By Tony Gardner
Time in performance is not under the control of its audience: live performance can neither be rewound nor paused for later viewing,
the experience of it cannot be slowed down or speeded up by its audience.
4.1 Theatre, technology and time
By Steve Dixon (pp. 89-97)
- Atemporal: a negatively configured “non-time” of contemporary experience
- Highly stylized and ritualized “acting” performances, slow-motion movements and repetitions all contribute to a sense of time’s manipulation and disruption.
- Henri Bergson: “what I call “my present” has one foot in my past, and another in the future”.
Pitches, J., and Popat, S. (ed.) (2011) Performance Perspectives: A Critical Introduction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan
4.2 Ghost dance: time and duration in the work of Lone Twin
Gregg Wheelan in conversation with Tony Gardner (pp. 97-102)
- The use of video and other digital technologies to manipulate the passage of time in contemporary media performance can create a sense of the extemporal,
or “time out of time”.
- Durational works can mark out and frame a special time in the ongoing flow of the everyday as a privileged space of performance.
- Marina Abramovic has spoken about creating a special kind of time through her durational pieces, arguing that
artist and spectator must “meet in a completely new territory, and build from that timeless time spent together”.
- It is dramatic to end something that has been going on for what is largely considered a long time.
But the idea of an ending does create something of heightened sense of being together.
- Giving something a lot of time allows for all sorts of things to happen – it creates an opening, a field of possibilities.
Pitches, J., and Popat, S. (ed.) (2011) Performance Perspectives: A Critical Introduction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan
4.3 The lives and times of performance
By Tony Gardner (pp.102-110)
- The time in which the work can be experienced by an audience is not the control of that audience: being there fundamentally means being there at the right time.
- The audience appears to give up individual control of time as part of the basic contract of live theater and submits to the “shared time” of the performance.
- “Live performance exists in the present, and human beings have a need to be present in this life”. (McBurney)
Pitches, J., and Popat, S. (ed.) (2011) Performance Perspectives: A Critical Introduction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan