'And this strength is in me still': Embodying Memory in Works by Jewish Women Performance Artists

Abstract

Performance art calls for a merging of the boundaries between 'life' and 'theatre', and many of its practitioners engage in what has come to be known as 'autoperformance', wherein the performer adopts a loosely autobiographical persona in order to designate one portion of the ongoing drama of his or her life as a theatrical event. The most popularly known of these autoperformers is Spalding Gray, whose Swimming to Cambodia and Monster in a Box have played to a wide range of audiences. The complexities and contradictions of memory are central to autoperformance for several reasons. Since the 'text' of a performance art work exists primarily in the moment of enactment, its recording and preservation engage us immediately in the postmodern act of redefining textuality as fragmentary or partial. As Peggy Phelan points out, citing Richard Schechner, the 'primary interest' in 'much postmodern performance art' is a result of 'the discourse it promotes after the fact'.' Postmodern art often seeks to confront and reinterpret the past, particularly as it presents itself to us through various texts, in order to reinscribe that past in an ongoing present. One might say that autoperformers use subjective memory to 'play out' the postmodern interest in drawing and reshaping the past as narration transforms it into the present tense. Autoperformance's narratives simultaneously create and confront history by the theatrical insistence on the continuous present tense of the performance moment, combined with the responses to, and integration of, multiple previously-existing 'texts' that range from songs tojokes to diary fragments to excerpts from other theatrical and literary works. Susan Rubin Suleiman's description of a postmodernist aesthetic includes the sense of a need to 'address' the past; Suleiman sees the postmodern as 'that moment of extreme (perhaps tragic, perhaps playful) self-consciousness when the present our present takes to reflecting on its relation to the past and to the future primarily as a problem of repetition'. She asks, in a reference that calls the Holocaust to mind, 'How does one create a future that will acknowledge and incorporate the past a past that