Challenging ideas of coherent identity, universal value and truth as not only impossible but also duplicitous, postmodernism both proposes that ‘grand narratives’ represent dominant class interests, and explores how meaning is always multiple and contingent on contexts, audiences and makers. Roland Barthes’ ‘The Death of the Author’ (1977) advocated a more democratic understanding of the production of meaning by emphasizing meaning’s contingency even in a written text and attributing its production to the reader/audience. Jean Baudrillard argued that the media saturation of contemporary consumer culture made it impossible to distinguish between the real, or truth, and the representation: everything is simulation. Because it is concerned with meaning’s representation – however compromised – postmodern art practice is often conspicuously self-conscious or meta-representational, emphasizing process over product. In postmodern performance there is often a move away from text-based theatre towards potentially more democratic devising techniques, and the playful and destabilizing approaches to identity characteristic of much performance art.
For many critics, postmodern performance is epitomized in the work of the Wooster Group. This queries the truth of naturalist theatre through different approaches to: acting/performing especially, which aims less to represent character than to acknowledge that it presents the performer, text and style. Postmodern performance’s effects are widely debated. For its supporters, it challenges elitist, universalist assumptions, and is often thrillingly pleasurable in its playful abandon of the familiar, its renegade engagement with diverse source materials, its exuberance and its humour. For its detractors, it is deliberately obscure, elitist and – while spectacular – emotionally and politically empty. Similarly, postmodernism’s radical contingency can seem to place it outside of history, beyond the possibility of commenting on the past, the present or the future. In other words, postmodern performance is seen by some to be at risk of a dangerous ethical relativism. From the RCTP
Image: Mike Pearson watching John Rowley and Dave Levett training, 1996. Courtesy of the Brith Gof archive