For Performance Season our approach is necessarily didactic, that is, in addition to carrying out our artistic research we hoped to introduce audiences of performance art to new ways of experiencing such art.
The premises of this “didactic” approach are
To research performance art practice.
Contextualize its place in present discourse and in visual art history.
To discover and to experiment with systems that can open up both new critical readings and readings that take into account perception as it influences/modifies the apprehension of a performance.
In realizing this “didactic” approach we found it helpful to divide performance art into certain categories. The festival participant could then choose a category that captured the spirit of her or his project.
In employing categories our purpose was not to simplify or reduce, but rather to create an opening for audience and artist to begin deconstructing the meanings behind the categories themselves.
This “didactic” approach, as we’ve defined it, uses the categories as its basis for research and then as a way to observe how such categories could be more or less suitable, exhaustive, descriptive or reductive for the festival participants. Our hope is that our approach will both help open up new definitions for talking about performative practice, as well as generate new discourses and new questions.