A golden surface

Virtuosity is a quality upon which much performance still depends. It involves, as Susan Melrose has argued, the sorts of operations and capabilities that enable the expert practitioner—the ballet dancer Darcey Bussell, for example—to ‘genuinely be able to do more, in terms of the spectator or listener’s own engagement, than she does’. ¹ Virtuosity is also, though, something that can get in the way of affective engagement, or indeed any other sort of engagement, with what the performer may be doing, or trying to do. Theatre maker and performer Matthew Goulish put it well when he said in a lecture some years ago ‘that it is a condition of performance that virtuosity, once recognised, becomes the subject of the performance, and displaces other ostensible subjects’. ² Put another way, virtuosity generates a very particular distribution of the sensible: if it draws attention to itself, then it tends to do so at the expense of other topics of attention. This understanding, of course, has itself long been shared by all sorts of virtuoso performers—actors, orators, teachers, politicians—for whom the value of a performance that is ‘impressive’ in one sense may need, if it is also to be ‘effective’, to be tempered with other considerations, to do with credibility, believability and such, or the focus that is drawn towards particular ideas and values. To the extent that virtuosity is at times a useful part of persuasion, one part amongst others of the contemporary performer’s rhetorical armoury, choreographer Jonathan Burrows, for instance, would appear to agree. As Burrows points out in his A Choreographer’s Handbook, a volume that in its title and format might be thought of as imitating the classical and early modern handbooks on rhetorical technique, virtuosity is a useful hook for an audience’s attention. It is, he remarks, ‘just another way to help the audience to care what happens next’. It achieves this, as often as not, by raising the stakes ‘to a place where the audience knows something may go wrong’, which, for Burrows, ‘is as much of a pleasure for the performer as for the audience’. ³ This, we might add, brings a particular temporality of attention to bear; or perhaps better, a certain temporal suspension. So it is that we ‘hold our breath’, or we perch ‘on the edge of our seats’, as we project towards what might be about to happen, for the performer and for ourselves. Just as, when the performance is done, we are suspended in another way in relation to something remarkable in which we participated, and to which report can hardly do justice (although report will try). Even so, for Burrows too, virtuosity can get in the way. As he says, ‘if everything is virtuosic then there’s nothing against which to read the virtuosity: it has to be in balance with other modes of engagement’. ⁴ Virtuosity functions—or needs to function, we might even say—ecologically: in relation to other aspects of performance practice, or other sorts of practice than performance, or perhaps other sorts of values generated from practice.