To be outside is to be between. The outside is inside in the sense that it is always in-between points of stasis, points of rest, points of arrest—between the institutions, subjectivities, categories, and other cultural structures that arrest movement, sense, potentiality, the wild.

What we must take great care in expressing is that the in-between is not subordinate to the terms that it is purportedly between. The between is not subordinate to points. Rather, to be between is to be moving and to be virtual. It is potential, change, and openness to the future. Between—the middle—is becoming, process. The middle is the only place to start for performance, because the constituents of performance—bodies, sensations, affects, arts, encounters—are always in spaces of movement, residing nomadically as inhabitants of vague, liminal spaces. Both performances are performances from a between: jokering mines the space between decorum and liberation; Raikes’ performance mines spaces between performers and audiences, wholeness and flux, and containment and dwelling.

A between is not some void separating two objects. It is not a position, a point, or a location. As Brian Massumi puts it, “the in-between, as such, is not a middling being but rather a being of the middle—the being of a relation” (70). Relations are external to their terms. They are in excess of points. A relation is a vague space—a virtual opening—that is ontologically distinct from whatever points are being related. Massumi explains that such an ontological distinction “is in fact an indispensable step toward conceptualizing change as anything more or other than negation, deviation, rupture, or subversion” (70). Operations like negation and subversion may dislodge the relative ordering of terms in signification, but they don’t provide a new set of terms.

An ontology of the middle is thus an ontology of change and movement. It is the constant introduction of something more, new, unexpected. An ontology of the middle—the between—for performance is the transformative potential of performance, the surprise of the event. To return to Deleuze and Guattari, “Between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle” (25). No matter the duration or breadth of a performance, look for the moments of movement. Look for the moments when things get quick. Be open to the surprise; it just may carry you away. Be careful, though, or you might miss it.