A Perfect Theatre for One: Teaching "Performance Composition"

Abstract

Although it's arbitrary and overly dignified, I like the title of the course I teach: Performance Composition. I like to say it, I enjoy the syntactical formality of it with my tongue and teeth. I like the word "composition"; it makes me think of high school and of those black-and-white notebooks with the lines, waiting for words. I like the title most, though, because it accredits performance as something that gets composed, as opposed to something thrown together, heaved up, improvised, stolen from silence, torn from the mind like Athena from Zeus. I like the euphemism, the cover-up; performance is, from my perspective, all those things, and worse. Most courses in the NYU Performance Studies Department offer a syllabus, an exquisite reading list, a landscape of references and contexts. The only thing I know is how to get a show up, how to take personal experiences, obsessions, images, memories, desires, things overheard, things discarded, physical fantasies, and make performance art out of them. That is what I teach. And forget the Composition, I like Performance. I like the tiny, deeply telling ways in which it distinguishes itself from The Theatre, such as: