Performance, Utopia, and the "Utopian Performative"

Abstract

This essay is a rumination of sorts, the beginning of an inquiry into the ways in which performance might provide us with experiences of utopia. How can performance, in itself, be a utopian gesture? Why do people come together to watch other people labor on stage, when contemporary culture solicits their attention with myriad other forms of representation and opportunities for social gathering? Why do people continue to seek the liveness, the present-tenseness that performance and theatre offer? Is the desire to be there, in the moment, an expression of a utopian impulse? Certainly, people are drawn to theatre and performance by fashion and by taste, by the need to collect the cultural capital that theatre going provides. Live theatre remains a powerful site at which to establish and exchange notions of cultural taste, to set standards, and to model fashions, trends, and styles.