Chapter 2

About

WHAT IS PERFORMANCE STUDIES?

Performance studies came into existence within, and as a response to, the radically changing intellectual and artistic circumstances of the last third of the twentieth century. As the twenty-first century unfolds, many people remain dissatisfied with the status quo. Equipped with ever more powerful means of creating, finding, and sharing information – the internet, cell phones, social media, super-fast computers – people are increasingly finding the world not a book to be read but a performance to participate in. Performance studies is an academic discipline designed to answer the need to deal with the changing circumstances of the “glocal” – the powerful combination of the local and the global.

Performance studies is more interactive, hyper-textual, virtual, and fluid than most scholarly disciplines. At the same time, adherents to performance studies face daunting ethical and political questions. What limits, if any, ought there to be to the ways information is gathered, processed, and distributed? Should those with the means intervene to protect the “human rights” of others or must we respect local cultural autonomy at whatever cost? Who shall address these questions? Only political, religious, economic, and military leaders? Increasingly, performance studies is practiced by a global community well aware of this situation. Artists and scholars are playing increasingly decisive roles in addressing these ethical and political questions.

 

Classroom Activities

PERFORM

1. Form a circle. Each person speaks her/his name. Continue until everyone in the class knows everyone else’s name.
2. Someone walks across the room. Someone else describes that action. The person walks across the room again, “showing” what previously they were just “doing.” What were the differences between “walking” and “showing walking?”
3. Choose an example of performance from everyday life that you are familiar with (it can be any number of actions, from a job interview to going out to a nightclub) and adapt it to become a formal performance for an audience. How does the activity change once it happens “on stage”?
4. J.L. Austin defined performatives as utterances such as bets, promises, namings, and so on that actually do something, that perform. Enact a performative and record your thoughts afterward. What did you accomplish with your performative? Was it successful?

WRITE ABOUT

1. Review my list of the seven areas where performance theory and the social sciences coincide (see p. PAGE in your book). Choose one topic you have discussed and analyzed in another of your classes (e.g. psychology, sociology, speech, history, etc.), and analyze that topic as a performance. How does this new lens change your understanding of the topic?
2. Conduct your own investigation of the use of cell phones, mobile internet, and smart phone use around the world. How many people in China, for example, regularly use smart phones? How many people use Facebook on a mobile device? On a tablet? On a personal computer? How does access to the internet influence, create, and repeat performances?
3. Analyze your own Facebook page: in what ways does your profile perform? When are you truly being yourself on Facebook and when are you portraying a particular version of you? Do you create different selves for different sets of friends?
4. Choose a performance—one that you are or were involved in either as a performer or spectator—and write a short analysis using Dwight Conquergood’s three “A”s of performance studies: Artistry, Analysis, and Activism (see p. PAGE of your book). How well did your chosen performance live up to Conquergood’s model? Do you think performances need to live up to such a mission? 

Weblinks

USA

• Performance Studies at Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona
• Performance Studies at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island 
• Theatre, Dance & Performance Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, California
• Performance Studies at the University of California at Davis, Davis, California
• Performance Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California
• Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
• Performance Studies at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.  
• Performance Studies at Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, Georgia
• Theatre, Dance & Performance Studies at the University of Maryland
• Performance Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
• Performance Studies at New York University, New York, NY
• Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, New York University, New York
• Performance Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina
• Performance Studies at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois
• Performance Studies at Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas  
• Performance Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle, Washington

UK

• Theatre, Film, and Television Studies at Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth, Wales 
• Contemporary Drama and Performance Studies at Brunel University
• Theatre & Performance Studies at King’s College London
• Drama and Theatre Studies at Liverpool Hope University
• Theatre & Performance at Queen Mary, University of London
• Drama, Theatre and Performance at Roehampton University
• Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick

Europe

• Performance Studies at University of Limerick, Ireland
• Performance Studies at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz, Germany  
• Theatre and Performance at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
• Media, Art and Performance Studies at Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands  

Additional International Programs and Organizations

• Performance Studies at Ambedkar University Delhi, India
• Te Puna Toi Performance Research Project at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand  
• Centre for Theatre and Performance at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia  
• Theatre and Performance at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia   
• Theatre and Performance Studies at National University of Singapore, Singapore  
• Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia
• Centre for Performance Research
• PerformanceStudies.org  
• Performance Studies international  

Sample Discussion Questions

TALK ABOUT

1. What is the “place” of performance studies in your department? What can you suggest to change or improve it?
2. How might performance studies help to deal with some of the problems facing the world, such as threats to the environment, the oppression and exploitation of people, overpopulation, and war?
3. At the beginning of Chapter 1, the author details his own subjectivity in relationship to this book. How would you describe your own subjectivity? In what context have you come to learn about performance studies? What values do you have and what values exist in your surroundings?
4. What are the differences between analyzing text and analyzing performance? What different tools must one use?

Videos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrRmXb4FLwQ