Performance studies

Performance studies has been growing as an academic field since the 1970s. Indeed, it has produced a wide variety of perspectives and it is now integrated into a number of social sciences (Sociology, Anthropology, Linguistics), humanities (Philosophy, English, History) and is a growing discipline in and of itself. While diverse theorists have adopted theatre discourses and metaphors, the connection between theatre and performance is commonly misunderstood. Some performance theories are concerned with the manner in which individuals perform aspects of everyday life. For example, Judith Butler uses the term "performativity" to describe the material presence of abstract discourses. For Butler, a subject is never performing his or herself, but rather enacting certain discourses.

Performance Studies has been challenged as an emerging discipline. Many academics have been critical of its instability. As an academic field it is difficult to pin down; either that is the nature of the field itself or it is still too young to tell. There are, however, numerous degree granting programmes that train researchers being offered by universities. Some have referred to it as an "interdiscipline" or a "postdiscipline." The process of defining it becomes a practice in performance studies itself. How is it being inscribed? What does it mean or do to engage in this process of creating a wiki entry? Does it impose an ideology, an abjecting frame of assumption or logic? What does it perform? How is it performative? Perhaps once we have defined it, we have already pinned it down? Performance studies is interdisciplinary: "The primary fundamental of performance studies is that there is no fixed canon of works, ideas, practices or anything else that defines or limits the field."

Origins of and basic concepts in Performance Studies

Performance Studies as an academic field has multiple origin narratives. Wallace Bacon (1914-2001), considered by many the father of Performance theory, taught performance of literature as the ultimate act of humility. In his defining statement of performance theory Bacon writes "Our center is in the interaction between readers and texts which enriches , extends, clarifies, and (yes) alters the interior and even the exterior lives of students [and performers and audiences] through the power of texts" (Literature in Performance, Vol 5 No 1, 1984; p. 84). In addition, Robert Breen's text Chamber Theatre is a cornerstone in the field for staging narrative texts though controversial in its assertions about the place of narrative details in chamber productions. Breen is also regarded by many as a founding theorist for the discipline along with advocate Louise Rosenblatt. The next generation of performance scholars would develop the academic credibility and humanity of the disicipline with equal power. Beverly Whitaker-Long, Mary Francis Hopkins, Ted Colson, Isabel Crouch, Dwight Conquergood, Lilla Heston, Marion Kleinau, Paul Gray, Lee Hudson, Mary Strine, Francine Merritt and Thomas Sloane built the discipline for the decades of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Their students continued to enrich the heritage: Elizabeth Fine, Jean Haskell-Spear, Elizabeth Bell, Tim Gura, Linda Park-Fuller, Nathan Stucky, Carol Simpson Stern, James Van Oosting, Jill Taft-Kaufman, Karen Valentine, Joanna Macauley, and John Anderson. See David Thompson's Performance of Literature in Historical Perspectives (University Press of America, 1983) for an overview of Performance Studies perspectives to 1983. See also Literature in Performance, the journal of Performance Studies when the discipline was known as Performance of Literature. Other accounts of the discipline's roots stress the research collaborations of director Richard Schechner and anthropologist Victor Turner. This origin narrative emphasizes a definition of performance as being "between theatre and anthropology" and often stresses the importance of intercultural performances as an alternative to either traditional proscenium theatre or traditional anthropological fieldwork. Dwight Conquergood developed a branch of performance ethnography that centered the political nature of the practice and advocated for methodological dialogism from the point of encounter to the practices of research reporting. Bryan Reynolds has developed a combined performance theory and critical methodology known as “transversal poetics” to bring historical analysis in conversation with current research in a number of fields, from social semiotics to cognitive neuroscience, the effect of which has been to expand the relevancy of performance studies across academic disciplines. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has contributed an interest in tourist productions and ethnographic showmanship to the field, Judd Case has adapted performance to the study of media and religion, Diana Taylor has brought a hemispheric perspective on Latin American performance and theorized the relationship between the archive and the performance repertoire, while Corinne Kratz developed a mode of performance analysis that emphasizes the role of multimedia communication in performance.

An alternative origin narrative stresses the development of speech-act theory by philosophers J.L. Austin and Judith Butler, literary critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and also Shoshana Felman. The theory proposed by Austin in How To Do Things With Words states that “to say something is to do something, or in saying something we do something, and even by saying something we do something.” the most illustrative example being "I do," as part of a marriage ceremony. For any of these performative utterances to be felicitous, per Austin, they must be true, appropriate and conventional according to those with the proper authority: a priest, a judge, or the scholar, for instance. Austin accounts for the infelicitous by noting that “there will always occur difficult or marginal cases where nothing in the previous history of a conventional procedure will decide conclusively whether such a procedure is or is not correctly applied to such a case.” The possibility of failure in performatives (utterances made with language and the body) is taken up by Butler and is understood as the “political promise of the performative.” Her argument is that because the performative needs to maintain conventional power, convention itself has to be reiterated, and in this reiteration it can be expropriated by the unauthorized usage and thus create new futures. She cites Rosa Parks as an example:

When Rosa Parks sat in the front of the bus, she had no prior right to do so guaranteed by any…conventions of the South. And yet, in laying claim to the right for which she had no prior authorization, she endowed a certain authority on the act, and began the insurrectionary process of overthrowing those established codes of legitimacy.

The question of the infelicitous utterance (the misfire)is also taken up by Shoshana Felman when she states "Infelicity, or failure, is not for Austin an accident of the performative, it is inherent in it, essential to it. In other words…Austin conceives of failure not as external but as internal to the promise, as what actually constitutes it.”

Performance studies has also had a strong relationship to the fields of feminism, psychoanalysis, critical race theory and queer theory. Theorists like Peggy Phelan, José Esteban Muñoz, E. Patrick Johnson, Rebecca Schneider, and André Lepecki have been equally influential in both performance studies and these related fields.

Performance studies incorporates theories of drama, dance, art, anthropology, folkloristics, philosophy, cultural studies, sociology, comparative literature, and more and more, music performance. More can be found out by reading Schechner's book: Performance Studies: An Introduction or in D. Soyini Madison and Judith Hamera's The Sage Handbook for Performance Studies. The first performance studies department was created at NYU. However, there is some debate that the joint-cradles of Performance Studies are Northwestern University and NYU. For more information on the different origins and disciplinary traditions of performance studies see Shannon Jackson's book Professing Performance and the introductory chapter in Nathan Stucky and Cynthia Wimmer's Teaching Performance Studies. Generally the differences between the NYU and Northwestern models cite different disciplinary concerns: NYU is generally characterized as a program that pushed the definitions of theatrical practice influenced by the thearical avant-garde thus expanding its definition of what can be framed as an event and Northwestern as one that transitioned from an elocution and performance of literature tradition to expand its definition of presentational aesthetics beyond oral interpretation. In both instances a focus on practice lead to a research methodology beyond theatre or literature/speech. In the United States, the field has spread to Brown, UC Berkeley, and elsewhere. Undergraduate and graduate programs are offered at Louisiana State University, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Texas A&M University’s Department of Performance Studies is unique in including both Music and Theatre degree programs. A new generation of researchers have also joined the faculty ranks at these and other institutions and evidence the continued expansion and rejuvenation of the field. These young scholars include: Patrick Anderson (UCSD), Christine Balance (UC Irvine), Robin Bernstein (Harvard), Henry Bial (Kansas), Rachel Bowditch (ASU), Brandi Catanese (Berkeley), Renee Alexander Craft (UNC), Craig Gingrich-Philbrook (Southern Illinois), Brian Herrera (UNM), Suk-Young Kim (UCSB), Branislav Jacovljevic (Stanford), Jill Lane (NYU), Eng-Beng Lim (Michigan State), Paige McGinley (Yale), Jisha Menon (Stanford), Tavia Nyongo (NYU), Tony Perucci (UNC), Jennifer Parker-Starbuck (Roehampton), Jeffrey Q. McCune, Jr. (UMD), Ramon Rivera-Servera (Northwestern), Theresa Smalec (CUNY), Shannon Steen (Berkeley), Alexandra Vasquez (Princeton), Shane Vogel (Indiana), E.J. Westlake (Michigan), Maurya Wickstrom (CUNY), Patricia Ybarra (Brown), and Harvey Young (Northwestern).

In the United Kingdom the University of Wales, Aberystwyth offers a degree scheme in performance studies with highly acclaimed performance artists such as Mike Pearson, Heike Roms and Jill Greenhalgh.

In India, the research initiatives of Centre for Performance Research and Cultural Studies in South Asia (cpracsis) focus on redefining methodologies of cultural studies and research on the basis of the nuances of performance studies.

In Australia, the University of Sydney and Queensland University of Technology offer degrees majoring in performance studies, Honours, Masters and Phd. Performance Studies in some countries is also an A-level (AS and A2) course consisting of the integration of the discrete art forms of Dance, Music and Drama in performing arts.

Performance studies has a long-standing and complex relationship to the practice of performance art, also known as live art or visual art performance.

Some key companies and practitioners who are widely considered to be working within this field include: Karen Finley, Robert Lepage, Ariane Mnouchkine and the Theatre du Soleil, Robert Wilson, Forced Entertainment (UK), Pina Bausch, Trisha Brown, DV8 Physical theater, The Wooster Group (New York), Anne Bogart and The Siti Company (New York), and Jan Fabre (Belgium). Other artists, generally outside the European avant-garde theatre, who have been instrumental to the development of analysis in the field include: Carmelita Tropicana, Holly Hughes, Tim Miller, Annie Sprinkle, John Leguizamo, Guillermo Gomez-Peña, Coco Fusco, Ruby Tru, Linda Montano, Vaginal Davis, Lois Weaver, Peggy Shaw, Anna Deveare Smith, Robbie McCauley, Marga Gomez, Dan Kwong, Diamanda Galas, Ron Athey, Reverend Billy, Ana Mendieta, Deb Margolis, Terry Galloway, Eric Bogosian, Danny Hoch, Quentin Crisp, Justin Bond and Kenny Mellman aka Kiki and Herb, Rachel Rosenthal, Spalding Gray, Laurie Anderson, Rhodessa Jones, Bill T. Jones, Luis Alfaro, Reno, John Fleck, and Meredith Monk.

Controversies

Richard Schechner was a professor of drama, first at Tulane University, then at New York University, before he became interested in integrating the field of theater with numerous other disciplines. At least two of his former students wrote significant criticisms of the new field.

In TheaterWeek, Richard Hornby wrote that the field of performance studies must embrace acting theory and traditional Euro-American theater if it is to have any value. Performance Studies, at least as Schechner had come to it, had little to do with stage performance, Hornby maintained.

Davi Napoleon went further in the pages of the same magazine. "Performance Studies doesn't have the integrity of any discipline," she wrote. "It's not a mix of theater and other performing arts, such as dance and opera, though these are included....There are classes in Aesthetics and Everyday Life, Autobiography and the Performing Self, Creativity in Covergence and Creolization...Performance studies covers everything, and those who want to study something, such as theater history, cannot."

Schechner said he did not reject theater but expanded the department at NYU by bringing in other disciplines. "I can eat pasta and also eat sushi."

Napoleon countered that pasta and sushi are both foods, while archeology and theater are not both performing arts. "Moreover, Performance Studies students don't digest two fields. They sample from a smorgasbord of disciplines without troubling to learn any. It may appear to be interdiscipinary, but Performance Studies is really anti-disciplinary." Napoleon also quotes Michael Kirby, a colleague of Richard Schechner's at NYU who felt Schechner was taking the department in the wrong direction.

See also

• J.L. Austin
• Judith Butler
• Dwight Conquergood
• Shannon Jackson
• E. Patrick Johnson
• André Lepecki
• David Lewin
• D. Soyini Madison
• Fred Moten
• José Muñoz
• Peggy Phelan
• Performative turn
• Joseph Roach
• Richard Schechner
• Eve Sedgwick
• Diana Taylor

References

• Napoleon, Davi. Transcending Substance in TheaterWeek November 20, 1995.
• Hornby, Richard. Against Performance Theory in TheaterWeek October 17, 1994.

• Lepecki, André. Of the Presence of the Body: Essays on Dance and Performance Theory. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2004.

• Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.

• Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory

• Schechner, Richard. Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985.

External links

• Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics
• PerformanceStudies.Org
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