shuang's itp jorney

In Performance Practice as a Site of Opposition, bell hooks addresses performance as "organic resistance", especially African American performance. She points out the gap between survival (masking) and ritual play (creating art) in African American performance and believes that as the ramification of this capitalist white-supremacist society the two divergent aspects of performance have intertwined into the African American performance.

 

Performance can become an organic resistance because of its accessibility (least material, relying on no physical instrument nor any demanding environment.) Both symbolically and literally, the performers, often when silenced or oppressed, are claiming voices. She also sheds light on how it is a shame that the silenced performers have to communicate via the oppressor's tongue, though she does credit part of the movement for racial uplift to the 19th-century black bourgeois culture. [Shouldn't it be the oppressor's responsibility to initiate the act of transgressing the boundaries and making amends? It is, however, very tricky with identity politics, etc.]

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Performance is engagement that requires dialogue and reciprocity. But maybe because performance serves as forces/means for resistance, hook implies sometimes performance needs to overextend its responsibility to reach a larger mass. In many cases, this extension is made upon the sacrifice of its live/present/dialogic nature. [As technologies enable the performers to present the performance in the circulation of representations of representations better and better, is it more reasonable for a performer to sacrifice performance's live and dialogic nature in exchange for the astronomical quantifiable influence, or does it make the circulated product something other than the original form of organic resistance?]

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I especially appreciate how hooks also delineates performances as a form of collective recovery. The active narrative in the same context is very inviting and confident. While this active tone ends the passage on performance's undeniable radical potential, I am doubting how performers should retain and realise the radical potential. Looking back at the two divergent aspects of African American performance: survival and rituals, the two wrenching forces defined African American performance. While addressing the importance of black space, my doubts on performance's radical potential apply to most minority groups. Maybe on top of the primary survival aspect, in our capitalist society, the marketability of performance is playing a heavier and heavier role which could greatly dilute the radical power. When the mass influence becomes a euphemism for income, would the performers hold their ground on creating rituals？