Erika Fischer-Lichte: A Comparative Analysis

Both Erika Fischer-Lichte and Richard Schechner recognise the power of performance as a means of transformation through emergent phenomena. Fischer-Lichte argues that any performative turn might be interpreted by an “emergent moment” (9) that provokes a new one. Relating to this, Schechner evokes a change in status led by a performative process and also expresses that: “[performance] opens up enough time in the right place for the exchange to take, be made: it is liminal, a fluid mid-point between two fixed structures.” (1988: 132). Besides this, the author also refers a particular example that serves our purpose for this paper. Schechner writes: “By means of performance the basic relationship - one might say the fundamental relationship

Punk scene was not about music, but about showing (a)political positions. As opposed to krautrock scene, where looks were never a concern (exception being Kraftwerk), punk scene’s dress code was already a way of showing where they stood facing the constraints imposed by society. Probably the most extremist way of shocking others was the use of swastikas attached to their clothes trying to defy the eldest, who were still stuck in germanophobia period. Invoking the will for a materialisation of a real change of patterns, punk scene exploded simultaneously in UK, West Germany and even East Germany proved to be (sub)culturally alive. After the dormant presence of what was a powerful sonic revolution, punk groups erupted. Dressed in metal and leather, they demanded a not-so-silent revolution. Once again:

Minority discourse sets the act of emergence in the antagonistic in-between of image and sign, the accumulative and the adjunct, presence and proxy. ... Minority discourse acknowledges the status of national culture - and the people - as a contentious, performative space of the perplexity of the living in the midst of the pedagogical representations of the fullness of life. ... The discourse of the minority reveals the insurmountable ambivalence that structures the equivocal movement of historical time. (Bhabha, ——: