Tony Perucci

The Poetics of Ruptural Performance: The End(s) of Sense in Political Performance

This panel considers the ways in which performance can interrupt the experience of the quotidian experience of public and privatized spaces as a means of political, social and economic justice. Each paper considers the challenge of performance activism as more than a means of conveying information or a simple political message. Rather, performance not only constitutes its publics, but also the experience of publicity. For L.M. Bogad, publicity is enacted through his participation in the production of fake special editions of the New York Times, International Herald Tribune, and New York Post. While each paper had its own activist agenda, all contained headlines and articles that performed The World We Want to See as already existing. Benjamin Shepard describes how a burlesque of DIY activism has functioned as a means of inhabiting public space, enabling the interplay of movements for sexual freedom and the global justice movement. Finally, Tony Perucci articulates the ways in which rupture operates as a strategy of activist performance in Brazil, Russia, and the USA to constitute poetic publics and that challenge the conventional practices of political sense-making. In each paper, of central importance is the question of what particular ways performance can not only produce publics, but can also mobilize them in the pleasure of political action and of publicity itself.