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Laurie Booth: Performance Plus
| Article
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20594 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1992 |
1,862 Words |
| Author
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Claudia Woolgar
Claudia Woolgar is a free-lance theater critic and arts
journalist based in London. |
"As an artist I have no interest in perpetuating the thought that things are either right or wrong. There are as many interpretations of my work as there are people in the audience." Such an assessment by an artist of his own work ought to be a godsend to any critic facing the task of reviewing that artist's performance. It offers the critic carte blanche to think and say as he wishes--he cannot go wrong if the whole notion of right and wrong had been dismissed from the outset. And yet, without striving to understand what the artist is hoping to convey and achieve in his performance, the review may be well off the mark, and surely isn't that to do the artist a great injustice?
This carte blanche was offered by the British dancer and choreographer Laurie Booth, yet critics nevertheless are considerably challenged in interpreting and assessing his work. Although he views himself primarily as part of the modern dance movement, Booth's work embraces many of the elements most commonly found under the umbrella term performance art.
Performance art has always been a concept that defies definition, and hence any such production is notoriously difficult to assess in standard critical terms. It is experimental and open-ended, and there is a conscious attempt by "performance artists" to subvert standard art forms. Booth's work is highly experimental (to the extent that the word dance would be more aptly replaced with the term movement); it is essentially nonlinear; it is deconstructive in the sense that his theatrical language is a mixture of music and the spoken word (or "text"), strong visual images, and movement; and it uses electronic music scores overlapping with more classical music sounds.
Although the Institute of Contemporary Arts has been a key venue for such work in London, the performance art movement in Britain has largely taken place outside the capital. In spite of the difficulties posed by Booth's work, critical opinion has been favorable and he is regarded as one of Britain's leading independent choreographers. To try to understand his reputation means to try to understand his work.
Speaking in his apartment in Brighton, England, overlooking the sea, Booth commented, "What we suffer from in this country is a lack of analysis as to how things happen aesthetically speaking." Anxious not to be personally stamped with such a diagnosis, I asked Booth to explain his work.
"I was mainly interested in the [work] of Grotowsky, and also of Peter
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