The Big Word Building
(at Rhythm Street)

Perhaps the single most important development in the realm of performance during the 1990s has been the renewed emphasis placed on language, text, the word. Whereas the performance art and experimental theatre of the 1970s was often intentionally mute or inarticulate, the 1980s saw the beginnings of the current verbal renaissance in Laurie Anderson's emphasis on story-telling, the Wooster Group's incorporation of classic dramatic texts into their pieces, Eric Bogosian's performances of written texts, and, especially, Spalding Gray's autobiographical monologues.

Gray's influence has been especially pervasive: the 90s have seen a veritable explosion of the kind of performance he pioneered. While some of its practitioners have come to performance from a background in visual art (Karen Finley is a notorious example) many others are actors. The line between this kind of performance art and theatre has become progressively blurred as monologue performances have found their way into the commercial theatre and served as audition pieces for performers' television and film careers. To some extent, the popularity of monologue performance is a reflection of the economics of performance in an era of cultural downsizing: both Broadway producers and alternative spaces find the idea of paying for one person and a microphone much more attractive than that of sponsoring more elaborate and expensive performances.

To a very great extent, the autobiographical monologue form has been linked in the 90s with identity politics, on the premise that the personal, when performed, is the political. Many of these performances have focused on the performer's biography as read through the politics of gender, ethnicity, race, and sexual orientation. From my point of view, too much of this work has become predictable and trite. Too often, the irony and performative ambiguity that gave Gray's work its original edge have given way to sentimentality in the work of the performers he inspired.

The renewed importance of the word is visible not only in the ubiquity of autobiographical monologue but also in such other performance phenomena as poetry slams, the spoken word performances of Henry Rollins, renewed interest in combining texts with music modelled on the jazz and poetry performances of the beat era, and the adoption of rap as an international lingua franca. The recognition of such performers as Bogosian, Gray, and Finley as writers, some of whom now write texts apart from their performances (Gray's fiction, Bogosian's plays and screenplays) is part of this development as well. Ironically, stand-up comedy, in many ways the ur-text of monologue performance, has seen its popularity fade in the 90s after the boom of the 80s even as many of its techniques are incorporated by performers in other genres.

The other important trend performance trend of the 90s has been a return to using the body as the material of performance in very direct and disturbing ways. Whereas the body art of the 60s celebrated the ecstatic body and that of the 70s viewed the body's materiality either from the coolly detached perspective of male conceptualists or the politically-charged passion of feminist artists, the body art of the 90s foregrounds the body's engagement with and inscription by technology. Medical and information technologies have become the means and the subjects of performance. Orlan and Stelarc are examples, as is Baryshnikov's recent performance in which he dances while attached to a heart monitor so that the beating of his aging dancer's heart becomes the soundtrack. If I had to make a prediction, I would guess that the next wave of performance will move away from the person-and-microphone model in favor of direct engagment with our increasingly technologized world.

Philp Auslander.