Writing Performance, Identity, and Everyday Life

The Selected Works of Ronald J. Pelias

Ronald J. Pelias

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367592110
• eBook ISBN: 9781351111737
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Research & Methodology in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Writing Performance, Identity, and Everyday Life invites the reader into Ronald J. Pelias' world of artistic and everyday performance. Calling upon a broad range of qualitative methods, these selected writings from Pelias submerge themselves in the evocative and embodied, in the material and consequential, often creating moving accounts of their topics.

The book is divided into four sections: Foundational Logics, Performance, Identity, and Everyday Life. Part I addresses the methodological underpinnings of the book, focusing on the 'touchstones' that inform Pelias' work: performative, autoethnographic, poetic, and narrative methods. These directions push the researcher toward empathic engagement, a leaning toward others; using the literary to evoke the cognitive and affective aspects of experience; and an ethical sensibility located in social justice. Parts II–IV focus on artistic and everyday life performances, including discussions of the disciplinary shift from the oral interpretation of literature to the field of performance studies; empathy and the actor's process; conceptions of performance; the performance of race, gender, and sexuality; and performances in interpersonal relations and academic circles.

By the end, readers will see Pelias demonstrate the power of qualitative methods to engage and to present alternative ways of being. Pelias' work shows us how to understand and feel the evocative strength of thinking performatively.

Part I
Foundational logics

1 Performative inquiry

Embodiment and its challenges

In the long history of theatrical discussion, scholars have approached performance from three general stances. First, scholars have viewed performance as a cultural and artistic object worthy of investigation. Within this logic, scholars have most frequently explored how performance functions within certain historical and cultural contexts, how performance is best theorized and accomplished, how a given performance might best be understood as a communicative act and as a moment within theatrical practice, and how performance fosters meaning making and social change. Such studies borrow from a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches from the arts, humanities, and social sciences.

Second, scholars have called upon performance as a generative vocabulary for understanding human behavior. In this sense, people are best seen not as homo sapiens or homo luden, but as homo histrio— performing creatures who are created and maintained through enactment, through doing what they do. Kenneth Burke’s (1945) dramatistic scheme, Irving Goffman’s (1959) notion of the presentation of self, Victor Turner’s (1982) model of social dramas, and Judith Butler’s (1990) conceptualization of stylized repetitive acts are familiar examples. Foundational in this perspective is the belief in the explanatory power of the life/drama analogy.

Third, scholars have operated from the assumption that performance itself is a way of knowing. This claim, axiomatic for performers, rests upon a faith in embodiment, in the power of giving voice and physicality to words, in the body as a site of knowledge. It is this last stance that I hope to address in this chapter, for it insists upon a working artist who engages in aesthetic performances as a methodological starting place. It finds its epistemological and ontological heart in performers enacting their own or others’ words on stage. In short, performative inquiry, from this perspective, is an embodied practice.

I proceed by discussing the nature of performance as an embodied practice. In doing so, I trace how embodiment entails a knowing, participatory, empathic, and political body. Next, I turn to three representative forms (literature in performance, performance ethnography, and autobiographical performance) to show a range of embodied inquiry and to point toward their respective methodological demands. Finally, I identify several challenges that performers confront when calling upon embodiment as a methodological tool. In particular, I will look at the presenting, lying, assuming, and intervening body.

Performance as embodied practice

To embody a self on stage, the performer must develop a flexible and responsive body, a body ready to function as a methodological tool. Just as mathematicians increase their methodological competence as they move from simple arithmetic to the highest forms of mathematical calculation, performers expand their procedural repertoire as they develop as artists. As the performers’ skills increase, they gain greater capacity in using the body as an exploratory instrument that probes and ponders what it encounters.

With training, the performer’s instrument becomes increasingly attuned and generates more productive insights. Over time, the performer learns to trust what the body teaches. It is useful to remember, however, that not all bodies move through the world in a similar manner. Some bodies possess limited agility, some not; some live in constant pain, some not; some feel disassociated from a sense of self, some not; some bodies are labeled disabled, some not. Regardless of the performer’s body, embodied practice calls upon the performer to employ a knowing, participatory, empathic, and political body. Each of these bodies is necessarily implicated in any performative act and, hence, is fundamental to performative inquiry.

The performer’s knowing body relies upon the physical and vocal behaviors brought forth in rehearsal and public presentation. The performer listens to what the body is saying and, based upon what the body has come to know, makes judgments about performance choices. More specifically, it involves a process of selecting what text to stage, playing with possible vocal and physical behaviors, testing the various possibilities against the givens in the text, choosing among the viable options for the best artistic choice, repeating each choice so that it becomes fine tuned for performance, and presenting the performance before an audience (Pelias, 1999). At each step in the process, the performer relies upon the body as a location of knowledge.

Performers are always trying to separate the good from the bad, the magical from the mundane. The knowing body serves to negotiate the multiplicity of options a performer faces. It helps the performer decide what seems right. It tells the performer what it knows about what is being said and how it is being said. Its telling comes forward cognitively, providing the performer with a clear understanding of why a particular decision might be right. In such cases, the performer can articulate the reasons for a given choice. The body’s telling also comes forward affectively, giving the performer emotional knowledge, offering a sense of the attitudes, sentiments, and passions of what is being performed. And its telling comes forward intuitively, initiating a felt but ineffable sense of what appears true. The knowing body, then, finds its power in the cognitive, affective, and intuitive coming together to form a sense of what it has to say.

The knowing body gains support from the empathic body. On the most fundamental level, the empathic body recognizes points of view other than its own. It understands that multiple perspectives always exist. More importantly, the empathic body has the capacity to understand and share in the feelings of others, to take on another sensibility. This methodological skill helps situate performers to create characters, including their own character in an autobiographical text. The empathic task, to use Stanislavski’s (1952) familiar terms, demands that the performer take into account the “given circumstances” of a character and employ the “magic if”: If I were in that situation, what would I do and feel? In this construction, performers project themselves into the life circumstances of others and use themselves to determine the nature of the experience. Alternatively, as Parrella (1971) first pointed out, performers may attempt to become others, adopting the characteristics of others as their own. The question here is not how the performer might feel in a certain situation but how the other might feel. This process of taking on others, of letting one’s own body be open to others, provides performers an entry, albeit always incomplete, into others’ life worlds. The empathic body, because of its ability and willingness to coalesce with others, is essential to embodiment and to performance as a method.

The participatory body learns by doing. The performer’s task is located in action. By doing the actions called forth by a given role, the performer comes to a sense of what those actions entail. As suggested above, the performer tries on various actions before settling into the actions that seem right. It is, in part, the repetition of those selected actions that is the most telling for the performer. Living with specific actions over an extended period of time allows the performer’s body to make those actions the performer’s own. This may require performers to reach well beyond their typical ways of being in the world, and as they reach out, they come to understand what it may be like to be another body. Performative inquiry cannot be accomplished from an observational stance; it demands participation. It asks performers to become others, to commit to others’ ways of being. Performers, of course, seldom forget that they are performers. Keeping in touch with their performing selves allows them to do the work they must do on stage. Yet part of the performers’ power is the ability, to use Wilshire’s (1982) helpful phrasing, “to stand in for others.”

Standing in, as Conquergood (1995) suggests, may be viewed as an act of mimesis (faking), poiesis (making), or kinesis (breaking and remaking). Whether performers see themselves as participating in order to replicate, construct, or provide alternatives to current constructions, their task remains constant: They are to perform actions that are available for others and for themselves to read. And, in the doing, they come to know how embodiment reifies, insinuates, destabilizes, interrogates, and alters their own and others’ ways of seeing the world.

Conquergood’s scheme is a reminder that in any act of embodiment there is always a political body. All performance is ideologically laden. Performers’ bodies are not neutral. They carry, among other markers, their gender, sexuality, ableness, class, race, and ethnicity with them. They signal cultural biases— beauty and blond hair, handsome and tan, jolly and round, and so on. Such claims imply that the performer’s body is always a contested site. Efforts at color-blind casting, for example, only demonstrate that directors can attempt to erase issues of race but cannot eliminate how audiences might interpret what they see. The identities that are put on stage come with and without cultural endorsement. Performers who are interested in interventionist work find their political bodies a rich methodological source for exploration and advocacy.

It would be misleading, however, to imply that any body could come on stage without being a body of advocacy. Bodily presence reifies or argues against a way of being. Questions of what bodies have access to the stage, what bodies are privileged, and what bodies are used for what ends swirl around every performance. Such questions may remain implicit, but increasingly, such issues have become explicit, sometimes in textual form and sometimes in staging. Dolan’s (1996) desire to use performance for activist work comes, in part, from its potential to display “the connectedness of bodies to themselves and each other, the demonstration of bodies in relations that are clearly political, deeply marked with power and with danger” (p. 12). The political body recognizes how power functions, dares to explore and expose it, and welcomes the opportunity to subvert it in the name of social justice.

Embodiment, then, is “an intensely sensuous way of knowing” (Conquer-good, 1991, p. 180). The experiencing body, situated in culture, is its methodological center. Unlike traditional scholarship where the body seems to slip away, performers generate and present their insights through the body, a knowing body, dependent upon its participatory and empathic capacities and located in contested yet potentially liberating space. As Conquergood (1991) puts it, performative inquiry “privileges particular, participatory, dynamic, intimate, precarious, embodied experience grounded in historical process, contingency, and ideology” (p. 187).

Representative forms of performative inquiry

Performers may focus their inquiry in a number of different directions, but the three most common sites for exploration are the literary, cultural, and personal, known generically as literature in performance, performance ethnography, and autobiographical performance. These labels, of course, blur, crisscross, leak, but they do point toward distinct orientations and place certain methodological issues in the foreground.

Staging literature (i.e., drama, poems, prose fiction, nonfiction) has consumed the bulk of performers’ energies. Literary texts, some specifically written for presentation on stage and some not, carry their own aesthetic dimensions, situating the performer in a position of either trying to feature or to resist what a given text asks. The delicate negotiation between literature’s art and the performer’s art is an ongoing process, informed by the performer’s motives for presenting a given work. For some performers, their task is to offer a credible rendering of a literary text; for others, their aim is to discover in literature places for innovation and critique. Not surprisingly, these goals are in keeping with the objectives of various literary and critical theories—some positions, to use Booth’s (1979) helpful terms, encourage readers to strive for “understanding” and some for “overstanding” (pp. 235–257). A central consideration performers face when working with literary texts is their stance, whether it will be one of consent or one of dissent. Depending upon the stance the performer elects, performative inquiry may be textually driven or textually detached.

For the performers who are driven to give consent to a literary work, their methodologica...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A way in
• PART I Foundational logics
• PART II Performance
• PART III Identity
• PART IV Everyday life
• Index