THE PRESSURE TO PERFORM

THE PRESSURE TO PERFORM is a participatory performance that focuses on the pressure to perform in our society, linked to the expectations we have of what happens on a theatre stage.

In our daily lives, we have many expectations about how much and when we are supposed to perform. It is a natural part of working life that one is measured by one’s performance and expected to deliver something—to live up to certain expectations that you don´t always fully know or understand.

As audience members, we have high expectations of what we are going to experience on stage in a Theatre. Here, the pressure to perform is high from the very second the lights go up. This is something we fundamentally work with in theatre. We know that the pressure is there, and we try to live up to it. But we also create the framework ourselves. We decide the premise of the performance, and in that way we can, to some extent, control what is expected. By adjusting the framework, we can adjust the expectations of what will happen.

Imagine if we could do the same in our everyday lives. Few people probably feel that they can. Many experience an unreasonable pressure to perform in the modern competitive society we live in, where someone is always ready to take over if we fail to meet those expectations.

What does this do to us as human beings? When and how does the pressure to perform become too great? And how can we create better frameworks for our social lives?

The performance is designed as a scenic laboratory, where the audience alternates between being performers and spectators, guided through wireless headphones by the two performers: Daniel Norback and Erik Pold.

Goffman’s Sociological Perspective

The performance takes its starting point in Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman’s book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life from 1959. Goffman is known for using the functions and concepts of theatre as metaphors for understanding human beings in social contexts. Among other things, he describes how we take on certain roles to create or “frame” the contexts we are part of. We build an understanding of these contexts through our way of performing—both in what we say and how we say it.

This sociological perspective is brought into the theatre space in the form of “meta-theatre.”