In their introductory essay, editors Peter Gillgren and Mårten Snickare invite the reader to explore the relationship between performance and performativity, but they “deliberately” do not define these terms to highlight their “fruitful plurality” (10). Since many of the contributors offer their own definitions of the terms at stake, some thoughts from the editors about how these definitions speak to each other might have been helpful. Nevertheless, the editors’ insistence that the essays speak for themselves effectively and productively keeps the discussion open and open-ended.
The volume is divided into three sections, with a final postscript by David Carrier. Making this an attractive publication are a handful of color plates that augment the abundant black-and-white, high-quality figures that accompany each essay, and a collective bibliography and index. The collection is legitimately interdisciplinary, examining performativity through a variety of critical lenses and fields (architecture, art, music, theater, and dance).
The first section, “A Performative Society,” begins with an essay by Peter Burke that describes types of early modern performance and provides a whirlwind tour of the historiography of the “performative turn” (15). Next, Martin Olin’s “Diplomatic Performativity and the Applied Arts in Seventeenth-Century Europe” examines ceremonial entry pamphlets, reminding us that they were simultaneously “a record of and a script for an ideal performance” (25). He discusses the liminality of ambassadors and explains how seemingly petty squabbles over precedence, such as the order of carriages in a procession, were acutely important because precedence was not just an outward sign of status but actually part of what constituted rank itself (26).
Another essay in the first section, Camilla Kandare’s “CorpoReality: Queen Christina of Sweden and the Embodiment of Sovereignty,” employs choreographic understandings of the body to rethink Queen Christina’s canonization ceremony in 1669. Kandare reveals the queen and her observers’ sensitivity to the significance of bodies in relation to each other, demonstrating how “corporeal relationships and spatial configurations” confirmed or qualified precedence and status (50). She shows that both the queen herself and her contemporaries were more interested in the body’s actions than its appearance, what Kandare distinguishes as the “figuring of the body” rather than its “figure” (50).
Several of the essays in the second section, “Performances and Audiences,” explore the tension between performance texts that stressed controlling the emotions and performances that (often intentionally) excited the passions. Erika Fischer-Lichte shows how stage machinery and lighting, combined with acting and singing, were employed to arouse emotions and ensure that spectators were “transformed into viri perculsi (deeply moved beings)” (87). At the same time, the stories told in Baroque plays and operas emphasized that loss of self-control “results in complete disaster” for a courtier (95). This created a paradoxical situation in which “the semiotic dimension of the performance taught the spectators a lesson, which the performative dimension dismissed and counteracted” (95).
Lars Berglund explores the similarly complex reception of musical performance in the Baroque Roman Church. Ignoring papal regulations, Jesuit sacred music employed the same techniques as secular, erotic music, incorporating dissonances and suspensions to convey the “bittersweet yearning and torments of love” (103–04). The difference was that in the sacred context the goal was to “move the affect of the listeners in accordance with the subject of the text, and thus bend their heart towards the Divine” (104–05). Further complicating matters, the performers most prized as interpreters of sacred music, the castrati, had angelic voices, but both men and women considered them boyishly attractive objects of desire, and several were notorious for their sexual escapades (105–07).
The overlapping of divine role and earthly performer is also the subject of Genevieve Warwick’s essay in the third section of the volume. Warwick eschews a single interpretation of paintings like Caravaggio’s Sick Bacchus in favor of a “playful polyvalence” (140). She contends that just as rooms in aristocratic residences were considered multifunctional, so too were artworks preferred that could “set into play a multiplicity of signifieds through a succession of wide-ranging allusions, so offering a plurality of pleasures to its viewers” (141).
Indeed, a “plurality of pleasures” may be gained from the essays in this volume. The collection features many illuminating studies that, together, broaden our understanding of the “performative turn” and demonstrate the benefits of expanding rather than limiting our definitions and interpretations.
