Performance Studies: The Basics

Andreea S. Micu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000456691
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Arts de la scène

Performance Studies: The Basics offers an overview of the multiple, often overlapping definitions of performance, from performance art, performance as everyday life, and rituals, to the performative dimensions of identity, such as gender, race and sexuality.

This book defines the interdisciplinary field of performance studies as it has evolvedover the past four decades at the intersection of academic scholarship and artistic and activist practices. It discusses performance as an important means of communicating and ofunderstanding the world, highlighting its intersections with critical theory and arguing for the importance of performance in the study of human behaviour and social practices.

Complete with a helpful glossary andbibliography, as well assuggestions for further reading, this book is an ideal starting point for those studying performance studies as well as for general readers with an interest in the subject.

1

What is Performance?

10.4324/9780429286377-2

Framing performance

Although we commonly understand theatre and performance art to be quite different from self-presentational behaviour or ritual, and that both of those categories are very different from performances of, for example, gender, one of the goals of this book is to explore the porous boundaries between all those different phenomena we call performance.

In the art world, performance took special relevance in the 1960s and 1970s. Performance art, also referred to as live art or body art emerged at the same time as many artists were pushing the boundaries of the art world, which they considered to be trite, conservative and unable to respond to contemporary historical challenges. Even as they were mixing genres by combining visual art, painting, sculpture or dance, these artists were claiming the body as the essential instrument of art making. Pioneer feminist performers such as Rachel Rosenthal (1926–2015) or Carolee Schneemann (1939–2019) also called out the misogynistic culture of the art world and the secondary place it gave to women artists. Many performance artists of the time also advocated for taking performance art out of the traditional art and theatrical spaces in order to find broader audiences. These concerns with the body and the space of the performance have been characteristic of performance art ever since.

But performance art’s tendency to constantly push the boundaries of what the appropriate places for performance are and who could be considered a performer have also made it more complicated to define performance in general. When performance art leaves the space of the museum, the theatre, or the art gallery and enters other public spaces, expectations about how bodies should behave in these spaces are disrupted and the limits between make-believe and the everyday become blurry. However, precisely because of this ability to cross boundaries, performance has become deeply intertwined with various forms of political protest and activism over the past few decades. The relationship between performance and political protest has a long and rich history. In 1967, amidst widespread sentiment against the Vietnam War, a group of several hundred political activists led by Abbie Hoffman (1936–89) marched towards the Pentagon with the intention of staging an exorcism. Holding hands, chanting, and calling upon the elements and various deities, the activists claimed to be able to stop the war by making the Pentagon levitate several feet above the ground and purify it from evil energy. The performance not only attracted the intervention of the Army, but also the attention of national media. Employing performance for its ability to disrupt the expectations of the state regarding political protest proved to be an effective strategy for the activists, garnering widespread public support.

Countless contemporary examples point to the ability of performance to create unusual situations, mix art and political protest and mobilize bodies to take over public space. By highlighting the aesthetic elements of the everyday, or by introducing the spectacular in seemingly quotidian situations, performers often put into question the limits of what is accepted. New York-based group The Church of Stop Shopping and its leader, Reverend Billy, stage performances that target the symbols of consumerism and capitalism, such as Monsanto’s headquarters or the Trump Tower on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. Their performances bring together theatrical spectacle, street protest and religious sermons to draw attention to the economic and financial processes that are endangering the planet and creating poverty.

Giving the porous boundaries between artistic forms of performance and other social events, how do we define performance? From a performance studies perspective, a performance is defined by its framing. This means drawing certain spatial and temporal boundaries and looking at what happens within those boundaries as performance. In the previous example, we can set the frame at Reverend Billy’s sermons and the Choir’s responses and songs and analyse them as performance. But we might also want to choose a broader frame by including the audiences that the performance appeals to. Thus, we might want to include the pedestrians that stop to watch, those who pass by without looking, the security staff at Monsanto’s headquarters, or the police patrols in front of Trump Tower. Doing so would yield a different definition of performance, with different participants and different stakes.

Social scientists, especially in the field of anthropology, have for a long time distinguished between cultural and social performances. Cultural performances are framed events with a beginning and an end, audiences and actors or performers, however broadly understood. Examples of cultural performance include plays, concerts, circus acts, storytelling, puppet shows, carnivals, parades and ritual ceremonies, such as weddings and funerals. Cultural performances are intentionally presented to an audience. Social performances are also communicative acts but they are not marked as specific events nor conducted in such a way that the people carrying them are aware of performing. They include everyday interactions of individuals, such as conversations, gestures, walking, eating, forms of greeting, etc. They are culturally specific behaviours that can include symbolic practices, but they are generally not framed as events presented to an audience. More recently, performance studies scholar Joshua Chambers-Letson has offered another useful distinction between quotidian and aesthetic performance. Quotidian performances are everyday acts of self-presentation, akin to what anthropologists have traditionally called social performances. Aesthetic performances are a step removed from the everyday and are meant to be encountered by audiences as aesthetic experiences, such as going to the theatre, the opera, a concert, or a performance art event.

Although establishing discrete categories for the study of performance can be quite useful as one first approaches performance studies as a field, it is important to remember that ultimately these categories are not set in stone. In framing something as a performance, distinctions between discrete categories often become blurry. Cultural performances can act as the gravitational centre that attracts and stimulates its own class of social performances, such as the interactions amongst those gathered in a theatre lobby before a play. Quotidian performances can be highly aesthetic, as people who cosplay know, and aesthetic performances can appear quite quotidian, or at least seek to intentionally blur the boundaries between the quotidian and the aesthetic with productive results, as seen in the examples of The Church of Stop Shopping and Hoffman’s Pentagon exorcists. The following sections offer an overview of how performance is broadly understood and used in the field of performance studies.

Performance in everyday life

In our daily interactions, we play different roles for different people in different settings. And although we always remain ourselves, different parts of us come to the fore in these roles. Hence, we might behave very differently at work, in church, while flirting with a love interest, or casually hanging out with a group of friends. Studying these everyday behaviours, Erving Goffman (1922–1982), a Canadian American sociologist, argued that all human activities that seek to influence others in any way, whether consciously or unconsciously, can be understood as performance. Goffman thought that by performing our selves in the everyday, we present a front to others, one that not only responds to what they expect of us, but also to the impressions we want to leave on them. Thus, things that might seem quite ordinary or even irrelevant can in fact be highly consequential, such as the way we dress, arrange our hair, talk, remain silent, gesticulate, walk and sit down. From this perspective, human interactions can be broken apart into their essential performance elements, such as actors, audiences, costumes, settings, or props. It is the relationship between these elements that allows us to extract meanings and cues on how to behave socially, even though much of this process happens unconsciously.

One of Goffman’s essential contributions was the idea that when performing one’s everyday self, someone might travel from belief to disbelief in what they are doing and vice versa. Thus, they might start performing with certain scepticism, only for the sake of their audience, but eventually end up feeling that their performance expresses some part of their authentic self. This idea resembles that longstanding piece of common wisdom that when we do something for long enough, it becomes an essential part of who we are. But the opposite is also true, in that we might repeat a certain behaviour and at some point start feeling increasingly estranged from it, as if we were forcing ourselves to do something that does not quite feel authentic. We will return to and expand upon this relationship between identity and the repetition of behaviour later when we talk about performativity.

Our everyday performances also mark our belonging to different communities, our beliefs and our values. They convey substantial information about who we are and who we want to be. Because we consciously or unconsciously mark our alignment with or our distance from particular communities and social groups, our performances might not always comply with social expectations. Sometimes, we might want to present ourselves in ways that specifically disrupt these, like a goth teenager craving forms of self-expression that veer away from the desires of their conservative parents. Other times, our performances of self simply cannot be contained within a particular set of expectations, or they might make us stand out in uncomfortable ways. We might not always be able to choose the ways we perform our gender, sexuality, race, or class, and this might determine the ways our performances – and by extension ourselves – are perceived in various social situations.

But whether we use our everyday performances to stand out, blend in, or hide in plain sight, whether we succeed or fail at what we are trying to convey when we perform, what seems clear is that there is no such thing as coming before others without performing. Crucially, these forms of everyday quotidian performance do not have to be consciously understood or defined as performance by their actors. Insofar as they have a presentational, communicative purpose in a given social setting, they can be analysed as such.

Rituals

Social scientists have long noticed that in all cultures performance is an essential part of the social human experience and is deployed in rituals that mark important life transitions, heal the social fabric after moments of crisis, or solidify a sense of community with shared values and traditions. Anthropologists have traditionally divided rituals into two categories: sacred and secular. Sacred rituals are those related to religious or spiritual beliefs and generally involve some form of communication with the supernatural. Secular rituals are those related to the many facets of public and everyday life, such as state ceremonies or sport events. However, in many non-Western societies, and often also in Western society, the differences between sacred and secular rituals are blurred and we might see events that contain elements of both. For example, funerals held for soldiers killed while on military duty often involve both religious and public rituals. In many countries, including some in which religious and political life are supposedly separated, when an elected president or prime minister starts public duty, they take an oath on a Bible or other religious text. Whether sacred, secular, or mixed, all rituals are structured, usually collective events in which people engage in actions that feel important and transformative to them or their community. Usually, rituals involve clear divisions of roles and rules of participation. These roles and rules determine what actions each participant will perform. During rituals, people perform particular gestures, actions, speeches, songs, dances, etc. Performance is an essential part of ritual because the behaviours in which participants engage are repeated over time, often through generations, and are passed from body to body in a learning process that is embodied and physical.

In the 1960s, he was not American anthropologist Victor Turner (1920–1983) posited that ritual performance is used as an instrument to conjure up and create collective meaning, have transformative experiences, solidify communal life and beliefs, or recall a mythic past. He called the experience of togetherness that happens in rituals communitas, arguing that however transient or bound to the time and place of the ritual, the experience of togetherness momentarily abolishes the differences in status between the members of the community. Communitas has the temporary ability to bring people together as equals who share a common experience. We can see Turner’s notion of communitas at work in any contemporary example of ritual. Sport fans wear their team’s colours and attend games where they might perform particular chants, songs, or gestures that mark them as part of a collective. The attendants of a Catholic Eucharist ingest the holy wafer, and through this action build a sense of being one community in Christ. In the United States, the recital of the Pledge of Allegiance to begin congressional sessions, local government meetings, and in schools is a performance that solidifies the idea of nationhood. Across college campuses, fraternities and sororities perform rituals that mark their members as parts of a community.

The persistence of rituals in human societies across different times and geographical locations suggests that our species has always used performance to create and maintain community, to make sense of life transitions and difficult experiences, or to feel connected with supernatural or spiritual dimensions. Broadly speaking, in rituals, humans use performance to give meaning to their lives. Given the importance of rituals, it is not surprising that some people might feel very strongly about the ‘right’ ways of performing certain rituals, or have the impression that rituals are immutable and fixed over time. As with any other kind of performance, however, rituals can and do change. Often, new rituals are invented to promote or consolidate certain collective values. Sometimes, old rituals performed over long periods of time might change almost imperceptibly through the small differences that repetition entails. Finally, we might choose to change the way we perform a certain ritual to make a point about the status quo that the ritual upholds or represents. When some NFL players started to kneel in 2016 during the American national anthem to protest systemic racism in their country, they were deliberately changing their performance in a collective ritual of nationhood. In doing so, they used performance to call attention to the fact that the nation is not a neutral category but one that serves the interests of some individuals over others based on their race and class.

Performativity

In the 1960s, British philosopher J. L. Austin (1911–1960) developed his idea that language does more than just describe reality, and that some utterances or ‘speech acts’ have material and tangible consequences. He grouped these speech acts that do something in the world in a category that he labelled performative. He also argued that performative speech acts are different from constative speech acts, which merely describe the world. Austin also noticed that in order for speech acts to have their performative effect, specific social conventions have to be fulfilled. In one of his classic examples, the utterance ‘I do’ pronounced during a marriage ceremony has the power of binding two individuals in a social contract, but only in specific social circumstances. Some of these circumstances include that the words are pronounced by someone authorized to officiate the wedding, in front of witnesses, and provided that – at least at the time of his writing – the married individuals are a man and woman. Austin’s essential contribution was to help us see that language makes the world as much as it describes it.

One of Austin’s students, American philosopher John R. Searle (b. 1932), took Austin’s definition of the performative a step further, arguing that performative language is not only circumscribed to special occasions. For Searle, all language can be performative when spoken with intention. And given that some sort of intention is almost always present in all utterances, Searle concluded that all language was performative.

Also drawing on Austin’s theories, French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) theorized that the effectiveness of speech in creating a particular reality is not so much related to the fulfilment of a set of circumstances that will give the utterance social validity, but to its iterability, that is, its repetition. Essential to Derrida’s contribution is the idea that individual human intention in uttering something is highly determined by the structure of repetition of language. That is, the things we say mean something precisely because we share a set of conventions about their meaning with the people that we speak to, and these conventions about their meaning have been established through repetition. Returning to Austin’s by way of Derrida shows us that uttering the words ‘I do’ in a marriage ceremony is socially binding not only because the occasion fulfils all the right requirements, but because marriage ceremonies have been repeated in more or less the same way for a very long time. Repetition is what gives performative speech its capacity to shape the world. Derrida’s contribution shows that, when we utter performative speech acts, we do not simply get to make the world as if we had complete agency, but we insert ourselves in a process in which meanings are socially constructed in particular ways.

Contemporary feminist and queer theorist Judith Butler draws on Derrida’s idea of language as iteration to argue that subjects’ identities are produced by speech and that this production happens in social circumstances over which they do not have total control. In her book Bodies that Matter, published in 1993, Butler poses her theory of gender performativity as an example of how discourse produces bodies. Butler argues that gender is an enactment, one that responds to social expectations that are imposed on the individual from the very moment of birth. Nowadays, the performative dimension of gender might not strike many of us as shocking. We know that when adults dress...