Abstraction: Abstracting

Investigating Contemporary Performance Poetic Practices

The definition of performance is ‘the action or process of performing’[1]. Performance is an object in a state of being; it involves interaction, it involves the exchange of energy. My explorations aim to deal with examining poetic performance as a plural event which is under constant construction in:

TEXT PERFORMANCE DOCUMENTATION

The binaries of these terms and their materialities will be explored to create a practice which aligns these terms and traces their co-dependence. I am interested in the dialogue and status of these poetic materialities; where text becomes performance, where action becomes poetic, where documentation is poem, where performance is poetry, where writing is performance.

These investigations will be framed by avant garde poets and performers who challenge the materiality of the poem. My investigation will focus on and form a dialogue with the rules and restraints of the Language poets, experimental women poets such as Caroline Bergvall, Fiona Templeton, Redell Olsen and Carla Harryman as well as female performance artists to include Carolee Scheeman, Kathy Acker, Eleanor Antin and Marina Abramovic. I will draw on their traditions and those of fluxus, site specific performance and technology to establish a focussed practice which looks to be performed and performing.

Materiality is at the forefront of this investigation and I intend to engage practically with spatiality and the female body in performance. My spatial critical argument will be framed by Robert Smithson, Nick Kay, Philip Auslander, Henri Lefebvre, Gustave Bachelard and Elizabeth Grosz. My focus practically is on experimental female poets and artists and theoretically the work of Rachel Blau Duplessis is at the forefront of finding a practised space which is available for female production. A space which works to create its own feminist language of performance. A space which is performed and performing.


[1] The Oxford English Dictionary, ed. Catherine Soanes, (Oxford: Oxford university Press, 2000)