Editorial: On mundane performance

We are inundated with mundanity. We can find the mundane in every moment or action of life that seems not worthy of examination, which is to say a significant portion of our time is spent with and among the mundane. The study of the mundane is itself mundane as it requires that we repeat and return those otherwise overlooked hourly, daily, weekly, monthly actions that fill up but nevertheless frequently sustain and maintain our lives. The mundane as a field of study and as performance calls for the reconsideration of the ways that we perform or don’t perform and the ways we do either in middling fashions. Most times, for instance, we actually perform the mundane without consciously knowing or deciding it, which perhaps ascribes to the mundane a kind of loss of control, automation and repetition. But if we actively try to be mundane, does our success or failure make the attempt more or less mundane?

At the same time, many of our mundane activities are determined by social norms and the various expectations of day-to-day living, the basic preservation of ourselves, our families, friends, work and life. We could say that the mundane is a bit like breathing. Even as we might not notice it all the time, we need it in order to survive. Because the mundane is often associated with our habits and unquestioned patterns, it is when it is disrupted that mundanity actually emerges and is made observable through its absence. That is, the mundane is always with us and can vary in its timbre and vibrancy yet often remains elusive.

The notions of the everyday and the mundane are often overlapped as having the same meaning. In this issue, a clearer distinction is sought between the concept of the mundane and the broader notions associated with the performance of otherwise pedestrian life. The motivation of this endeavour is that while the everyday has been well examined within the humanities, and performance studies has turned to disciplines such as sociology and anthropology for such studies, the mundane, we find, can be set somewhat separately. While the everyday is useful in considering performance or ‘twicebehaved behavior’ (Schechner 2017: 36) as the longstanding definition has it, the mundane perhaps takes the everyday to another level of (in)significance.

Indeed, common dictionaries define the mundane as ‘lacking interest or excitement; dull’. This differentiation underscores the nuanced qualities of the mundane, emphasizing its characteristic banality, routine and mediocrity as separate from the multifaceted dynamics encompassed within the broader framework of everyday life.

Studying the mundane presents a paradox wherein that which is truly so unexceptional as to be unremarkable, once examined (and remarked upon), is made notable and no longer mundane. The mundane surrounds us but it recedes as we begin to notice it. Chasing after it is difficult even as we have at times tried to perform the mundane in order to conjure more normal times. We are cognizant, for instance, of the fact that, even among the most extraordinary events of the past few years, the mundane came to the fore more regularly both in its absence and as we tried to return to some form of ‘normal’ or to construct a ‘new normal’. The mundane, as an often-invisible structure to our lives and performative practices, has a connective, bonding quality that spreads throughout the nexus of everydayness. This often becomes evident in art about mundane life wherein that which is so ordinary so as to be regularly ignored becomes pronounced once examined.

In engaging the mundane, artists and scholars demonstrate how performance can illuminate the significance of seemingly trivial actions. As Alan Read reminds us, ‘theatre poaches on everyday life for its content, relationships, humour, surprise, shock, intimacy and voyeurism’ (1995: 47). Similarly, art draws on and emphasizes the day-to-day rituals and activities that undergird the more spectacular or otherwise meaningful moments and relations. For instance, Chantal Akerman’s films and installations involve the enactment of everyday tasks, focusing especially on the ordinariness of women’s lives, while Yvonne Rainer’s ‘No Manifesto’ appears as a set of instructions toward ordinaryness and away from showy theatricality – ‘No to spectacle. No to virtuosity … No to Style’ (2015 [1965]). Thinking with those daily conventions and routines and away from some cliches of science fiction and fantasy writing, Martine Syms envisions the possibilities for mundanity in ‘The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto’ (2015). The manifesto offers ‘a new framework for black diasporic artistic production’ and asserts a recognition for ‘the sense that the rituals and inconsistencies of daily life are compelling, dynamic, and utterly strange’, while it depicts a future built on ordinary experiences in a society grappling with racial injustice. Bruce Nauman’s work often involves performing mundane tasks or disrupting them. In his Days installation from 2009, for instance, he ‘fills a gallery with a double row of speakers, which emit a surge of voices reciting the days of the week out of order’ and his 16 mm film piece Two Balls between the Floor and Ceiling with Changing Rhythms (1967–8) features the artist performing various mundane tasks. Taylor Walsh suggests that ‘by tampering with the routine progression from one day to the next, he disrupts the conventions by which we mark the passage of time’ (2018).

The (re)performance of the mundane is itself at the heart of many critiques of mundanity. Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975) is an artwork (cover page) whereby the artist highlights unexpected nuances emerging from the female body when routine actions are performed in the kitchen. In this work, Rosler performs her supposed ‘duties’ as a housewife, adding a pinch of irony and exaggeration in her gestures. The intentional excess in Rosler’s gestures is enough to act as a critique upon stereotypes around women’s role in society. In this alphabet of kitchen implements, states Rosler, ‘when the woman speaks, she names her own oppression.’ Rosler’s performance utilizes the well-known everydayness and its patterns and transforms it to meet her expressive aims. In doing so, mundane tasks that usually remain unnoticed are pulled from their boring daily routine and transformed into poignant critique.

This issue of Performance Research presents wide-ranging and nuanced explorations of the role of the mundane in day-to-day performance, as well as its potential as a source of inspiration and contrast for artistic performances. We are indebted to those in and outside of theatre and performance studies who have embarked on such work previously. For instance, in sociology, Wayne Brekhus’s ‘Mundane Manifesto’ argues that

1) the marked (or extraordinary) draws disproportionate attention in relation to its prevalence, while the unmarked (or ordinary) is overlooked despite its pervasiveness in social life; 2) focusing on the extraordinary reproduces stereotypes of social life and distorts our understanding of reality; and 3) the unmarked is more consequential, more important and more interesting than it appears while the extraordinary is more inconsequential, more trivial, and more boring than it initially appears. (Brekhus 2000)

The manifesto builds on work previously published by Brekhus (1998) and was included in the inaugural issue of the Journal of Mundane Behavior, a journal that ran from 2000 to 2004 and is now archived on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. The attention to the ‘unmarked’ of course will resonate with performance studies scholars, it being one of the keywords in the title of Peggy Phelan’s essential work for the field (1996). More recently, Ju Yon Kim offers the term the racial mundane to describe the ways that race is routinely charged with spectacle. As Kim argues ‘the displacement of quotidian behaviors from anonymity into public scrutiny more broadly has played a crucial role in shaping Asian American racial formation’ (2015: 3), and ‘whether on the stage, in a magazine article, or in a government report – this spectacle only gives the illusion of representing the quotidian experiences of those who are racialized’ (14). Jacob Gallagher-Ross’s Theaters of the Everyday: Aesthetic democracy on the American stage invites us to consider the ways that a practiced attention to everyday interactions and experiences opened new approaches for US theatre making and viewing. Recently, Evelyn O’Malley, Cathy Turner and Giselle Garcia posited the need for a ‘mundane theatre’ that relies on the dictionary definition of the term that relates it to and of the earth. Mundane theatre for them is ‘grounded by earth and rediscovering of place, expressive of corporeal interconnectedness, engaged with materiality and revealing earth as that which remains paradoxically concealed’ (2022). Such work opens additional possibilities, not only for examining mundane performance but for identifying the ways the mundane is leveraged and develops ways of thinking and performing.

While the articles offer explanations and analyses of historic and contemporary performances of the mundane, they are not solely concerned with exposition or recounting various instances of mundanity. The issue rather aims to define and explore the applications of the notion of the mundane in aesthetics, the humanities and performance, emphasizing the importance of not giving in to simplistic notions of the mundane. Instead, the authors are interested in both reestablishing and reimagining the conceptual milieu within which the mundane has been operating in the history of art and performance, inventing new modes of engaging with the concept in theory and practice.

The issue includes discussions of different performance genres and the mundane at the intersections of performance with other disciplines including philosophy, sociology and science. Ranjana Dave, Bhargav Rani and Zhen Zhang each examine the politics of the mundane and the ways that idleness and rest can be considered as forms of resistance. Dave’s article ‘Reading rest as resistance' offers an insightful analysis of the work and philosophy of artists like Johar, Rao, and D’Souza, while Bhargav Rani delves into the radical aspects of idleness in ‘Performing heroic laziness: Historical consciousness and everyday life in the Thalua Club of Banaras.’ Bindi Kang’s contribution focuses on the politics of the mundane by examining video blogs from female migrant workers to discuss the (re)presentation of the everyday. Kang focuses on the transformation of the quotidian and explores the interplay between the extraordinary and the monotonous within the context of everyday performance. Similarly, Zhen Zhang situates his article ‘Walking out of the mundane’ in the reality of contemporary China and in the ways the artists of the post- 80s generation make efforts to break away from the mundane and to reach the limits of an emancipatory potential.

In ‘Twelve (queer) labours', Alan Parker grapples with questions of mundane queerness, both aesthetically and formally. Jessica Nakamura’s contribution raises ethical inquiries related to domesticity and the mundane, while Janelle Reinelt draws on her own practice and daily experience in ‘Zen tea practice as mundane performance’. Brandon Woolf offers a performance score for mundanity with ‘T.MUDD: A hyper-caffeinated performance-meditation on messianic themes’, including sheet music for the mundane performance. Ellen Redling explores the intersection of modern dating and performance, navigating the boundary between the mundane and the exceptional.

The issue continues with the discussion of different performance genres including interactive and immersive theatre. Teri Howson-Griffiths examines ‘Beyond spectacle: Inadvertent and intentional use of the mundane in immersive theatres’ to critically address the divergence from traditional associations of the mundane within immersive theatrical praxis and offer concise examples of mundanity within spectacular settings. Tim Reid’s ‘Clods, compost and the buoyancy of clowns’ offers insights into the relationship between contemporary circus and performance.

The issue concludes with the analysis of the intersection of performance with other disciplines including philosophy, sociology and science. Joanna Ruth Evans examines categories of the mundane alongside music and art bridging philosophy and musical improvisation. Rebecca Collins investigates the scientific term of ‘indeterminacy in relation to the mundane’ in the article ‘On listening in to the scientific mundane: Parameters for understanding uncertainty and political indeterminacy’, and Gaspar’s and Zapparova’s artist pages invites readers to embark on a mesmerizing auditory journey through the mundane, accompanied by a different genre – that of photography.

This issue on the mundane grew out of collaborative efforts and approaches affiliated with the ‘Ends’ initiative,¹ which is a loose affiliation of scholars and artists drawn together at the intersections of collaborative scholarly practices, posthuman performance, and an increasingly shared sense of finitude (Bharucha et al. 2022). For the editors, the notion of studying the mundane amid this constellation emerged from a series of workshops using methodologies developed through the Ends initiative and related to a project involving the co-authoring of a book with fifteen collaborators from around the world (Ambayec et al. 2024). Our work in editing this issue was enhanced by the generous contributions of Kristen Lewis, who was an essential part of the team during the project’s nascent stages as we conceptualized the issue and developed our own approach to collaborative editing. As some of us have considered elsewhere (Brown et al. 2021, Chua et al. 2021), some of the essential aspects of collaboration, editing and performance-making together are in fact the most mundane.

In light of this, throughout the issue the reader will find brief pieces representing mundane life in the co-created and co-curated ‘Everywhere, all the time, 3:42: Collaborative encounters with the mundane’. Ranging from the descriptive to the poetic to the found or discovered, these pieces ask the reader to engage and re-engage with mundanity as they read. The work emerged through a series of workshops, the creation of performance scores, and the collaborative development of the piece’s form and its content. Drawn from mundane experiences and performances observed and developed by a dozen authors situated in various parts of the world, the incessant performance of mundanity is meant to remind us of how pervasive the mundane actually is and how overlooked it necessarily can be. Overall, we hope this issue of Performance Research provides multiple openings to the mundanity that surrounds us and encourages new perspectives on the role of the mundane in performance. We don’t know that we have resolved the apparent paradox of the mundane as we believe the articles and artistic work here by the various contributors is rather profound, but we know mundanity is not far away as we set down the issue and return to those overlooked daily performances that make up our lives.

Notes

1 More at https://performingends.com.