Documental performativo / Performative Documentary Performative documentaries (which appeared in the 1980s and ‘90s) privilege subjective narration and self-reflexive experience as the film-maker interacts or negotiates with people being filmed. Cinematic enunciation is interrupted by oral testimonies providing an element of relational interplay which challenges authorial control/authority as constructed in dominant documentary forms.
Paris Is Burning (EUA) Jennie Livingston, 1990 Paris Is Burning is a 1990 documentary film directed by Jennie Livingston. Filmed in the mid-to-late 1980s, it chronicles the ball culture of New York City and the African American, Latino, gay and transgender communities involved in it. In the film the elaborately-structured Ball competitions are shown in all their intricacy as parodies of normative aesthetics- from clothing to walking in fashion shows- which denaturalised hetero-normative masculinity or femininity, and drag is presented as a complex performance of gender, class and race, in which one can express one's identity, desires and aspirations along many dimensions. The film depicts people with different gender identities or communities and their different forms of expression. It also explores how its subjects dealt with the adversity of racism, homophobia, AIDS and poverty.
re.act.feminism. A Performing Archive , A continually expanding, temporary and living performance archive travelling through six European countries from 2011 to 2013. It presents feminist, gender-critical and queer performance art by over 120 artists and artist collectives from the 1960s to the beginning of the 1980s, as well as contemporary positions.
Revolutionary Love: I am Your Worst Fear, I am Your Best Fantasy. Sharon Hayes (USA), 2008, New York artist Sharon Hayes mounted two large-scale public performances titled Revolutionary Love 1: I Am Your Worst Fear and Revolutionary Love 2: I Am Your Best Fantasy at both the Republican and Democratic national conventions in 2008. On each occasion groups of approximately 70-100 people recited texts about love, politics, gay power, and gay liberation, written by Hayes. Drawing on both the history of the Gay Liberation movement, which forged a new and deep relationship between love and politics, and the political climate at a time when the war in Iraq figured as a central element in the Presidential campaign, Hayes’ work challenged simplistic oppositions between love and war. Conflating grassroots political activism, performance art, queer theory, and national politics, Hayes’ two public performances included speakers drawn from the gay, lesbian, and transgendered community.
