While contemporary performance may borrow
either aesthetic strategies
or apparent ideological gestures from the past,
this borrowing
makes no claims to invest the material
or the aesthetic strategy
with a historical “thought.”

The process in which a block of material
or a analogous strategy
incorporates a prior unit or technique
in a form of quotation
that makes no reference to what is prior
other than its status as
something borrowed, appropriated, taken up
in the moment of performance.

Is there originality in any work of art?

Have I thought myself
into the corner of defining art itself
as a manipulation of existing languages,
tropes, gestures
that may vary in craft
but always re-presents or reproduces
what is prior.

Productions of Shakespeare, Ibsen, O’Neill
are only simulations,
in no way a production of originality;
while contemporary performance
frees itself from that pretense.

Of course
this is bull shit
as that freedom from pretense
is itself a claim for authenticity.