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  • Clods, Compost and the Buoy...
    Reid, Tim

    Performance research, 06/2023, Letnik: 28, Številka: 4
    Journal Article

    Of all performers, clowns might be the most mundane, in that their work – attending the etymological roots of the mundane – firmly and fixedly is of the world. Earthy, coarse and material, rebounding from whatever slip, trip, stumble or fall, their ascents only ever return them to the surface, back to the world. But of what is that buoyancy made? How does a clown get back up? To account for that force, this paper follows what Shoshana Felman finds, via J. L. Austin, as 'triviality as a philosophy – as a method'. When Austin writes: 'To feel the firm ground of prejudice slipping away is exhilarating, but brings its revenges,' it is Austin's humour, Felman shows, keeping him afloat. Buoyancy, then, could be understood as a species of performative force. Given how Felman's reading has shaped performance theory, this paper pushes her term triviality into the mundane by citing the context of performance and taking a performer whose ostensible field is humour. This paper, then, considers a clown, Alex Tatarsky, and a series of workshop performances given in an autumn 2021 residency at The Kitchen in New York, which turned, specifically, around the performance of etymology and an ecological commitment to compost. Celebrating how organic matter breaks into dirt gives Tatarsky a vehicle to break the linguistic-symbolic itself into roots. Revelling in the visceral force of language's materiality – as sound, history and the means by which we meet and misunderstand one another – Tatarsky pulses through states of disintegration both individual and collective. In the performance of etymology, they offer the common derivation of clown as clod, as in dirt – what makes the ground. Fixing that signature, Tatarsky breaks down themselves, and in that, rebounds to show something of how the world holds together, and what can happen when it doesn't.