Risk in Performance: Facing the Future

Abstract

While modern rational thinking has developed complex methods for calculating and managing risk, the better forecast and prepare for the future, certain modern performance practices have embraced the element of risk. In this article I interrogate this phenomenon, offering a distinction between risk-taking in modernist and postmodernist performance. Whereas in the former risk serves to transcend the representational aspects of performance, in the later it is banalized, revealing its inevitability in both performance situations and everyday life.