semiotic thickness and doctor who

prologue to the prologue

this is my very favorite moment in the entire history of the dr. who franchise. it takes place in the second episode of the three-part "dragonfire" serial, the story introducing my favorite companion, ace, played by sophie aldred. i cackle like an automated rooster whenever this scene comes up. the immediate story context is that the doctor is trying to distract a guard while a friend enters a restricted area, and he decides to do so by initiating a completely random philosophical discussion. the guard, however, is excited to have a chance to exercise his passion for philosophy, and pursues the matter further than the doctor is prepared for.

this exchange is meaningful for me on many levels, not just because it's a fine non-sequitur gag, but also because it both contains and exemplifies an overlapping set of performance questions in my own life. 

trust me, this is actually going somewhere.

prologue: the in, the as, the otherwise 

last year i was starting to feel my way into an embodied knowledge about the relations between social performance and performance as a poetic-artistic practice. i was trying to collect information from observation of and encounters with other performers, particularly an adopted mentor. i described one of my encounters with him (and others) in an early post here, the "performance in/as" one. in that post i began to try to put into language what my body had discovered about my own difficulty with toggling from my "performance mode" into the kind of performance needed for normative social exchanges. because this discovery took place at a dr. who fan convention, involving actors from that show, it's been particularly useful and fun to continue to base the development of further knowledge-language-insights in my relationship to the show as both performance and social setting.

what i call my performance mode is a particular kind of hyperaware, empathic bodily state that involves simultaneous deep receptivity and generative projectivity. when i'm giving a reading, or when i'm doing comic or dramatic improv, or when i'm dancing for fun or for a performance, i enter this mode. if it's an acting or improv situation, it empowers a pretty much instantaneous and intimate connection with the other(s) in the collaboration. very rarely, i encounter someone in an ostensibly social situation whose mode of initiating contact is, in fact, to offer themselves in their own performance mode. that's what happened with my adopted mentor, and the surprise of it (the overlap or blending of what had always been contradictory types of performance for me) shocked me into a series of realizations that are still emerging.

let me tease it out a bit here.

misdefinition

if you've been in my life and/or in my audience for a while, you've observed me saying i can no longer do or attend live, in-person performance. in view of the above re-intro, it might be helpful to clarify that when i said that, i meant the following:

live, in-person, speech-demanding, artistic/poetic performance as typically expected according to genre conventions, WITH

a conventional evening-and-weekend schedule slot that starts late and ends very late, AND

the primary function of the event being a social occasion, an entertainment or party at which social activities are expected of the performer after and usually also before the performance.

(there are other assumed elements of performance events that are included in those descriptions, or at least suggested, but i want to keep my point streamlined.) 

some of these conditions also apply to online streamed events, such as the long duration and the speech emphasis, not to mention the time slot, but it is definitely easier for me to work with zoom and what it empowers than the total overload and cognitive freeze that some of you may have witnessed when i still made myself do the things described above. 

i had not realized until that dr. who con that my inability to toggle from social to artistic performance was because i cannot enter my performance mode in social performance. there is no safe place in everyday life for a trance state that allows that degree of porousness and empathy! social performance enacts rituals of qualification for belonging, among people who may or may not want to include one another. it is fraught with risk, in a way that, for me, a "stage" sort of performance is not. (this is one reason why i have always felt totally safe onstage, and totally unsafe in, say, situations like graduations, funerals or office culture.) in everyday social performance there has never been a way for me to be simultaneously legible, authentic and correct. 

the funny thing, though, is that the disjunct between my social and creative performance fluencies obscures the fact of social performance as performance, which made me overlook the obvious: participating in a dr. who con IS live, in-person performance! it's a social performance i can tolerate because normativity is not assumed or idealized as the goal. but it's also a collaborative performance in which every single person contributes to the making of the event, whether they mean to or not! they don't even have to be a cosplayer!

it's (how i make) a whole new world

analyzing the "semiotic thickness" of that key moment in my performance history, and the realizations it catalyzed, have helped me recognize the ways i actually do performance. i love devising new ways to perform that center my strengths, but as i said in the recent tarot post, i have been limited by a received notion of what "real" participation is, ditto performance, and i couldn't validate my own modes of bringing my energies and projects into the world because i was so stuck on the idea that i had to keep proving i still matter by the methods and scales i never could really sustain or reach. 

with the "poem walk" post, i began to articulate one new mode of performing that uses my body without my voice. this is authentically me and also unites a great swath of my loves, interests and commitments. i will probably move with additional ways of bringing embodied work and knowledge into the world. and i am still perfectly happy to collaborate in a specifically sited, in-person social performance on a limited scale--that is to say, come by sometime!