Introduction

BASIC PREMISE

Many aspects of cultural life can be understood as performance: sports events, political demonstrations, national celebrations, religious rituals, weddings and funerals.

Why can social events be understood as performances?

• They are based on repetition ('twice-behaved behavior').
• They are limited in space and time.
• They are intentionally produced by some people for others to observe (to create an effect in others).
• They are based on interactions.

Is performance fake?

Sometimes we think of performance as fake, but that's not necessarily the case. Performance is a way of participating collectively in activities of meaning-making.

Advantages of thinking of Culture as performance

• It highlights the active participation of different people in the making of meaning.
• It allows you to see connections across many aspects of cultural life. Political events might have more in common with sports than you could think. Looking at them together paints a more complex picture of the history of a particular place.

Examples

• Parades
• Protests
• Festivals
• Weddings

Origins of Performance Studies

• A collaboration between theatre scholars and social scientists.
• The study of theatre becomes more sophisticated if you see theatre performances in relation to social histories and contexts.
• The study of certain social events becomes more interesting if taken as performance.
• Schechner and Turner were the first to work together.

The main theorists and their ideas

Ervin Goffman

• The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956).
• "All the activity of and individual which occurs during a period marked by his continuous presence before a particular set of observers and which has some influence on the observers".
• Importance of role playing in social situations.

Ervin Goffman (continued)

• Corrective interchange: challenge, offering, acceptance and thanks.
• At the end the equilibrium is re-established, but it might mean an accommodation to a new order.
• Framing and keying: how particular situations are set apart in time and space.
• His emphasis is on the audience, and on how social performance functions on society.

Milton Singer

• "Cultural performance" in Traditional India: Structure and Change (1959)
• People think of their culture as encapsulated in discrete events.
• Concretization of cultural assumptions.
• "Most observable units of the cultural structure".
• Set apart in time, place and occasion.
• Recitations, religious festivals, weddings.

Victor Turner

• "Social Drama" in Schism and Continuity (1957).
• Focus on organizational structure of social events
• Based on Van Gennep's idea of rites of passage.
• Separation, transition and incorporation.
• Ceremony marking individual or social change: from peace to war, adolescence to adulthood, etc.

Dwight Conquergood

Richard Schechner

• Performance Theory (1977)
• Twice-behaved behavior
• Extensive collaboration with Victor Turner

Richard Schechner

The fan

Richard Schechner

The web

Richard Schechner

Dramatic Circle

Limits and applications

Limitations

• Performance is transient.
• The concept of performance can become to wide and all-encompassing to be meaningful.

How to use this approach

• Ask yourself: how could x be understood in terms of performance?
• What does it reveal? Is this more meaningful that studying this particular event?
• Ethnographic approach. Take notes, talk to people. Then review the notes. Don't assume form the outset it is a useful methodology.