Modern Dating and Performance: Creative blendings between the mundane and the exceptional

This article explores dating as/in performance, especially regarding the ‘first date’. It shows that modern data-driven Internet/app dating can seem quite mundane and lead to work-like 'burnout', which is most likely why dating-performers such as the infamous 'Tinder Swindler', a male dater who often played the 'role' of an heir to a diamond tycoon on Tinder to defraud women, opted to make the app dating experience more exceptional and 'immersive' – and at the same time dangerous and fraudulent. He thereby arguably responded to a heightened yearning for exceptional, emotional experiences in the face of a growing datafication and rationalization that is in line with current developments in capitalist culture. The article demonstrates that a blended performance of the mundane and the exceptional can work against such extremes of 'burnout' or capitalist exploitation, by giving a voice and agency to those who have not been listened to – or have often been viewed as passive – in the dating process, for instance due to their gender and ethnicity. Theories of the performance of the everyday and of digital everyday performance are employed to enhance the understanding of how such blended pieces work, but it will also be shown that the 'mundane' and the 'exceptional' can take on a multiplicity of meanings in this context, or even resist a fixed meaning altogether at times, in order to counteract simplistic readings or (pre-)conceptions regarding gender and ethnicity. The case studies analysed here – Lían Amaris Sifuentes’ and Luke DuBois' Fashionably Late for the Relationship (2007-8) and Jacob Boehme's Blood on the Dance Floor (2016) – work with feminist and queer-indigenous-HIV-positive dramaturgies to shed light on the dating process, embrace the performance of the mundane, but, as I argue, also work creatively with blendings between the mundane and the exceptional in order to provoke socio-political change.