ABSTRACT
In recent theoretical debate, across the cultural profiles that reveal the anxieties and imperatives that run through those cultures, and in the many elusive occurrences that sketchily gather under the rubric “performance”, the body has taken on a new textual status that marks a shift from viewing it as a natural form, a material presence free from cultural intervention, to reading the body as the locus of complex processes of ideological construction that materialise the body itself in and through discourse, and that reveal the body as only the apparent base from which notions of “identity” (such as “race” “sex” “gender” “class” or “sexuality”) can be read. In performance, the body, or traces of the body, or echoes of the body in its absence, or the movement of the body in space, or the sounds of the body, are the foundations upon which the very notion of “performance” itself is predicated. Therefore, an analysis of the performing body, (and is not the body always a performing body, a body that performs its own presence, its own material status?) can reveal something of the ideological and discursive systems that produce and inform that body in the first place.
