The Ghosts of Versailles

An important shift occurred in the work of many analysts of performance in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a shift suggested by the title and the main argument of a book appearing at that time, Gerald Hinkle's 1979 Art as Event. Hinkle argued that critical understanding of the performing arts had been hindered by the application to them of strategies evolved in arts such as literature and painting, where temporal placement and duration were not so central a part of the experience. Instead of attempting to analyse a phenomenon like a theatrical performance as an art object, Hinkle suggested, it should rather be considered as an event, a shift in orientation that not only places more emphasis on the working out of the performance in a temporal dimension, but also on the embedding of the entire experience in a particular historical and cultural moment which normally operates on a more direct and conscious fashion in both the creative and the receptive processes than it does in such arts as literature and painting.