The performance of Last Words: a play of relational aesthetics

ABSTRACT

This essay frames the Last Words’ script and how an audience participates in the performance to create meaning and enhance relational aesthetics. I use a second-person narrative to focus on the audience, both as the subject and the play’s content, and to demonstrate the performance indeterminacy of the experience. I present the author as an equal audience member rather than from an authoritarian perspective (Gesuato) to help consider how an audience participates in making meaning. Finally, through Last Words, I posit the structure I used to create the script can be applied to various epistolatory documents.

KEYWORDS:

• Audience
• absence
• interactivity
• relational aesthetics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Full disclosure, I was inspired by the Irish revolutionary letters written in 1916 while crafting this script. Although a significant and meaningful battle by the Irish against the British to establish a free country, own land, and choose their own government, this is not a performance about the Irish 1916 revolt at Easter. The lack of specific signifiers in the script of the Easter uprising is meant to purposefully interrogate the absence of characters and heighten the relational aesthetics, interactivity, and the form of the performance. (The letters are available in the public domain and published by the Irish government in Last Words: Letters and Statements of the Leaders Executed After the Rising at Easter 1916 (Mac Lochlainn)). I cite in the script the pages from the Irish government’s collection of letters in Last Words.