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Performance Studies is not one-size fits all, but all sizes try to fit in. That is, if you can handle conflict, cope with ambiguity, navigate the incomprehensible, relish the rivalry. —Lois Weaver A STUDENT’S GUIDE TO Performance Studies Performance Studies: A Moving Target A sk any two Performance ...

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Performance Studies is not one-size fits all, but all sizes try to fit in. That is, if you can handle conflict, cope with ambiguity, navigate the incomprehensible, relish the rivalry. —Lois Weaver

A STUDENT’S GUIDE TO

Performance Studies

Performance Studies: A Moving Target

A

sk any two Performance Studies (PS) scholars to describe their field—and you might get three different answers. Some respondents will turn your question into another question. Or they’ll offer an answer as elusive as a Zen-koan. No matter the form, these attempts to describe the emerging field of Performance Studies are provocative, colorful and full of boundless energy. Like the field itself, they resist easy formulation.

Is performance studies a ‘field,’ an ‘area,’ a ‘discipline’? The sidewinder snake moves across the desert floor by contracting and extending itself in a sideways motion. Wherever this beautiful rattlesnake points, it is not going there. Such (in)direction is characteristic of performance studies. This area/field/discipline often plays at what it is not, tricking those who want to fix it, alarming some, amusing others, astounding a few as it side-winds its way across the deserts of academia. —Richard Schechner, New York University

INSIDE • Key Developments in the Field • Questions to Get You Started • Sample Performance Studies Projects • Performance Studies Books, Journals and Academic Programs • Glossary of Terms

I think of Performance Studies…as a hide-out, an after school program for bad boys and girls, a safe house for those who can’t go by the rules. Performance Studies is not one-size fits all, but all sizes try to fit in. That is, if you can handle conflict, cope with ambiguity, navigate the incomprehensible, relish the rivalry. For both artists and academics it can be a place to see yourself reflected, challenged, codified, cracked up, over baked and served up…Isn’t that the point? To question. Is it fun? Is it fashion? Or is it food? Or just further education? —Lois Weaver, School of English and Drama at Queen Mary

Some respondents will even employ animal metaphors to try to clarify the situation.

Perhaps it’s tough to pin PS down precisely because of the ephemeral nature of its subject: performance. If you have ever performed in a school play, an All-State track-race, Easter Mass or your sister’s wedding, you know that the work involved is multi-layered, and—despite all your planning— the result always unpredictable. You also know that the performance does not just consist of ‘The Big Day’ itself, but is comprised of many processes along the way—training, worrying, practicing your instrument, building the set, sending out invitations, and the like. And then there’s the post-production wrap-up, such as attending the trophy ceremony, reading critics’ reviews, heading home for

It is a special kind of rush to set out in pursuit of an object-ofstudy that is as elusive, temporal, and contingent as performance. —Henry Bial

Aunt Sally’s Easter Ham dinner, or—if you’re dutiful!—sending out thank-you notes. To study a performance, then, is to set out to understand a complex event that is in-process, that moves and grows over time. Since the performance itself won’t stand still, trying to capture its essence can likewise be an adventure. It is a special kind of rush to set out in pursuit of an object-of-study that is as elusive, temporal, and contingent as performance. To be a performance studies reader is to work without a net, to walk on hot coals, to search in a dark alley at midnight for a black cat that isn’t there…We are the lovers on Keats’ Grecian urn, eternally in pursuit…For the most part, those of us who consider ourselves ‘performance studies people’ like it that way. —Henry Bial, University of New Mexico

Why the Buzz? If scholars admit they can’t, or won’t, give a clear answer to describe their field, why then such a buzz of excitement about Performance Studies? Precisely because it prefers questions to answers, flux to order, expanding boundaries to fixed limits. Unlike another academic field that might exclude certain questions from its range of purview, Performance Studies is a method of inquiry that posits an underlying dimension of ‘performance’ to all human behavior—from Native American peyote rituals to high-speed NASCAR races to getting dressed in the morning. Because it’s willing to house a vast array of material under one roof, then, PS openly defies the traditional separations that commonly exist between university departments. It celebrates projects that fall between the lines. It puts previously alienated scholars and artists into conversation. It would sooner put up a fight than submit to ready-made categories. Sometimes uncoordinated, often playful, always

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ambitious, PS is an emerging field that is still in the making. Given its responsiveness to ever-new areas of inquiry, you could say it’s a field that wants always to be in the making. Precisely suited to a dynamic world, PS won’t offer Fixed Truths because none of the phenomena it studies appear in black and white either. For many PS scholars, that’s its greatest strength: as Diane Taylor says: ‘I find PS’s very undefinability and complexity reassuring.’ If you’re finding yourself nodding with enthusiasm, if PS’s celebration of intellectual discomfort comforts you, then you may have found an area of like-minded colleagues. You too may be a ‘performance studies person.’ While this brochure won’t try to provide a comprehensive definition of the field, it will update you on basic concepts and vocabulary so that you can join the lively PS conversations unfolding in lecture halls, rehearsal rooms and conference panels throughout the US and world. ‘The one overriding and underlying assumption of performance studies,’ Richard Schechner states, ‘is that the field is wide open.’ Because of its democratic spirit, its invitation to hear many voices—you should feel free to dive right in.

The Subject: Performance One thing can be said for sure: Performance Studies takes performance itself as the object of inquiry. That is, PS scholars do not begin by asking questions of ‘Being.’ They do not inquire into ‘essences’, as if beliefs and social values are natural or God-given. Instead, Performance Studies scholars see all of social reality as constructed by ‘Doings’—actions, behaviors and events. No aspect of human expression—religious, artistic, political, physical, sexual— descends from On High, fixed for eternity. Instead, the various features of a culture’s life are contingent—they are shaped and reshaped in particular

KINDS OF PERFORMANCES (A mere sampling, in no particular order)

• Live theater: Broadway, Off-Broadway, London’s Globe

• The theatricality of everyday life: dress, posture, job uniform, wearing make-up

• Avant-garde performance: 1960s ‘Happenings;’ Off-off Broadway; street performances; Edinburgh fringe festival

• Radio talk shows, nightly news report

• Modern dance, ballet, tap, hip-hop, free style • Opera, orchestra music, musical theater • Film, U.S. Hollywood culture • Religious ritual, rite ceremonies • Sermons/preaching; Gospel music • Sexuality: private sex, drag, pornography, voyeurism • Politics: campaign speeches, State of the Union address, voting • Gang activity and culture • ‘Secular’ ceremonies: sweet 16s, weddings, job promotions, college graduations

• Fairs, Carnivals, Mardi Gras • Magic Shows, Puppet Theater • Popular entertainment: Stand-up comedy, Saturday Night Live; nightclubs • Blue-grass, country music • Dog shows, Bull Fights • Rap music, Spoken word poetry • Graffiti, Bumper-stickers • Internet chat-rooms, blogs, dating websites • Sports/Games, Superbowl Sunday • Pantomime • Civil Rights Marches, Labor strikes • College lecturing, student life on campus

• Military culture, boot camp

Can you think of others?

• Colonialism; fascism (just think of the rallies!); apartheid; democracy; terrorism • Ways of speaking: promising, betting

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• Ways of writing: autobiography, ‘performative writing’

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• Trials and executions, public beheadings, taking hostages on TV • Money markets (Nasdaq, Dow Jones), Wall Street culture • The ‘performance’ of cars: Top 25 Best Buys of 2006; mph and 0-60 times

_______________________________________ _______________________________________ _______________________________________ _______________________________________ _______________________________________ _______________________________________

• Parenting _______________________________________ • Computers, digital animation

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• Animal Rights’ Protests

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• Portrait Photography _______________________________________ …to name only a few. _______________________________________

• Psychotherapy: psychoanalysis, face-to-face talk therapy, role-playing

Performance Studies has a huge appetite for encountering, even inventing, new kinds of performing… —Henry Bial

A Student’s Guide to Performance Studies | 3

TIMELINE OF PS ‘HAPPENINGS’

Key Turning Points in the Development of the Field 1965: Richard Schechner publishes his article ‘Approaches,’ in the Tulane Drama Review. This was his first written articulation that ‘performance is an inclusive category that includes play, games, sports, performance in everyday life, and ritual.’ Many subsequent works developing his ‘Broad Spectrum Approach’ were to come.

1967: Schechner is invited to head the Drama Department at NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

1970: In Paris, Peter Brook, a British director, founded the International Center for Theater Research.

1979: Schechner offered the first course at NYU entitled ‘Performance Theory.’ The original advertisement read: ‘Leading American and world figures in the performance arts and the social sciences will discuss the relationship between social anthropology, psychology, semiotics, and the performing arts. The course examines theater and dance in Western and non-Western cultures, ranging from the avant-garde to tradition, ritual and popular forms.’

1980: The Drama Department at NYU, realizing that it was no longer teaching only ‘drama’ or ‘theater,’ changed its name to Performance

social and historical circumstances, in complex and lengthy processes. By way of analogy, then, a group’s alleged ‘nature’ is actually a series of performances: behaviors which are learned, rehearsed and presented over time. Because these performances are the building blocks that structure our reality, PS scholars work to understand and comment upon how they function—to explain what any given performance does, and how it is doing it. Among other questions, they ask: What circumstances helped create this performance? How is it structured? What relationships does it enable? What effect does it have in a society, and has that function changed over time? The only common denominator of the field, then, is this: Performance Studies scholars study performances. For most of us, the term ‘performance’ brings to mind the performing arts, exceptional affairs that typically unfold under bright lights before a packed house. Just think: ‘The Alvin Ailey performance will be playing at the Kennedy Center for another week.’ Or, ‘Bryn Terfel gave the performance of his career in The Met’s Don Giovanni! And indeed, some PS projects do focus on great theater, dance, or music performances. But PS’s decisive initiative, however, was to disentangle the terms ‘play,’ ‘act,’ ‘acting’ and ‘performance’ from an exclusive association with the performing arts. While everyone agrees that the 2005 Broadway staging of The Glass Menagerie is a performance, PS asserts that a theatrical dimension underlines all human activity. Therefore, any event, action, or behavior can be studied as a performance, and a scholar can investigate the various processes that go into making it up. For instance, PS regards U.S. Senate confirmation hearings, Japanese Zen rock gardening, and Bantu burial rites as performances, each of which is structured by actions and processes that can be analyzed and compared. Sky-diving and Evangelical prayer are

also kinds of performances, as are public executions in North Korea and telling Yiddish jokes. Ditto for the pre-Oscar Awards Red Carpet fashion interviews and Louisiana shrimp-catching. Ultimately, PS asserts that all aspects of everyday life, even the seemingly spontaneous or mundane, reveal a ‘performative’ component—a component that makes them like a performance.* Like good theater scholars, PS scholars investigate any performance’s ‘dramaturgy’—the processes by which it was composed, prepared and presented.

And why study Performance? Cultures are often most fully expressive in their performances. PS scholars hope to comprehend and explain what such behaviors might indicate about the individual, group or culture that enacts them. Richard Schechner has outlined seven functions of performance: • To entertain • To make something that is beautiful • To mark or change identity • To make or foster community • To heal • To teach, persuade or convince • To deal with the sacred and/or the demonic In his book The Future of Ritual, he writes that, in any of these varieties, ‘Performance’s subject [is] transformation: the startling ability of human beings to create themselves, to change, to become—for worse or better—what they ordinarily are not.’ By means of performance, then, something is created, born, changed, celebrated, or ended. It is this transformative site that PS scholars study.

Continued on page 6

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Words with a * can be found in the glossary on page 19.

The sidewinder snake moves across the desert floor by contracting and extending itself in a sideways motion. Wherever this beautiful rattlesnake points, it is not going there. Such (in)direction is characteristic of Performance Studies. — Richard Schechner

The Story Unfolds: Developments in the Field From Ritual to Theater Two American anthropologists, Victor Turner and Richard Schechner, may be considered the ‘fathers’ of the field of Performance Studies (though there are also many important uncles and aunts, and especially children, in the family tree). In his research in the late 1960s, Turner began to see a universal theatrical language at play in the various cultural rituals he studied. He determined that all groups—be it the Ndembu people of north-western Zambia or tree-painters in Medieval China— perform rituals that dramatize and communicate stories about themselves. They all, for example, engage in some form of coming-of-age ceremonies, exorcism rites, or warfare, behaviors which contain a theatrical component and which enable the actor(s) to achieve a change in stature, manage crisis or give birth to a new state of affairs. Turner noted that such rites tend to occur in a ‘liminal’* space of heightened intensity separate from routine life, much like a dramatic theater performance. Given that these ritual acts exhibit many of the same means of expression employed on a theater stage, Turner termed them ‘social dramas.’ Each culture, each person within it, uses the entire sensory repertoire to convey messages: manual gesticulations, facial expressions, bodily postures, rapid, heavy or light breathing, tears, at the individual level…stylized gestures, dance patterns, prescribed silences, synchronized movements such as marching, the moves and ‘plays’ of games, sports and rituals, at the cultural level. Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theater: The Human Seriousness of Play

Compelled to further explore the ‘theatrical potential of social life,’ Turner invited NYU professor Richard Schechner to join him in organizing the 1981 ‘World Conference on Ritual and Performance.’ In his own work, Schechner had similarly begun to argue that there are ‘points of contact’ between anthropological and theatrical thought. In his book Between Theater and Anthropology, he noted that ritual and theater performances share many common features: they both enact a transformation in being or consciousness, occur in a state of intensity, enable interactions between audience and performer, and consist of a whole sequence of behaviors prior to and after the main event on display. Schechner and Turner collaborated in a series of 3 conferences to investigate further whether

PS’s Roots in the Theatrical Avant-Garde t is important to note that both Turner and Schechner were highly involved in the avant garde art scene that developed in the U.S. in the 1960s. Turner became an avid viewer of such theater, and Schechner himself is a theater director and participant. Their insights about the fluid spectrum of theatrical activity reflected the tendency of these art movements to blur or breach the boundaries separating ‘art’ from ‘life,’ as well as art genres from each other. The famous ‘Happenings’ and other experimental performance acts of the 1960s rejected the rigid artifices of modern theater, where (for instance) an audience sat at a distance from the scripted actions ‘up there’ on stage. Instead, many of these experimental artists proclaimed, theater—one person doing something while another one watches—is unfolding everywhere around us.

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I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theater to be engaged. —Peter Brook, ‘The Deadly Theater,’ 1968 This rejection of stark genre boundaries shaped the intellectual backdrop against which Turner and Schechner argued that a vast array of human activity—theater, dance, music, games, sports, rituals, and more—is composed of theatrical elements.

A Student’s Guide to Performance Studies | 5

TIMELINE OF PS ‘HAPPENINGS’

Continued from page 4 Studies. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, with

there was a common theatrical basis to a Broad Spectrum of human activity, from rituals to games to sports.

her PhD in Folklore and wide-ranging interests in Jewish studies, museum displays, tourist performances and the aesthetics of everyday life, becomes its chair. She would serve from 19801992, and is credited with transforming it into a fullyfledged B.A. granting department with 8 full-time PS faculty members.

1980: The Drama Review adds the subtitle ‘Journal of Performance Studies’ to signal its more inclusive approach to performative behavior.

1981-82: Victor Turner, an anthropologist who had articulated a continuum of ‘theatrical’ behavior in his book From Ritual to Theater, invites Richard Schechner to help plan a ‘World Conference on Ritual and Performance.’ Three related conferences are

Our intellectual goal in the conferences…was to approach the genres of theater, dance, music, sports and ritual as a single, coherent group, as performance. The underlying question became whether or not the same methodological tools and approaches could be used to understand a noh drama, a football game, a Yaqui deer dance, a Yoruba masked dance, and a postmodern experimental performance…? Richard Schechner, By Means of Performance

At these early conferences, Turner and Schechner wondered aloud whether this theatrical behavior that everywhere displayed itself was a kind of language—structured by ‘letters’ in the form of physical movements, sounds, and other bodily expressions. The first theater-person to formulate ...