4: The Performer

The Power of Performance

In a 2012 TED Talk, South African mime Andrew Buckland lectured on the nature of conflict in drama while expertly—and inexplicably—engaging in an invisible tug-of-war with someone apparently just offstage. After a moment, he deadpanned: “The salient element of this demonstration was that, despite what you might think, there’s no rope.” Over the audience’s laughter, he added, “Importantly, there’s nobody at the other end pulling the no rope that we didn’t see.” As the room quieted, Buckland pushed the point further: “But I’m willing to bet that the majority of people in this room saw somebody there and, even more important, each person saw their own individual, unique nobody pulling the no rope that we couldn’t see—each one of us individually and communally activating our imaginations to imagine and visualize somebody who’s patently not there” (Buckland 2012).

Buckland’s elegant demonstration reveals the power of performance. Performance leads us—collectively and individually—into an imaginative act despite ourselves. We know there is no rope, yet we respond as though there is. When it works, performance seems like magic. Not magic in the sense of something otherworldly (though it sometimes involves the supernatural), but magic as a craft: a skill honed over years, made to look effortless. As discussed in the introduction, performance has deep roots in mimesis—the human impulse to imitate. It is tied to our capacity for symbolic thought and action, one of our key evolutionary advantages. Skilled performers have often, though not always, been revered across human cultures. With their bodies, voices, faces, and gestures as primary tools, performers can conjure worlds that influence our subconscious minds and invite us to imagine new possibilities.

British experimental theatre director Peter Brook famously wrote, “I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and that is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged” (Brook 1968, 11). By this definition, in our digital age of hyper-surveillance, very few aspects of our lives fall outside the realm of performance. We might broadcast our morning routines in “Get Ready with Me” videos or cultivate an online persona through pranks, challenges, and daily vlogs. Even if we choose not to participate in digital performance culture, we are filmed dozens—perhaps hundreds—of times a day by doorbell cameras, traffic cameras, retail surveillance, and other people’s phones. We perform different versions of ourselves for our families, friends, classmates, and coworkers.

Performance encompasses everything from self-fashioning and digital encounters to Broadway musicals and blockbuster films to sacred rituals and children’s dramatic play. This book focuses on a narrower category: theatre as a live, embodied form of storytelling for an audience. Theatrical performers exist in every society, but what it means to perform and to be a performer varies dramatically across cultures, historical periods, and belief systems. While many students in the United States may encounter performance through social media, Western theatre, film, television, and music videos, the global history of performance reveals far broader possibilities. Appreciating these possibilities expands our understanding of what performers do and challenges narrow assumptions about acting, storytelling, and embodiment. It also reminds us that theatre has always been shaped not only by artistic influences but also by social, spiritual, and political contexts.