PARTICIPATION PERFORMANCE

LIVE RADIO AND TV audiences participate by clapping and laughing on cues from the host, until they do them spontaneously. Some of their members are invited onstage to carry props around, sing, answer questions, or act in skits and competitive games. They thus pass (for a time) from watcher to doer; they are inside the action, generating it. Yet they know they have a relatively minor role. The show is being directed by someone else. They will return, sooner or later, to their seats in the audience. In fact, they never leave their seats in their thoughts.

Such participants are a sort of mobile audience, acting for everyone’s entertainment as if they were real actors. They are “good sports.” They form a bridging device between their group and the show-persons. The MC and his or her staff do not come from a place in the audience. It is where you come from that tells you what you are.

Audience-participation shows have evolved as popular art genres along with political rallies, demonstrations, holiday celebrations and social dancing. Parts of the common culture, their forms are known and accepted; the moves individuals must make within each are familiar, and their goals or uses are assumed to be clear.

Use to the user and use to the observer (the nonparticipant) can be very different things. Observers who analyze culture in depth might be looking for large, abstract purposes in popular art forms: ceremonial, sexual, propitiational, recreational, and the like. For example, in the labor disputes of the 1930s they might see a ritualistic similarity between a picket line and what happened inside a factory. Workers would display a measured, circular pacing style with signs carried aloft, accompanied by simple, repetitive chants, and this could appear remarkably like the mechanical movements of the assembly lines they were shutting down. Although they stopped working, they continued working, symbolically.

Charlie Chaplin observed it all wonderfully in his Modern Times, of course, but the workers were mainly interested in getting more money. That was sufficient reason for participating in the milling crowd and taking their places on the picket line when scheduled. Their motives were simply different. The anonymous developers of the picket-line art form probably did not consider it an art form, but certainly must have sensed that ceremony was a way to achieve specific results, even if it was not the only way. I consider it an art form because my profession has taught me to do so.

Participation in anything is often a question of motive and use. The depth-analysts seek symbols in action and don’t participate in strikes, normally, but in the operations of analysis and interpretation. The union organizers of pickets need bargaining clout and so participate in making arrangements and pounding on the management’s tables. The workers need buying power and so they start marching and chanting. At least some of them do.

Communal art forms, including those the public would readily call “artistic,” typically contain a mix of professional director/performers who have high visibility, semi-professionals who are visible but carry out relatively simple jobs, and unskilled enthusiasts who swell the ranks and provide excitement or commitment. This hierarchy is quite clear in the traditional July 4th parades of small American towns: there are the band leaders, musicians and baton twirlers; there are the flag and float bearers; the civic leaders in shiny automobiles; and the children who break away from parents to run along with marchers whom they know.

In this kind of parade everybody knows everybody else. Thus the audience packed at the sidewalks has more than a passive role. Besides overseeing and appraising its relatives and friends in the procession, and releasing its children and dogs to run beside the drummers, it arrives early with food and drink, maps out preferred vantage places, dresses appropriately with patriotic paraphernalia, carries identifying insignia of local business affiliations, cheers, waves and calls out familiarly to individual paraders, who acknowledge them in turn by nods, smiles and winks.

As a group, the crowd, like the marchers, is made up of plain aficionados and real experts who occasionally arrange sub-acts such as skits and the unfurling and raising of banners and placards at appropriate moments for the enjoyment of the paraders, as well as for their immediate neighbors and the local press. Some of them wear costumes to stand out.

Communal performances like July 4th parades are planned and given on special occasions, requiring particular preparations and certain individuals or groups with skills to carry them out. They are also intended to convey expressive effects such as patriotism. But when the community’s traditions are left for artistic experiments conducted in idiosyncratic ways, the crowd of knowing supporters and participants shrinks to a handful. And at that, what the handful actually knows or is supposed to derive from the works is uncertain and mute, seeming to have to do with a shared openness to novelty, to being sensitized, to flexibility of stance, rather than to possessing a body of hard information and well-rehearsed moves. What passes between the members of this tiny circle are subtle signals about the values of the group they belong to.

What then is participation in these productions? Those early Happenings and Fluxus Events which were in fact participatory—most were not¹—were a species of audience-involvement theater akin to the radio and TV variety; they were also traceable to the guided tour, parade, carnival test of skill, secret society initiation, and popular texts on Zen.² The artist, helped by a few colleagues, was the creator and director. Together, they initiated audiences into the unique rites of the pieces.

Their formats, therefore, were essentially familiar ones in disguise, recalling “low” rather than “high” theater, and in the case of Zen, well-known meditational techniques. Even their subject matter was not particularly esoteric; it was a blend of American Pop elements, Expressionist/Surrealist film imagery and anthologized koans. And these were collaged together, without transitions, in a manner that had become standard art fare everywhere.

What was unusual for art was that people were to take part in them; were to be, literally, the ingredients of the performances. Hence instruction in participation had to be more explicit than in communal performances and, given the special interests of the audiences, had to be at the same moment mysterious.

These audiences were mainly art-conscious ones, accustomed to accepting states of mystification as a positive value. The context of the performances was “art”: most of the artists were already known, the mailing list was selective, a gallery was listed as sponsor, they were held in storefront- or loft-galleries, there were reviews in the art pages of the news media; all bespoke avant-garde experimentation. The audiences were thus co-religionists before they ever arrived at a performance. They were ready to be mystified and further confirmed in their group membership.

But they were not used to the real-time, close physicality of the experience. They were accustomed to paintings and sculptures at a distance. Therefore, if an artist wanted to engage them in sweeping debris from one place to another, confederates would begin sweeping and then would pass the brooms around. The use of debris, on another level, signaled reassurance to an art world then occupied with explorations of the junk of our throwaway culture—junk was a password—and the act of sweeping was not only easy, it was a non-art act, disposable like its material.

Similarly, if the audience was to recite certain words, instruction sheets were given in advance or cards were handed out during a piece. But the words would be either simple utterances such as “get ’em!” or they would be lists or random groupings that could be read on the spot. Vernacular like debris, they also resembled contemporary poetry and echoed an art world’s taste at the time for non-linear clusters of elements.

The point is that the signals and cues sent out by the artist and returned in acknowledgment by the participating audience were as appropriate to this segment of the society as the signals and cues sent to general TV audiences are appropriate to them. This may seem truistic, but participation presupposes shared assumptions, interests, language, meanings, contexts and uses. It cannot take place otherwise.

II

The complex question of familiarity never arises in vernacular communal performances, in which the unfolding of events seems so innocent and folksy—even when aggressive as in strikes. Everyone knows what’s going on and what to do. It is the outsider-scholar who reads the complexity and writes the script out in full.

But it’s the business of artists to be curious about their doings, and the question of how participation takes place did come up in the late ’50s and early ’60s. It was apparent to some of us that the level and kind of involvement just described was pretty trivial. Tasks on the order of sweeping or reading words remain relatively mindless as long as their context is a loose theatrical event prepared in advance for an uninformed audience. Familiarization, which could generate commitment, is quite impossible when a work is performed only once or a few times (as it usually was then). And the principal, directorial role of the artist and colleagues is locked in from the start, leaving minor satisfactions to the spectator participants (whose only other recourse would be protest or revolt if they cared that much—and some did). The theatrical model was plainly inadequate; a different genre was necessary.

Two steps were taken. One of them was to ritualize a mix of lifelike elements and fantasy, reject the staging area, and invite a number of people to take part in it, explaining the plan in a spirit of ceremony. Naturally, ritualism is not ritual and it was evident to all that what we were doing was an invention, an interlude, coming not out of belief and custom but out of the artist. Its effect was vaguely archaic (thus tapping ample reserves of nostalgia), yet because of its real environments, which included traffic, food from the supermarket and working TV sets, it was instantly modern. It worked. As a move, it eliminated the audience and gave the piece its own autonomy.

For some years this was the main route followed (not always strictly) by Kenneth Dewey, myself, Milan Kńīźak, Marta Minujin and Wolf Vostell.³ Kńīźak and Vostell continue to work well as ritualists. After 1966 I discarded the mode mainly because in the United States there is no history of high ceremony (for Westerners) as there is in Europe, and it began to seem pompous to go on. And so I turned my attention to the mundane, which Americans understand perfectly.

The other step, actually overlapping the first, was suggested by certain small pieces of George Brecht, Robert Filliou, Kńīźak and Sonja Svecová. These were to be, or could easily be, executed by one person, some in private, some in public. They referred in a general way to intellectual games, treasure hunts, spiritual exercises, and the behavior of street eccentrics, beggars and petitioners. They prompted the idea that a group work could be composed, additively, of such individual activities, without attempting to coordinate them in any way. A performance could be simply a cluster of events in any number of durations and places. (John Cage’s interest in chance and the unique, rather than organized, sound event, was helpful in this regard.) All that was needed was a half-dozen friends and a list of simple things to do or think alone. Examples: Changing one’s shirt in a park recreation area. Walking through a city, crossing streets only with persons wearing red coats. Listening for hours to a dripping faucet.

This worked for awhile, except that participants felt arbitrarily isolated and tended to drift off into unmotivated indifference. The absurdity of doing something odd without an audience’s approval, or of paying attention to tedium, was of course part of the problem, even for those professing interest. But what may have been missing was a grounding in ordinary experience that could replace the absent stimulation of an audience or cohesive crowd in a ceremony.

In the late 1950s Erving Goff man published The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, a sociological study of conventional human relations. Its essential premise was that the routines of domesticity, work, education, and management of daily affairs, which do not seem to be art forms for their very ordinariness and lack of conscious expressive purpose, nevertheless possess a distinctly performancelike character. Only the performers are not usually aware of it.

They are not aware of it because there is no frame around everyday transactions the way there is, literally, around a television program, and more figuratively, around a strike or parade. Repetitive, daily occurrences are not usually set off from themselves. People do not think each morning when they brush their teeth, “Now I am doing a performance.”

But Goff man gives ordinary routines quotation marks by setting them off as subjects of analysis. In this book and subsequent ones, he describes greetings, relations among office workers and bosses, front-store and back-store behavior, civilities and discourtesies in private and public, how small social units are maintained on streets and in crowded gatherings, and so forth, as if each situation had a prescribed scenario. Human beings participate in these scenarios, spontaneously or after elaborate preparations, like actors without stage or audience, watching and cueing one another.

Some scenarios are learned and practiced over a lifetime. Table manners, for instance, acquired from childhood at home, are regimented and simplified in boarding school or the army, and are refined later on, let’s say, for entertaining guests upon whom one wants to make an impression. The passage is from informal, to formal, to nuanced manners; most middle-class urbanites take part in the continuum, and can move back and forth, without giving much thought to the rich body language, positionings, timings, conversational and voice adjustments that accompany each mode.

The performance of everyday routines, of course, is not really the same as acting a written script, since conscious intent is absent. There is a phenomenal and experiential difference. Being a performer (like being a lawyer) involves responsibility for what “performer” may mean and what it may entail. Nor are everyday routines managed by a stage director, although within the theatrical metaphor, parents, officials, teachers, guides and bosses may be construed as equivalents. But again, these mentors would have to see themselves as directors of performances, rather than instructors in social mores and professions outside of the arts. What is interesting to art, though, is that everyday routines could be used as real off-stage performances. An artist would then be engaged in performing a “performance.”

Intentionally performing everyday life is bound to create some curious kinds of awareness. Life’s subject matter is almost too familiar to grasp, and life’s formats (if they can be called that) are not familiar enough. Focusing on what is habitual and trying to put a line around what is continuous can be a bit like rubbing your stomach and tapping your head, then reversing. Without an audience at all, with no formally designated stage or clearing, the performer becomes both agent and watcher, simultaneously. She or he takes on the task of “framing” the transaction internally, by paying attention in motion.

For instance, imagine you and a partner are performing a prescribed set of moves drawn from the ways people use the telephone. You carry out this plan in your respective homes without intentional spectators. (Your families and friends, of course, may pass in and out of the scene.) You take into account that each of you is thinking of the other, just as telephone callers normally do. But both of you also know that you are especially tuned to nuances of voice, length of pauses, and possible meanings of the planned parts of the conversations, which would not be normal. And you focus, additionally, on such unconscious but typical behavior as reaching for the receiver (quickly or slowly, after two rings or three?), changing it from ear to ear, pacing back and forth, scratching an itch, doodling, replacing the receiver (slamming it?), non-essentials of the communication but constant accompaniments. The feelings produced under these conditions are not simply emotions; and the knowledge acquired is not simply casual information. The situation is too personal and off-kilter for that. What is at stake is less conformity to expectations about people’s telephone activity than close experiencing of its obvious and hidden features.

III

Up to this point I contrasted audience participation theater in popular and art culture with participation performance relating to everyday routines. I’d like now to look more closely at this lifelike performance, beginning with how a normal routine becomes the performance of a routine.

Consider certain common transactions—shaking hands, eating, saying goodbye—as “readymades.” Their only unusual feature will be the attentiveness brought to bear on them. They aren’t someone else’s routines that are to be observed, but one’s own, just as they happen.

Example. You are introduced to someone at a party. He is escorted across the room. You stand about three feet apart. Your mutual friend is between both of you, holding his arm lightly at the elbow. You look at his face, avoiding his eyes, then to your friend’s mouth which forms the name, then back again to the mouth of the man. He says “hello” a bit overzealously, thrusts his hand at you with some force (which you interpret as nervousness) and you feel yourself move back a fraction of an inch, automatically stiffening your hand as it raises for the impact.

You move forward now. The hand is still coming. It seems to take too long. You shift your weight to your right foot because someone standing to your left with her back to you is talking on the telephone, and you can’t move on that side which would be natural to you. You’re off balance now and feel his hand jam into yours, the fingers closing. It is a small hand and his fingers have to travel to make their grip felt. It is warm and dry. You wonder how you would have met his advance on your other foot.

You sense his fingers finally closing around yours and you hesitate before responding, then do so perfunctorily. You lean back, echoing the forward motion of his handshake. Your forearm becomes rigid but you force it to go limp. You realize that your friend is waiting for you to return the hello but you’ve forgotten the courtesy in your examination of the encounter.

Trying to sound cheerful, you say the name. The man looks fleetingly to your friend for clarification. You forget to say “glad to meet you” and when you remember, it’s too late. You’re glancing now at the wrinkles of his hand, at his ring from some college, at the grey stain on his cuff. You pump his hand too many times. This upsets him.

He begins to withdraw, trying to disentangle himself without betraying his initial expression of heartiness. Your friend steps into the silence with details of who each of you is. The woman on the telephone is listening to the person on the other end and your friend’s voice sounds too loud. She lights a cigarette and accidentally backs into you as she reaches for an ashtray, pushing you toward the man. He pulls away further. The woman doesn’t notice and resumes talking. You’re aware of her voice and dislike the cigarette smoke. You jerk your head in her direction, then bring it back to face the man. He has freed his hand and is lowering it to his side.

Now you shift your weight to a more comfortable position, rocking slightly on your heels. Your right hand is still in the air. You look at it as if it contained a message. You put it carefully in your pocket and raise your eyes to meet the man’s. He stares, not comprehending, and blinks. Your glance swings aside to take in the room and others. He definitely sees this move as a sign-off. Your friend continues talking, searching your face and body for clues to your behavior. He isn’t aware himself that he feels something odd about you. You follow his eyes with yours and move a step to the right. Your feet are now planted firmly on the floor. This effectively puts your friend in a line between you and the man, cutting him off from view. He makes a polite excuse and leaves, but your friend remains and asks how your mother and father are feeling.

It is quite apparent to you that you have been using the situation as a study and have caused some minor confusion. You are normally sociable and wanted it all to happen unnoticed. But you decide not to explain anything since your friend has just been called away. Suppose, next, that all three of you in the preceding exchange were involved intentionally as participants; suppose that there had been an agreed-upon plan to wait for some occasion when two of you who did not know each other would be introduced by your mutual friend. Normal behavior would then become exaggerated, would lapse and peak strangely. The everyday routine would be a routine that talks about itself.

Performances like this generate a curious sort of self-consciousness permeating every gesture. You each watch each other watch each other. You watch the surroundings in detail. Your moves are compartmented in thought and thus slowed down in perception. You speed up your actual pace to compensate; you will your mind to integrate all the pieces that have separated out, while you take part in very real human affairs. You wonder who is being introduced, two people, you to yourself, or both? You are not projecting an image of a routine to spectators “out there” but are doing it, shaking hands, nodding, saying the amenities, for yourself and for one another.

In other words, you experience directly what you already know in theory: That consciousness alters the world, that natural things seem unnatural once you attend to them, and vice versa. Hence, if everyday routines conceived as readymade performances literally change because of their double use as art/not art, it might seem perfectly natural to build the observed changes into subsequent performances before they happen, because they, or something like them, would happen anyway.

Preparing an Activity, therefore, can be considered a naturally artificial act. It would include in its plan, or “program,” small retardations and accelerations of, say, handshaking motions; elaborations of pacing, juxtapositions of other routines that ordinarily are present, like saying goodbye; repetitions (echoing all routines’ repetitiveness); reversals; displacements; shifts in setting, such as shaking hands on different street corners; as well as normal conversations and reviewings of what is going on. Traditional distinctions between life, art and analysis, in whatever preferred order, are put aside.

The Activity Maneuvers was assembled using just this approach. Its basic routine is the courtesy shown another person when passing through a doorway. The following program was given in advance to seven couples who carried it out in the environs of Naples in March of 1976:

1 A and B

passing backwards

through a doorway

one before the other

(see fig. 1) the other, saying you’re first

passing through again

moving in reverse

the first, saying thank me

(see fig.2) being thanked

locating four more doors

repeating routine

2 A and B

locating still another door

(see fig. 3) nothing reaching to open it

saying excuse me

(see fig. 4) passing through together

saying excuse me

both reaching to close it

saying excuse me

backing in reverse to door

both reaching to open it

saying after you

(see fig. 5) passing through together

both reaching to close it

(see fig. 6) saying after you

locating four more doors

repeating routine

3 A and B

locating still another door

passing through

one before the other

(see figs. 7, 8, 9) the first, saying I’ll pay you

the second, accepting or not

locating four more doors

repeating routine

In the preliminary briefing with the participants, I made some general remarks about daily social behavior and what Maneuvers had to do with it. An orientation has proven not only useful but necessary, since invariably no one knows how to deal with such a project. Orientation thus becomes part of the piece, as does any discussion during and after.

I pointed out that within the forms of politeness there is enough room to transmit any number of complex messages. For instance, holding a door open for someone to pass through first is a simple kind of social grace that is learned almost universally. But between persons of the same sex or rank, there may be subtle jockeying for first or second position. Each position may signify the superior one in a particular circumstance.

In cultures which are facing changes in women’s and men’s roles, the traditional male gesture of reaching for and holding open a door for a woman can meet with either rebuke or knowing smiles. In another vein, one can be “shown the door” (be ordered to leave) with almost the same gross body movements as when being invited to go first. But there is never any doubt about what is meant.

Maneuvers, I continued, was an exaggerated arrangement of such competitive, often funny, exchanges between two individuals as they go through doorways. With repeats and variations resembling slapstick movies that are played backward and forward, it might become unclear which side of a door was “in” or “out.” After finding 15 different doors to carry out these moves, the initial question of being first or second could seem problematical.

Each pair (A and B) went about the city and selected their own doorways. They had no necessary connection with the other participants carrying out the identical program. During the nearly two days allotted, they maintained their everyday routines as usual, and fitted in the special routine of the Activity around shopping, eating, schooling and socializing. As it happened, most of the 14 shared classes at an art college and intermittently exchanged stories about what was going on.

Choices of doorways reflected the personalities and needs of the partnerships. Some preferred seclusion away from the stares of passersby. They sought out alleyways, toilets and suburban garages. Part of their admitted reason was embarrassment, but another part was the wish quietly to internalize the process. Others enjoyed provoking curiosity in public and went to department stores, beauty salons, movies and train stations. They later realized they wanted an audience regardless of its irrelevancy to the piece.

Despite these differences, all were struck by certain strange features of the work (which had been suggested to me while studying “doorway courtesies” as readymades). There were four psychologically loaded twists on the verbal clichés that are traded when doorway courtesies are normally performed.

In part 1 the first person passing through a doorway backward is told “you’re first,” instead of the common “after you”; when the pair runs the scene frontward, she or he then says “thank me,” presumably for acknowledging the other’s primacy.

Part 2 starts out as straight vaudeville between A and B but is skewed by their later statement, in the reverse re-runs, when both of them say “after you.” This sounds proper but can only be sarcasm or irony in view of part l’s episode, implying that each secretly controls the maneuver by appearing to defer to the other. “Thank me?”

In part 3, which recaps part 1, A and B have a new chance to decide which one will go first. But when the decision is made, the first says, “I’ll pay you.” And the second can accept if the price is right, or not accept if it isn’t. “I’ll pay you” can be taken to mean “I’ll pay you to remain in second place,” that is, “I can buy your subordination and flattery.” Refusal to accept the money may be a way of asking for more, or saying that “I am not for sale.” This statement caused the most consternation in the discussion after the Activity.

Throughout the three parts, the repetitions of the routine allowed A and B to switch their positions of first and second, if they wanted to, and to maneuver whatever psychological advantages they thought they had achieved or lost. Courtesies were the tools.

Routine expressions like “please” and “thanks” are ceremonial messages. Their equivalents were placed in this work in such a way as to call attention to their strategic capabilities. “You’re first” elicits “thank me;” “excuse me” elicits further “excuse me’s” (like the famous Alphonse-Gaston rendition); each can be translated into “pay me” and “I’ll pay you.” Courtesies are forms of bill tenderings and payments for favors given and returned.

This account doesn’t attempt to go into the hilarious squeeze-plays that occurred in part 2 when A and B went forward and backward through doorways at the same time. Ungainly body contacts don’t mix well with formalities and when they do accidentally (here on purpose), all you can say is “excuse me.”

Neither does it speak of the importance of each environmental setting for the feel of the particular transaction as it happened. Obviously, a bedroom doorway will conjure one meaning for a couple and a bank doorway another. Fifteen such entrances and exits can add up to a rich experience.

Nor has it said anything about the effect of the piece upon couples of similar and opposite sex. This, too, was critical and can be surmised to have provoked distinctive kinds of maneuvers among the seven partnerships. And that they were Italians (except for myself), was significant.

Finally, it was mentioned that the participants were drawn from a professional art background. Their prior investments of time, energy and values were called into some (serious) question by what they did. I cannot say anything more than this now, but it would be interesting to compare the experience of a group of merchants, or a group of sociologists, doing the same Activity. The meanings construed, on human, professional, and philosophical levels, might be very different.

Allan Kaprow, an originator of Happenings, teaches at the University of California, San Diego.

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NOTES

1. See my “Non-Theatrical Performance,” Artforum, May, 1976; also Michael Kirby’s Happenings, New York, 1965

2. I haven’t mentioned Italian Futurist or post-Revolution Russian performances; nor Dada and Bauhaus performances; nor Surrealism; nor the Japanese Gutai; nor Cage’s performance at Black Mountain College—simply because they were theatrical genres: the cabaret entertainment, the spectacle, the political demonstration, the seance-magic show, the 3-ring circus, etc. I take for granted that every human act has its model(s) and I’m attempting to identify those that apply here.

3. Ibid. footnote 1; also my Assemblage, Environments and Happenings, New York, 1966.