that corporeal knowledge maintains a firm link to the visual
arts (arte-accion, arte
efimero ["art-action," "ephemeral art"]) and theatrical
traditions. Performance includes but is not reducible to any of these words

usually used to replace it: teatralidad, espectdculo,accion, representacion.

Teatralidad and espectdculo, like theatricality and spectacle in
English, cap
ture the constructed, sense of
all-encompassing performance. The many
ways inwhich social life and human behavior can be viewed as perfor
mance come across in them, a
though with particular valence. Theatrical
ity, for me, sustains a scenario, a paradigmatic setup that relies on live
48 I TRANSLATINGPERFORMANCE

a schematic
participants, is structured around plot, and has a foreseeable
(though adaptable) end. As opposed to narratives, scenarios force us to
consider the embodied existence of all participants. Theatricality makes
that scenario alive and compelling. Unlike a trope, which is a
figure of
on
speech, theatricality does not rely language
to transmit a set pattern of
behavior or action. Theatrical scenarios are structured in a predictable, for
mulaic, and hence repeatable fashion. Theatricality, like theater, flaunts its
artifice, its constructedness; it strives for efficaciousness, not authenticity. It
connotes a conscious, controlled, and thus always political dimension that

performance need not imply. It differs from spectacle in that theatricality

highlights themechanics of spectacle. A spectacle, I agree with Guy De
bord, is not an image but a series of social relations mediated by images. It
"ties individuals into an economy of looks and looking" that can appear
more
invisibly normalizing, that is, less theatrical (Taylor, Disappearing Acts
119). Both teatralidad and espectdculo,however, are nouns with no verb and
so do not allow for individual cultural agency in the way that
perform does.
Much is lost when we give up the potential for direct and active interven
tion by adopting these words to replace performance.
Words such as accion and representacion do allow for individual action and
intervention. Accion can be defined as an "act," an avant-garde "happening"
(arte-accion), a "rally," or political "intervention." The Spanish word brings
eco
together both the aesthetic and political dimensions of perform. But the
nomic and social mandates pressuring people to perform in certain norma
tive ways are not included?the way we perform our gender or ethnicity, for
seems more directed and intentional and thus less socially
example. Accion
and politically embroiled than perform,which evokes both the prohibition

against and the potential for transgression.We may be performing multiple

even while one clearly defined
socially constructed roles at once, engaged in
even with its verb represent,
antimilitary accion, for example. Representation,
a
conjures up notions ofmimesis, of break between the real and its represen
so
tation, thatperformance and perform have productively complicated. While
these terms have been proposed instead of the {ovz\ga-so\m&\ng performance,

they too derive fromWestern languages, cultural histories, and ideologies.

Why then not use a term from one of the non-European languages,
fromNahuatl, Maya, Quechua, Aymara, or any of the hundreds of indige
nous languages still spoken in the Americas? Olin, meaning "movement" in
Nahuatl, might be a candidate. Olin is the motor behind everything that
movement of the sun, stars, earth, and ele
happens in life?the repeated
ments. Olin is also amonth in theMexica calendar and therefore enables
a so
temporal and historical specificity. Olin is also deity who intervenes in
cial matters. The term simultaneously captures the broad, all-encompassing
 DIANA TAYLOR III49

nature of performance as reiterative process and carrying through as well as

the potential of performance for historical specificity and individual cultural
agency. Or maybe adopt areito, the term for "song-dance"? Areitos, de
scribed by the conquerors in the Caribbean of the sixteenth century,were a
collective act involving singing, dancing, celebration, and worship that
claimed aesthetic as well as sociopolitical and religious legitimacy. This
term is attractive, because itblurs all Aristotelian notions of discretely devel
man
oped genres, publics, and ends. It clearly reflects the idea that cultural
ifestations exceed compartmentalization either by genre (song-dance), by
or intended effect
participants-actors, by (religious, sociopolitical, aesthetic),
a that groundsWestern cultural thought. It calls into
compartmentalization
our taxonomies, even as itpoints to new interpretive possibilities.
question
But replacing a word that has a recognizable albeit problematic history?
such as performance?with another that has developed in a different context
and that signals a profoundly different worldview would only be an act of
wishful thinking, an attempt to forget our shared history of power relations
a even ifwe
and cultural domination, history that would not disappear
our as a theoretical term rather than as an
changed language. Performance,
or a practice, is a newcomer to the field. While it emerged in the
object
United States at a time of disciplinary shifts to engage objects of analysis that

previously exceeded academic boundaries (i.e., the aesthetics of everyday

life), it is not, like theater,weighed down by centuries of colonial evangelical
or I find itsvery undefinability and reassur
normalizing activity. complexity
even
ing. Performance carries the possibility of challenge, self-challenge,
within it. As a term a a an
simultaneously denoting process, praxis, episteme,
amode of transmission, an accomplishment, and ameans of intervening in
the world, it far exceeds the possibilities of these other words offered in its
place. The problem of untranslatability, as I see it, is actually a positive one, a
necessary stumbling block that reminds us that we?in our various disci

plines, languages, or geographic locations throughout theAmericas?do not

or understand one another. I propose that we pro
simply unproblematically
ceed from the premise thatwe do not understand one another. Let us recog
nize that every effort toward understanding needs towork against notions of
easy access, decipherability, and translatability.This stumbling block stymies
not only Spanish and Portuguese
speakers faced with a foreign word but also
English speakers who thought they knew what performancemeant.

NOTES =~

xThe Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics is a consortium of institu

tions, scholars, artists, and activists in the Americas who the intersections of
explore
 50 III
TRANSLATING PERFORMANCE

and politics (both broadly construed) in the Americas since the sixteenth
performance
For more information, see
century. hemi.ps.tsoa.nyu.edu.
21am indebted toPaul Connerton for this term,which he uses inhis excellentbook
How SocietiesRemember(39).
3The is-as distinction (an event ^performance; an event is Scheduler's.
^performance)
4"We will know one another better by entering one another's and
performances
learning theirgrammars and vocabularies" (qtd. in Schechner andAppel 1).
5Comingfrom a Lacanian position,Peggy Phelan limitsthe lifeofperformance to the
"Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise
present: participate
in the circulation of representations of
representation. [...] Performance's being, like the
ontology of subjectivityproposed here, becomes itselfthroughdisappearance" (H6).
6"Performance on
the idea of expressive movements
draw as mnemonic
genealogies
reserves, movements
made and remembered residual
including patterned by bodies,
movements retained in or words (or in the silences between them),
implicitly images
and imaginary movements dreamed inminds not to but constitutive of
prior language
it" (Roach 26). See also Connerton's How Societies Remember and my forthcoming The
Archive and the Repertoire.
refers to events out of business or
7"E1 performance" usually coming politics, while
events that come from the arts. I am in
the feminine "la performance" usually denotes
debted toMarcela Fuentes for this observation.
8Common of performance in Latin America now draws from the anthropologi
usage
Cultura eEspetacularidadefrom Brazil)
cal and sociological (e.g., the journalPerformance,
as well as from art (as inMexico's Ex-Teresa Arte Actual's 41882 Minutos de
performance
to the productive of the various meanings.
Performance) highlight entanglement

WORKS CITED
Austin, J.L. How toDo ThingswithWords. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1975.
64-73.
Scientific American
Blackmore, Susan. "The Power ofMemes." Oct. 2000:

Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. UP, 1989.

Cambridge: Cambridge
Debord, Guy. SocietyoftheSpectacle.Detroit: Black andRed, 1983.
Derrida, Event Context." Trans. Alan Bass.
Jacques. "Signature Margins of Philosophy.
Chicago: U ofChicago P, 1982. 307-30.
McKenzie, orElse: From to London: 2001.
Jon. Perform Discipline Performance. Roudedge,
London: Roudedge, 1993.
Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked:The PoliticsofPerformance.
Roach, Joseph. Cities of Dead:
the Circum-Atlantic
Performance.New York: Columbia UP,
1996.
Schechner,Richard. BetweenTheater andAnthropology. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania
P, 1985.
Schechner, Richard, and Will eds. By Means New York: Rout
Appel, ofPerformance.

ledge, 1980.
Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire. Durham: Duke UP, forthcoming.
Taylor,
-. Acts. Durham: Duke UP, 1997.
Disappearing
Turner, Victor. From Ritual toTheater. New York: Performing Arts Journal, 1982.