About
WHAT IS PERFORMANCE?
There are many ways to understand performance, but the two primary approaches are to talk about “as” performance and “is” performance:
Using the category “as” performance, one can look into things otherwise closed off to inquiry. In every human activity there are usually many players with different and even opposing points of view, goals, and feelings. One asks performance questions of events: How is an event deployed in space and disclosed in time? What special clothes or objects are put to use? What roles are played and how are these different, if at all, from who the performers usually are? How are the events controlled, distributed, received, and evaluated?
“Is” performance refers to more definite, bounded events marked by context, convention, usage, and tradition. However, in the twenty-first century, clear distinctions between “as” performance and “is” performance are vanishing. More and more people experience their lives as a connected series of performances that often overlap: dressing up for a party, interviewing for a job, experimenting with sexual orientations and gender roles, playing a life role such as mother or son, or a professional role such as doctor or teacher. The sense that “performance is everywhere” is heightened by an increasingly mediatized environment where people communicate by phone and the internet, where an unlimited quantity of information and entertainment comes through the air.
One way of navigating and organizing this complex situation is to arrange the performance genres, performative behaviors, and performance activities into a continuum, where they blend into one another and interact with indistinct boundaries.
Classroom Activities
PERFORM
- Observe an everyday encounter of people you do not know. Intervene in the encounter yourself with a definite goal in mind. Afterwards, discuss how your intervention changed the performances of the others. Did they welcome or resent your intervention? Why?
- In small groups, take turns reproducing for your group a bit of behavior that you ordinarily do only in private. How did the behavior change when you were self-consciously performing for others?
- Work with a group to create a happening in the manner of Allan Kaprow’s “lifelike” art. The performance can be as simple or complicated as you wish (and can feasibly pull off). When it is over, discuss the performance’s “onceness.”
- Choose a performance (a scene from a play, an improvisation, a warm-up, a stand-up act, a famous speech, etc.) and rehearse the performance with different functions in mind. What happens to your performance when you are no longer performing to simply entertain? What happens to the performance when it is meant to heal, teach, or foster community?
WRITE ABOUT
- Analyze the “Fan and the Web.” Which drawing helps you understand the broad spectrum of performance better? List examples of the different types of performance. Which types of performance are familiar to you, and which are areas that you would like to learn more about?
- Look for examples of the word “performance” in popular culture. Look through magazines and newspapers; browse the internet; read through junk mail; etc. Collect anything you can find that includes the word “performance.” Once you have several examples, write about them with particular attention to how the word is used in different ways and with different connotations.
- Choose an act, behavior, or other event not typically considered to be a performance. Write a short analysis of your example as performance.
- The “onceness” of certain events that seem to happen for the first time—e.g., the events of 11 September 2001—is a function of context, reception, and the countless ways bits of behavior can be organized, performed, and displayed. But there have been “other” September 11ths. Research this date in history. Write about what you find. Then look for examples of films and television programs in which similar events take place. How do your findings relate to the concept of restored behavior?
- Find an example of a politician speaking in public, either live or on television or the internet. Analyze the performance using the key concepts of “make believe” and “make belief.”
Weblinks
- Audio recording of Allan Kaprow’s “How to Make a Happening”
- Explore the Teatro Olimpico
- Explore images from Goya’s Disasters of War
- Explore the legacy of Luis Valdez from El Teatro Campesino
- Learn more about Bertolt Brecht from the International Brecht Society
- More on wrestling
Sample Discussion Questions
TALK ABOUT
- Pick an action not usually thought to be a performance. For example, waiting on line at a supermarket checkout counter, crossing the street at a busy intersection, visiting a sick friend. In what ways can each of these be analyzed “as” a performance?
- Select a sports match, a religious ritual, an everyday life occurrence, and a performing art. Discuss their similarities and differences “as” performances with regard to venue, function, audience involvement, event structure, and historical-cultural context.
- Definitions of “performance” change over time. For example, although now we think of Ancient Greek theatre competitions as “theatre,” they were considered more “ritual” than “theatre” at the time. What are examples of contemporary performances that have or may shift categories? In what category, for example, does reality television belong? True? Fiction? What about television news? Purely functional? Or aesthetic entertainment?
- What does it mean to say that “all behavior is restored behavior”? When are we aware of our behavior being “twice-behaved” and when do we just “live life”?
- How do performances function? In a group, create a list of performances and talk about the different functions of performances on your list. When do functions overlap?
Videos
What is Performance?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=27&v=rfAM9dftV1A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7ktQb7HaAk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTbQq5egq1c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SB6zTUfEODc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YG6fMnH17GU