Theatre has always relied on the audience and the relationship between performance and the audience. A show, a play, any type of performance requires attention from the observers, that is one of the reasons what makes it special and valuable. Actors thrive on the reaction that they receive, just as they perform worse if the audience is not responsive. It is just a nature of theater or, probably, any kind of performative art. During the production of Oil I realized that sometimes the audience doesn’t know what they sign up for until the play starts. Their expectations are specific, not all of the audience members are open-minded, some are conservative, some are racist, etc. Therefore, only when scene 1 starts they get full understanding of what they actually came to see. Oil has lots of moments where actors perform sexual attraction and this is where audience can find themselves misun...
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Nowadays, attention economy and surveillance capitalism became a new platform for selling clothes, make-up, gadgets, and other types of goods. In this post, I would like to take a closer look at attention economy from the angle of social and mass media which include famous actors, singers, bloggers and other people, who we call celebrities. 21 st century is a century of television, stream TV, Instagram, mass production of films, enormous quantity of different music, you name it – we have it. Population of the world has a vast amount of choices what to listen to, what to read, what to watch. With this tendency and freedom of surfing the internet, increases the curiosity of following those “stars” who we view on the big screen or listen on Spotify while getting to work. We are the generation of dreamers, we are also a generation of “wannabes”. Not only young teenagers from the middle class look up to Taylor Swift, but also there is that ol...
Judith Butler leads a discussion on gender and sexual precarity, on how some of us, based on our performativity and performative acts, are in lack of protection from the government and authorities, how we are exposed to violence, cruelty or being discredited. She examines performativity of a gender - that is given at birth, and compares it with performative acts - actions that we conduct opposed to what society expects us to do based on our external looks. I would like to examine the same patterns in Kazakh families among women, who are expected to behave in a specific way or to follow explicit performative acts in order to be accepted in their societal environment. Traditional Kazakh families are divided into three different classes, which are called “ zhuz ”: senior, middle and junior. Based on their ancestry, women are required to marry a man from the same zhuz. If a woman chooses a man from another class or another race, she will become a disgrace to her family and will nev...
Performance can be viewed from many different angles. It could be a quality of functioning as in any program for the computer or an equipment at the factory; a teaching explanation of different actions (walking, singing, playing piano, etc.); a ritual that has been repeating for years or centuries as well as by one or many different people; an event taking place in a specific location with such goals as entertainment or making change, creating beauty, anything else or all together combined. It can also be just a state of “being”, divided into categories of “active being” or “static being”, physical or spiritual. For instance, a painting could be observed as a static and physical performance , which also has an audience and a specific influence on it. Or performance could be a spiritual prayer that is aimed on emerging various emotions or altering someone’s’ behavior, thoughts. Performance doesn’t have specific borders, in fact, they are being vanishe...