One Acts 41 One Acts: Reductive Performances Make a Difference BY YELENA GLUZMAN Abstract Since the twentieth century, the dominant understanding of the operational basis of a performance has been located in the differentiation between the performer and the spectator. As Jacques Rancière points out in The Emancipated Spectator, this differentiation can posit spectators as active or passive, oppressive or oppressed, as long as difference remained. This ambiguous differentiation leads to a seeming impasse in the analysis of how a performance system operates. Four intentionally reductive performance works, conceived by the author as a series of One Acts, are introduced in the context of this audience/performer dilemma. One Acts, performances in which the content of the work consists of one performed action, are further characterized by the fact that the performances are enacted and received by the spectators themselves. Sociologist Niklas Luhmann adapted the notion of autopoieisis and applied it to various social systems, describing these systems as operationally closed, distinct from a larger environment which can interact with the system only by becoming part of the internal language of that system. Significantly, in Luhmann’s paradigm, humans are always relegated to the environment, and are not constitutive elements of the system itself. Drawing on Luhmann’s theory, this paper proposes locating a performance’s operative structure in the difference between a performative action and its environment, rather than the difference between a performer and spectator. The four One Acts described here (Give and Take, M.E.A.T., Free Family Portraits, and The Emancipated Spectator) are framed by this endeavor. The purpose of this paper is to introduce four original performance works (Give and Take, M.E.A.T., Free Family Portraits, and The Emancipated Spectator) and to position these works within a historical and theoretical framework focusing on the notion of differentiation as it has been used to describe theatre events. 1 To frame this 1 Differentiating theatrical elements in an attempt to define or understand theatre has depended on dominant trends, which have shifted considerably over the past few hundred years. Whereas pre- twentieth century theatre practices were largely concerned with aesthetic issues (including questions of Spirit, pedagogy, and professional technique), twentieth century theatre (and overwhelmingly so post- 1960) has been more concerned with political issues (centred around problems of community, agency, and power). So, though a good deal of theatre in 1920s-1940s was political in intent (including the works of Brecht and the Federal Theatre) it presupposed a stable relationship between the performers (whose actions within a symbolic – i.e. theatrical – structure agitated the spectators) and the spectators (who were agitated to later real –i.e. non-symbolic – action). By the 1960’s, it was the differentiation