On the Endurance of Theatre in Live Art

This article argues that discourses and practices of Live Art offer a unique way in to debates about the distinctions between theatre and performance art that have been ongoing in theatre and performance studies for several decades. Rather than simply being another permutation of the same debate - where theatre on the one hand is opposed to 'performance' (whether performance art or Live Art) on the other - I argue that Live Art allows us to see performance art and theatre in continuing relation to one another. Specifically, I propose that theatre persists as an object of endurance in Live Art - as something that is endured by and that endures within it. Whereas practices of endurance have often been central to debates about the distinction between theatre and performance art, with endurance usually being aligned with performance art's striving for the 'real' in opposition to theatre's mimetic practices, I ask what it might mean to endure the imitated, the rehearsed, and the repeated. Key to this argument is a reading of Forced Entertainment's 2008 theatre performance, Spectacular, which includes a sixty-minute enactment of dying. In the course of this reading, the excesses of theatre and the extremes of endurance art practices (both often gendered female) are shown to have more in common than might usually appear.