Peformance Studies PDF
Peformance Studies PDF
Peformance Studies PDF
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1965:
Richard Schechner publishes
his article Approaches, in
the Tulane Drama Review.
This was his first written
articulation that perform-
ance is an inclusive category
that includes play, games,
sports, performance in every-
day life, and ritual. Many
subsequent works develop-
ing 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 anthropolo-
gy, psychology, semiotics,
and the performing arts.
The course examines theater
and dance in Western and
non-Western cultures, rang-
ing 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
Key Turning Points
in the Development
of the Field
Words with a * can be found in the glossary on page 19.
Continued on page 6
A Students Guide to Performance Studies | 5
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
groupsbe it the Ndembu people of north-west-
ern 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 cere-
monies, 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 rou-
tine life, much like a dramatic theater perform-
ance. Given that these ritual acts exhibit many of
the same means of expression employed on a the-
ater 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 levelstylized gestures, dance
patterns, prescribed silences, synchronized
movements such as marching, the moves and
plays of games, sports and rituals, at the cul-
tural level.
Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theater: The
Human Seriousness of Play
Compelled to further explore the theatrical poten-
tial 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 per-
formances share many common features: they
both enact a transformation in being or conscious-
ness, occur in a state of intensity, enable interac-
tions 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
PSs 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, theaterone person doing something while another one watch-
esis unfolding everywhere around us.
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 need-
ed 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 activitytheater,
dance, music, games, sports, rituals, and moreis composed of theatrical elements.
I
6 | A Students Guide to Performance Studies
there was a common theatrical basis to a Broad
Spectrum of human activity, from rituals to games
to sports.
Our intellectual goal in the conferenceswas 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
languagestructured by letters in the form of
physical movements, sounds, and other bodily
expressions.
The first theater-person to formulate a notion
of a new physical language was Antonin Artaud,
the French actor and theater theorist. Lets listen to
the thoughts he offered after watching a troupe of
Balinese dancers in Paris:
Through the labyrinth of their gestures, atti-
tudes, and sudden cries, through the gyrations
and turns which leave no portion of the stage
space unutilized, the sense of a new physical
language, based upon signs and no longer upon
words, is liberated. These actorsseem to be
animated hieroglyphs.
For Artaud, Turner and Schechner, the text under
analysis ceased to be a static written record, but
became the animated languages of human expres-
sionmovement, body posture, sound, voice,
pace, activity. In these early years after the first
conferences, PS scholars set out to investigate
embodied, live events as they are performed.
Scholars tried to read the structure of a perform-
ance, how it behaved vis--vis its environment, and
what insight about its practitioners these first two
findings might make possible. (See PSs Roots in
the Theatrical Avant-Garde on page 5.)
But if PS was born in anthropology and theater,
it moved in its teenage and early adult years into
vastly broader terrain. As you can see in the
Timeline of Events (See page 4), since these early
days PS has undergone many changesnot just in
expanding the number of activities its willing to
consider, but also in revising the very definition of
the concept of performance itself. As Peggy
Phelan wrote after NYUs 1995 conference called
The Future of the Field,
While theater and anthropology certainly
played a role in the generative disciplines of
performance studies, other points of contact
have also had exceptional force in the field.
Moreover, many of these points of contact are
instrumental to the future of the field, not
because theater and anthropology have ended
but because the function and force of those dis-
ciplines have been so thoroughly revised in the
past two decades.
Peggy Phelan, The Ends of Performance
The next pages of this brochure document some
of the stops and turns PS has taken in the last
two decades. While the road has been winding,
one thing has remained certain: PS asserts that
performance is the central constituent of the
fabric of social reality. It takes for granted that
appearances are actualities: it doesnt look for
hidden depth beneath the surface actions of an
individual or group, but instead sees those very
behaviors as intelligible constructs that, when
analyzed, can shed light on their makers. Thus
performancesbe they of an individual, group,
or society, or of language or technologyare
what is under the microscope in any PS investi-
gation. They are the data, evidence, records and
text of its inquiry.
Studies. Barbara
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, with
her PhD in Folklore and
wide-ranging interests in
Jewish studies, museum dis-
plays, tourist performances
and the aesthetics of every-
day life, becomes its chair.
She would serve from 1980-
1992, and is credited with
transforming it into a fully-
fledged 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 anthropolo-
gist 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
held during this year, the first
on the Yaqui Deer Dancers of
the U.S. Southwest and the
second on the work of Suzuki
Tadashi. By Means of
Performance was written in
response to these fruitful
collaborations.
1984:
Northwestern University
begins the second major
Performance Studies depart-
ment in the US. Their
approach differs from NYUs
in its exploration of the per-
formative nature of speech
and communication.
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