Performer process in the live act: interactive experiments in the audience–performer relationship

Abstract

Every performer has a unique practice to perform, a process in which they evoke energies to communicate work to the live audience. It is an intricate process of channelling, feeding, funnelling, charging and releasing. This process includes influences of pedagogy, and it may be self-taught, through a teacher, or within an institution. Through looking at performance art discourse, I have located a blind spot around embodied training to enrich performer practice. The historical trajectory of performance art has contributed to this blind spot, specifically performance art’s objectives of authenticity and the ‘real’ in live performance. In much recent performance art discourse, the focus has been more on the external, socio-political context of performance rather than on the internal resources necessary for effective performance strategies to communicate the work. This leads to the central question of this thesis: how can a performer understand, access and sustain open and expansive performance-states-of-being? I argue that this heightened embodied awareness is an experiential realm that resides outside of the everyday and requires skills to be understood and accessed – it requires embodied training. This thesis explores performer practice from interdisciplinary perspectives to expand the discourse of embodied training in the performance art field. It employs methods that test theoretical positions through action research and creative practice. My artistic practice is hybrid and sits between performance, participatory and interactive art. This thesis contains three studio works in which performance-states-of-being, and the performer/audience relationship embody the key findings of this research project. These works experiment with the nature of live performance, and grant insight into accessing heightened performance-states-of-being and an enhanced relationship with the audience.