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PERFORMART?

by John Fenn

So one of the great things about the new Cyberage is that you get to make up words, and spell them just the way you want. I'm stubbornly sticking to website and webpage as single words and reserve the right to hang my "cyber" as an un-hyphenated prefix or postfix on any word I choose. Bill Safire, take a hike. I'll create the language, you keep track of it, OK?

So I needed a new word for what I do. Hereby and heretofore I do christen and launch the word PERFORMART.

Performart is when a human being presents, events, actions, language, or music for an audience gathered for their entertainment and/or edification.

There. It's that simple. But you ain't getting of that easy, no way.

Performart comes in two flavors - textual and non-textual. Music, dance, circus arts and acrobatics, mime etc. are non-textual. Theater, movies, videos, happenings, street theater, lectures, playwrighting, directing, cinematography, acting are all textual. This is to say, textual performart, if not totally driven by language, at least utilizes language as a strong component.

OK, you're smart. You ask, "What about a singer who sings songs? Textual? Non-textual?"

I guess a singer is a performartist situated between the textual and non-textual. Hey, "only the stars are perfek" (Moonstruck quote, trivia buffs).

Of course, now, as I spin this stuff out, I am not involved in performart - nor are novelists, my dear friends the poets, or baseball stars. Athletic figures' primary purpose is not to perform for an audience but to win the game. It just happens that a lot of folks like to watch.

Lawyers are not performartists - although they sure can demonstrate acting skills. The jury is not an audience gathered for entertainment and or edification, but assembled to get information and make a decision.

Newscasters are performartists, though. Talk show hosts can get in under the tent.

Well, so it goes.

Why am I doing this? Well, in the first place, I have often been called a writer or an author. The fact is, I'm neither (except when I'm expounding in this webpage). I'm a performartist. The texts I generate have vastly different needs of form, diction and content than I fulfill than when I write this or if I were writing a novel.

Secondly, because I write for film, video and theater, give lectures and will, at the drop of an olive in a martini glass, "perform" silly stories from my past for any audience that has the misfortune of being captive, I need some sort of catch-all term for what I do.

Hence, Performart.