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The Arts

Performance Is The Thing

Dzifa Benson is compelled to consider the nature of performance.

“All the world’s a stage
And all the men and women merely players
They have their exits and their entrances
And one man in his time plays many parts”
From As You Like It by William Shakespeare

Shakespeare’s melancholic hero Jacques is a libertine-turned-philosopher. He has turned to philosophy in his quest for a new identity, and as a philosopher he questions much of what he sees around him, causing him to offer the soliloquy from which the above excerpt is taken.

I have to say I am with Jacques on this one, at least as far as those four lines are concerned. The world of the stage, of roles and masks, parts and personas to play, has been one of the most enduring and insightful ways of speaking about life and the world that we live in. But the incandescent philosophical question to me is this: if performance is a metaphor for life, then what is the nature of performance? How does Shakespeare’s use of a theatrical metaphor to represent the grand design of life interface with what I do as a performer, in an artificially controlled setting, with an audience primed and receptive to what I want to portray?

The definition of philosophy is pretty much set – love of wisdom, the rational investigation of questions about existence and knowledge and ethics, the application of reason towards a more enlightened way of life.

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