La grâce peut-elle être performative ? Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church (2009-2017) de Trajal Harrell ou la grâce après le « tournant performatif »

Abstract

Is grace still relevant for the contemporary performing arts? To answer this question, this article focuses on the historical opposition between grace and affectation. It highlights the theoretical trajectory of these concepts, which have been associated respectively with authenticity and innocence, and with pretense and theatricality. Their opposition is superimposed on another, that between man, perceived as neutral, pure and true, and woman, opaque, deceptive and volatile. The mention of the notion of grace in a seminal article by Michael Fried in the 1960s allows us to pinpoint the meanings with which grace and affectation were imbued in the mid-twentieth century in the art world. A debate seems to have emerged between, on the one hand, an essentialist conception of grace understood as presence by Fried, as well as some performance artists and postmodern dancers, and, on the other hand, the author Susan Sontag and her reflections on camp – which is a manifestation of theatricality, even affectation – and the irrelevance of the modern quest for presence. It would seem that while grace was related to the performative in performance art, it has undergone, like performativity itself, a transformation at the dawn of the twenty-first century, which has reconfigured its opposition to affectation. Trajal Harrell’s work contributes to this movement by staging an over-theatricality that exhausts the necessity of grace. This article concludes that, after the “performative turn,” grace still carries with it some traditional dynamics such as seduction and innocence, which are subverted with distancing strategies like exacerbation, parody and quotation; strategies associated to affectation, which becomes a source of pleasure for the spectator. The author coins the notion of grace of affectation, which finds echoes in several contemporary aesthetic discourses on theater and cinema.