Are All Performers Vampires?: Performance, Energy, Feeding and Exchange (Exploratory Working Paper for Eric Bogosian Is a Real Vampire and So Can You: A 1990s-Style Unauthorized Biography)

Performance studies and real vampire literature both develop accounts of exchange between bodies. Theorizing on performance tends to conceptualize its object of study within an event, and the vampire literature tends to center the self. They converge on a shared vocabulary of energy as relational and potentially transformative.A point of intersection is offered in Michelle Belanger’s The Vampire Codex (2000) with its observation that people with what the text describes as latent vampiric potential may be drawn toward the performing arts. This raises a potentially provocative question: Are all performers vampires? This is not in an ontological sense which is outside the scope of this project, but in a discursive sense that both bodies of literature converge on recurring accounts of energetic exchange. Both vampires and performers are described in terms of energetic economies. What might be critically productive about analyzing the points of convergence and friction between performance and vampires? This exploratory working paper brings selected performance studies scholarship into conversation with primary sources produced by vampire practitioners. It first considers the differing conceptual orientations of the two bodies of literature. Then it examines theorizing on energetic circulation in performance studies alongside vampire practitioner discussions of feeding and exchange. Particular attention is given to how each discourse conceptualizes self, relationality and social transformation. Rather than proposing an equivalence or radical separation of performance and vampires, these preliminary readings identify questions for further comparative discourse analysis. The central argument is: while not all performers can be said to be vampires in the terms supplied by the vampire literature, performance can function as a vampire feeding technology in overlapping conceptual language.