Everyday Performances

Jessica        Morris

Enjoy Performances

Diagnostics 1.2

15 January 2015

        When looking at the performances of my everyday life, I realized the sheer amount of performances that I encounter throughout the day. I did not realize that almost everything that I encounter is some type of performance in one-way or another. Anything from watching a barista make me a coffee to watching my favorite television show is a performance. While for some things it is hard to see how they follow the guidelines of performance, most things do in fact embody the five major parts of performance: having a framed event, human agency, patterns of action, two levels of reality (actual and subjunctive), and reoccurrence and change in cultural-historical networks. Over the course of my forty-eight hour experience logging performances I encountered, a film I saw greatly encompasses these five parts.

        When watching a film in a movie theater, an event is being performed. The film had a set time starting at promptly 7:10. Because of its precise start and end times, it is considered a framed event. The setting also establishes it as a framed event by sectioning off the individual theater in the building to be used for the showing. Everyone in the theater including myself was there to watch the film creating a closed event. Because everyone came on his or her own accord, this event has human agency. Everyone made the conscious decision to go see the film instead of doing other things. While watching, the audience also had an emotional reaction to the film. The movie was very suspenseful, which can elicit many different emotions for the viewer. This adds to the human agency of the event because the viewer had an emotional response to the film.

         To be considered a performance, an event must also exist in two realities, the actual reality and the subjunctive reality. In the case of the film that I saw, the actual reality is simply the movie watching environment that I was in and what was actually on screen. These are all things that are occurring in real life for everyone in the movie theater. While it may be similar, everyone’s subjunctive reality is different. One idea of subjunctive reality is the story world that is being acted out on screen. Everyone in the theater is watching this fictional story world occur and making inferences about it in their head. The subjunctive reality may take this form as well. Due to the suspenseful nature of the film, the audience was trying to piece together what was happening and trying to solve the crime. This is all taking place in our own subjunctive reality away from the actual reality that everyone is in.