Performance: A Critical Introduction

Marvin Carlson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351983822
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Théâtre

Since its original publication in 1996, Marvin Carlson's Performance: A Critical Introduction has remained the definitive guide to understanding performance as a theatrical activity. It is an unparalleled exploration of the myriad ways in which performance has been interpreted, its importance to disciplines from anthropology to linguistics, and how it underpins essential concepts of human society.

In this comprehensively revised and updated third edition, Carlson tackles the pressing themes and theories of our age, with expanded coverage of:

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• the growth and importance of racial and ethnic performance;

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• the emergence of performance concerned with age and disability;

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• the popularity and significance of participatory and immersive theatre;

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• the crucial relevance of identity politics and cultural performance in the twenty-first century.

Also including a fully updated bibliography and glossary, this classic text is an invaluable touchstone for any student of performance studies, theatre history, and the performing and visual arts.

Chapter 1

The performance of culture

Anthropological and ethnographic approaches

The term “performance,” as it is encountered, for example, in departments or programs of “performance studies” in the United States today, is heavily indebted to terminology and theoretical strategies developed during the 1960s and 1970s in the social sciences, and particularly in anthropology and sociology. Especially important in making connections across the boundaries of traditional theatre studies, anthropology, and sociology has been the writings of Richard Schechner, coming from a theatre background, the anthropologists Victor Turner and Dwight Conquergood, and the sociologist Erving Goffman. For persons involved in theatre studies, a major statement of these converging interests appeared in the fall of 1973, in a special issue of The Drama Review devoted to “Theatre and the Social Sciences.” In the introduction to that issue, guest editor Richard Schechner listed seven “areas where performance theory and the social sciences coincide.” These were:

1 Performance in everyday life, including gatherings of every kind.

2 The structure of sports, ritual, play, and public political behaviors.

3 Analysis of various modes of communication (other than the written word); semiotics.

4 Connections between human and animal behavior patterns with an emphasis on play and ritualized behavior.

5 Aspects of psychotherapy that emphasize person‑to‑person interaction, acting out, and body awareness.

6 Ethnography and prehistory—both of exotic and familiar cultures.

7 Constitution of unified theories of performance, which are, in fact, theories of behavior.¹

Schechner’s listing is somewhat reminiscent of a similar attempt to suggest future areas of research between theatre and the social sciences published in 1956 by Georges Gurvitch to summarize the proceedings of a French conference on the subject. Anticipating the subsequent research of scholars like Goffman and Turner, Gurvitch called attention to the theatrical or performance elements in all social ceremonies, even in “a simple reception or a gathering of friends.”²

Both of these lists outline a rather broader field than the main line of research has in fact followed, but each may be considered as a whole remarkably prescient about a significant part of modern performance study. Indeed, an understanding of contemporary usage of the term performance can probably most usefully begin with an overview of the most influential and relevant writings on the subject in anthropology and sociology. Accordingly we shall consider, in this chapter, the issues and concerns surrounding performance in anthropological writing since the 1960s, and, in the following chapter, we turn to sociology. The hope in outlining developments in both fields is by no means to provide a general introduction to modern anthropological or sociological theory, but rather to introduce the specific aspects of that theory that have contributed to current thinking about performance, both in theory and in practice.

Performance and anthropology

The field of anthropology has been a particularly rich source for the discussion of performance. Indeed it had become so attractive a subject in that field by the 1970s that some anthropologists expressed concern about its ubiquity. Dell Hymes, for example, complained in 1975 that: “If some grammarians have confused matters by lumping what does not interest them under ‘performance,’ cultural anthropologists and folklorists have not done much to clarify the situation. We have tended to lump what does interest us under ‘performance.’”³

Hymes makes an attempt to confine the sprawling field of what is lumped under “performance” by contrasting it with two activity categories often confused with it: behavior and conduct. The first refers simply to “anything and everything that happens,” the second to behavior “under the aegis of social norms, cultural rules, shared principles of interpretability.” Clearly conduct is a certain subset of behavior, and performance Hymes defines as a further subset within conduct, in which one or more persons “assume a responsibility to an audience and to tradition as they understand it.” Yet, in keeping with the essentially contested nature of performance, even this rather specific articulation raises as many problems as it solves, particularly in what is meant by “assuming responsibility.” The audience certainly plays a key role in most attempts to define performance, especially in those attempts to separate performance from other behavior, but just how the performer is “responsible” to them has itself been the subject of much debate.

Even more problematic is the idea of responsibility to tradition. There is widespread agreement among performance theorists that all performance is based upon some pre‑existing model, script, or pattern of action. Richard Schechner in a happy and widely‑quoted phrase calls performance “restored behavior.”⁴ John MacAloon has similarly asserted that “there is no performance without pre‑formance.”⁵ On the other hand, much modern anthropological analysis of performance has laid special stress on how performance can work within a society precisely to undermine tradition, to provide a site for the exploration of fresh and alternative structures and patterns of behavior. Whether performance within a culture serves most importantly to reinforce the assumptions of that culture or to provide a possible site of alternative assumptions is an on-going debate that provides a particularly clear example of the contested quality of performance analysis.

Precisely what performance accomplishes and how it accomplishes this clearly can be approached in a variety of ways, although there has been general agreement that within every culture there can be discovered a certain kind of activity, set apart from other activities by space, time, attitude, or all three, that can be spoken of and analyzed as performance. Folklore studies has been one of the areas of anthropology and cultural studies that has contributed most significantly to modern concepts of performance study, and one of the first anthropological theorists to utilize “performance” as a central critical term, William H. Jansen, employed it to deal with a major concern of the 1950s in folklore studies, that is, classification. Jansen suggested a classification model with performance and participation as two ends of a spectrum, based primarily upon the degree of involvement of the “audience” of the event.⁶

Cultural performance

The term “cultural performance,” now widely found in anthropological and ethnographic writing, was coined by Milton Singer in an introduction to a collection of essays on Indian culture that he edited in 1959. Here Singer suggested that the culture content of a tradition was transmitted by specific cultural media as well as by human carriers and that a study of the operations of such media on particular occasions could provide anthropology with “a particularization of the structure of tradition complementary to the social organization.”⁷ South Asians, and perhaps all peoples, Singer argued, thought of their culture as encapsulated in discrete events, “cultural performances,” which could be exhibited to themselves and others and which provided the “most concrete observable units of the cultural structure.” Among these “performances,” Singer listed traditional theatre and dance, but also concerts, recitations, religious festivals, weddings, and so on. All such performances possessed certain features: “a definitely limited time span, a beginning and an end, an organized program of activity, a set of performers, an audience, and a place and occasion of performance.”⁸ If one would substitute “a script” for Singer’s “organized program of activity,” then these distinctive features of cultural performance could as easily be describing the traditional concept of theatre, and Singer’s approach and his influence has unquestionably contributed significantly to the convergence of anthropological and theatrical theory in the area of performance from the early 1970s onward. His “features” of performance, especially their emphasis on performance as “set apart” in time, place, and occasion, find countless echoes in subsequent research, and his view of performance as a discrete concretization of cultural assumptions significantly contributed to what might be categorized as the conservative interpretation of performance’s role in culture.

During the next decade, the relationship between culture and performance became a matter of increasing concern in both folklore studies and general anthropology. Between his two surveys of the former field in 1963 and 1972, Richard M. Dorson noted the rise of a new orientation, which he called a “contextual approach” to folklore research.⁹ The emphasis of such an approach shifts from the text to its function as a performative and communicative act in a particular cultural situation and has looked to the field of sociolinguistics for much of its theory and methodology. Dell Hymes has characterized this blending of communication models and cultural placement as a new “ethnography of communication,”¹⁰ and Dan Ben‑Amos and Kenneth S. Goldstein in their introduction to a 1975 collection of essays on folklore, suggest that the new emphasis falls not upon “the entire network of culturally defined communicative events, but upon these situations in which the relationship of performance obtains between speakers and listeners.”¹¹

Kenneth Burke and the rhetoric of performance

In their analysis of the component elements of this relationship, contextual folklorists began to converge with performance analysts in other fields. A common source for a number of these was the writings of Kenneth Burke, especially for those contextualists who began to consider the rhetorical function of folkloric performance. Roger Abrahams, for example, in advancing a “rhetorical theory of folklore,” claimed that “performance is a way of persuading through the production of pleasure,” and specifically recommended Burke as a source of analytic strategies.¹² Burke has perhaps been even more influenti...