Why Performance Studies?

Within academic study there is an underlying tension between ‘theatre’ and ‘performance’.

 

A Google image search for 'theatre' and 'performance' - first images that appear. Theatre is perceived as 'a theatre' - i.e. proscenium arch stages and tiered seating; Performance, as a word and concept has many more layered meanings and preconceptions.
Image Sources: Time Out - The best theatres in Edinburgh | Thomson-Reuters blog

Performance is a relatively new scholarly discipline and Richard Schechner states that the term encompasses both the performing arts and performative action, which is “how performance is used in politics, medicine, religion, popular entertainments, and ordinary face-to-face interactions […] Performative thinking must be seen as a method of cultural analysis.”[1] Kirshenblatt-Gimblett also writes that performance can be detected in “…contemporary cultural, aesthetic, and political theory.”[2] Performance can be detected in many, if not most aspects of daily life, whether or not it is overtly recognised as such.

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett proposes that “Performance Studies takes performance as an organising concept for the study of a wide range of behaviour.”[3] Within Performance Studies there is a recognition of interdisciplinarity across performance and performative action, sometimes inherent in procedure and not overtly recognised as performance, which is also a theme that Marvin Carlson touches upon, stating that “Everyone at some time or another is conscious of ‘playing a role’ socially…. All human activity could potentially be considered as performance…”[4] The Brecht poem On Everyday Theatre references the performative actions seen on a street, concluding that the theatre and theatricality of daily life experience is more meaningful, and useful, than that produced on stage.

Image Source: The Telegraph
2012 Sony World Photography Awards

Conquergood agrees that Performance Studies “…draw[s] together legitimated as well as subjugated modes of inquiry.” He also considers the “…three a’s of performance studies: artistry, analysis, activism.” [5] Learning both kinaesthetically and through scholarship.

Within Theatre Studies there is a tendency to afford pre-eminence to the written word in the form of a script, and Dwight Conquergood writes that, in a white, western hegemony, academic knowledge is prized more highly above somatic, visceral forms of knowledge such as lived experience, and challenges the “class-based arrogance of scriptocenterism…”[6] within the theatre, as in society, where academic qualification is perceived as more valid than lived experience.

For Performance Studies, theatres value lies within its immediacy, which is often lost when written or recorded. The affect, and effect, of performance cannot be translated into text. Performance is the demonstration of embodied knowledge, and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett defines one method of studying performance as “…refusing to privilege the Western theatre model… not tak[ing] text as its point of departure, but rather the ‘knowing body’ and the corporal dimension of performance.”[7]

Conquergood also advocates the same themes; performance crossing, and blurring, lines between cultures, and debating the primacy and supremacy of “empirical… propositional knowledge” that is learned academically, but advocating for the “active, intimate, hands-on participation and personal connection”[8] that can only come from ‘learning by doing’

Image Source: forthearts.org.uk

Conquergood argues more explicitly for the imperialist, colonialist, and supremacist connotations of the written word: if much of the world’s population is illiterate then reading and writing becomes a tool of oppression. He believes that lived experience, and therefore by extension live performance, may be the superior form of knowledge as “…the whole realm of complex, finely nuanced meaning that is embodied, tacit, intoned, gestured, improvised, coexperienced, covert – and all the more deeply meaningful because of its refusal to be spelled out.”[9] This also reflects the previously discussed script-centric model of theatre, assigning more meaning to a form that many cannot access. Scarcity creates value, and if most cannot read, then reading becomes elite.

…Garifuna people… use the word gapencillitin, which means ‘people with pencil’ to refer to… elites who approach life from an intellectual perspective… class stratification, related to differential knowledges, is articulated in terms of access to literacy.[10]

Performance Studies grows out of a need to formalise and theorise across the boundaries of the performing arts, but also incorporating performative actions from diverse disciplines, and recognising that performance can be found outside of the performing arts and away from Euro-American script-based theatre textrocentralism. The academic study of performance is a new awareness of a need to frame the relevance of performance, performing arts and performativity.

…programs that combine intellectual rigour with artistic excellence that is critically engaged, where they do not have to banish their artistic spirit in order to become a critical thinker, or repress their intellectual self or political passion to explore their artistic side.[11]

However, theatre has a long history of integrating other elements of the performing arts, but also championing interdisciplinarity from outside sources. Therefore Performance Studies is a modern concept to describe and study practises which have been taking place since the inception of performance as a form of communication, which supports Schechner’s statement that performance studies inquire into performative behaviour rather than the exclusivity of the performing arts. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett also cited Schechner’s observation that “long before scholars took an interest, artists had an expanded view of performance.”[12]

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The wide range of actions that could be studied as Performance risks the overcomplication of its own categorisation. If everything is performance, then equally nothing is, and we risk defining an action by what it “is not” rather than by what “it is”.
Carlson also questions the concept of ‘performance’ and the difficulties of classification, writing “…certain concepts, such as art and democracy, had disagreement about their essence built into the concept itself.” [13]

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett assuages this by stating that “Performance Studies starts with a set of concerns and objects […] the field is particularly attuned to issues of place, personhood, cultural citizenship, and equity […] bringing diverse performance cultures into conversation and collaboration with one another.”[14]

Performance Studies, within academia, denotes interdisciplinary, cross-boundary study, by grounding performance in theory as well as theorising performance.

Exciting, robustly intellectual world-civilisation courses can be built around studying dance, theatre, rituals, popular entertainments, and sports – buttressed by necessary readings in history and literature, and accompanied by spirited discussions.[15]

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[1] Richard Schechner, ‘Performance Studies: The Broad Spectrum Approach’, TDR 32.3 (Autumn 1988), p.5.

[2] Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, ‘Performance Studies’ in The Performance Studies Reader, ed. by Henry Bial and Sara Brady, 3^rd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), p.44.

[3] Ibid., p.43.

[4] Marvin Carlson, ‘”What is Performance?”’, in Performance: A Critical Introduction, 2^nd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), p.4.

[5] Dwight Conquergood, ‘Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research’, TDR (Summer 2002), p.152.

[6] Ibid., p.147.

[7] Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, ‘Performance Studies’, p.46.

[8] Conquergood, ‘Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research’, p.146.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid. p.148

[11] Ibid., p.153.

[12] Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, ‘Performance Studies’, p.47.

[13] Carlson, ‘”What is Performance?”’, p.1.

[14] Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, ‘Performance Studies’, pp.43-51

[15] Schechner, ‘Performance Studies: The Broad Spectrum Approach’, p.5.

Bibliography

Marvin Carlson, ‘”What is Performance?”’, in Performance: A Critical Introduction, 2^nd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 2004)

Dwight Conquergood, ‘Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research’, TDR (Summer 2002)

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, ‘Performance Studies’ in The Performance Studies Reader, ed. by Henry Bial and Sara Brady, 3^rd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 2015)

Richard Schechner, ‘Performance Studies: The Broad Spectrum Approach’, TDR 32.3 (Autumn 1988)