A few months ago, I tried to recast some of my performance art as essays. The experiment was an abysmal failure.
Performance art depends on audience interaction, or at least audience response to the speaker, It is art for the ear, not for the page. I have long known art which sparkles on the page may well fall flat on the stage. I now suspect that the converse is true as well.
I have often seen the author of a prize-winning story, essay, or poem fall flat when reading from the stage I used to write this off to delivery, but I now believe the issue may ring deeper. Performance is, I believe, a genre all its own. It is sometimes grouped with poetry, possibly because poets often give public readings of their work. Of course, plays were originally written in verse, and Aristotle’s classic work, The Poetics, is a work for playwrights.
So Poetry, Performance Art, and Plays may have a common thread holding them together, but each is its on genre, as is storytelling, one which may have more in common with performance art than the others. Here is a link to a video of me reading several poems in front of an audience. The very first work is performance art, and you may notice a subtle difference between it an the others.
It appears on this page:
https://www.facebook.com/PechaKuchaChattanooga
Performance art depends on audience interaction, or at least audience response to the speaker, It is art for the ear, not for the page. I have long known art which sparkles on the page may well fall flat on the stage. I now suspect that the converse is true as well.
I have often seen the author of a prize-winning story, essay, or poem fall flat when reading from the stage I used to write this off to delivery, but I now believe the issue may ring deeper. Performance is, I believe, a genre all its own. It is sometimes grouped with poetry, possibly because poets often give public readings of their work. Of course, plays were originally written in verse, and Aristotle’s classic work, The Poetics, is a work for playwrights.
So Poetry, Performance Art, and Plays may have a common thread holding them together, but each is its on genre, as is storytelling, one which may have more in common with performance art than the others. Here is a link to a video of me reading several poems in front of an audience. The very first work is performance art, and you may notice a subtle difference between it an the others.
It appears on this page:
https://www.facebook.com/PechaKuchaChattanooga
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