Through an examination of the Irish actress George Anne Bellamy’s 1785 benefit (a performance whose ticket sales were designated to support a particular performer or playwright), Nevena Martinovic argues that in exchange for their financial support of the aging celebrity, audiences felt entitled to witness the “incapacity” of older actresses even as they rejected their theatrical performances. The presentation of Bellamy’s body with that of the twenty-six-year-old Elizabeth Farren onstage was depicted as an “embarrassment” by the press the next day. The pairing of Bellamy and Farren at a performance specifically for the financial benefit of the former exemplifies the ways that age did not exempt women from their physical objectification onstage but merely changed the nature of it. Farren’s repetitive performance as “young woman” served as the live, embodied memory of Bellamy’s remote physical and artistic prime.
Jacqueline Jenkins considers the cultural work of medieval performance rites in the lives of contemporary secular academics, lay-historians, and tourists seeking experiences of medieval “liveness.” She focuses specifically on the affective appeal of engaging in an embodied way with medieval, typically religious, site-specific performance rites to participants who do not share in either the worldview or the religious sentiments of the experiences. For example, what role does affect play in the experiences that over three hundred-thousand people have each year while walking the Camino de Santiago? She argues that a specifically affective engagement is the primary reason most seek out experiences so remote from their contemporary lives, and that the cultural work of what she is calling ‘affect tourism’ is a rich and as yet under-identified area in affect studies.
Salvador Herrera describes how transhuman conceptual artist Muxxxe marches along the US-Mexico border wearing a desert-stained ensemble covered in over five hundred ceramic crucifixes that obscure their face. Their embodied performance is dedicated to those who lost their lives pursuing the American Dream, enlivening a melancholic archive of coloniality through the specter of the living dead. For Muxxxe, the borderlands refer not only to a violent geopolitical space, but also to a symbolic purgatory: “a cemetery of dreams” for those who cannot traverse systems of oppression. Against what performance studies scholar José Esteban Muñoz calls “the burden of liveness,” Muxxxe enacts what Herrera call a primordial temporality. No Identificadx refers not only to the reduction of migrants to depersonalized corpses, but to a new ethical imperative whereby empathetic identification is not required to organize against the gendered and racialized necropolitics of the border.
Cord-Heinrich Plinke draws from two digital/live hybrid performance in Germany: Dieses Blicken (This Gaze), performed at Theatertreffen der Jugend Berlin in 2021, and Momentaufnahmen (Momentary Recordings/Momentary Receptions), to be performed in 2022. Both pieces bring together performers with disabilities and refugees into Germany, and challenge conceptions of ability, monstrosity, and the mediation of bodily sensation. He lays out the drifting apart of bodily sensations in these performances in what he calls “the poetics of disobedience.” With this, a subject-object split between audience and performers is complicated, and the question of remoteness versus liveness addressed directly; interestingly, it is with the help of digital technology that the sense of remoteness in this engagement is reduced. Both performances discussed here engage with questions of the chimeric and the hyperreal, and posit historically and socially pre-produced images of subjects vis-à-vis the individual bodies that inhabit these.