Everybody is Performing Themselves: Risk, Performance, and Sophie Calle

Co-created by Brooklyn-based theater artist Ivan Talijancic and Minnesota-based playwright Rachel Jendrzejewski, TRACES (after Sophie Calle) is a participatory site-specific performance that unfolds in real time across downtown Minneapolis.

Based on the work of French artist Sophie Calle, the work is staged by an ensemble of mostly cis women, trans women, and nonbinary people. A performer in the work, Marcela Michelle, sat down with Lynn Lukkas and lead performer Lisa Channer, professors in the University of Minnesota’s Department of Art and Theater Arts & Dance respectively, to discuss the relationships among performance, framing, and identity in TRACES and the work of Sophie Calle.

Marcela Michelle

To get us started, Lynn, I’m wondering if you can situate Sophie Calle and her work.

Lynn Lukkas

Calle has a unique place in feminist art history. She is an artist who has crossed a lot of disciplines, but whose work is centered on conceptual approaches. Calle can’t be pigeonholed in terms of form, but she has done work that turned many of the notions around art-making on its head. In a way, she disrupts the expected role of the artist. In her work, the artist becomes intimate with their audience. She’s extremely important in my mind.

Lisa Channer

Calle’s approach to this kind of work, putting your own body on the line in a way that only performance can do, also connects to feminist art. There are examples by other feminist artists, such as Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece or in the work of Judy Chicago.

When you take a body, especially a female-presenting body, and you put it on display, it becomes a kind of radical feminism. Calle also does this, albeit in different ways. She experiments with both content and form. She’s pushing boundaries in both those directions, which makes her dangerous. And I like her danger.

LL

That is a really good word to use for her because she plays with that whole idea of danger and the notion of putting her body on the line. In her work Sleepers, she invites a stranger into her bed. I don’t know how much more intimate you get than that, or how much more potential for danger there is. When I heard about the work many years ago, my first thought was, Oh God, I don’t know if I’d feel safe enough to do that.

MM

Following this thread of dangerous female audacity. Lisa, I’m wondering if you can situate TRACES in a theatrical tradition. I’m curious about what direct interaction does for us today, given the challenges presented after Covid, as well as by social media and streaming. How does all of that relate to this conversation we’re having about these radical feminist artists as well?

LC

I love this question.

Live performance art-making changed since Covid. How the work talks to this moment, particularly because TRACES creates an experience for one person at a time, couldn’t be more intimately crafted. Although there is a script, it depends entirely on the person. It is a beautiful thing to think of the performance with one person as the tip of an iceberg. Underneath the surface is everything needed to support that one person having a good experience. It’s a beautiful idea.

MM

How does this work engage with more recent interest in what is called promenade or site-specific theater, where an audience isn’t just sitting in seats within a theater and watching the performance?

LC

I don’t think promenade theater is new. It’s been happening since the Middle Ages and the Greek theater. We’ve been doing promenade theater all throughout theater history. But I do like to note that the evolution of the idea of stations, or a promenade where the audience member moves from stage to stage, does really spark up in the Middle Ages. It is a beautiful rebirth of a kind of theater after the dark ages.

Back then in Italy and France, the Catholic Church shifted theater into the religious pageants. Attendance got so big to the Corpus Christi masses that the productions started to spill out into the courtyards, and the medieval history plays became pageant play epics. Audiences would see the story of Noah in one place and then walk to see the Jesus crucifixion over there. An audience might move from individual performances of the stations of the cross. Promenade theater is a very community-oriented form.  

We have Aristotle’s text Poetics that is the foundation of the Greek approach to theater, but I always say that a lot of modern theater comes out of that medieval history.

MM

Lynn, as someone who comes from the visual arts, was there anything in TRACES you didn’t expect?

LL

I had this interesting moment when the work was being rehearsed when I didn’t know what to do. I wondered: Am I supposed to do something?

I really became aware of myself as a performer in that context. I wasn’t only the participant or what I would call the audience. Instead, I began to think of myself as a performer in the larger context of the piece; it felt like those boundaries began to break down. I felt that I was both a witness and a participant, but I wasn’t sure what I was witnessing because I felt in the dark. There was a process of experiencing the work wherein I began to think of myself as a performer.

MM

This discussion of boundaries brings me to ideas around consent. When I talk to people about TRACES to those who are unfamiliar with Sophie Calle, I inevitably talk about Suite Vénitienne, in which she follows this stranger around taking photographs of him, and Hotel, in which she works as a housekeeper in the hotel, rifling through everybody’s things and making art out of all this material. Depending on the age of the person I’m speaking to, I get a question about consent. I’m curious: What do you think Calle’s work and TRACES has to say around conversations concerning consent in art-making?

LL

Surely Calle is transgressing those notions of consent intentionally. I don’t know that she wouldn’t make the same work if she were to ask for consent to begin with.

LC

She operates as an outlaw that’s purposely provoking norms, norms of consent and privacy. Throughout her work, Calle is being her truest, fucked-up, messed-up, and confused self. Her own journey as a human is very brave and open. It does implicate other people, and there’s no way around that. It is interesting that we are coming from slightly different generations ourselves. When I was your age, we weren’t having these conversations that we’re having now. There were no intimacy choreographers or intimacy directors. If you had to kiss someone in a scene, for example, the teacher or the director said, “Just go in the hall and break the ice and then come in and when you’re ready and kiss.” There was no care around any of that stuff.

Take, for instance, the Living Theater and their work Paradise Now, in which they also did not ask consent of the audience before they put themselves naked and having sexual encounters on the stage. The audience was invited and brought on stage at times. Then, at the end of the show, they paraded out of the theater naked. When it was staged at Yale University, there is a famous moment at the end of the work when the artists paraded naked down the streets of New Haven. That approach was transgressive and dangerous in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

It was an era when many artists were purposely trying to crush notions of propriety, safety, shame, and all that stuff. We know that that movement wasn’t always great to women, or anybody. There wasn’t consent. Shit happened in this moment of freedom. These two extremes—this idea of we need consent for everything we do and a kind of just push every boundary open, even though some people might be uncomfortable—are always in conversation with each other. It is a pendulum. We’re constantly figuring out the balance.

I’m a person who’s 58, trying to think like a 30-year-old now, instead of how I thought when I was 30. I got into theater so I could kiss people and roll around naked. That’s what I wanted. It is just a different moment we’re in.

MM

That is interesting because I am a bit of an outlier or often in a minority in my age group around conversations around consent, content warnings, and what I see as a kind of sanitization and purity. If we need to know everything, then where is the risk and the surprise?

I was so drawn to this TRACES when Rachel approached me about it because there is some risk and choice-making. All these themes present in Sophie’s work complicate these issues. It’s not a binary, and there is something to be said about the pendulum overcorrecting and going to extreme ends of things so that we can find where it goes.

LC

It will never stop because there is no “right.” There’s never going to be a balanced ending. It’s always going to be doing this because every single conversation that we have is not new. We’re just saying it in different ways. The human conversations around art are age-old, and danger versus safety is not new.

LL

It’s a real issue though, too. I think because we’ve come through a time where, for some people, consent wasn’t asked. We must be mindful of that. While at the same time, how do you do work like this that is so impactful if you’re being so careful all the time? What I see in students now is they’re so careful. They don’t want to offend anyone. They don’t want to be on the wrong side of whatever issue it is that they’re bringing up. They just don’t, can’t, bear the idea that they might be. There is a real risk aversion today that wasn’t present in recent years.

LC

Social media has changed a lot of this. It’s amplified. You can’t privately disagree. It’s all out there, and everybody is performing themselves.

LL

We are talking about Sophie Calle in relation to theater, but I came to her work as a photographer. Her photography raises different questions about how we know what is real and the truth.

MM

Those two elements seem to weave together, especially as we live in a time where identity and performance are very big concerns for people, whether that be in conversations around social media, gender, or other ways of accessing and performing the self. How do you think Calle’s work and TRACES engage in this?

LL

As Sophie Calle is undertaking all these transgressive acts, she is also performing and bringing her own identity into question. In Hotel, she is performing the role of a housekeeper. She isn’t really a housekeeper, so she’s performing the role of the housekeeper.

LC

This connects with a lot of the conversations we’re currently having in the theater around authentic casting. Can someone play someone who doesn’t have the same life experience as them?

It is an important conversation, especially as there is a horrible history of minstrel shows, Caucasian actors playing Asian characters with yellow face as well as red face, and other kinds of problems around racial identity and casting. My students had an interesting conversation about it, and I think they’re genuinely perplexed about it. For example, who gets to play a lesbian character? Do you have to be identifying as a lesbian to authentically embody a lesbian character? Will you get to the point where you can only ever just play yourself? If you follow that trajectory to its end, it means theater dies, and we’re just in performance. Theater is, by nature, fake. We’ve been having these interesting conversations just in the community of theater makers around casting.

With TRACES, the audience members who became witness participants in the work are only asked to be themselves. How people respond to that is interesting.

MM

In my opinion, this is an access conversation, when we talk about who gets to play what roles. If we only reward cisgender heterosexual men for playing transgender women, and they get Oscars. However, I know actors who identified as women who were being cast as men a lot. Through the process of getting to perform these male roles, they realized that they feel more comfortable as a man outside the theater. Now they live as men. That is something we run the risk of losing if it becomes only: You have to be this to play this. You have to be that to play that.

Lynn, what you said around Sophie Calle playing the housekeeper reminded me of Judith Butler. How many times do you have to repeat the performance of being a housekeeper before you are, in fact, a housekeeper?

LC

Talk to someone who is a professional bartender or waiter. They put on that character of a bartender or waiter while at work.

LL

However, that is their real work. I’ve been a waitress. It is different when you put a frame around it. If you take out that frame of theater or art, you have a completely different context.

LC

I agree, but I do think this notion of playing yourself is fascinating.

LL

My students are always performing because they’ve been in front of a camera their whole lives. Ideas of surveillance certainly come up in Sophie Calle’s work from the 1970s and 1980s, which, as someone who is 68, is when I came of age.

In Suite Vénitienne, Calle is surveying Henri B. and secretly taking his picture as she moves through Venice. I think it’s different now. It’s like we’ve turned surveillance on ourselves, when before it was that others were surveying you. I think that is fundamentally different and can be attributed directly to social media.

MM

I agree. There’s a contradiction in my generation, where people are getting cosmetic surgery so that our faces are not recognizable by external mass surveillance. Yet here we are every day posting our lives on social media. Lynn, how does this kind of surveillance relate to photography?

LL

Photography is the document. Then if it’s a document, you have to ask, “Well, what is it a document of?” Is it a document of a fiction? Is it a document of a fact? Is it reality?

With some of Calle’s work, this gets more complex. Is it fiction because she’s performing this situation? Yet it’s presented as an authentic document of something that really happened. I don’t have an answer for that. It complicates these ideas around photography in extremely interesting ways.

MM

That reminds me of a conversation the theater and opera director Anne Bogart had at UCLA with a neuroscientist about memory and neurons. How the more you remember a thing, the farther away you get from the memory, because we can only ever remember the most recent memory of the thing.  You are always changing it just a little bit every time you retell the story.

LL

That resonates throughout Calle’s work. Even in TRACES, when the participant witness, or audience, will walk away with the memory of the experience. I love that.

MM

Lisa, is there anything about TRACES that lingers with you?

LC

One thing I love about TRACES is its silliness. It is very easy to take conceptual art and keep it obtuse, precious, and smart. I just am really happy when smart art can get made that also doesn’t erase fun and joy. That is a radical act in itself these days.▪︎

Experience Wax Factory: TRACES (after Sophie Calle) for yourself at the Walker from Oct 28–Nov 11, 2024