II. Key ideas of the text: "On Defence of Performance" by Guillermo Gómez Peña

Character of the text:
The text goes back and forth between a chronicle and a theoretical essay -being faithful to the artist's style. The idea is to try to handle over to the reader a sort of compass, that would enable he/she to sail thorugh the waters of the field, reaching his/her own conclusions. The attempt is to transmit an emobodied knowledge and experience through writing, which demands loads of images as keyports into the blurry borders of the performance field. It is noteworthy that he allows in as valid sources of knowledge not only conversations, reflections, correspondance and 'conscious' experience but also his dreams. (There is another -previous?- version of the text online, which shows the text is ever evolving and utterly unfinished)
Structure of the Text:
The text is divided into three parts (though one can detect several communicating vessels between them). The first part is devoted to describing the field itself, its landmarks (What's the field like?). The second part is much more introspective: it sketches traces of an embodied experience -which in a way brings it closer- (How is it to be in the field?). The third part, once having shown the field, and gone through the body traspasses boundries into the art-world (and the overall system as it can be perceived from there), trying to draw distinctions and sharing a sort of 'sense of direction' (How does one relate from this field to the world?). This trajectory resembles the one he talks of when referring to the 'embodied experience'. Here is an outline of it.

Part I: The cartography of performance
1. The map
2. The sanctuary
3. The human body
4. My 'job'
5. Identity survival kit
6. The irreplaceable body

Part II: Turning the gaze inwards
7. At odds with authority
8. Siding with the underdog
9. Clumsy activists
10. A matter of life or death
11. Dreaming in Spanish
12. An urban legend
13. Necessary and unnecessary risks
14. Embodied theory
15. Dysfunctional archives
16. Everyday life
17. Celebrity culture (censored in our version) (An example of R.A.?)
18. I dreamt I was a pop celebrity

Part III: Performance vis-a-vis theatre and the art world
19. Performance and theatre
20. Art criminals
21. A performance artist dreams of being an actor
22. Time and space
23. "Art with a capital A" and art institutions
24. Marginalizing lingo
25. The cult of innovation
26. Deported/discovered
27. The ethnographic dream
28. Thorny questions
29. The empty stage

[A little game, now. I tied to extract -an interpretation of- the most important ideas within each section with just a few words:

1. 'scanning radars'; 2. 'intersitial emancipation'; 3. 'symbollic materia prima'; 4. 'questioning, sediments, open space'; 5. 'multiple identities sampled'; 6. 'body as the centre'; 7. 'dismantling abusive authority'; 8. 'gut humanism'; 9. 'bad organizers, useful esthetics'; 10. 'jump of faith'; 11. 'keep close to reality'; 12. 'pale kinkiness';  13. 'risk as a strategy'; 14. 'emotional and corporeal associative intelligence'; 15. 'archive of the negatives of culture'; 16. 'challenge:domesticate chaos and discipline myself'; 17. 'bad wit etiquette rules'; 18. 'fame as a representation'; 19. 'theatre-fixed-structure, performance-fluid-in-media-res'; 20. 'cultural anti-heroes'; 21. 'rejection of the underlying subject'; 22. 'not-acting: being here'; 23. 'liminal artists'; 24. 'alternative: restaking the territory: pushing the market-based-centre to the margins'; 25. 'going somwhere vs. pressure of the market system'; 26. 'privileged temporary insiders'; 27. 'the nightmare of fixation'; 28. 'reminders of other freedoms, talk-back and listen'; 29. 'the interest lays in the audience'.

Maybe we could read them several times (assuming they're the essential part of each section, that is), read them in reversed order, in alphabetical order, or just randomly. Does it help to track a set of interconenctions? I can group those into spheres:
A. (through the) body; pure: (1, 3, 6, 8); shared: (13, 14, 16, 22, 28)
B. On (and around) the limit; pure: (2); shared: (5, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 26, 28, 29)
C. Seen through the others; pure: (17); shared: (5, 9, 13, 15, 20, 23)
D. Against...; pure: (18, 25, 28); shared: (7, 8, 21)
E. Rules of the game: pure: (4, 10, 16); shared: (5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 14, 19, 21, 22, 24, 26, 28, 29 )

If nothing else, this little game shows some core concerns of the author, and shows the complexity of the map he is trying to draw. (He does warn us about it in the last few sentences: "Like performance, this text is incomplete, and will continue to change in the coming months. A warrior without glory, I turn off my computer…") If we wanted to characterize it (not fixing it), then maybe we should think of something resembling Schechner's overlapping circles -only this time shifting and perhaps in three dimensions.]

Key Ideas:

• 17. Time and space: “Performance is a way of being in the space in front of or around an audience; a heightened gaze, a unique sense of purpose in handling thee objects, commitments, and words, and at the same time, it is an ‘ontological’ attitude towards the whole universe.”
• The body is central and irreplaceable. Through its emotional and corporeal associative inteligences, we can scan (as radar does) the field we are to work with. It is the stage and materia prima to be dealt with. The political dimension of the job must always be worked through the body and towards the others (eagerly looking for feedback). The work is about 'being here'in this particular time and space. Having a body and listening to it, automatically places us in an interstitial space (between identities, among others, between culture and nature). Risking to trespass its borders, pushing them farther, can be an emancipatory excercise.
• Bordering is a strategy that involves risk (of one and the others). It involves the sampling of multiple identities, which fights back the temptation of a 'straitjacket identity' and its partner: an 'underlying subject'. Such a strategy frequently puts one at odds with authority, which normally is interested on having fixed (thus controllable) entities to handle and market with. This makes performance artists, liminal artists, always coming back and forth, in and out of the circle of recognition (and financing). However, being a temporary insider grants the benefit of being able to withdraw from sight and reinvent one's self (and freedoms).
• The game (for it is a game, however serious it might be) demands affirmation of the place were we stand ('being here'). It asks for a 'humane relationship'with things and a 'humanization of the senses' -in Marx's terms. Using corporeal and emotional intelligence (intuition and exploration) it allows the 'other' to appear from within us. Not a fixed other, but a smart, edgy, bordering and oftenly politically incorrect other that points out injustice, throws questions for others to answer, and opens spaces to be filled with unusual attitudes (thus it reminds us of other possibilities, other freedoms). This in a way makes the 'normal' seem 'exotic', posing a question on what 'normality' is -and its desirability. It tries to scape the rage and vertigo of the market-logic (without much success, unfortunatley). It is political more by nature than by intention. It shows that one must learn to talk-back, but that the finest secret lays in learning how to listen... for the answer (which may be not more than another question or the same question reformulated in a more interesting way) lays within those who normally are ignored: the audience.