Please Please me: ‘Empathy’ and ‘Sympathy’ in Critical Metapraxis

Abstract

Synopsis: Can those of us who write about ‘new performance’ give something back ‐ a discursive replica, for example, not of performance itself, but of our experiences in/of ‘if? (Laughter, self‐mocking.) What can I say? Discourse ‐ that veritable Mother of a code ‐ has its own logics of practice, and its own modes of reproduction, to the extent that ways of speaking theatre (performance), ratified at different moments of history, speak and rewrite themselves through us, almost independently of what we see and feel in the event. Do you see the problem, for ‘new performance’ practitioners? ‘Radical theatre’, ’popular theatre’, ‘political theatre’ ‐ the ’avant‐garde'?. You can see what I'm getting at here, in twentieth century terms, just as you know that I mean when I say ‘plot’ and ‘character’ ‐ and then ‘subtext’ (as though these were eternal truths of theatre's nature, transcending history). But is it appropriate that it is in these terms that we appraise LiveArt, here, in 1993? This does not mean that L...