Rather, they dispense information like rods and wheels in a Tinkertoy construction of psychology, and they use the actors' performances as a kind of drapery with which to fill it out.
Since classical music performance serves as a kind of aural museum for canonical scores, why can't it also serve as a living museum for performance styles?
"The real Fuller is a lively, savvy, humorous woman," Hanke said, "while Parker's performance presents her as a kind of sitcom moron for the first part of the film and a rather judgmental and wholly unpleasant character in her later scenes".
Dilworth (2005b) objects that Davies's basic contention to the effect that works are action tokens is incompatible with his claim that works, conceived of as a particular generative performance, have a kind of "modal flexibility," which means that the same work could have had different properties (e.g., it could have been created a few minutes earlier or later).
Each performance becomes a kind of scavenger hunt as skaters go from jumps to spins to footwork, and back to jumps, trying to score enough points to win.
As with many theatrical adolescents, performance was a kind of salvation; Menzel may have been a misfit elsewhere, but warbling "Sunrise, Sunset" with a six-man band behind her the world made sense.
That she has always been defined in terms of the men in her life goes a long way toward explaining Ms. Guinness's reinvention of herself roughly a decade ago as a kind of performance artist whose tool kit is her wardrobe.
At the heart of it is a full-fledged, richly detailed performance from Lupita Nyong'o as a kind of universal Mother Courage of the shanties.
Shaw's performance, which played the king as a kind of gleefully self-satisfied adolescent, has more than a little ham in it, too.
The notion of art making as a kind of performance will be overt, of course, when Performa 11, the fourth incarnation of RoseLee Goldberg's innovative "visual art performance biennial" rolls around for three weeks starting Nov. 1.
