« Informance » as a lecture performance of « Set and Reset » (1986)

Case study 

Before going through the case study, here are a few instructions you can follow using the digital tool e-spect@tor or not:

A. Without using the e-spect@tor tool

1) Please watch the video first, without taking notes: in this way, you will grasp the different aspects of the performance (as if you were attending the live show).

2) Watch it again and take notes focusing on the performative aspects. Then, compare them with the analysis that is provided to you below.

B. Using the e-spect@tor tool

 
First, please read the guidelines to create your account on the e-spect@tor tool and connect to it following the instructions in Unit III.

 
1) Once connected to the e-spect@tor tool, please join the project Trisha Brown "Informance" using the code: tor-e-2-m4v0Zn-R_GbuV

 
2) Please start watching Trisha Brown's "Informance" first, using the performance mode: in this way, you can't stop the run of the video as if you were attending the live show. Also, as if you were attending a live show for the first time, you can annotate free comments (like association of ideas) and use the set of emoticons to declare your emotions and basic opinions. 

3) Please watch the video a second time using the analysis mode : 

Why is "Informance" performative?

• The portmanteau word "informance" (information + performance) refers to intermediality, namely the mixture between two different media and media techniques: a dance piece is being performed and commented upon simultaneously, the comments progressively transforming the piece via the corrective and cumulative effects.  
• The use of space is unusual. The audience is directly addressed, and Trisha Brown, the lead dancer in the 1983 original piece, now plays the part of the keynote speaker in direct interaction with the public, as her position in the apron stage shows. This break from the conventional act of performing in front of the audience and the combination of the lecture and dance affect the audience and alter their perception of the dance piece while it is performed. The resulting hybrid form, mixing the informal, seemingly casual dimension of Brown's talk and the performers' dynamic, concentrated and precise gestures, is metalanguage and mise en abyme.
• Music and its use are redefined. The alternation between music and silence, or rather Trisha Brown's voice used as a substitute for music, challenges our expectation of a melodic line. "Informance" begins with no music, which does not mean music is absent. It is replaced by the voice of Trisha Brown, which acts as a melodic line (from 0 to 5'14). Despite looking spontaneous, Brown's talk must have been carefully thought out. Full of humour, innuendo, long sentences and pauses, ascending and descending tonalities and pitches, accelerations or slowdowns, Brown's lecture becomes the chorus. When music surges, Brown's mesmerizing voice accompanies the dancers' movements but also talks the audience into incorporating them. We thus experience a double narrative: that of the genesis of the original 1983 "Set and reset" and that of "Informance" being narrated (told and retold?) right in front of us. "Informance" equals "Set and reset" +1 at the moment it is enunciated, both in words and movements. 
• Brown is a keynote speaker but also a performer through a complex web of glances (going from the public to the dancers and conversely): her eyes spanning the stage and the auditorium, she bridges audiences and performers, being the interaction between them. 

Trisha Brown's voice now embodies that of a dance critic. We can say that "Informance" is both retrospective in outlook (it looks back on "Set and reset") and cumulative (it tells what the dancers are doing). "Informance" equals "Set and reset" +1. Again, the piece being shown to us encompasses Schechner's categories, more particularly "showing doing" (the dancers showing what "Set and reset" used to be and what it is becoming at the moment it is performed) and "telling showing doing" (Trisha Brown as narrator, demiurge and dance critic).