[Performative Arts in Social Fields]

© Patricia Hoeppe ‚Performed City’, Performance Press International Berlin 2015, p. 247 f. )

‚Performative-Social Feedback       

The ethnologist and anthropologist Victor Turner and the theater director Richard Schechner explain the impact that process-oriented and action-oriented Performance Art has on social and community issues by means of their diagram „social drama – performative drama“ which illustrates a feedback-loop. 

The faculty of „Performance Studies“ NYU/ TISCH School of Arts developed by them in 1967 in New York, USA as an interdisciplinary research field, has since then considered performance actions in dealing with social issues and examined the interactions between the two. Turner discovered that in times of societal insecurity and change, symbols and ritual-like activities in the form of artistic performances help in rebuilding community. A laminale phase, which everyone manages to get through together, is especially conducive to the creation of a new mutual identity. This is one of the impacts Performance Art has on settling society. 

Richard Schechner represents the energy, which flows from the artistic into the social and from the social into the artistic as an aesthetic-dramatic feedback loop. This concept is applied here to the performative-social situation and its social and individual impact can be understood as larger or smaller loops. One can begin reading the feedback at any point in the loop. We begin with the visible and consciously perceptible social and political acts (x). After a duration of being presence this then reaches the unconscious. Its impact continues working there. It raises questions and simultaneously holds the solution. Its aesthetic structure is an inherent part of the artistic theme. In the light of current events, the performance artist is able to form questions and develop solutions in the form of performative settlings for the issues, which have found their way from the unconscious to the conscious, which are performed on the stage of every day life. The artistic performative event can be consciously perceived by society – and then after being present for a time, it sinks down again into societal unconsciousness. The performative-aesthetic experiences continue to have an effect in the depths of the unconscious. These experiences, having gone through the depths of the unconscious, bring about transformation. With time, that which was performatively settled works its way up through different levels and layers back into the conscious and demands a political, social and communal re-action. After a reality-constituting settling it sinks down again. Perhaps it will come up again into the conscious if a similarly controversial social issue ever comes up. If, at this sensitive moment, a performative impulse is once again settled, that society can continue to develop further. 

The reason why Performance Art and social issues have such direct access to each other may have something to do with the phenomena of the structural identity. Rudolf Arnheim, a gestalt psychologist, describes it so: „Thus, for example, a person‘s mood can be expressed physically through a similar physical movement. A dancer‘s gestures of the laundry moving gently in a breeze can contain the same structural traits as a mood or a conceptual connection, which the observer is able to recognize in these movements.“ Performance actions, dealing with artistic-performative settlings of social and political issues, open up spaces of reality where it is possible to transform social situations on a continuous basis. This, in turn, has a sustainable impact on Performance Art.‘

[Master’s program concept]

The concept of the Master’s program ‚Performative Arts in Social Fields‘ for the Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences was developed 2012-16 by Prof. Patricia Ines Hoeppe. It is based on her artistic research Performed City and the understanding of socio-performative feedbacks. She explicitly distances herself from its current description and implementation.