Art, performing

3. The centrality of the performer

That artists need the services of performers in instancing their work is not to say merely that performers are means for the work’s transmission. The foundry workers who follow the sculptor’s instructions and the film’s projectionist help to create or transmit the work, but theirs is not the pivotal role of the performer. They might be replaced by technologically superior alternatives without thereby altering the artistic character of the statue or film, whereas the performer’s task is ineliminably part of works created for performance.

Artists work with media; the appreciation of art requires the audience to be aware of the limits and possibilities of the media employed. In the performing arts, the requirements of performance are part of the medium in which artists operate. Artists do not create works that happen to be performed; rather, they write for performance, taking into account what will be involved for performers when they produce the outcome. (So it is that a new, though derivative, piece results when a musical work is transcribed for instruments different from those specified for the original.) Just as the viewers of a painting consider not only what it represents, but also its surface and the manner of its representation, so audiences in the performing arts consider the artist’s use of the performers and their props or tools. They should be aware, for instance, that a dance depicts the death of a swan, that a given actor is playing the parts of several characters and that organists use their feet as well as their hands.

Many works for performance employ the performer’s skills in order to achieve narrative, expressive, formal or other effects. These, rather than the performer’s activity, are the proper focus of appreciative concern, even if that concern involves an awareness of the connection between the artist’s instructions, the performer’s efforts and the artistic result. In other pieces, though, the artistic point of the work is to highlight the expertise and techniques of the performer. This is the case with works providing virtuosic roles for one or two performers; some genres, such as the concerto and étude, are of this kind. As Thomas Carson Mark suggests (1980), such pieces are about the talents required to perform them; the audience’s fullest appreciation requires a recognition of the difficulties overcome by the performer in making the rendition seem effortless.

Combining the points just made with the earlier emphasis on the relation between the work’s identity and its means of performance, it is possible to see why the tools, techniques and skills of the performer come to be valued and preserved in their own right, sometimes despite the availability of simpler alternatives. If a new ballet shoe were capable of doubling the height of a dancer’s leap, it would not be appropriate for dancers to wear the new shoes for performances of nineteenth-century ballets; even if exaggerated elevation is a desirable feature in such works, the difficulty of achieving that elevation is also part of those works. Similarly, the programmed synthesizer is no substitute for the violin when it comes to performing Bach’s Partitas, even if it exactly reproduces the sound of a violin. It is not surprising, then, that musicians, dancers and actors of the past formed guilds, not only to train novices but also to keep secret the tricks of their crafts. Contemporary performers are expected to maintain the required standards.

The central place of artistic skill and creativity in performances helps to explain the distinction between, on the one hand, the disc jockey or ink-printer and, on the other, the performer. The former might be involved in delivering a work of art to an audience, but their roles lack the particular skills for which artists plan the shapes of their works. Tragedies are written for actors and concertos are written for pianists, but films are not made for projectionists and bronzes are not made for casters. Thus it is sometimes said that performers are artists’ collaborators, not their servants.