...Ian Maxwell has described the moment in undergraduate performance studies courses in which students grasp that ‘everything is performative’:
Suddenly, everything is up for (performance) analysis: the dance party on the weekend; this tutorial; breakfast with your flatmates/family/lover and so on. It is an exciting moment, but also a dangerous one. The problem lies with the possibility of the application of an analytical paradigm, itself predicated upon theatre spectatorship, ‘theatricalising’ other kinds of events; seeing everyone as actors, spaces and places as stages, objects as props, and reading dramaturgical coherencies into an event’s patterns and shapes. (Maxwell 1998: 78)...and the lesson to be learnt from that rather fleeting critical vogue is twofold: firstly, that the revelatory power of a new analytical paradigm can be quickly dissipated if it is applied too broadly and secondly, that critics need to be aware, as Ian Maxwell warns here, of the cultural baggage that the new metaphor may be slipping in under the radar, as it were.
...It is probably true to say that the relative slowness with which performance studies has been taken up in European universities is due, at least in part, to the lack of a widely understood translation of the key term. While in English the verb means ‘to do’ as well as ‘to act’, the association with theatre has brought additional connotations of insincerity or artificiality that complicate the first usage. English speakers would, thus, find it perfectly normal to refer to a surgeon performing an operation but to call the operation itself a performance would probably indicate they thought there was something wrong or at least unusual about it. Referring to someone’s behaviour or an event as a performance is to suggest that they are in some way excessive, or that they are consciously constructed or even inauthentic.
...Extrapolating from the burgeoning literature in English that utilises the term, it can be posited that performance requires people (or animals or even things) who perform, and people who witness the performance. Performance is always for someone even if the roles shift and witness becomes performer or vice versa. The question then arises as to whether performer and witness need to be present to each other, that is, whether performance is necessarily live. Assenting to this proposition would not exclude multimedia events, where live and mediatised elements coexist, but it renders problematic the case of film and television.
...the further crucial element that semioticians have referred to as the performance contract: for an activity to be seen as a performance there needs to be a certain intention on the part of the performer and a corresponding awareness on the part of the spectator/witness, or vice versa. While there are multiple ways in which this intentionality may be manifested and played with, it is important always to consider what contract is implied or formally offered and how it is actually experienced. Performer, witness, event or action, contract, occasion, location are the minimal conditions that constitute the phenomenon of performance which has thereby become a potentially vast and confusing field of study.
Help in mapping pathways through this field has come from performance theorists who have proposed a number of categories of activity which, although somewhat differently conceptualised by different scholars, do at least make it possible to begin to negotiate the sudden dizzying expansion of the concept of performance. The principal categories are aesthetic, cultural and social performance and direct
theatre.
Aesthetic performance involves performances mounted with a view to being witnessed and experienced as such by both performers and spectators[2] and it includes traditional theatre, performance theatre, and all the other performing arts and the blurred genres emerging from the interfaces between them all.
Cultural performance has emerged from the very fruitful interactions that have been going on with anthropology and sociology. Cultural performances include parades, carnivals, official celebrations, commemorative rituals, public occasions, and national and international sporting contests. They are, as Elin Diamond has put it, occasions wherein “culture complexly enunciates itself” (Diamond 1996: 6).
Social performance is the term that is increasingly being used to refer to the performative behaviours that mark every aspect of our social interactions and even the manifestation of self in everyday life.
Direct theatre is a term coined by Richard Schechner and it covers some of the terrain occupied by cultural performance (carnivals, festivals and parades, which may be sanctioned by those in power or may subvert officialdom in some way, and sometimes both at once), but it also includes more overtly subversive activities such as demonstrations and “politically radical symbolic public actions” (an example he gives is the dismantling of the Berlin Wall by the people in 1989), and the guerilla theatre of the 1960s.
...The word theatre rather than performance in Schechner’s phrase is appropriate because it suggests that there is a degree of organisation, dramaturgical shaping and structuring of the event with a view to its impact on spectators, and Schechner points out that
direct theatre is raw material for the universally displayed second theatre, TV news, which includes often improvised responses to the first theatre. (Schechner 1992: 104)...performance as a significant theoretical or analytical category, performance is a means through which something else can be explored.
...Approaching any social behaviour or event as performance has involved, to an extent, seeing them through a conceptual filter derived from ideas of theatre, and this has proved illuminating even though the idea of theatre that seems to haunt the imaginary of social science scholars is one derived from early 20th century rather than contemporary artistic practice.
In the relatively short time that performance studies has been formalising itself as a discipline, significant methodological work has been achieved in three major areas and, although much work remains to be done in all three, they can already be seen to constitute an effective epistemological foundation.
...Firstly, the complex and problematical undertaking known as performance analysis and this is the area in which semiotics has been most influential.
...The second area is becoming known as rehearsal studies and it reflects a growing awareness of the importance of the production process that precedes performance for a fuller appreciation of the performance itself. The emphasis on process, however, goes beyond a desire for deeper insights into the performance, conceptualised as work of art, and opens the way to a greater understanding of the ways in which performances both reflect the society within which they occur and contribute to that society’s idea of itself (Threadgold 1997: 118-133).
...The third area concerns the role of the spectator or witness and the dynamics of the relations that occur during performance between the performers and those engaged in witnessing what is being done.
Performance Analysis
...Step one is to establish in as much detail as possible the material signifiers involved in the performance, and here the performance itself will guide the analyst as to the nature and range of elements that seem to be operative. Step two is to note the diachronic structure of the event whether this is enacting a narrative (or fragments of different narratives as in much postmodern performance), performing a ritual, playing a game or undertaking some other structured and purposeful activity. The point here is to examine how the physical segmentation of the event constructs, orders and shapes the content, whether this is overtly narrative or not. Step three is to extrapolate from the mass of detail that has been noted the dominant recurring paradigms or signifying ensembles, to use Anne Ubersfeld’s term (Ubersfeld 1981), and step four is to consider the meanings that the analyst believes emerge from the relations that have been perceived between these performance paradigms and the narrative(s), actions or events presented.
...What is being elucidated is not the meaning of a particular piece of performance, but rather the culturally and socially situated ways in which meanings come into being.
...it is always necessary to be alert to the ways in which any analytical schema can potentially distort or colour the performances and expressive behaviours it is being used to elucidate.
Rehearsal studies
to develop methods for the observation and analysis of rehearsal. In the early days, our interest was substantially in the way the complex strands of the subsequent performance came together, how the dominant signifiers came to be selected, what role was played by the written text in this process, and how the same text is able to tell such different stories and convey such different meanings in the theatre.
... Taking note of the discussions in the rehearsal room that surrounded the selection and elaboration of major elements in the performance, noting the options tried and discarded as well as those retained, it became clear that every theatrical signifier observed in performance was like the tip of a semiotic iceberg, with depths of meaning beneath the observed surface. It also became clear that the normal one-time spectator sees only a small part of what is there and that our society, while lavishing attention on written texts, has institutionalised a very shallow mode of reception for performance that does not do justice to the weeks of work and creative invention involved.
...Participant observation and thick description are key elements in the ethnographically informed method of rehearsal study that has been developed at the University of Sydney and the task of the rehearsal analyst, like that of the ethnographer in the field, involves careful observation of the minutiae that constitute the work processes of the group being studied, an attempt to understand what the details observed mean to the people involved, and their relevance to the broader cultural context. The analysis of rehearsal requires one to focus on the specific but at the same time to be alert to the larger context that both influences, and is influenced by, the specific work process being observed.
If anthropological interpretation is constructing a reading of what happens, then to divorce it from what happens – from what, in this time or that place, specific people say, what they do, what is done to them, from the whole vast business of the world – is to divorce it from its applications and render it vacant. (18)This group of artists, working in this draughty warehouse, to produce this performance to be performed in this particular venue are indeed part of the ‘whole vast business of the world’ and the complex web of connections that make it so are a major part of what the rehearsal analyst is attempting to tease out.
Spectator Studies/Event theory
...Potentially more radical is the attempt to explore the way spectators experience the performance and to examine what happens downstream of performance, i.e. how spectators remember this experience, what meanings they construct with it, and how the performance, now conceptualised as event, becomes part of the social life of the community.
Recent work on spectatorship in live performance ranges from highly empirical studies of particular audiences to theoretical modelling that attempts to encapsulate the essential structures of theatrical spectatorship. Not all of this work draws overtly on semiotic terminology and some, indeed, is critical of the shortcomings of semiotics in relation to spectatorship (Sauter 2000).
...Asking who is attending various types of live performance and why they do so provides useful information, particularly for theatre managers and funding bodies, but it reveals very little about how spectators attend, what they do when they are there, what they make of the experiences they have, what they remember of what they have experienced and, thus, how the performances become enmeshed within the wider culture.
These are all questions that are opened up when performance is considered as a mode of communication, involving senders and receivers in a complex relationship with each other, and necessarily embedded within the social event constituted by the coming together at a given time and place of both parties. Scholarly studies of spectatorship have involved experimentation with some intriguing methods of collecting information, the most promising of which are, in my view, Willmar Sauter’s system of ‘theatre talks’ and Tim Fitzpatrick’s experiments with the ‘eyemark’ recorder (Sauter 2000; Fitzpatrick 1990 and 1991).
...Theatre poses in an acute form the question as to whether performance analysis and spectatorial practice can in fact be separated, given that the performance only has meaning when it is viewed by someone and that the analytical process constructs the viewing subject as much as the performance, or rather it indicates the extent to which the two co-construct each other.
seeing, watching and looking at theatre do not begin to explain what happens between an audience and a performer (Read 1993: 58)but the common terminology encourages just such a reductionist view. Stuart Grant, in his doctoral thesis proposing a phenomenological approach to the “transcendental intersubjective Audience”, makes frequent use of the words ‘witness’ and ‘witnessing’ (Grant 2007), which brings to the fore another essential dimension of what is going on.
...
A performance centred approach to any performance event, whether this be a theatrical production, a football match, a political demonstration or a court hearing, can be summed up as the attempt to answer as completely as possible what grammarians call the “wh” questions: who is doing it, who is it being done for, what is being done and how, where and when is it being done and why. These deceptively simple questions need to be complemented by two additions: ‘who is paying?’ and ‘who benefits?’. The additions function in a similar way to the sender/receiver categories in an actantial analysis to oblige the analyst to consider the wider social and cultural context within which the performance is occurring, the functions it is serving in this wider context and its relation to dominant structures of power and authority. The questions may seem simple but, if performance analysis and rehearsal studies can be seen as attempts to answer ‘what’ and ‘how’, then it is evident that answering them is complex and difficult, requiring the input of numerous disciplinary approaches, borrowed from semiotics, ethnography, sociology and linguistics, to name only the most obvious.
The list serves as a basic rule of thumb, reminding the analyst that each of the questions has to be considered. Asking ‘where’, for example, involves consideration not only of the location of the performance venue within the social space of the community, the nature of this space, its historical and political resonance within the community but also, crucially, where the performers are located in relation to those who are witnessing their performance. While this may seem obvious, it is worth pondering the fact that so much of the pictorial record of aesthetic and cultural performance fails to provide any information about the relative location of the performers and spectator/witnesses. A performance specialist always seeks this information but it is rarely provided by the painters, photographers and video makers whose work forms the precious iconographic record of necessarily ephemeral performances. Much writing about performance treats only one or two of these questions, skates over the surface of others, and ignores others altogether. The point to be stressed, however, is that all the questions need to be considered in order to arrive at a deep understanding of the event in question and of its performativity.
