ABSTRACT
New books on the theory of performance will always be studied with interest by European readers concerned with modern and ‘postmodern’ theatre practice-even if these books concentrate more or less exclusively on the American scene, and even if the reader is already familiar with the standard works on the subject by, let’s say, RoseLee Goldberg, Richard Schechner, the late Michael Kirby, Henry Sayre and others. The reader will also probably know some of the collections of essays on performance; for example, the work of Joseph Roach and important materials from anthropological, sociological, or psychological approaches. Performance remains an inspiring and provocative subject-matter not only because so much intensity and manifold artistic inspiration and reflection have gone into its practice since the 1970s, but also because performance is a key concept in the process of questioning and rethinking the notion of theatre in general as (and beyond) a mode of representation. It is at the heart of new ways of theorizing, understanding and describing cultural practice as cultural performance and has proved to be a key term also in theories of textual process and signification. This is perhaps the ‘deepest’ and at the same time most dangerous level of the problem: if language makes it possible to (in fact, cannot but) posit ‘facts’, realities, relations regardless of their material existence; if each speech-act is a performance and thereby an invention which remains radically independent of the ‘truth’ of its denotational contentsthen it is this reality of performance which creates the split in all signification (and not only artistic) between representation and nonrepresentation, reliability and radical risk, identity and non-identity, essence and non-(es)sense. That is the question-to be or not to be a reliable statement. It is not by chance that one of the major German studies on the subject, Johannes Lothar Schröder’s book on performance (Münster, 1990), carries the title Identität (‘ldentity’). Performance art is essentially art questioning, risking, dispersing identity: of meaning, ego, art, gender, culture.
