My Decade in Performance: An Introduction

I love end-of-year list season. I love discovering work that I’d missed or overlooked throughout the year; I love the arguments and conversations that the subjective, arbitrary nature of lists can spark; I even love the silly anticipation of a countdown as I scroll down to see which album or movie such-and-such critic or media outlet has anointed NUMBER ONE. Perhaps most of all, I love that for the month of December, arts criticism centers so unabashedly on lifting up work that we love. ‘Tis truly the most wonderful time of the year.

Now, as we enter the final December of the 2010s, we find ourselves blessed with not just end-of-year lists, but end-of-decade lists. I recently came across one such list that my friend, playwright Ryan Hudak, compiled and shared of his favorite performance experiences of the decade. Ryan inspired me to go digging in my own memory (and, yes, my box of old programs) for the work that has left the greatest impression on me over the last ten years—ten years over which I came into my own as an artist myself.

I’ve been wanting to be more consistent and less precious about my critical writing—spending several months reworking one particular piece over and over for academic journal submissions has not helped with this—so I’ve decided to both share my list and work on my discipline by writing a month’s worth of mini-essays, one each day in December. I set only a few ground rules for myself in compiling this list. Public performances only (no private/personal performance-related experiences, however life-changing—with love to my colleagues at the Banff Centre summer 2018 and La MaMa Umbria summer 2013), and nothing I had a creative hand in myself.

The work I’ve decided to write about isn’t necessarily “my favorite” performance of the decade. (Though often it is!) I certainly wouldn’t call it a Best Of list. Rather, this is a 31-part reflection on ten years of seeing and thinking about live performance, via various artists, experiences, and individual works that have imprinted themselves on me in some way. It’s wholly tied to who I am and how I feel at this exact moment in late 2019, and it reflects all the aesthetic, geographic, and demographic biases I hold as a human and audience member. (Almost all New York-centric; much whiter than I feel good about.) In this it is a look back and also, I hope, a kind of map forward for myself. Whose work do I want to support and amplify? Where are the gaps in my knowledge and experience, and what do I seek out to fill them in? When I’m stuck in my own artmaking process, or feeling like I’m pursuing a uselessly self-indulgent vocation, where can I turn for a bit of practical inspiration, or the reminder that this work can have—has had—a profound effect on other folks?

And if this sparks some arguments and conversations, leads folks to discover work they’ve missed or overlooked, or just gives you that silly sense of anticipation, so much the better.

Mini-essays start tomorrow!

xx
p