In terms of their effect on their audiences, performance artworks can be assigned to three categories: Evocative, INvocative, and PROvocative. Evocative performances indicate, even depict, events and situations exterior to the actual experience of the performance. Traditional narrative theater fails unter the "evocative" rubric, as does any other presentation - no matter how radically formulated which in any way simulates circumstances other than that of the performance itself. Invocative performances follow or build on more-or-less traditional ceremonial patterns of action. As such they are in effect rituals, invoking supra-mortal forces.
Few art or theater performances today actually appeal to deitics, or set one in a mood to contemplate universal spiritual matters, the way a Catholic High Mass or Buddhist monk's chanting does; but the ersatz ceremonies of Hermann Nitsch's Orgien-Mysterien Theater, for instance, or the suspension of temporal apperception realize in La-Monte Young's music, achieve the same elevated focus and, by inference, sense of deistic appeal. Provocative performances are spectacles, at most incidentally associative or ritualized. Spectacles provoke simple, even childlike passions - joy, excitement, wonder, fear - which can be (but are not necessarily) harnessed to adult feelings (reverence, patriotism, nostalgia, aesthetic satisfaction). Firework displays and musical bands marching in parade engage us in such simple provocation.
The element of pure play, always an important component in her work, has now become paramount. Some of the segments of "AE Bla Bla Bla" provoke viewers themselves to interact playfully, while others entertain through the cleverness of Schloss' own play.
