More Performative Than Personal (Nov. 2009)

I’ve been thinking a lot about how the personal and the performative intersect lately. My process ultimately begins with the personal, which slowly transforms into the performative through the process of writing, choreographing, rehearsing, and performing a piece. My work, however, always appears to be highly personal, at least on the surface. I struggle with how to ask the audience to look deeper and see the performativity. Simultaneously, the process of performing different texts (personal, scholarly, popular), always transforms my understandings of these personal roots… Audre Lorde, one of my muses, says, “Our visions begin with our desires.” This could not be truer  for me. My performances begin with my desires, my fears, my struggles, and my triumphs. That is also how I hope to allow access for my audience— through their own desires.

Self-disclosure is such a sticky thing, though… In what circumstances is self-disclosure more about the selfish need to perform therapy and in what circumstances can it lead to genuine communal understandings via performance? What about this intersection between the personal and the performative leads to a problematic gendering of performance as a luxury; as trivial? And what about it can lead to new ways of knowing?

I don’t have answers to these questions yet, but as I work on a performance about the male gaze, gynecology, my kidney donation, and laparoscopic surgery, I search for a balance between the personal and the performative.