Performing performance and LAPSing around: how, where, why, wait, what?

14.3.2025 0 Like 0 kommenttia

In an effort to summarize performance from a personal point of view, student ambassador George Rallis talks about the energy of performance art, their podcast Lapsing Around while also the program LAPS. 

The more frequent question I am asked as a performance artist, is to define and differentiate the nature of performance art from that of its more “socially distributed and recognized” counterparts of dance and theater. In order to remove the academic performativity that a more pronounced definition would provide, a classmate has very eloquently put it “it’s just people doing weird things in rooms”. With an appropriate dose of humor, while also an inexplicable and casual poesies, I will try to provide a personal depiction of what performance, the LAPS program while also Lapsing Around can be.  
 
I started performing as a resolution to the inability of my previous studies to scratch the artistic itch I’ve always had. Regardless of whether philosophy and theory will always be my critical pivots used to actually make sense of the world, there is a level of inaccessibility that accompanies them. This inaccessibility is not a neo-liberal and socially derived way of describing the modus operandi of these types of thinking(s), but more so, an inability to fully encapsulate ways of existing, being and occupying within others. Witnessing an artwork and then thinking in order to make sense of it can definitely be a successful way of producing its discourse, however, your embodiment and corporeality still remain mostly intact to the process of creation of its affect. In this way, I was lead to choosing the Live Art and Performance Studies (LAPS for short), as a continuation of my thus far theoretic journey and in this way merging my academic interests with my body’s desire to be seen, be shown and be staged for both its own liking while also, an audiences reaction. 

LAPS is a two-year English language master’s program that combines theoretical work with artistic research. In a parallel, our critical thinking is informed by bodies of knowledge that have been constructed through an array of disciplines, from anthropology, performance art theory, politics, economics and aesthetic philosophy, to name a few. Additionally, the artistic compartment of the studies, allows through studio practice, various workshops, and corporeal exercises, to somehow attempt to grasp what the body can do within space and time if it moves through certain meanings.  

In my own understanding, the existence of performance usually occurs outside of the white cube or the theater stage. If I use my personal narrative, I can remember the mannerisms that the strong femininities I was surrounding myself with, as the first communicative performative gestures that have given sway to the way I use my arms and hips. Likewise, in my upbringing, I remember the head-bangs my friends were providing as a companion to the double-bass and snare, while their long hair as a performative agent, somehow twisted time in the spiral of a windmill. Then once older, the club dancefloor was for me the educational platform I could express myself through by dancing in repetitive rhythms, synching bodies with the lights that washed our sweaty skins. Ultimately, being lead to drag, burlesque and anarcho-queer events and spaces, providing me my first ever spotlights before I resulted to black boxes and white cubes. 

Performance exists within society as a meaning multiplication of the ways our bodies use time and space, to twist the way we experience both. As a combination of stimuli, disciplines and mediums, performance art has as its basic principle the creation of a discourse within gesture. It’s that split time, where ephemerality happens to be captured, yet fails to be repeated in the same way. It is not a repetitive well-rehearsed series of movements and ideas. It is not a pre-written and thought-through situation where the end-goal is to create the designed feeling. Maybe performance is a negation of prescribed behaviors. Maybe it’s the tweaking of those behaviors into a body-poem. Maybe this character of deviance is the gateway of performance, not restricting itself to fields specifically stemming from academia, but instead, is able to follow a more self-referential and holistic approach to what embodied and corporeal practices can be. 

Then if one is to make sense of a performance pedagogy, one needs to remember the four pillars (as also denoted by LAPS), that make performance worth performing. Singular artistic practice, theoretical rigor, collaborative ethos and the decisive role, art can play in society. Essentially, by using our bodies in an unruly way, to embody whatever meaning we wish to expand on, we attempt to analyze and explore the power structures and the way they perform themselves. As engrained within the ways we live our lives, attempting in an artistic way to confront the methodologies and practices used to be a body, have a body and embody the where, your body bodies in. Then through different social, interpersonal and subjective orientations, move according to the specific research required to explore what modalities make your artistic voice, echo in other people’s hearing.  

I always say, it takes a very specific mind to do performance, as performance can be anything. For me it takes a mind that can see the beauty of how a body moves, on a staircase, in its own pace, as this staircase ascends to the social architectures that body becomes the pillars to. As a communication cursor, the body talks with theory, flipping each page, to make a fold of meaning that will later on be used as a weapon causing paper cuts. This is what I hope LAPS can do for others, while also what I was set out to do, with the podcast series Lapsing Around. Somehow, make sense of what performance can be, and how personal of a story, LAPS students try to iterate with their own understandings of the same question. How to performance?  

Lapsing Around and “Life of an Art Student” podcast

LAPS website

LAPS student blogs

Written by Georgios Rallis.