Arti Performative

In a performance art class we were shown two pieces - one was a video of Samuel Beckett's Not I, and the other was a recent London performance of John Cage's 4'33". I had never seen Not I before and I enjoyed it. My understanding of the Italian language is poor and limited to picking out words I know and forming my own sentences around them, but I think the teacher was talking about 'speech art'. He kept saying 'si parla' is better than 'io parlo' etc. which means 'it is spoken' is better than 'I speak'. I still have no idea what this means. It was quite interesting to hear him talk about language (I think) when I was excluded from the conversation for that very reason.

I've just finished reading Edward T. Hall's The Hidden Dimension which also talks of language. In light of this, I think this is what the teacher was saying: 'When you speak, you speak using a prescribed framework of that particular language. Likewise, when you experience a piece of art, you experience it through your cultural framework.' I suppose that, similarly, performance in this context could be described as a schematic language.

With this in mind, I remember watching Nicolas Philibert's Le Pays des Sourds, perhaps it's relevant to this sort of discussion.

I also re-watched Lars Von Trier's The Five Obstructions. Good stuff