Contemporary performance often integrates live performance and media.  When film or video segments display the image of the actor, the projection–as a manifestation of a moment prior to performance–qualifies the work of the live actor interacting with it.  I recognize that the actor’s interaction with the video has been pre-determined and reenacts material generated prior to the moment of performance.  The live actor may play the game of being in the same time frame as the video, in a time frame that I, as a spectator, know is prior to the performance, and the performance then vacillate or oscillate between here and then.  Also the clarity of the status of the projection as image suggests that the live actor interacting with it also functions in the performance space as image

This phenomenon of making reference to the past may be even more intricate than I had hoped. The film or tape may be the product of a series of rehearsals in which someone eventually declares that the preparation is finished and a performance segment is ready to be recorded on some media.  I must work backwards from the manifestation of the work–the film or performance–to an idea of its source in the imagination and the labor of the director/creator.   I must recognize that it recovers moments that were created in a previous collaboration of actor and director.  As well, technology has developed to the point at which an edited medium may also collate a series of performances and may then manipulate them digitally or otherwise to make reference to an original that is itself a fiction because these recorded moments never existed as a sequential whole in time.

The recorded image makes reference in my mind to the following:

• first to those specific moments performed before the camera;
• second to a series of moments of rehearsal preceding that performance that established the work recorded;
• and third to the creative period of editing that creates this record of an non-existent “original” performance.

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I could not with any certainty fix the references to all of those preceding moments but I can relate the recorded segment to a notion of an original (existing as the work performed before the camera) that is itself a recovery of the labor of earlier moments.  The consequence of this way of thinking, of course, builds an idea of a series of receding moments that have difficulty coming to rest in any specific reference to the past.   Even though I recognize that the work embodies the labor of the past in the present display.

My realization that the ontological presence of the actor is inaccessible is intensified by my understanding of the performative nature of human presence itself.  My awareness that any human figure that shares my space and time may be manifested to me through a kind of performance.  I realize the degree to which many of those categories by which I identify the human figure–ethnicity, gender, class, for example–may be performances and, at some level, as Judith Butler reminds us, are always as performative as ontological.   Presence is always, to some degree, an enactment undertaken to stimulate the construction of an image in the consciousness of the beholder.  When human beings are self-consciously the object of another’s viewing or listening, the observed almost inevitably shapes the signs of this presence to project the image of the figure they desire to be perceived.

The display of one human figure to another or a group of others certainly becomes even more complicated when that display is aesthetic, when the behavior of the observed is acting.  Here observed figures self-consciously set out to build illusions, to project some character different from their own, to lie as an aesthetic act. Illusion and lie are, however, inexact terms for what I am discussing, as both actor and spectator know from the outset that deception will not be one of the consequences of the performance.   However, the spectator evaluates the actor on some criteria that help to determine how well the actor’s lie mimics the literal truth, and the spectator may also make judgments about the truthfulness of the performance on some allegorical level.  In any case, the aesthetic frame of performance transforms what, in other circumstances, would be deception into the ludic, the playful.

In many instances, whoever is in charge of the aesthetic event chooses a performer whose body, voice, and mannerisms correspond as closely as possible to the fictional figure to be performed.  At the other extreme, there are performers (such as Anna Deavere Smith) who deliberately perform against the categories by which they would ordinarily be identified and perform a wide range of figures with extreme social, racial, and generic differences.  In this case, part of our aesthetic pleasure comes from our awareness of the performer’s virtuosity, the technical skill through which the fundamental image created by the performer’s physical presence is transformed to accommodate these differences.  In the process of perceiving the human actor in an aesthetic event I subordinate my sense of the actor as human being to my sense of the actor as human being functioning as image or stimulus to the formation of an image in my consciousness that combines in a intricate way my awareness of the presence of the actor and the actor’s presence as a theatrical entity.

The director relies upon the psychic and kinesthetic memory of the actor to record behavior generated in rehearsal.  In rehearsal persistent repetition writes a sequence of movement and vocal patterns in the actor’s memory that performance plays back almost automatically.  Later performances attempt to recover or to regenerate the details of the previous performances in a serial repetition.  Changes occur, often in an attempt to realize an idealized and unattainable notion of perfection; but the actor’s work remains one of recuperation, recovery, repetition, the reenactment of the work of the past in the labor of the present, the production of the performance that is a re-production of earlier work.

The actor’s body constitutes the primary technological instrument of the live theater, and I struggle to think clearly about performance I think it is helpful to conceptualize acting as a technology that functions to reproduce voice and gesture recorded earlier.  Performance always depends upon the function of systems of memory.  One could make the distinction between live performance as the reenactment of the past and the medium of either film or video as the record of the past.  This difference would take into consideration the distinction between the self-generated use of memory of the actor to reembody the work of rehearsal and the recording of images on some medium.  However, the point I am emphasizing is that the actor’s body is, indeed, imprinted with material by extensive repetition to respond in performance as closely as possible to some predetermined, previously generated sequences of behavior.  Whereas we celebrate the immediacy of live performance, we also return to performances of music, drama, and dance to experience the satisfaction of a repetition, the reoccurrence of formal patterns that have, in some way, been inscribed into our memory as well as the actor’s.  The pleasure of these aesthetic experiences derives, at least in part, from the anticipation and satisfaction of experiencing the fulfillment of a familiar formal structure.  Freud’s theories of repetition may be useful but not wholly necessary to understand this enjoyment.