Reading Performance
I found this resource on the Live Art Development Agency website please follow the link below for the full guide. In this post I have taken a section of the text which questions the transference of ‘experience’.
http://www.thisisliveart.co.uk/resources/Study_Room/guides/rachel_lois_clapham_guide.html
Reading Performance Writing: A Guide (2010) by Rachel Lois Chapman
What is it? Towards a re-enactment of the experience of performative writing by Danae Theodoridou. Here is its cover: matthew goulish 39 MICROLECTURES in proximity of performance How do we understand something? We understand something by approaching it. How do we approach something? We approach it from any direction. We approach it using our eyes, our ears, our noses, our intellects, our imaginations. We approach it with silence. We approach it with childhood. We use pain. We use history. We take a safe route or a dangerous one. We discover our approach and follow it. What is it? ‘The bad thing with experience is that it can’t be transferred.’ (Remember these words)
What is it? You go back to it, you try to describe it, you try to analyze it, you try to show it, you try to tell it, you try to express it, you try to share it, you try to transfer it. What is it? Performative words. Their experience. It can’t be transferred. What is it? No need for describing words, analyzing words, showing words, telling words, sharing words, transferring words. Just words to re-enact the experience. If it can be transferred, it can be re-done and it can be re-lived. Here they are, they don’t transfer, they re-create. The experience of one who read a book and bought it twice, of one who carried a book everywhere like a personal Bible, of one who since that day knows that ‘the bad thing with experience is that it can’t be transferred’.
It was such a relief reading this text and it confirmed to me how a personal ‘experience’ cannot be copied and exactly transferred to another person. All that can be done is to re-create and allow the experience to be interpreted in multiple ways and know that this is OK. The main experiences I want to re-enact are feeling out of synch verbally with people and to re-create watching the New Year Gala TV show with translation.
