Performance Studies

Performance as an Object of Study

For performance studies scholars, performance is the object of study. The term performance describes an aesthetic event, is used metaphorically, and as an analytic tool. The broad and varied uses of the term performance make it difficult to pin down, which means the term is also a contested concept.

Performance includes live theater, drama, avant-garde shows, dance routines, concerts, presentations, and recitals. Performance studies scholars investigate theatrical presentation as a form of human expression. More than mimicry of real life, performances are viewed and analyzed for their ability to restore, revive, and re-create relationships, culture, and power.

Just as staged performances are understood as a form of human expression, everyday human action can be analyzed as a type of drama. Kenneth Burke developed the idea of dramatism, which illuminates how performance occurs in everyday life. The pentad, one aspect of dramatism, uses dramatic concepts, such as act, agent, scene, agency, and purpose, as analytic tools to explore people’s actions and motives.

Others have used theatrical language to understand everyday interactions. In the late 1960s, anthropologist Victor Turner and theater scholar Richard Schechner, both considered to be fathers of performance studies, used theatrical language to explain cultural rituals. In studying cultures different from their own, they realized people would perform rituals that dramatize and communicate stories about themselves. For example, Turner coined the term “social dramas” to explain what happens in a community when someone breaks a rule, the community’s process of siding with or against the rule breaker, and how the community works to resolve the problem.

Performance, as a term, has also expanded through the concept and theory of performativity. The concept of the performative emerged when J. L. Austin used the term performance to explore how language functions. For Austin, language is not merely referential but also performative. In other words, language does something. For example, when someone states, “I promise to take out the trash in the morning,” they are not describing a promise but engaging in the act of promising. Austin’s student John R. Searle extended his work to claim that all language is a form of doing.[Page 1217] Similarly, Jacques Derrida argued that words are reiterative or citational. In speech, meaning, content, intent, and custom have been repeated over time and are communicative and comprehensible because they are recognizable in their repetition. Expanding on Austin and Derrida, Judith Butler has broadened the performative with the concept performativity in relation to theories of the body. Butler claims that gender is recognized and embodied through specific stylized acts that are repeated across generations. These repetitions over time create and confirm what it means to be male or female. This emphasis on performativity as citationality (repetition) makes important claims about identity, arguing that identities are socially constructed rather than biologically determined.

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