What is performance?

What is performance?
Occur in many different instances and kinds
Must be constructed as a broad spectrum or continuum of human actions
Any action that is framed, enacted, presented, highlighted or displayed is a
performance
Performances are restored behaviors, performed actions that people train for and
rehearse
o Restored behavior: physical, verbal, or virtual actions that are not-for-the-first
time; that are prepared or rehearsed. A person may not be aware that she is
performing a strip of restored behavior. Also referred to as twice-behaved
behavior.
times when we are behaving differently than our everyday selveles
Never for the first time
behavior that you repeat, not invent
An activity of a given participant on a given occasion which serves to influence in
any way any other participants.
Entire constructed environment that makes up the performance
Is/As performance:
IS performance:
o culture tell us/history tell us performance arts
for a particular cultural situation
when understood to be one
o Rituals, play and games
o One cannot determine what is a performance without referring to specific
cultural circumstances
AS performance:

o anything can be studied as performance

o we can analyze its particular performance qualities
o might not be considered a performance in daily life for those who participate
in the act
What are evoking and embodying? How do they help us move between the here
and now in the narrative performance?
Evoking:
o Using behavior (the body) to make audience see the environment of the story
world
Visualizing
gazing, staring up, bending down to look at something
Showing
pointing or acknowledging
Responding
gasp, looking startled
o Trying to get people to see the environment by responding to it
o Examples:
Responding to water being splashed on you
Embodying:
o Doing the action you are verbally describing
o Demonstrating to show audience just how it was
o Not just acting it out, but showing it to audience to make them form an
opinion
o Pretending to kick a soccer ball when you say I scored the goal

Here and Now

o Refers to the performance itself
Then and there
o Refers to what is being portrayed

Make believe:
boundaries between what is real and fiction are distinct and clear
Boundaries between the world of performance and everyday reality = clear and
distinct
Kids playing doctors
Playing dress up
Done it before (restored )
Never the same way twice (flux)
Make belief
boundary is intentionally blurred
Create the social realities they enact
A play done it before
Rehearsed (restored)
Never actually the same because audience, delays, forgetting lines, improve (flux)
Flux:
the dialectic tension with restored behavior

never the same way twice

the how of the performance
o liveness of performance

Using one of the eight kinds of performance, explain the concepts of restored
behavior, flux, and is/as performance:
Restored behavior:
o Not being done for the first time
Flux:
o Sex never happens the same way twice
As performance:
o Not considered performance by tradition or social contexts
Eight kinds of performance:
1. in everyday life cooking, socializing, just living
2. in the arts
3. in sports and other popular entertainments
4. in business
5. in technology
6. in sex
7. in ritual sacred and secular
8. in play

Ritual and/as performance:

Performance: ritualized behavior conditioned and/or permeated by play
Ritual and play lead people into a second reality separate from ordinary life where
people can become people other than their daily selves
Continuity between way you do performance the first time and the second time
Ritual defined:
More or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not encoded by
performers actions you rehearsed
Stylized, repetitive, stereotyped
Occur at special places and times fixed by the clock, calendar or specified
circumstances
Formal acts and utterances not encoded by performaces
Rituals:
events
in a special place/time marked off from everyday life
Produces communitas
o normative
o spontaneous
Produces anti-structure
Communitas
o experience by ritual
o Spontaneous cant plan for; happens when group of people come together

o comradery
Sacred and secular
Everyday rituals:
repeated
predictable
rehearsed (to the point that they may become unconscious)
as it has been done
restored behavior (not done for first time)
Liminality:
neither here nor there
betwixt and between
a space of transformation
the ritual participants are suspended between the identity they brought with them and
the identity they leave with
frequently likened to death, to being in the womb
behavior is normally passive
Liminoid:
Ritual in modern/post modern society
Leisure
Performing arts
Ritual-like types of symbolic action that occur in leisure activities
voluntary

arts and popular entertainment

counter-culture of the 1960s known as the New Age with its alternative religions and
medicines and non-traditional lifestyles
Sheckner argues that it is unfounded to say that performing arts have their origins in ritual there
is no evidence and he says that performance = combination of ritual and play rather than the
evolution of ritual

1. Analyze a ritual from your own experience, sacred or secular, using Schechners four
perspectives on ritual (structure, function, process and experience)
Family dinner (secular) function to eat/spend time with family
Communion (sacred) function to show faith to God
2. What distinctions does Vitcor Turner draw between Liminality and Liminoid?
How do liminality and liminoid address different ritual context?
In liminality, communitas tends to characterize relationships between those jointly
undergoing ritual transition.
o Communitas is spontaneous, immediate, concrete not shaped by norms
Liberation from the constraints of ordinary life anti-structure
Performance:
1. How do you understand Schechners approach to the broad spectrum of performing?
2. What is the relationship between preforming and acting according to Schechner? In
your answer consider two examples from Kirbys matrix of acting.
Michael Kirbys continuum of acting
nonmatrixed performing
o actions performed onstage which do not involve role-playing
o doing something onstage other than playing a character moving props and
assitsting in onstage costume changes while the performance is going on

symbolized matrix
o someone performing actions that can be understood by spectators as
belonging to a character even though the performer always behaves as
herself
received acting
o what extras do in cosume, speak fragments of lines, and the audience
reads them as part of the situation of a scene but they do very little character
acting
simple acting
o simulation and impersonation
o performer generates a character with feelings
complex acting
o the whole being of the performer physical, mental, emotional is called on at
a high level of commitment
Brechtian acting:
Alienation or enstrangement
The actor does not hid ebehidn the attributes of the role or disappear into the role
o Actor and the playwright and director takes a position to some degree outside
what is being performed objective place where the artist can offer opinions
concerning the dilemma facing the character, the social context of the drama,
and the relationship of the play to the situation of the audience
o
Chapter 4
Poetic performance, Viewpoints reading, Shape
Describe two types of play and explain how each may function socially, politically or
communicatively. (Page 93/94, 101)
Competition: competition in elections
Chance: chance you wont win the election/chance someone will respond badly to
you
Mimicry: playing imaginary/pretend games is a big part of socialization for younger
children

Dizziness: people getting blackout drunk

What is flow and why is it different from meta-communication? Give an example of and
elaborate on the different effects they have on the quality of a performance? (97 and 102-104)
Flow:
o losing yourself in the action so awareness of anything other than performance
disappears
o Different that meta communication meta communication is a signal of
letting the audience how the action should be interpreted and has an awareness
of persuading the audience that flow does not
Describe how shape, various modes of shape change, and pedestrian/abstract gestures
create, define, or transform relationships.
Performance in its play qualities is ritual modified by play
Performance = ritual
o been done before following a pattern
o Never the same way twice
o Play adds quality of chance not just following according to plan
What is play?
Fantasy, make-believe, creativity, exploration, discovery
Willing suspension of disbelief
Regulating
Types of play:
Agon or competition
o Games where there are winners and losers
o The outcome is determined by the skills and/or strengths of the players

o Races, weightlifting, chess

Alea or chance
o Games where fate, luck, or grace determine the winner
o Dice, roulette
Mimicry or simulation
o Playing within an iminganry, make-believe, or illusory world
o Theatre, childrens make-believe play
Ilinx or dizziness
o playing to induce a disorienting experience or state of mind
o Spinning, roller-coaster rides, getting crazy drunk
Flow:
Close to being in a trance
Occurs when the player becomes one with the playing
Extreme self-awareness where the player has total control over the play act
Boundary between the interior psychological self and the performed activity dissolves
State in which people are so involved with an activity that nothing else matters
One moment transfers to next with ease
Goal oriented
Metacommunication
o signal that frames other signals contained within or after it
o communicating that you are playing dog nipping at you versus biting you

o Signal that tells receivers how to interpret the communication they are
receiving
o example = crossing your fingers when speaking meaning you are lying,
winking meaning you are joking
Functions of play:
education/practice
o social learning
escape from/relief of stress
o pretending and transformation of self
placing ourselves in social orders
o where do we fit in relation to others, the ladder, contingent positions
muscular exercise
o health, thinking performing as different way to come to know the world
The Nine Viewpoints: main approach to performance
Tempo
o the rate of speed; slowing down, speeding up
o action beyond how they would in everyday life
Duration
Kinesthetic response
o Reaction so fast cant see what caused it
o Door slams and you turn around
Repetition

In sequence
As motif
Gives the audience something to hold onto when the narrative isnt so literal
Means of making strange an image, action or idea by framing it for
audience
o Function as a structure
Space
o shape
Were always in one, but usually not aware
To work with shape as a viewpoint, we can break down the shape our
body is in based on simple formal elements
Lines
Curves
gesture
o Shape with a beginning, middle and an end
o Behavioral
Private
Public communicative, intended to send a meaning
o Expressive
not literal/representational
not everyday
abstract and symbolic
may express a concept/idea/emotion
o
o
o
o

architecture
o Physical environment of your space
o Material of physical environment is part of your piece
special relationship
o Distance and angle between people as dynamic relationship
o Crafting where bodies are in relation to other people
topography
o floor pattern
Shape-flow mode of shape change
emphasizes relationship between performer and his/her internal state
Directional mode of shape change arcing and spoking
emphasizes relationship between performer and particular other
pointed to a target
direct focus
Pyramid shape, wall shape
Carving mode of shape change
emphasizes relationship between self performer and environment
making room for other objects
melting around other objects in the world
Round shape, screw shape

Chapter 7 - Performance Process (4/12)

Political performance, orenstein & Zeese readings (4/19)
Four types of Performance Activism. How does each type of performance activism apply
to the Occupy Wall Street Movement?
Occupation of public and private spaces
o act of occupying space itself can be as important as the act itself
o The Occupy Wall Street movement occupied the public space of Zuccotti Park
in NY
Enactment of collectivity and solidarity
o The people living in Zuccottti Park created a self-sustaining environment by
developing a community that had farms, food, and entertainment
o Encouraged public engagements and it did not have just one leader, everyone
had a voice in position in Occupy Wall Street
Occasion to disrupt the official story
o Occupy Wall Street disrupted the official story by trying to expose the
corruptions of the banks
Dramatize injustices and inequalities dominant mode of understanding (makes the
injustices visible)
o Made the injustices visible by taking over NYC
What are the three main components of the time-space sequence, and how did you
incorporate each of them in your narrative fiction or collaborative devised performance
(Ch. 7)
Time-Space:
Proto-performance
o training

o workshop
o rehearsal
Performance
o Warm-up
o Public performance
o events/contexts sustaining the public performance
o cool down
Aftermath
o critical responses
o archives
o memories
Protoperformance:
brainstorming what to do for the piece, trying out different movements, practicing the
piece (training, workshop, rehearsal)
Performance:
setting up for the performance, actually performing, bowing after performance
(warm-up, performance, events/context sustaining public performance, cool down)
Aftermath:
class critiques of performance, archive, memories of the performance
o Chapter 6
o 1. Using the concepts of restored behavior and flux, give an example of a
make believe and a make belief performance.
o
o 2. List all 5 elements of Burke's Pentad. Explain how at least 3 of these would
be used in the creation of the alienation effect, as in a Brechtian performance.
o
o Kenneth Burkes Pentad: notes from 2/9
Agent (who)
Scene (when and where)
Act (what)
Agency (how and what materials)
Purpose (why)
o