Conclusion: These Confessional Times (P.157 - 172)

• P. 157 The performance of personal narratives might bring hidden, denied or marginalised experiences into the spotlight, proposing other possible life paths. bearing witness and giving testimony to others' life-stories might serve to make more complex our historical knowledge or bring the past into the present as a means to inform our futures.
• Devising a performance out of the material of personal experience might enable new insights into the relationship between experience and structures of power, between identity and its formation (and reformation. Performing the personal in public might allow a connection between the performer and the spectator, encouraging the formation of a community or prompting discussion, dialogue and debate. [Potential of devising autobiographical performance]
• P.162 The work of autobiographical performance is to explore (question, reveal) the relationship between the personal and the political , engaging with and theorising the discursive construction of selves and experience. The personal has political purchase when its place in history and culture is examines, when is ontology is dissected rather than taken as a given, when the epistemology of experience is plotted.
• P.167 Throughout Autobiography and Performance I have made a great deal of the fact that performance enables a live encounter. Many mass mediated works often incorporate live elements, while developments in broadcast technology have meant the inclusion of moments of interactive involvement form the views, making the mediated event increasingly immediate. The face that a performance -any performance- is live is no guarantee of its political impact, and liveness by an audience at a live event and feel completely isolated and alienated from the performer and other spectators. On the other hand, one can be part of an audience at a recorded event and feel part of a community in those moments when there is shared recognition (spontaneous cheering and applause at the cinema comes to mind).
• The 'liveness' of performance that supposedly sets it apart from other forms is to be found in the shared time and space of performer and spectator. Admittedly, the potential for the performer to sense, in the moment, and respond to the spectators' responses is a unique feature of live performance. Again, though, this feature has to be actively pressed into service and made to work and it demands that the performer takes a certain risk by actually being in each unique moment of liveness and also in this shared space.
  

Heddon, D. (2008). Autobiography and Performance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.