THE PERFORMER

A professor of sociology and the humanities investigates many forms of performance, from theatrical to political.

Sennett, who began his latest book as right-wing demagogues came to power, notes that the most distressing of them was Trump, whose “malign performances...draw on the same materials of expression as do prayers, Bach cantatas or the ballets of George Balanchine.” By comparison, he cites a Roman god and states that “art made in the good spirit of Janus focuses on process rather than a finished and fixed product.” Drawing on extensive research and his experience as a cello player, Sennett “considers the unsettling, ambiguous, dangerous powers of performed expression.” In these far-ranging pieces, the author touches on the importance of ritual; cites Diderot’s The Paradox of Acting in stating that “the less deeply a performer feels, the more they can make an audience feel”; notes the troubling phenomenon of dramatized violence that is “larger than life,” like the ridiculous outfits people wore during the storming of the U.S. Capitol, which “can be accepted, and enjoyed,” thus inuring people to a tragedy’s severity; details the ways in which demagogues manipulate audiences by “playing on their hurt”; and shows how expertise at staging, as with Bayard Rustin and the 1963 March on Washington, can be “a challenge to power.” Sennett’s examples are so wide-ranging—from commedia dell’arte to Noh theater, Hannah Arendt to Merce Cunningham—that he sometimes obscures his central thesis, but that doesn’t diminish the power of much of the text. Many details are unforgettable, as when he writes that a problem in the early days of enclosed theaters is that they stank: “People bought chicken wings and sausages from roving vendors, and peed in the plentiful pissoirs located in the corridors.”

An engaging if overstuffed work that describes the tools performers use to create a lasting effect.