« Home | Introducing the "What is Performance Studies?" Series » | Black Gay AKAs---Scandal Erupts over Gay Sororitie... » | Saturday Night/Sunday Mornin' : Crobar gets a Name... » | On Friendship » | I dont know if im gonna make it guys.... » | So much for that Afro idea... » | Frank goes on The Beyonce Diet » | Where are the children headed this year? » | Whats the Tea? » | area exams a month away.... »

Problems in Performance Studies: Defining the Field, Defining the Method

An online and interactive syllabus by Frank Leon Roberts:


"So what is Performance Studies?" This ever-asked question usually begins and ends with several overlapping concerns: is performance studies simply a narrower version of cultural studies, a field without a real method, a mere product of the all-encompassing 'postmodernist turn' in academia? Is 'performance studies' a "field", an "area" or a "discipline"? What is the difference between performativity and performance and what does this difference entail methodologically? How does performance studies deal with (and/or suffer from) the backlash toward the bastardized overexposure of the "performance metaphor" in literary and cultural studies in a post-Judith Butler era? What exactly constitutes performance studies' empirical apparatus? What are the differences, if any, between "performance studies", "performance theory" and "theories of performativity"?

Believe it or not, these questions are neither unanswerable nor are they "new" to the field. Let us begin with several useful approaches:

  • Diana Taylor. "Acts of Transfer" in The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Duke University Press, 1999.

View link here. Diana Taylor was Chair of the Department of Performance Studies at NYU from circa 1998 to 2003. She is currently Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish and is Director of the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics. This essay is the opening chapter of her book The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas which won the Modern Language Association's 2004 Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for best book in Latin American and Spanish Literatures and Cultures. Taylor's book challenges the preponderance of "textuality" as an objects and metaphor of analysis in humanities and social science research. Taylor calls for a move beyond the academy's long term fetish of "the Archive" (textual documents, bones, films, letters, and other supposedly "enduring" material) to a shift toward "the Repertoire" (ephemeral forms of knowledge such as ritual, gesture, music, dance, and vernacular speech). Ultimately she suggests that history, memory, and culture itself is usually transmitted in the "repertoire". This is particularly the case, she tells us, for non-Western and marginalized ethnic groups, many of whom have been accused of "having no history" because of the absense of a preponderance of "proper" evidentiary archival materials (think of early such claims regarding African American slaves as a "people without a culture", for instance). Taylor shows how the "repertoire", including the body itself, has been a primary site for the transmission of history, memory, and culture. This book, a new classic in the field, continues and enriches the claims made by Joseph Roach (another former Chair of NYU's Performance Studies department) in his influential work Cities of the Dead (below).

  • Peggy Phelan, "Introduction: The Ends of Performance" in The Ends of Performance, eds. Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane. NYU Press, 1998. pp. 1-19

Download the_ends_of_performance.pdf

Peggy Phelan was Chair of Performance Studies at NYU from 1994 to 1997. Her first book, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance was an instant classic in the field in part for the last chapter's controversial claim that performance is incapable of reproduction. I've attached Phelan's brief introduction to her 1998 co-edited collection The Ends of Performance. Pay particular attention to pages 3 through 7.
  • Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. "Performance Studies". Rockefeller Foundation Essay, Culture and Creativity, September 1999.

View link here. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, trained as a folklorist and anthropologist, served as Chair of NYU's department for twelve years from 1981 to 1993. She currently holds the endowed appointment of "University Professor" at NYU, where her title is also Professor of Performance Studies and Hebrew and Judaic Studies. This essay, written for a project at the Rockefeller Foundation, provides an important intellectual history of the field, including excellent references to three distinct institutional approaches (NYU, Northwestern, and University of Paris VI).

  • Dwight Conquergood. "Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research." TDR: The Drama Review 46, no 2: 145-56.

Download dwight_conquergood.pdf. During his time as Chair of Northwestern's department of performance studies, the late Dwight Conquergood emphasized an ethnographic and anthropological approach to the study of performance. In this oft-cited essay Conquergood critiques the "world as text" model popularized in anthropology by Clifford Geertz ( i.e "The culture of a people is an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong"). By introducing the concept of the "co-performative witness", Conquergood argues that performance studies offers a methodological intervention for doing and writing ethnography. Rather than "reading" (i.e. intrepreting) culture as a "text", he suggests that performance----as a form of embodied behavior---is a more useful metaphor for describing and approaching lived experience.

  • Richard Schechner. "What is 'Performance Studies' Anyway?" Unpublished draft version.

Download unpublished-draft-whatisperformancestudiesanyway.pdf

This essay is the unpublished draft version of an essay that later appears in published form in the collection The Ends of Performance. This unpublished version actually provides a more detailed intellectual history of performance studies than the later essay does, in part because it offers a more lengthlydiscussion of the institutional variations of the field at NYU and Northwestern (similar to Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's essay).
  • Richard Schechner. "What is 'Performance Studies' Anyway?" in The Ends of Performance.

Download richard_schechnerwhat_is_performance_studiespublished_version.pdf
Here is the published version of the essay mentioned above.

  • Richard Schechner. "Points of Contact Between Anthropological and Theatrical Thought." in Between and Theater, Foreword by Victor Turner. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985.

Download between_theater_and_anthropology_intro.pdf.

Richard Schechner is the intellectual forefather of performance studies. This book, based on his colloborations with anthropologist Victor Turner, is usually understood to be the official beginning of performance studies as its own discipline, one situated "betwixt and between" anthropology and non-western theatre. You cant understand performance studies methodologically without reading this work, particularly this opening chapter and the second chapter "Restored Behavior."
  • Joseph Roach: "Introduction: History, Memory, and Performance." Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. Columbia University Press, 1996.

Download cities_of_the_dead_introduction.pdf

Joseph Roach briefly served as Chair of Performance Studies at NYU in the early ninties. Up until the mid-nineties performance studies had been accused of being a somewhat exceedingly 'presentist' discourse, one more concerned with contemporary 'happenings' then with the events of the past. Roach's watershed text Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance offered the first decidingly performance studies approach to the study of history. The book went on to win the prestigious James Russell Lowell prize from the Modern Language Association in 1996.
  • Victor Turner. "Preface: Victor Turner's Last Adventure" (by Richard Schechner) and Chapter Four, "The Anthropology of Performance" in The Anthropology of Performance. PAJ Publications, 1987.

Download the_anthropology_of_performance_intro.pdf

As i've mentioned, NYU scholars trace performance studies' ontology to the colloborations with director Richard Schechner and anthropologist Victor Turner. This book, The Anthropology of Performance, is Turner's classic contribution to the field (though published posthumously). You should also read his earlier work Dramas, Fields, Metaphors, another foundational text.
  • Elin Diamond, "Introduction" in Performance and Cultural Politics, ed. Elin Diamond. Routledge Press, 1996/ pp. 1-13

Download performance_and_cultural_politics.pdf
Another solid, clean and concise intro. Pay particular attention to pages 2-3 and 6.

  • Erin Striff, "Introduction: Locating Performance Studies" in Performance Studies, ed. Erin Striff. Palgrave MacMillan Press, 2003.

Download locating_performance_studies.pdf

This intro does a good job of briefly mapping Turner and sociologist Ervin Goffman's influence on the field. Pay particular attention to pages 3-7.


-courtesy Frank Leon Roberts, Department of Performance Studies, New York University
(note: folks can thank me in advance for uploading all of these dam essays!...also, my dear colleagues in my department, i know that you're spying on this blog, so this is for you! feel free to comment...)

Category: What is Performance Studies?

Posted by the young people's professor on 3/20/2007 at 4:28:00 PM |

umm...thanks...lol

Posted by Blogger AC | 3/21/2007  

by the way. my homegirl (like for real home...home like half the time i don't know if she thought it or i said it type homegirl)is about to make a new home in NYC starting in your performance studies program this summer. Look out for Ebony Golden. Beautiful powerful creative sista. You'll see. I know you'll welcome her well.

Posted by Blogger lex | 4/09/2007  

Post a Comment