Performance

PERFORMATTVE tNQUtRY
Embadiment and lts Challenges

185

186 a

Genre

Foundational in this perspective is the belief

in the explanatory power of the life/drama

analogy.

Third, scholars have operated from the

assumption that performance itself is a way
of knowing. This claim, axiomatic for performers, rests upon a faith in embodiment,
in the power of giving voice and physicality
to words, in the body as a sire of knowledge. It is this lasr srance that I hope to
address in this chapter, for it insists upon a
working artist who engages in aesthetic
performances as a methodological starting
It finds its epistemological and ontological heart in performers enacting their
place.

own or others' words on stage. In short,

performative inquiry, from this perspective,
is an embodied practice.
I proceed by discussing the narure ofperformance as an embodied practice. In doing
so, I trace how embodiment entails a know-

ing, participarory, empathic, and political

body. Next, I turn to three representative
forms (literature in performance, performance ethnography, and autobiographical
performance) to show a ange of embodied
inquiry and to point toward their respective
methodological demands. Finally, I identify
several challenges that performers confront
when calling upon embodiment as a methodological tool. In parricular, I will look at the

presenting, lying, assuming, and interven-

ing body.

Performance a.s
Embodied Practice

To embody a self on stage, the performer

must develop a flexible and responsive body,
a body ready to function as a methodological

tool. Just as mathematicians increase their

methodological competence as they move
from simple arithmetic to the highest forms
of mathematical calculation, performers

expand their procedural repertoire as they

develop as artists. As the performers' skills
increase, they gain greater capacity in using
the body as an exploratory instrument that
probes and ponders what it encounters.
tJlith training, the performer's instrument becomes increasingly attuned and
generates more productive insights. Over
time, the performer learns to trust what the

body teaches. It is useful to remember,

however, that not all bodies move through
the world in a similar manner. Some bodies
possess limited agility, some not; some live
in constant pain, some not; some feel disassociated from a sense of self, some not;
some bodies are labeled disabled, some not.
Regardless of the performer's body, embodied practice calls upon the performer to
employ a knowing, participatory, empathic,
and political body. Each of these bodies is
necessarily implicated in any performative
act and, hence, is fundamental to performa-

tive inquiry.

The performer's knowing body relies

upon the physical and vocal behaviors
brought forth in rehearsal and public presentation. The performer listens to what the
body is saying and, based upon what the
body has come to know, makes judgments
about performance choices. More specifically, it involves a process of selecting what
text to stage, playing with possible vocal
and physical behaviors, testing the various
possibilities against the givens in the text,

choosing among the viable options for the

best artistic choice, repeating each choice so
that it becomes fine tuned for performance,
and presenting the performance before an
audience (Pelias, 1999). At each step in the
process, the performer relies upon the body
as a location of knowledge.
Performers are always trying to separate

the good from the bad, the magical from

the mundane. The knowing body serves to
negotiate the multiplicity of options a performer faces. It helps the performer decide

Performatiue

what seems right.

It

tells the performer

what it knows about what is being said and

how it is being said. Its telling comes for-

ward cognitively, providing the performer

with a clear understanding of why a particular decision might be right. In such cases,
the performer can articulate the reasons
for a given choice. The body's telling also
comes forward affectively, giving the performer emotional knowledge, offering a
sense of the attitudes, sentiments, and passions of what is being performed. And its
telling comes forward intuitively, initiating
a felt but ineffable sense of what appears
true. The knowing body, then, finds its
power in the cognitive, affective, and intuitive coming together to form a sense of
what it has to say.
The knowing body gains support from
the empathic body. On the most fundamen-

tal level, the

empathic body recognizes

points of view other than its own. It understands that multiple perspectives always
exist. More importantly, the empathic body
has the capacity to understand and share in
the feelings of others, to take on another sen-

sibil. This methodological skill helps situate performers to create characters' including

their own character in an autobiographical

text. The empathic task, to use Stanislavski's
(1,952) familiar terms, demands that the performer take into account the "given circumstances" of a character and employ the
"magic if": If I were in that situation, what

do and feel? In this construction,

performers project themselves into the life
circumstances of others and use themselves
to determine the nature of the experience.

would

Alternatively, as Parrella (1'971) first pointed

out, performers may attempt to become
others, adopting the characteristics of others
as their own. The question here is not how
the performer might feel in a certain situa-

tion but how the other might feel. This

process of taking on others, of letting
one's own body be open to others, provides

Inquiry a

187

performers an entry, albeit always incomplete, into others' life worlds. The empathic
body, because of its ability and willingness to
coalesce with others, is essential to embodiment and to performance as a method.
The participatory body learns by doing.
The performer's task is located in action.
By doing the actions called forth by a given
role, the performer comes to a sense of what
those actions entail. As suggested above, the

performer tries on various actions before

settling into the actions that seem right.
It is, in part, the repetition of those selected
actions that is the most telling for the performer. Living with specific actions over
an extended period of time allows the performer's body to make those actions the
performer's own. This may require performers to reach well beyond their typical ways
of being in the world, and as they reach out,
they come to understand what it may be like
to be another body. Performative inquiry
cannot be accomplished from an observational stance; it demands participation. It
asks performers to become others, to commit to others' ways of being. Performers, of
course, seldom forget that they are performers. Keeping in touch with their performing
selves allows them to do the work they
must do on stage. Yet part of the performers'
power is the ability, to use'Wilshire's (1982)
helpful phrasing, "to stand in for others."
Standing in, as Conquergood (1'995)
suggests, may be viewed as an act of mime-

sis (faking), poiesis (making), or kinesis

(breaking and remaking). lhether performers see themselves as participating
in order to replicate, construct, or provide
alternatives to current constructions, their
task remains constant: They are to perform
actions that are available for others and for
themselves to read. And, in the doing' they
come to know how embodiment reifies,
insinuates, destabilizes, interrogates, and
alters their own and others' ways of seeing
the world.

1BB a

Genre

Conquergood's scheme is a reminder

act of embodiment there is
that in
^ny
always a political body. All performance is
ideologically laden. Performers' bodies are
not neutral. They carry, among other markers, their gender, sexuality, ableness, class,
race, and ethnicity with them. They signal
cultural biases-beauty and blond hair,
handsome and tan, jolly and round, and so
on. Such claims imply that the performer's

body is always a contested site' Efforts

at color-blind casting, for example' only
demonstrate that directors can attempt to
erase issues of race but cannot eliminate
how audiences might interpret what they
see. The identities that are put on stage
come with and without cultural endorsement. Performers who are interested in
interventionist work find their political
bodies a rich methodological source for
exploration and advocacY.
It would be misleading, however, to
imply that any body could come on stage
without being a body of advocacy. Bodily
presence reifies or argues against a way
of being. Questions of what bodies have
access to the stage, what bodies are privileged, and what bodies are used for what
ends swirl around every performance' Such
questions may remain implicit, but increasingly, such issues have become explicit,
sometimes in textual form and sometimes
in staging. Dolan's (1996) desire to use performance for activist work comes' in part'
from its potential to display "the connectbodies to themselves and each
other, the demonstration of bodies in relaedness

of

tions that are clearly political, deeply

marked with power and with danger"
(p.12). The political body recognizes how
power functions, dares to explore and
expose it, and welcomes the opportunity to
subvert it in the name of social justice.
Embodiment, then' is "an intensely sensuous way of knowing" (Conquergood, t99t,
p. 1S0). The experiencing body, situated in

culture, is its methodological center. Unlike

traditional scholarship where the body seems
to slip away, performers generate and present their insights through the body, a knowing body, dependent upon its participatory

and empathic capacities and located in

contested yet potentially liberating space. As
Conquergoo d (1'9911 puts it, performative

inquiry "privileges particular, participatory'

dynamic, intimate, precarious, embodied
experience grounded in historical process,
contingency, and ideology" (p' 187).

Representatiue Forms
of P erformatiu e In quirY

Performers may focus their inquiry in a

number of different directions, but the three

most common sites for exploration

are

the literary, cultural, and personal, known

generically as literature in performance' per-

formance ethnography, and autobiographical performance. These labels, of course, blur'

crisscross, leak, but they do point toward distinct orientations and place certain methodological issues in the foreground.
Staging literature (i.e., drama, poems'
prose fiction, nonfiction) has consumed the
bulk of performers' energies. Literary texts,
some specifically written for presentation
on stage and some not' carry their own aes-

thetic dimensions, situating the performer

in a position of either trying to feature or to
resist what a given text asks. The delicate
negotiation between literature's art and
the performer's art is an ongoing process'
informed by the performer's motives for
presenting a given work. For some performers, their task is to offer a credible rendering of a literary text; for others' their aim is
to discover in literature places for innovation and critique. Not surprisingly, these
goals are in keeping with the objectives of
various literary and critical theories-some

Performatiue

positions, to use Booth's (1'979) helpful

terms, encourage readers to strive for
"understanding" and some for "overstanding" (pp. 23 5:257).4 central consideration
performers face when working with literary
texts is their stance, whether it will be one
of consent or one of dissent. Depending

upon the stance the performer elects, performative inquiry may be textually driven
or textually detached.
For the performers who are driven to give

consent to a literary work, their methodological task is to seek entry into the textual
wodd and, in so doing, come to know the
characters that live there. Much of actor
training is involved with giving performers
the skills to gain access, to allow others to
speak through them, and to inhabit worlds

other than their own. For the performers

who wish to detach themselves from textual
dictates, their procedural charge is to discover how to keep present a given literary

work while they spin away from or comment upon it. The text, functioning as a
launch point for what the performer wants
to say, might be approached metaphorically
to establish a conceptual overlay that guides
an audience's reading. Shakespeare's plays,
for instance, are often placed in surprising
contexts (e.g.,Tbe Merry'Wiues of Windsor
in the United States suburbia in the 1950s
The Mercltant of Venice in Nazi Germany).
Or a text might be inserted with the performer's political conunentary, encouraging
an audience to reflect upon what is being
said. Such postmodern stagings, perhaps
most frequently associated with the'Wooster
Group, often interweave their own intertextual observations and connections. Performers who elect such strategies put into

play the power of their own readings.

Methodologically, their embodied enactments tilt toward their own stamp upon a
literary work.

Performance ethnography places cul-

tural understandings on stage. Performers,

Inquiry a

189

following ethnographic procedures, gather

data from the field, but instead of turning
that data into a traditional written report,
they script and stage their findings. Informed
by the early work of Turner (1,9861 and
Schechner (1993), performance ethnographers believe that the rich array of cultural
practices can best be represented, not on the
page, but through embodied presentation.

By presenting cultural others on

stage,

performers display living bodies who participate in the ongoing process of making
culture. In their representations, performance ethnographers strive to avoid shalIowness and exploitation, a desire that is
not easily accomplished when reaching across
cultures.

Equally tricky is how performance

ethnographers decide to script themselves.
In some shows, the ethnographer is implied
but not embodied on stage. In others, the
ethnographer functions as a narrator who
provides an interpretive frame for the
audience. In still others, the ethnographer
becomes a central character, a participant
in ongoing cultural practices. Another issue
facing performance ethnographers is how
they see their task. For some, the performance functions as a report, an account of
what they found in the field that reaches
toward objectivity. For others, performance
serves as a site

of advocacy, an opportunity

to intervene on behalf of cultural others.

Such considerations call forward different
methodological procedures and, hence,
alter the nature of the performative inquiry.

Autobiographical performance traffics

in the details of a particular life, featuring
either one's own personal life experiences
or another's autobiographical tale. More
often than not, it features texts of exceptional wit, extraordinary events, and/or
oppressed or historical individuals. As for
the performance ethnographer, the autobiographical performer engages in a process
of selection and shaping, of deciding what

190 a

Genre

to share. Both are always making a rhetorical case, and in doing so, they face issues
of truthfulness: \lhat information can be
'What
particburied, minimized, or altered?
ulars can be dropped or added to create aesthetic interest? llhat details about others
can be included without their consent? The
autobiographer performer, unlike the performance ethnographer, however, takes
as the primary aim to create a particular
speaker that tells of life lived. The autobio-

graphical performer shares intimacies and'

at times, indignities. The performer establishes a persona that audience members may
admire or abhor, embrace or resist, identify

with or dismiss.
Such an interest leads performers to be
keenly aware that there are personal consequences to every telling. Making public
occurrences that are often kept private carries risks. The man who in performance selfidentifies as gay, for example, may soon find

himself in danger of physical harm beyond

the site of the performance. The woman who
discloses her anorexia, for instance, may discover that in her social life she has become
reduced to that identity marker. The autobiographical performer, then, is always in an
ongoing negotiation between authenticity

and rhetorical efficacy, between the desire

'Sith
for honesry and the need to protect.
autobiographical performances, inquiry
maneuvers between the told and untold. Its
strength, however, derives from telling the
untold. As Lockford (2001) argues,

it is often dirty work, this

digging into

the rich soil of humanity. Digging into

our humanity, we cannot keep the soil
out from under our nails, the clay off
our faces, and the sand away from the
'We
write with humility
folds of our skin.
about that which makes us remember
our humanity, that which makes us
humble, that which makes us human.
(p. 118)

Some Chllenges

for

Performatiue Inquiry

I have been arguing that the performative

method is powerful and carries some partic-

ular methodological demands as it moves

across genres. Like other methods, it also
confronts certain challenges. In this next
section, I outline some risks that performers
face when embodiment functions as their
method of inquiry. These risks might best
be addressed as the presenting, Iying,
assuming, and intervening bodies. The performer's body is engaged in an act of live
presentatlon.
Through physical and vocal behaviors,

performers attempt to put on display what

they wish to communicate. There may be,
however, slippage between what the body
knows and what it can say and between
what the body says and what an audience
can interpret. Performers may have intense

bodily feelings but lack the competence

to translate those feelings into meaningful
communicative acts for either themselves or
an audience. Moreover, performers and an
audience may recognize a given act as highly
meaningful but remain unable to articulate
what it might be saying. In this case, the
presenting body is communicative, speak-

ing through the intuitive and the felt, but

performers cannot always formulate into
words the body's meaning. In addition, performers may have difficulty determining
whether or not what they know has come
from bodily enactment or from some other
source of insight. Park-Fuller (1983) offers
a rich explanation of these dilemmas:

of performance is
a sensual language, it does not constitute knowledge by naming; it constiBecause the language

tutes knowledge by sensing. Thus, when

called upon to describe an insight gained
in the process of production, the reporter

Performatiue
must translate sensed knowledge to conceptual knowledge and, since any translation involves change, the translation

from

sensed knowledge

knowledge changes the

to

conceptual
nature of the

insight. (p.72)

Inquiry a

'191

Such a move keeps bodily claims where

they belong, connected to a particular body.
The habit of speaking of "the body" can
obscure the fact that performative inquiry
always takes place in an individual body, a

body enriched and scarred by its lifelong

facts. Rich's (2001) call for using "my body"

The presenting body sees the stage as its

site of publication. It offers what it knows
not on the page but in live performance. But
because performance is ephemeral (once
given, then lost), performance scholars have
tried to document in print form what the

over "the body" in her discussion of identity politics is applicable here:

Perhaps we need a moratorium on saying "the body." For it's also possible to

abstract "the" body.

'\hen

I write "the

body knows. Such attempts' more often

than not, have been frustrating. Seldom
does a printed account capture the feel for a
performance. In recent years, scholars (e.g.,
Miller & Pelias, 2001; Pollock, 1998) have
turned to performative writing as a strategy

body" I see nothing in particular. To

write "my body" plunges me into lived
experience, particularity....To say
"the body" lifts me away from what has
given me a primary perspective. To say
"my body" reduces the temptation to

for providing a richer sense of the presenting

body. Recognizing language's representa-

grandiose assertions. (p. 67)

tional limitations, performative writing

often deploys the poetic as the best strategy

for entering into and reporting what the

body might know. Even when doing so,
print accounts remain limited, a diminished
rendering of what occurred on stage.

The lying body is a reminder that the

body is a habituated site that carries its historical and cultural markings. The fact that
I gag at the sight of mayonnaise tells more
about my unfortunate encounter with some
rancid mayonnaise in my childhood than it
does about the nature of mayonnaise. This
trivial example calls to mind examples of
much larger consequence: the disgust the
Nazi body may have felt toward Jews, the
repulsion the straight body may feel when
seeing fwo men kissing, the loathing one
political party may feel for another political
party. As Gingrich-Philbrook (2001) notes,
the body offers "an opportunity for error

And it reduces the potential confusion

between what performing bodies might
know and what a particular' situated body
might assert. Whatever lies or truths our
bodies might tell, they are our own.

The assuming body falls Prey to the

intimacy of embodiment. Coming to know
others by taking on their physical and vocal
qualities, their attitudes and circumstances,
and their historical and cultural situations
may lead performers to believe that they
fully understand others. But understanding is
always partial. Moreover, in the belief of full

as much as wisdom" (p. 7l,. This suggests

that what the body knows requires critical

understanding, they may feel an obligation

to speak for others, particulady given their
communicative skills. But a difference can be
drawn between "speaking for" and "speaking with." \hen speaking for, performers
offer amonologue on behalf of another' The
monologue comes forward as a "what is'"
\lhen speaking with, performers engage in a
dialogue, an ongoing conversation between
a performer and another, even though the

reflection, a constant ethical testing, a

reflexive turn.

performer may be the only speaker. Instead

of suggesting "what isr" dialogic performance

192 a
stages

Genre

"what might be." The

difference

that asserts "what

poses
"what might be"
that
is" and one
becomes particularly loaded when a performer wishes to "overstand," to offer a
critique of another's way of being. The challenge for performers is to recognize the
nature of what they know, its partiality, its
beNveen a performance

presumptive and political dangers.

The intervening body sees performance
an
opportunity to work for social justice.
as

It is politically

engaged, committed to productive change. In its desire to affect social

life, it strives to reach constituencies that
have a stake in what it has to say. As Dolan

(2001) explains, performance can be a

"participatory forum in which ideas and
possibilities for social equiry and justice are
shared" (p.456). Performance can "offer us
glimpses of utopia" (p. 456), "imaginative
territories that map themselves over the
real" (p. 457). This "utopian performative"
plays against performance practices that
reify cultural logics and obstruct alternative
expressions, often by means of commodification and control of resources.
The intervening body, regardless of the
obstacles it might confront, runs a number of
methodological risks. In addition to reifying
what it may hope to question, the intervening body may offer possibilities but no
course of action, or conversely, may call for
action without posing sufficient possibilities.
In the first case, embodiment may propose
so many speculative possibilities that it is difficult to imagine what action to take. In the
second case, embodiment posits an action
that appears to solve a problem without recognizing the complexity of a situation.
Despite the challenges of the presenting,
lying, assuming, and intervening bodies,

performative inquiry stands as a highly productive method. Across various forms, performance is an embodied practice, dependent
upon participatory and empathic skills and
situated politically, that trusts the body as a
site of knowing. It insists that performers

who surrender themselves to the bodily

stance of others will come to understand
in a most profound way: sensuously, human

to human, fully present, open, ready to

take in what others have to offer.

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