Introduction: Redefining Visceral Performance

Abstract

Since the late twentieth century a performance style has emerged which exploits diverse artistic languages to establish an ‘experiential’ audience event via the recreation of visceral experience.¹ Impossible to define as a genre due to the fluidity of forms explored, this performance style places emphasis on the human body as a primary force of signification and utilizes the ever-increasing possibilities in design and technology. In addition to this it has reclaimed the verbal as a visceral act and embraced the written word, a factor previously denied in certain performance practice where the language of physicality has been prioritized. Consequently, this style enables practitioners and audience members alike to tap into pre-linguistic communication processes and engages with an awareness of ‘the primordial’ via such sensually stimulated perception. Merged with this is the potential to engender a certain feeling of transcendence, of comprehending ideas, experiences and concepts in a unique way. As a result, this style produces a response of disturbance that can be simultaneously challenging and exhilarating, at once unsettling and pleasurable.

Creating performances and writing about those performances require acts of critical and creative imagination; both contend with the imperatives carried by ‘the act’.

(Peggy Phelan, 1998: 7)