Blotting and the Line of Beauty: On Performances by Botho Strauss and Peter Handke

Abstract

The performance of a text or the staging of a play is often and easily imagined as the representation, in another medium, of its content or meaning. On stage can be shown what the script merely says; the rehearsal process and the production itself thus appear as means towards the end of communicating to the audience what an author has set down on paper. When this picture of what goes on in performance is extended to dance or the realization of musical scores, the notion of "representation" proves too narrow, and performances are, therefore, often said to "express" a feeling, content, or intention.