Lecture Performance on Lecture Performance at Tanzquartier Wien, 24.9.05

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I will do this performance in English; if you have questions afterwards I will be glad to answer them.
The title of this performance is "I in Disguise"

Sometimes it also works the other way around.
Some years ago Will Quadflieg was playing Lear in some uninteresting interpretation. But quite soon during the performance it became clear that the famous old actor wasn’t master over his kingdom and his text anymore. And so Lear and Gloster were sitting next to each other on the floor, lost in a big, now even huge stage. Two men with a tragic, famous fate. Vainly they tried to start a conversation. But where they were now there were no words anymore.
The king, who could’t stop reigning, the actor, who couldn’t stop acting, stubborn and confused, an old man sitting on stage, in life, didn’t know how to go on.
Then, in midst of this exhausting, deeply unpleasant silence suddenly and clearly audible a voice – the voice of the prompter. First just a whisper, then louder and louder: “The shoes!”
Now the old friend of the king remembers, now Lear too remembers, and Gloster puts carefully and sad the shoes on his kings feet. And they continue their far and hard way.

The role devours the actor and spits him out again. Like a cartoon cat does with the bone of an engulfed bird. And says: I.
And means not Lear anymore. But Quadflieg.

Adrian Williams, a young American, Frankfurt based performance artist, puts over a costume, looks pertly out of the mouth of a unicorn as other cartoon birds look out of the mouths of other cartoon cats. And says: I.
I am a unicorn.
This unicorn is of course no role of the mimetic “as if”. Adrian Williams does not change her voice, she does not hide behind the costume. She throws it over and steers it. It is her text. “I” is her first word. “I am a unicorn”. Who is this “I”?
When Adrian Williams steps in her unicorn costume to the lectern and speaks as a unicorn about the relationship between unicorn and men she actually speaks about the relationship between men and art. And about the relationship between society and artists. Thus herself. And suddenly everything is getting extremely close again. Text in disguise. I in disguise.

The role of this “I” in lecture performance is hard to grasp. No more or less alien figure is taken over as in drama. But also not “no role” is played, like in an old fashioned understanding of performance art. The “I” of lecture performance is of course a role. The very own role, the role of ones life. Or a game with the assumption of it being the own role.
The “I” of lecture performance has to be true. And in the same time: It never has to be true. By playing with the own history (or someone else’s as own, or a made up one as own) the lecture performance allows and provokes a game of self-reflection. Xavier Le Roy’s “Product of Circumstances” – for many something like the mother of contemporary lecture performance – is very close to his own biography. He describes his way in life from being a molecular biologist to becoming first a dancer and finally an influential choreographer. This development is so spectacular, it seem so much like a metaphor for the work of Le Roy, that still not everybody believes it to be true. Unanswered questions that are integral parts of Le Roy’s critical approach towards performance and spectacle.
Le Roy does not wear an unicorn costume, but he is always wearing the same clothes for this performance. A Xavier-Le-Roy-disguise.
Adrian Williams costumes on the other hand come out of a children’s cosmos: Squirrels, unicorns, beheaded knights … at some point in life children say “I” for the first time.
I. I, I, I.
It’s a fascinating game, fascinating and scary as Christa Wolf describes it in “Kindheitsmuster”.
I. I, I, I.
This is the sequel of the famous scene where the child recognizes itself for the very first time as a person in the mirror, realizes itself as separated from the mother, sees itself divided and doubled, discovers itself for the first time as a whole. An experience that, as one of the fatherfigures of the 20th century has taught us, is an experience of lack. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I” lets the child – still motoric unable and totally dependent on their mother – feel deeply that there is no match of the outside picture and the reality of their body. The whole tragedy of human being in fast forward.
Only by stepping into the symbolic order of language there is at least a fragile negotiation possible. Language helps to overcome the lack of congruency with the own reality and allows the construction of an imaginary whole.

“I”, says the child. I. I, I, I.

The king who doesn’t have any words anymore loses not only his earthly kingdom but also his imagination. The lecture performance puts the whole play on the imaginary stage of language.

The lecture performance makes text to the actual stage of the performance. The power of this paradoxical indirect directness we know for example from Forced Entertainment’s lecture performances “A Decade of Forced Entertainment” and “The Travels”. The stage of language is open, has undefined borders and is not limited like material stages are. Limits become an opening towards trajectories destined to never coincide. It is this very paradox that produces and supports as well as undermines and reflects the the very distrust against the order of representation that makes the lecture performance such a highly subjective format.

In the double framing (as a lecture and a performance) the lecture performance oscillates between embodying and accounting, between narrating and enacting, representing and presenting, playing and lecturing, executing and explaining.
This enables a whole range of modes of perfection and imperfection on stage – every mistake, every imperfection is automatically an reflection on the situation of the performance itself. Xavier Le Roy even puts small imperfections – like skipping a slide – into his lecture to make it more “real”.
Lecture performances are artistic bastards, somewhere between poor or conceptual theatre and minimal art. They show the impossibility of imitation, of representation and at the same time its possibility. It is this why the space lecture performances offer, is so often used for testing abstruse theories in a game of fact and fiction (like Marten Spangbergs “Extra Clear Power” or Sibylle Peters “The Art of Demonstration”). And it is this why the space lecture performances offer, is so often used for talking about oneself: The “I” is a disguise for the “I”; it offers the possibility of being totally honest and hiding oneself behind oneself at the same time. This is crucial hence it allows a distance to oneself whilst being closing in to that very same self at the same time. Perhaps a closing in that could not be offered by an actual desire but only through a certain detournement, a deviation. As Hitchcock had it: Moving out of the subject while simultaneously zooming in. Le Roy reflects on this problem in his performance: “I was afraid, but I took the risk of being maybe too egocentric, hoping that I could provoke some questions.”

One of the first lecture performers in this sense was Spalding Gray (member of Richard Schechner’s Performance Group and founding member of the Wooster Group). His own biography is topic and content of “Swimming to Cambodia”: Gray sits during the whole performance (which was later also made a movie) at a table and delivers his monologue that is based on his adventures during the shooting of “The Killing Fields” in South East Asia, where Gray played a minor part. He combines personal biography with political history and the Making of “The Killing Fields”.
But while Gray’s view on his own history was – even though ironic – still an highly introspective, intimate and self-revealing one, most performers since the late nineties tend to put more distance to the “I” of there performance in order to develop a self-reflecting game of identities. Their lecture performances mostly concentrate on the working biography – and only touch private aspects when they are related to their work, for example when Le Roy and Petra Sabisch mention broken relationships and new loves as shifts in their work.

In this regard the lecture performances of Kattrin Deufert and Thomas Plischke play an exceptional role – and offer the probably most consequent and radical concept of thinking together private life, artistic work and aesthetics in choreography. Even though this goes for their whole body of work, it is most obvious in their performances “Directory” and “Directoy II”: The personal coming together of Deufert and Plischke marked a fundamental change in their both works. And their personal histories represent paradigmatically both sides of the bastard Lecture Performance (as it do, but within one person, the histories of Le Roy and Sabisch): She as a university scholar, he as choreographer and dancer. While “Directory I” is still separating these history, being more theoretical for Deufert’s part and more artistic on Plischke’s side, “Directory II” merges the styles. The “I” of Deufert and the “I” of Plischke in the first part has become a “we” in the second part:

Me, am I the reversal of another space, another place, simply by not being placed in yet another image. We, this is me (...).

The both “Directories” merge and separate performance and lecture at the same time. The voice is separated from the performers: Not only it comes, together with visual material, from a DVD, it is even read by others. And – in Part I – with reversed gender. While in Part II it has become one voice for both.
These two performances are balancing on a very thin line: They are personally and honest till it almost hurts – and at the same time they bring the own biography in the distance of an artwork by moving the “I” into an almost mythological context. Testing possible identities, gender and attitudes toward life.

The uncatchable “I” of the lecture performance is to some extend also the uncatchable authorship of the lecture performance. The classical lecture as well as the classical performance suggest that author and speaker/performer are one and the same. So does the lecture performance. On the other hand: there is no guarantee.

Andy Warhol was in the beginning of his career invited for a lecturing tour in US universities. Only at the 7th stop did somebody realise that the lecturer was not at all Andy Warhol but Mr John Smith, a chap Mr Warhol had hired to do the job. Warhol was sued but won the trial. Laurie Anderson on the other hand, did teach art history at some college but since the students were so bored she started to change the stories, not to amuse the students but herself.

Many artists understand the format of lecture performance at least partly as an open source project. Xavier Le Roy for example allows everybody who wants to perform his „Product of Circumstances“ to freely do so. Everybody could become the „I“ of Le Roy as a role. On the other hand, Le Roy gives clear advices, how this should be done:

The text is written in English correspondent to my ability in this language; it is part of the presentation and should be read as clearly as possible. The performance should, as much as possible, present each element as a matter of fact, trying not to emphasize any of the aspects. Try to perform without irony, sarcasm, romanticism, or any affect that could transform the facts. The performance of each element should stay as close as possible to fact.

Even though there seem to exist indeed one or two attempts to re-enact “Product of Circumstance” there is more much more artistic interest in using it in the sense of an open source: Petra Sabisch anticipated it as a dispositiv for her own life and story. Talking about the contamination of her own artistic work by Le Roy’s lecture performance, she uses the same frame, the same setup, the same structure, the same rules. She is not re-enacting, she is not performing Le Roy. She performs her own “I” but it is highly contaminated with the “I” of Le Roy.
Also Vera Knolle reacts with her lecture performance to Product of Circumstances. Based on a misunderstanding regarding the part about Le Roy’s advise “to perform without irony, sarcasm, romanticism, or any affect that could transform the facts” she developed a new piece. By repeating and repeating parts of Le Roy’s text she reflects on the impossibility of neutrality of speech, language and body. In some way it is a reflection opposite to Sabisch’s since she is looking for a way to de-contaminate the “I” in lecture performance.

The Swedish performer Mårten Spångberg on the other hand in “Extra Clear Power” doesn’t bother at all to distinguish between own and not own, between the I and the other. His text is the text of George Clooney in „Ocean’s Eleven“. Or the one of Xavier le Roy, or the one of Yves Klein, Rem Koolhaas, Madonna or Britney Spears . Or of Kelvin Spacey as college professor David Gale.
"What matter who is speaking?”, says Foucault. Put away with the “the tiresome repetitions: Who is the real author? Have we proof of his authenticity and originality? What has he revealed of his most profound self in his language?
New questions will be heard: What are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where does it come from; how is it circulated; who controls it? What placements are determined for possible subjects? Who can fulfil these diverse functions of the subject?"

Theatre is a machinery of illusions which never tells the truth. To lecture is to produce an apparatus of knowledge that should never lie. Consequently, if one lectures in a theatre, it will be a Bauchplatscher, or the truth told as a lie. The winner is logic.

If one buys Adrian Williams performance “Happy Birthday” he buys an enthusiastic laudatin to himself and becomes so “the most significant figure in art history“. It doesn’t matter if one had ever to do with arts and artists: “„I will tell you things you never knew about yourself, noble, honourable, amazing and spectacular things, believable things, realistic things, things your friends will find indecipherably possible“. Almost to be overlooked in the advertisement of this performance it says that Adrian will include “some own details”. Not invented. But own. The “I” in the disguise of the “you” „To explore oneself as other“, says Spalding Gray.

Maybe theory is biography, presenting it is a lecture, and doing a lecture is performing.
Thank you for your attention. I'd be glad to answer any questions you might have.