Theater and Performance - Performance Studies' Interdisciplinary Genealogy, Performance As Object, Performance As Method, Performance, Performativity, And Theatricality
"Performance" is an influential theoretical paradigm in the arts and humanities, with adherents in disciplines as diverse as anthropology, linguistic philosophy, and theater. Since the early 1980s, thinking about performance has been fostered in "performance studies" programs, disciplinary hybrids with widely variant intellectual genealogies, united by their commitment to performance as their central object and method of research.
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Histories of performance studies most frequently cite its formation in the convergence of experimental theater and structuralist anthropology in the late 1960s. Avant-garde theater practitioners in the United States such as Richard Schechner were exploring cultural traditions of performance that fell outside entrenched disciplinary traditions of Western theatrical practice and theater studies. The…
As an "interdiscipline," performance studies prides itself on its open, multivocal, and fluid character, refusing to dictate either a core methodology or canonical body of knowledge and resisting a fixed or exclusive definition of performance itself. That said, scholarship that goes under the banner of performance studies has in common a focus on process, action, events, and behavior…
While performance studies scholars espouse a range of often innovative methodologies, the ephemeral, subjective nature of performance as its subject matter poses unique challenges. For a majority of those in the field, understanding performance as a way of knowing entails a commitment to participant-observer ethnography as the principal research methodology. Dwight Conquergood, who has written ext…
The performance concept has since the late 1980s enjoyed a reach beyond this interdisciplinary constellation of performance studies through the elaboration of theories of performativity. Judith Butler's famous formulation draws on continental philosophy and the work of the linguist J. L. Austin to argue that, through processes of forcible iteration, discourse has the power to enact or mater…
Performance studies has been most notable for work that examines the politics and poetics of identity (gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality) in ways that are both responsive to the claims of human creativity and criticality and cognizant of the normative forces that constrain such expressions. This work avoids the Enlightenment distinctions between mind and body that have proved an obstacle to s…
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