It is still flattering to be misquoted, but when it is an answer to a question, and when it is the questioner who misquotes, one ought to be forgiven for thinking that the question was less leading than that the answer was altogether beside the point. ‘Simon Taylor’ does not give his description of performance, extrapolating to the suddenly ‘perplexed-me-on’ Herbert Blau. See here. … What ‘Simon Taylor’ describes in a comment which became a post, here, is in what manner performance picks up momentum from critical theory and how these reflective intricacies affect performance. In a second post, here, ‘Simon Taylor,’ realising he has not been clear resumes his response both in order to clarify and to address the second part of the question: Is performance an extrapolation, an advocation of those intricacies? Such intricacies are a matter of inference, if not interpellation, on Uri Khein’s part. However, ‘Simon Taylor’ suggests that they might already reside with the affect and be in turn effected in performance. So forming a feedback loop in representation, the image of thought: whereby, to start with, we observe performance picking up momentum from critical theory; spreading its surface as if in immanence… hence the surface without a ripple, and so on. As for how things really are: suggestion is made that they present themselves differently on Blau’s side of the curtain to how they appear to thought – or language – on the other side, where performance is not epiphenomenal, and being is said of the simulacra it gives rise to in the pure play of theatricality in the same sense as it is said of real models and actual people and events. And the shadows do not play false, that mislead.
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