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THE
REVIEW OF
COMMUNICATION Poetic Writing in Performance StudiesFrederick C. Corey
Ronald J. Pelias.
Writing Performance:
Poeticizing the Researcher’s Body.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. ix + 168
pages. $ 34.95. Scholars and artists in performance studies have a preoccupation with the fluid and ever-changing construct of “text” as a cultural, political, and intellectual institution. This preoccupation with “text” appears to be matched only by an ongoing attraction to and fear of the body. In Writing Performance: Poeticizing the Researcher’s Body, Ronald Pelias re-approaches both text and the body, adding to a line of scholarship that has attempted, sometimes successfully, to reorganize our way of thinking about performance, textuality, and the feeling body. “I want to write in another shape,” says Pelias. “I seek a space that unfolds softly, one that circles around, slides between, swallows whole. I want to live in feelings that are elusive, to live in doubt” (xi). By the end of the book, the doubts linger, swallows are incomplete, and the folds are wrinkles. Has the text not delivered on its promise, or is this book a search for the ephemeral soul? “It is not easy,” wrote Leland Roloff in The Perception and Evocation of Literature, “to restore the wisdom of the body and of the feeling-filled soul, or to trust the judgments of the body. The soul has been out of fashion in education, and its neglect has wreaked an unestimable toll” (3). The uneasiness of which Roloff speaks is apparent in Writing Performance. The words of the text are at times limp, flaccid, unable to rise and command attention. “I was a fool to let this poem out of my hands,” Pelias laments, “a fool to believe it had merit” (77). And, yet, in spite of—or possibly because of—the fear of embarrassment, the words appear on the page, exposed, subject to scrutiny. The reader is given the opportunity to snicker, and the author can only stand as a naked spectacle before his audience. Writing Performance is an act of exposure. The book is composed of a preface on the methodology followed by 15 essays. The essays are organized loosely around three themes: performing every day, on writing and performance, and being a witness. “An Ethnographic Autobiography of Performance in Everyday Life” opens the collection, and here Pelias weaves together a series of comments on the colloquial in an effort to interrogate the tenets of proof. The second essay, “Naming Men: The Business of Performing Manly,” is an exercise in “outing” men from popular culture—men ranging from Robert Bly and Davey Crockett to Mel Gibson and Walt Whitman. Pelias does not “out” these fellows in terms of their sexualities, but rather as compliant, compromising, or courageous embodiments of cultural interpretations of masculinity. The essay on manliness is followed by “Performing in the Classroom,” and here Pelias “outs” the love/hate relationship many of us have with teaching; he then offers a sequence of anecdotes that focus on race and socioeconomic class, and the first theme of the every day is closed with a long poem about his wife, the university, and domesticity. The poet, husband, teacher, and now-bureaucrat asks, “You don’t see any need to act on this, do you?” (56). Yet, one can only imagine that he does act, in the absence of necessity. The theme of writing and performance is addressed through five chapters written in a poetic style. In “The Poet and Performer Take Stage,” Pelias explores a performer’s somatic process, and in “Confessions of an Apprehensive Performer,” an essay that previously appeared in Text and Performance Quarterly, he looks at stage fright. The eighth essay, “The Audition,” is a scripted conversation between an actor and director, and the ninth essay intertextualizes images from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” The final essay on writing is a manifesto on performance; the text is reminiscent of the Futuristic rantings of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, but Writing Performance is unlikely to require police action. The third and final theme, being a witness, is composed of five essays dealing with “audience.” The first essay, “On Looking On,” takes a phenomenological approach to entering the theatre; descriptions are thick, and the perceptions are alternately located among proposed audience members. The scene shifts to New York, and Pelias takes the reader on a walking tour through the streets of Gramercy, into P.S. 122, around a mysterious Chelsea where he locates a lumber yard (a lumber yard? in Chelsea?)—the author’s gait is nervous, he is not comfortable on a stage marked by graffiti—and in the end, he finds comfort in the Reading Room of the New York Public Library. He then turns to a cross-racial discourse in “The DEF Comedy Jam, bell hooks, and Me.” He tries to engage bell hooks in a meaningful way, and he interrogates the privileges he inherits through his maleness, whiteness, class, and sexuality; the efforts are endearing, but critiques of power are ever so much more pithy when delivered without white male guilt as a filter. The penultimate essay, “Moving Bodies in Space and Time,” is remarkable less for its ambition than for its naming: Lesa Lockford, Ron Frederickson, Timothy Gura, and Tracy Stephenson are named and exposed, unlike previous chapters in which the characters are frequently disguised. The book closes with an interview the author conducts with himself; he re-approaches the themes of the book and reflects on general principles of performance and textuality. Writing Performance may not be a sterling example of the latest fashion in performance studies – performative writing – but it is an important work. In her essay “Performing Writing,” Della Pollock massages the nuances of the fashion; she runs her fingers along the resources of evocation, metonymy, reflexivity, and nervousness. She embodies these resources in her book Telling Bodies Performing Birth. While Writing Performance is not as nuanced as other such texts, the book is vital on at least two accounts: its manifestation of the author’s home institution, and its inherent tribute to the author himself. The study of communication and performance at Southern Illinois University is well known for a dual commitment to excellent education and brutal honesty. Southern Illinois University has produced consistently notable professors with interests in performance practice, performance pedagogy, and performance scholarship. Writing Performance is an archival citation of that consistency, and the author, who has played a crucial role in the ongoing legacy of Southern Illinois University, speaks well through the text. Yet, I confess to a thought that lingered in my mind as I read the book: Is this a self-centered journey? No, Writing Performance is not about the author; this is a text about an approach toward the feeling body, possibly even the soul of an idea, not an individual. What, then, does this book tell us about text and
the body? Fundamentally, Writing
Performance is an expression of the researching body.
The discursive formulation of text is continued as a fluid form,
and following Roloff, the book pursues qualities of openness,
exuberance, candor, and “a sense of pouring out openly and freely the
inner state of the character’s being” (75).
Writing Performance is
in many ways an attempt to do with words what others have attempted to
do with the body. Ours is
an age of digital media, Internet technology, and postmodern graphics,
but in Writing Performance, Pelias
returns to the tradition of words on a printed page as a way of
searching for and expressing textual meaning. Frederick C. Corey is associate dean of the College
of Public Programs at Arizona State University. WORKS CITEDPollock, Della. “Performing Writing.” In The Ends of Performance. Ed. Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane. New York: New York University Press, 1998. 73-103. Pollock, Della. Telling Bodies Performing Birth: Everyday Narratives of Childbirth. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Roloff, Leland. The Perception and Evocation of Literature. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman, 1973.
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