Summary for Post I

Hey, all—

Thanks for your amazing posts! There’s a lot here, so let me get to it.

Andréa seizes on the notion that performance is “scripted” behavior. Chatting with a friend, drinking some water, and petting a dog, she wonders what script if any they and the dog are performing. States (I think it’s him?—I’ll need to check) somewhere mentions that it’s tricky to describe pets and children as performing. Onstage (as I’m sure you all know), most pets and very young children (e.g., toddlers, infants) draw focus. They are, semiotically speaking, disruptions. Why? States guesses it’s because they are only, obviously themselves. They cannot engage in mimetic behavior (at least, not at the level dictated by formal stage conventions). At some level, the audience knows that they’re out of control. We hope the kid will behave; we hope the dog will go through its assigned tricks. But, audiences realize, there’s no guarantee this will be the case. The same kind of out-of-control fascination occurs with elements like fire or water on stage. They’re unpredictable—unscriptable—in ways that put pressure on the other elements on stage. Cool stuff, really. For your enjoyment: here’s MarinaAbramovic drinking water.

Andréa’s subsequent post on “felicity conditions” is appreciated.

Emily, in grappling with the notion that everything is performance, reminds me of a helpful distinction Schechner makes in the “What is Performance” optional reading I gave you. Namely, Schechner talks about two different conversations or avenues of inquiry we can take. We can, on the one hand, talk about something (an event, a phenomenon) like it is (unquestionably is) performance. Alternately, we can talk about something as (“as if it were”) performance. Performance, in other words, can be a conceptual box into which we put certain kinds of events. Or it can be a lens that we can peer through to examine events in a new light (the light of “what if we looked at this as a performance?”). The is/as distinction takes some of the pressure off of our having to have utterly certain definitions. Emily also distinguishes sports from performance by invoking the notion of the fictitious. Theatrical performances are fictitious; sports are real. It’s a rule of thumb that makes sense, but of course I’m going to throw a monkeywrench into the gears. The term fiction, after all, doesn’t mean untrue or without substance or consequence; it just means manufactured—crafted by someone. In this sense, football is both real (bones get broken, traumatic brain injuries happen, teams win and lose) and fictitious. Football is, in some sense, an arbitrary set rules for behavior that are “real” only because everyone involved consents to treat them seriously, suspending their disbelief in the ostensible silliness of the endeavor. (Of course, one can use that description for just about any human enterprise. Can you think of any exceptions?)

Sarah gives us a fascinating metaphor of theatre and performance as, respectively, the upper and middle classes of a kingdom. (What, I wonder, would the lower classes be? Porn acting? Mime? Prop comedy?) Theatre, she offers, operates as “a series of previously defined actions guided by an undisputed manual.” Performance, on the other hand, is “continuously defined behavior which seeks to dispute this single standard of operation.” Rather quickly, though, Sarah problematizes this distinction, pointing out how the boundaries between these two realms defines a zone of conflict. Performance constantly drifts into standardized, conventional practice; theatre attempts to push its boundaries by incorporating performance elements. The description of this battle—which Sarah frames as being vital to the kingdom’s survival—is fascinating.

Osi helpfully brings in Schechner’s distinction between “make-believe” and “make-belief” performance. Some kinds of performance (conventional theatre, LARPing, children playing) aim to create a space of “make-believe,” where participants conjoin imaginations to create and sustain a “what if” world or scenario. Other kinds of performance are “make-belief”—structured and even scripted, to be sure, but taken seriously and not separated from the rest of life in terms of consequence and seriousness. The presidency is Schechner’s example here. Various kinds of cultural and religious ritual might fit here. As Osi points out, these two realms have a lot of overlap. Can you think of times where you thought you were participating in one realm (make-belief/make-believe) only to end up in the other?

Austin provides a nice review of the elements of performance outlined by Carlson before turning to the sports/theatre distinction. For Austin, the crucial distinction is that in a sporting event, the participants aren’t clear on the conclusion in the same way that actors in a play are. (Of course, there are plays such as The Mystery of Edwin Drood that defy this convention.) Austin ends with an intriguing question about professional wrestling, a practice that challenges a lot of our conversations about theatre versus sports. (Neal Hebert, a recent PhD graduate of ours, wrote his dissertation on professional wrestling. He knows a lot about it.)

Two notions from Mike’s post catch my attention. First, he suggests a distinction between theatre and theater. The -re describes the craft/discipline; the -er describes the physical space. This reminds me of one of the first practical lessons I got in theatre, way back during a production of Chess (the other ABBA musical) at the Shawnee (Oklahoma) Little Theatre. I was a little high school junior, playing five or six different ensemble parts, and an older (like, 22 years old) theatre major from Oklahoma Baptist University, who was playing a bigger role, schooled me on pronunciation and syllabic emphasis. THEE-a-ter, she counseled, was this thing we’re doing, whereas the-A-ter was that place you go to watch movies. It was clear from her manner which one was preferable. In my mind, I’ve always pasted those pronunciations on the two different spellings. The other idea Mike brings up is that of obligatory performances, or performances under stress. Mike refers to occasions where you have to make an excuse to someone—a parent, a spouse, a teacher—and you engage in some “acrobatic” storytelling (even if you’re not, strictly speaking, lying). We’ll be talking more about performances under stress later in the semester.

Mark mentions a kind of performance-under-stress: his son’s request to play video games. As Mark points out, all performances depend upon contexts for their significance and meaning. Theatre’s only real distinction from performance, ultimately, is the standardized, conventional nature of its particular context. (Note how vital contexts are for performative acts, as well.) Of course, when there’s a lack of agreement or confusion about context, things can go awry See this example from The Naked Gun.

Can you think of real-world occasions where this kind of confusion has occurred?

Erica relates her experience of devising and performing her “Vocal History” assignment in (Stacy’s?) class, relating the various different kinds of voice she’s developed for different sets of contexts and audiences. It’s a cool example of the “not-me” and “not-not-me” and of how differential pressures can move us (oblige us?) to innovate our personal performances. Erica writes, “I cannot think of a moment in my life when I have been truly alone and had the same sense of performance as I have had in the instances I mentioned above.” This makes me wonder if and how we perform when we think we’re alone. Are we ever really separated from performance contexts, from the visible and invisible pressures that impel us to perform? When, in other words, might we be not performing? When might we be “just me”?

In her post, Lisa centers us on questions of purpose: what’s performance/theatre for? The purpose, as she states, will dictate our choices. She’s fascinated by occasions where intention and reception (or, as she puts it, “expectation and fruition”) differ. There’s always a risk with performance, right? One theatre scholar, Peggy Phelan (in her amazing book Unmarked: The Politics of Performance), reminds us that representation (and thus performance) follows two laws: “(i) it always conveys more than it intends, and (ii) it is never totalizing” (2). There’s a surplus and a deficit in every act of representation, a little wiggle room of both “I didn’t mean that” and “but I thought that’s what I just said.” This wiggle room can be a source of frustration (as when your audience just doesn’t get it, or when—worse—they see something offensive/bad in your performance that you didn’t intend at all). But it can also be a source of energy and joy. It’s the potential for the new/unexpected that makes representation/performance/theatre so dynamic. It’s this never-quite-exact Murphy’s Law of representation that gives theorists like Judith Butler hope. We’ll talk more about this later in class.

In his musings on the theatre/sports distinction, Dharmik mentions that theatre often intends to teach as well as entertain. There’s a venerable history in western theatre of theorists and practitioners (starting at least with Horace) saying that theatre’s twin purposes are “to teach and to please.” There have been variations on this throughout history (e.g., Antonio Minturno arguing, “teach, please, and persuade”; Lodovico Castelvetro saying “just entertain”). As a bit of arts advocacy, though, “teach and please” isn’t bad, is it? Would you say that theatre follows those aims? Should it? Dharmik also mentions the kind of personas that athletes often have. That’s a fascinating idea, the persona. How is a persona different than or similar to a character? Can you think of examples where the two blur into each other (off the top of my head: Mr. Rogers, Bill Nye the Science Guy, Mr. T)?

That’s all my thinks for now. Feel free to comment/elaborate either here or on your own (or others’) blogs. Do read/comment on each other’s blogs, and look for the prompt for Post 2 soon!

Best,

John