DRAFT ONLY DRAFT ONLY DRAFT ONLY What Is "Performance Studies" Anyway? Richard Schechner The sidewinder rattlesnake moves across the desert floor by contracting and extending itself in a sideways motion. Wherever this beautiful reptile points it is not going there. Such indirection is characteristic of performance studies. This area field discipline often plays what it is not, tricking those who want to fix it, frightening some, amusing others, astounding a few as it sidewinds its way across the deserts of academia. Mapping the Field In 1966 I published in TDR "Approaches to Theory/Criticism," a formulation of an area of study that I called "the performance activities of man" [sic]: Play, games, sports, theatre, and ritual (1966:27-28). These activities were "primeval," that is without prior origins or derivations. In 1970 I published in Theatre Quarterly "Actuals," the fruit of my 1960s thinking about ritual in non-Western cultures and contemporary avantgarde performance, the basis for what I later called the "broad spectrum approach"--performance studies as an intersection of practices, writing, data, and theories from social/cultural anthropology, ethnography, pre-history, ritual studies, theatre studies, semiotics, and both the historical and current avantgarde. In "Actuals" I referred to the Tiwi of Micronesia and the shamans of Siberia; I discussed Australian Aborigine initiation rites, a New Guinea cycle play, and avantgarde performances ranging from the Grotowski, the Living Theatre, and The Performance Group to Allan Kaprow's Happenings and Ralph Ortiz's blood ritual, The Sky Is Falling. For the first time, I used the term "performance theory" to describe my ideas. "Actuals" was an attempt to theorize materials I intuitively felt belonged together. It was the basis for what I later called the "broad spectrum approach"--performance studies as an intersection of practices, writing, data, and theories from social/cultural anthropology, ethnography, pre-history, ritual studies, theatre studies, and both the historical and current avantgarde. In 1973, I guest-edited a special issue of TDR, "Theatre and the Social Sciences," probably the first performance studies collection. Articles and interviews dealt with performance theory, kinesics, community art as life process, Peter Brook's journey through Africa, theatre as therapy, the Easter Passion Play of the Yaquis, and avantgarde performance. In the "Introduction" to this special issue of TDR, I wrote: [...] performance is a kind of communicative behavior that is part of, or continuous with, more formal ritual ceremonies, public gatherings, and various means of exchanging information, goods, and customs. [...] I believe there are seven key areas where performance theory and the social sciences coincide [...]: 1. Performance in everyday life, including gatherings of every kind. 2. The structure of sports, ritual, play, and public political behaviors. 3. Analysis of various modes of communication (other than the written word); semiotics. 4. Connections between human and animal behavior patterns with an emphasis on play and ritualized behavior. 5. Aspects of psychotherapy that emphasize person-to- person interaction, acting out, and body awareness. 6. Ethnography and prehistory--both of exotic and familiar cultures. 7. Construction of unified theories of performance, which are in fact, theories of behavior. [...] I propose that performance theory deal exclusively and coherently with the seven areas as outlined. This field could combine aspects of the "scientific method" with some of the traditional intuitive methods of the arts. This combination of means is suitable today for both the social sciences and the arts. This is because we are currently witnessing a convergence marked by increasingly analytic methods in the arts and increasingly intuitive methods in the social sciences (1973:3-4). In 1976 I co-edited with Mady Schuman Ritual, Play, and Performance, an anthology whose table of contents marked the parameters of "the field" as I then saw it. There were sections devoted to Ethology, Play, Ritual and Performance in Everyday Life, Shamanism, Trance, and Meditation, and Rites, Ceremonies, and Performances. Contributors included Konrad Lorenz, Jane Goodall, Johan Huizinga, Jane Belo, Ray Birdwhistell, Turner, Goffman, Levi-Strauss, Bateson, and Grotowski. In 1976, too, I first met Victor Turner face-to-face, kicking off a deep collaboration that continued to Turner's death in 1983. In 1977 my Essays on Performance Theory was published (revised and reissued in 1988 as Performance Theory). In Essays I wrote: Performance is a very inclusive notion of action; theatre is only one node on a continuum that reaches from ritualization in animal behavior (including humans) through performances in everyday life--greetings, displays of emotion, family scenes, and so on--to rites, ceremonies and performances: large-scale theatrical events (1977:1). I cite myself because the ideas I chewed on in classes, theatre productions, lectures, and conversations were motors driving what was to become "performance studies." I did not work alone. Even as I was seeking out like-minded people, they were looking for me. Oddballs all, we operated against the resistance of our own disciplines; we were tricky, charismatic, dangerous, playful. In the spring of 1979, the very first "Performance Theory" course at NYU was offered in what was still nominally the Graduate Drama Department of the NYU School of the Arts. The flyer announcing the course proclaimed: Leading American and world figures in the performing arts and the social sciences will discuss the relationship between social anthropology, psychology, semiotics, and the performing arts. The course examines theater and dance in Western and non-Western cultures, ranging form the avant- garde to traditional, ritual, and popular forms. The "visiting faculty" for Performance Theory was Alexander Alland, Paul Bouissac, Jerzy Grotowski, Donald Kaplan, Joann W. Kealinohomoku, Barbara Myerhoff, Jerome Rothenberg, Squat Theatre, and Victor Turner. Here, possibly for the first time together were anthropologists, a Freudian psychoanalyst, a semiotician specializing in play and circus, a dance scholar, a poet and scholar of oral cultures and shamanism, and leading experimental theatre artists. The graduate assistant for the course was Sally Banes. Over the next three years, Performance Theory counted among its visiting faculty Clifford Geertz, Masao Yamaguchi, Alfonso Ortiz, Erving Goffman, Eugenio Barba, Steve Paxton, Joanne Akalaitis, Yvonne Rainer, Meredith Monk, Augusto Boal, Colin Turnbull, Richard Foreman, Allan Kaprow, Linda Montano, Spalding Gray, Laurie Anderson, Peter Pitzele, Brian Sutton-Smith, Ray Birdwhistell, Edward T. Hall, Julie Taymor, Peter Chelkowski. Victor and Edith Turner were frequent participants. Topics ranged from "Performing the Self" and "Play" to "Shamanism," "Cultural and Intercultural Performance," and "Experimental Performance." The visitors were required not only to lecture or conduct a workshop on Monday night but to stick around for an intense question-and-answer session on Tuesday. My job was to knit the parts into coherent fabrics. NYU was generous during those years, both moneywise and in offering conceptual space for curricular experimentation. What was missing--I can see that now as clear as day--was feminist performance, post-structuralism, psychoanalytic thought, the notion of the "performative," and popular entertainments such as tourist sites and theme parks. These pillars of performance studies were brought to NYU by my colleagues Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Peggy Phelan. But I've jumped ahead. From Tulane to NYU Once upon a time there was a theatre department at Tulane University. That was back in the 1950s and 1960s. Its longtime head was Dr. Monroe Lippman, a man who could hate what you did while fiercely defending your right to do it. I got my PhD in Theatre from Tulane in 1962. My dissertation director and mentor was Robert W. Corrigan, founding editor of TDR. When in 1962 Corrigan left Tulane for greener pastures, Lippman offered me a job as assistant professor and editor of TDR. Corrigan's journal had a double focus, the emerging European avantgarde (Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Arrabal, and so on); and the analysis of drama. I focused TDR on experimental and political performance. Throughout the 60s I was increasingly interested in performance as behavior and not plays-as-written-texts. I wanted to apply to performances of every kind analytic and theoretical techniques drawn from the social sciences. Also my practice as a theatre director fused with my work with The Free Southern Theatre, as well as my experiences as a journalist and political activist, to reform TDR into a partisan rather than an "objective academic" journal. At first TDR went one way, my teaching another. At Tulane, I taught more or less standard drama and theatre history courses for graduate students: Corrigan's courses reshaped. My artistic work I did off campus, where I took part in Happenings and in the first environmental theatre productions. I got deeply involved in the Freedom Movement and the movement against the Vietnam War. These experiences tuned me in to street actions, the power of audience participation, and how permeable were the boundaries separating so-called actors from so-called spectators. I was also studying the theories of the "Cambridge Anthropologists," a group of early twentieth century scholars led by Jane Ellen Harrison, Francis Cornford, and Gilbert Murray, who investigated the relationship between ancient Greek theatre and ritual. They proposed a "ritual origin" for theatre. Although excited by their theories, I believed their supposition about Greek theatre was incomplete and misdirected. Still I picked up on "anthropology" as a means to studying theatre--and, more broadly, performance. I became more and more drawn to performance in everyday life, rituals, the performances of peoples who were not part of any named literature-based "great tradition"--mostly groups in New Guinea, Australia, and Micronesia. I read lots of ethnographies. Just as that work was beginning to congeal into something definite, the Tulane Theatre Department blew up. Tulane's top brass had long promised to build Lippman a new theatre. His department was working in a converted World War II barracks with worse than bad facilities. For years, the administration put Lippman off. I don't know the precipitating event, but finally Lippman--who had been at Tulane since the 1930s--quit. In angry sympathy, five of us resigned with Lippman. Meanwhile, Robert Corrigan--the Johnny Appleseed of theatre programs--left Carnegie-Mellon for NYU where he persuaded President James Hester that the time was ripe to begin an arts school to rival Julliard, the Yale School of Drama, and Carnegie-Mellon. Corrigan argued that NYU already had a strong undergraduate film program and a graduate department of drama and cinema that could be folded into the new School of the Arts. What was needed were graduate level professional training programs for actors, designers, dancers, and filmmakers. Hester was aware that Columbia University was considering starting its own professional arts school. Part of NYU's strategy was--as it continues to be--to compete with the Ivys and the strongest of the state schools. Hester bought Corrigan's idea. Corrigan brought in J. Michael Miller, a Tulane PhD, and Ted Hoffman, the former head of Carnegie-Mellon's theatre program. When Corrigan got wind of the resignations at Tulane, he invited me, and TDR, to NYU to chair the Department of Drama and Cinema. Such work was neither my calling nor my wish, so I proposed Lippman as chair. The deal was struck--Lippman and I began at NYU in the fall of 1967. Tulane was happy to rid itself of me, TDR, and most of its pesky Theatre Department. In 1968, Lippman, with my strong agreement, hired Brooks McNamara--an Iowa MA and Tulane PhD (both like me), a theatre designer, and a man passionately interested in popular entertainments. We three began reshaping the Drama and Cinema Department. In 1970 we were joined by one of our own PhDs, Michael Kirby. The Drama and Cinema programs were split in two. We were on our way. The mid to late 60s was hot in experimental theatre. In the fall of 1967, Grotowski made his first trip to America, offering at NYU an intense four week workshop. TDR was one of Grotowski's sponsors and I took part in his workshop--from which was born Andre Gregory's Manhattan Project and my Performance Group (later the Wooster Group). Grotowski taught more than acting. He showed how textual montage, rigorous psychophysical training, and ritual could be combined. He proved that apparently very ancient practices were also avantgarde. My experiences on the floor of Room 4D confirmed and illuminated what I had been reading in the social sciences. But even as I was drawn to Claude Levi-Strauss, Gregory Bateson, Victor Turner, and Erving Goffman, theatre studies were still mostly locked into drama and a strict construction of what constituted theatre history. When theatre people thought "non-Western" it was India, Japan, and China they thought about. Even China was slighted until after Nixon's 1972 trip. Except for anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz, few if any theatre people studied or practiced Javanese or Balinese performing arts. The writings of Artaud were well known, but no one went to look for themselves. "Performance fieldwork" and "theatre anthropology" were not yet formulated. Performance Studies At NYU In 1968, Corrigan, after barely three years at NYU, folded his tent and hiked west to become the first President of the California Institute of the Arts. David Oppenheim became dean of what was to become the Tisch School of the Arts. Unlike Corrigan, Oppenheim was in for the long haul, retiring in 1989 after 21 fruitful years as dean leading TSOA to the eminence it now enjoys. But the early years in the Graduate Drama Department were unsettled. After Lippman retired in TK, the Department drifted administratively. The chair rotated (though some faculty served more than one year). Hoffman, Corrigan's colleague from Carnegie-Mellon, and for a few years TDR's Associate Editor, was forced out as head of NYU's graduate theatre program and parked in the Drama Department. But if there was administrative wobble, there was conceptual reach. The curriculum was beyond the pale of other theatre departments. I was teaching courses in ritual and non-Western performance, McNamara in popular entertainments, while Kirby was developing his documentary approach to theatre history and his own version of structuralism. By the end of the 1970s, we knew we weren't teaching "drama" anymore or "theatre" in the ways it was taught elsewhere. So in 1980 we officially changed our name to Performance Studies. We were experimenting, but we weren't collectively coherent. Each of us was doing his own thing. Throughout the 1970s, I was preoccupied with directing The Performance Group and formulating performance theories. McNamara was immersed in his work as curator of the Shubert Archives. Kirby was editing TDR, making performances with his Structuralist Workshop and acting with the Wooster Group. By 1980 it was clear we needed more than a new name, we needed strong, consistent leadership. Enter Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. BKG, as she is known by all, came to NYU from the Department of Folklore and Folklife at the University of Pennsylvania. With a PhD in folklore from Indiana University her far-ranging interests spanned Jewish studies, museum displays (from colonial expositions to living history museums), tourist performances, and the aesthetics of everyday life. BKG became chair in the spring term of 1981 and remained in the post for 12 years. BKG was truly the first chair of Performance Studies. By this I mean it was she who crafted a singular department out of what had been disparate and sometimes quirky interests and practices. She insisted on frequent faculty meetings where we hashed out curriculum, degree requirements, entrance standards, qualifying exams, and lots more. She made certain that important decisions were debated until we reached consensus. She recruited faculty of quality. She confabbed with deans, scholars in other departments, and NYU's administration putting Performance Studies on the map academically speaking. Her syllabi and reading lists were (and are) models of excellence; her insistence on fulltime students working steadily towards their degrees performing at a high academic level transformed our population; her abilities to squeeze money out of rocks was nothing short of magic; her energy was unfailing and inspiring. A tireless organizer, conference participant, keynote speaker, performance theorist, cheerleader, boss, and cook, BKG often invited faculty and friends from different disciplines to her spacious loft (shared with her painter husband Max Gimblett). There serious work was leavened with comradeship and easy-going conversation. We taught, wrote, lived, worked, and socialized Performance Studies. In a word, BKG whirled us into shape. What happened during BKG's tenure as chair was a congealing of disparate yet related tendencies into a "discipline." Those practicing this discipline studied an emergent field; that field contained many areas. This expanded scope meant a move away from theatre as the sole basis of performance studies both in terms of curriculum and theory. Even under BKG's leadership, the morphing of Graduate Drama into Performance Studies was not an "all at once" thing. During 1978-80, the last year NYU had a Graduate Drama Department, many courses were orthodox--except for "Alternative Theatre," "Paratheatre," "Semiotics of Performance," "Festival and Folk Performance," and "Ritual Theatre." Most of these courses were taught by McNamara and me. Also at that time a rigorous curriculum in modern and postmodern dance was introduced. This "dance track" was carefully supervised by Marcia Siegel until her retirement in 1996. The mission statement in the 1980-82 Bulletin, the first under the "Performance Studies" banner (but without BKG's input), read, in part: [...] performance in cultural and social forms. [...] The curriculum is organized into six evolving areas of concentration: contemporary performance, performance theory, dance, popular performance, performance writing, and performing arts archives. Once BKG was aboard, this mission statement was revised and clarified. The 1982-84 Bulletin proclaimed: The Department of Performance Studies offers a curriculum covering the full range of performance forms, from theatre and dance to ritual and popular entertainment. [...] A wide spectrum of performance traditions--for example, postmodern dance, circus, Kathakali, Broadway, ballet, shamanism--are documented using fieldwork, interviews, and archival research and are analyzed from a variety of perspectives. As a whole, the program is both intercultural and interdisciplinary, drawing on the arts, humanities, [and] social sciences. This mission statement is repeated almost verbatim in all succeeding Bulletins, including the 1996-97 edition. Starting in 1982, courses reflected the expanded field as well as a clearer disciplinary focus. A required "Issues in Performance Studies," taught by BKG, took up "key concepts, issues, approaches, and methods of the study of performance from cross-cultural, historical, and interdisciplinary perspectives." "Performance Theory," with a different topic each term attempted to relate "contemporary aesthetics and social theory to theatre practice." Other courses went from "Punk, Sex, Rock, and Performance Art Now in New York," "Broadway," and "Directing and Dramaturgy" to "Southeast Asian Performance," a workshop on "Balinese Topeng Masked Performance," "Circus as a Performing Art," "Movement, Ritual, and Culture," "Dance Criticism," "The Ballroom and the Stage--Social Dance and Popular Entertainment," and "Ethnic Performance." Things remained more or less stable within that shifting universe of interests until the mid 1980s, when Marcia Siegel, Peggy Phelan, and Michael Taussig joined the department. Siegel joined the faculty in 1983, Phelan as an adjunct in 1985, and on a tenure-track line in 1987, and Taussig in 1988. Phelan was tenured and promoted when she assumed the chair of Performance Studies in 1994, a job she held through the spring of 1997. Taussig left for the anthropology department of Columbia University in 1993. Siegel stopped teaching at NYU in 1996. The impact of Siegel, Phelan, and Taussig was immediate, amplified by new courses from BKG in "Tourist Productions" and "The Aesthetics of Everyday Life." Siegel developed and led the work in dance, emphasizing movement analysis, critical writing, and dance history. Taussig taught such things as "Shamanism and Tragedy," "The Body in Shock," "The Magic of the State," and "Commodity Fetishism and Montage." His style of teaching was also important. He rambled, he digressed, he interrogated. Phelan's work in feminism and Lacanian psychoanalysis were reflected in such courses as "Gender and Performance," "Imprisonment and the Dramatic Imagination," and "Possession and Performance." Later, Phelan added courses in autobiography, psychoanalysis, and sexuality on stage. Guest faculty included Sue-Ellen Case, Kate Davy, Holly Hughes, and Deb Margolin CHECK BULLETINS & EXPAND/REFINE LIST. The new faculty was driving performance studies in strongly theorized and wide-ranging directions; the older faculty responded well for the most part. My own teaching interests remained steady, centering around Asian performance (both in itself and compared to Western genres), experimental theatre, and performance theory. By the late 1980s, it appeared as if the field had pretty well been mapped out, if not by any means fully explored. How wrong that assumption proved to be. We knew that we could not cover the whole range of what we collectively considered to be performance studies. What we wanted to do instead was offer some consistent methodological means for approaching what was a vast, almost unlimited field; and to explore--according to each faculty member's passions and interests--aspects of the whole. This approach emphasized by example the multivocality and plurality of performance studies. It also meant a shifting subject matter, the ongoing introduction of new courses, a careful selection of adjunct and visiting faculty. We took a cue from Victor Turner's admonition, "Chaps, not maps!" which meant to develop curriculum not according to an abstract theme, but crystallized around a group of people who loved their work and to the greatest degree negotiable enjoyed working with each other. We wanted to form a "school" in the sense that the Frankfurt School or the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought were schools: a scholarly community chewing over shared problems and materials, consciously advancing the borders of knowledge, taking intellectual chances--and passionately, experientially involved in what they were doing. During the 1980s, students greatly helped performance studies emerge as a department and field. Beginning in November/ December 1981, a student-edited Performance Studies Newsletter was issued on a regular basis. In the September/October 1982 Newsletter, editor Jill Dolan wrote: The Performance Studies Department is the first "drama" department to step beyond traditional forms and approaches to make the examination of performance proper the central concern. The literary, dramatic text is but one part of a complex whole that includes mise-en-scene, acting styles, stage design and technology, and directing theory. Classical theater forms are contrasted with post-modernism and performance art, as well as intercultural performances. [...] Courses in performance theory explore the concepts informing particular genres of dance, theater, ritual, folklore, sports, processions, and festivals (1982:1). In 1985, Ann Daly's Newsletter article was titled, "Inter- generic, Inter-disciplinary, Inter-cultural, Inter-esting." In her account of the end-of-term mini-conference emerging from BKG's Issues in Performance Studies class (a model for the Performance Studies annual national conferences), Daly wrote: In addition to establishing itself as an academic discipline, Performance Studies stimulates practitioners to re-imagine their professions and their methods. [...] Over the course of the conference, presenters questioned whether Performance Studies could include the performative qualities of a comic book, whether hijacking a plane is performance, whether Walt Disney's "Fantasia" is music video. How do funerals fit into the performance sequence model? How do tennis and Noh theatre compare in preparation process? Can the presidential debates be analyzed as performance? What exactly is gay theatre? The "Issues" conference demonstrated the departments experimental approach: openness, flexibility, rigorous thought, and a preference for questioning, rather than accepting (1985:3). A Period of Change In the late 1980s and continuing into the 1990s, changes in faculty and disciplinary focus accelerated. Hoffman retired in 198TK, Kirby in 1991; Siegel stopped teaching in 1996, and McNamara in 1997. May Joseph, Barbara Browning, and Jose Munoz joined the faculty in the 1990s. These younger faculty were less theatre or concert dance oriented than those who left or retired. Browning's Resistance in Motion (199TK) is a study of Brazilian samba "from the inside"--Browning learned the dance and was ritually initiated as a sambaista. Joseph teaches post-colonial theory and avantgarde performance. Munoz's work is on queer theory and performativity. Taussig's departure in 1993 and BKG's stepping down as chair in 1994 started a period of instability. Joseph Roach came and went after a single term as chair, but his brief presence left an imprint. Because he is both a premier theatre historian and adept at cultural studies, he promised to unite the two wings of the department. During his brief chairship he initiated a "self-study" that had strong repercussions even after he left. Upon Roach's departure, Phelan chaired from 1994 to 1997. As of this writing (March 1997), Diana Taylor noted for her work on Latin American performance and politics is poised to become chair. Also in the 1990s interest in African and Afro-American performance emerged within the department. J. Ndukaku Amankulor joined the faculty in 19TK teaching African popular performance, mask-dance-theatre, and ritual performance. Suddenly and sadly, in 1995 Amankulor died of a brain tumor. In 19TK, the Comparative Literature Department recruited renowned novelist-playwright- activist Ngugi wa Thiongo'o who requested a joint appointment to Performance Studies. Though not on a Performance Studies line, Ngugi teaches, participates in faculty meetings and colloquia, and advises PhD students. His courses center on orature--"song, dance, riddle, proverb, tale, narrative, myth, etc."--as the source of modern African theatre. Ngugi's work links several tendencies in the department: post-colonial studies, theatre, traditional and modern performance, and orality. What all the changes boil down to is that from about 1990 there has been a strong swing at NYU from being theatre-based towards something more theory-based. Some faculty focus on readings of gender, some on politics, some on behavior-- performance "itself." Diverse or even scattered as the curriculum reads, interactions among faculty through colloquia, planning courses, writing exam questions and collectively evaluating the answers, advising dissertations, and doing all faculty searches as a committee-of-the-whole actually shifts what each of us brings to the table. We actively seek connections and consensus. Students also are involved, with two participating in faculty meetings. As a graduate-only department, some students and recent PhDs occupy intellectual positions as "almost faculty," teaching adjunct courses either in Performance Studies or in NYU's Undergraduate Drama Department. Ongoing debates within the department continue around questions such as to what degree does performance studies depend on live performance, is performance studies "performative" rather than "actually performance," what is the place of theatre studies within performance studies, what separates performance studies from cultural studies? The ground continues to shift even as I write--some faculty lines remain open, and who fills them will further define the field as practiced by a very small department of eight fulltime faculty (plus Ngugi). Beyond NYU By the mid-1990s, the department and the discipline were independent of each other. The discipline of "performance studies" was by then successfully launched and flourishing in many different places in different ways. NYU faculty and graduates publish widely. NYU graduates are teaching all around the country. In 1984 Northwestern University established its Department of Performance Studies. Starting in 1995, an annual Performance Studies Conference has drawn hundreds of participants from the USA, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. TDR, "the journal of performance studies," is no longer alone in the field. Like material regularly appears in Theatre Journal, Performing Arts Journal, and Theatre Topics. In 1996, Performance Research was launched by the Centre for Performance Research in the U.K. Books of my writings have appeared (or will shortly) in nine languages, both European and Asian; my essays are even more widely translated. Phelan's, BKG's, Ngugi's, Browning's, and Munoz's writings and edited volumes are very well known. The "performance paradigm" is strong in the social sciences and cultural studies. All this signals the maturing and dissemination of a discipline larger than any single institution. What happens at NYU is important, of course, but not determinant of the future of the field. Students are continuously pointing the way. Their needs drive the search for new courses, new means of spreading the word and sharing intelligences. For example, "Performance Studies International," in the spring of 1990 brought dozens of scholars and performers to NYU. PSI was organized entirely by students, led by Jon McKenzie, and was the seed for the Performance Studies Annual Conferences to come in 1995, '96, and '97. There were other conferences from the 1970s onward that helped lay the groundwork for performance studies as a field. From Burg Wartenstein and the World Conference on Ritual and Performance to the Bellagio Conference on Intercultural Performance I met Victor Turner face-to-face in the spring of 1977 when he invited me to a lecture Clifford Geertz was giving at Columbia University. Turner suggested we have a beer after the lecture. Having read Turner avidly, I was as eager to meet him as he was to meet me--for he had read my stuff and recognized a kindred spirit. We went to one of those grungy beer halls near Columbia where, love at first sight, our conversation ranged all over the place, from Ndembu ritual, Sanskrit theatre, and Goffmanian performances in everyday life to Dionysus in 69, Levi-Strauss, Max Gluckman, and the work of Barbara Myerhoff, who I had not yet met. Turner invited me to participate in a conference he was planning in September 1977 to be held at a castle in Austria owned by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. Burg Wartenstein Symposium No. 76 on "Cultural Frames and Reflections, Ritual, Drama, and Spectacle" was no ordinary gathering. The scholars and artists were alone with each other for 10 days--no public sessions, just seminars, performances, good food, and passionate conversation. The roster of attendees made my mouth water: Jerome Rothenberg, Natalie Zeamon Davis, Barbara Myerhoff, John MacAloon, Ranjini and Ganeth Obeyesekere, Roberta da Matta, Alfonso Ortiz, Victoria Bricker, Smadar Lavie, and Kirin Narayan, and a few others. Collectively, this group of anthropologists, artists, historians, and humanists had great breadth and knowledge in terms of discipline, genre, area, and personal style. What would I contribute? I decided to develop a theory linking anthropological and theatrical thought. I also would show the film of Dionysus in 69 and discuss ritual in relation to experimental performance. The resulting essay was my first stab at what would become "Restoration of Behavior." At the Symposium I formed lasting relationships with several participants, most decisively with Turner and Myerhoff. We launched a set of collaborations, including a summer 1979 workshop which met at NYU and the Performing Garage whose co- teachers were Victor and Edith Turner, Myerhoff, Alexander Alland, Erving Goffman, and me. Other Wartenstein people accepted my invitation to lecture at NYU in my Performance Theory courses. Shortly after the Wenner-Gren Symposium, Turner and I began planning a "World Conference on Ritual and Performance," which turned out to be three conferences with a core group attending all three meetings. The first, in November 1981 in Arizona, focused on the ritual performances of the Yaquis; the second in New York in May 1982, focused on Japanese performance, especially Suzuki Tadashi. The culminating gathering was in New York from 23 August to 1 September 1982 where fifty persons presented work. Taken as a whole, the World Conference considered traditional, modern, and post-modern performances in Native America, Asia, and Africa. The range was from noh drama and experimental Japanese performance to Yaqui Deer Dancing, from kutiyattam and kathakali to African-American gospel, from Korean shamanism and American experimental theatre to circus. Conference planners insisted that work be presented live by artists and ritual specialists. By Means of Performance (1990) was edited from the papers, lectures, and demonstrations of the Conferences. For a 1980 planning committee meeting, Turner articulated our goal: By their performances shall ye know them. [....] Cultures are most fully expressed in and made conscious of themselves in their ritual and theatrical performances. [...] A performance is a dialectic of "flow," that is, spontaneous movement in which action and awareness are one, and "reflexivity," in which the central meanings, values and goals of a culture re seen "in action," as they shape and explain behavior. A performance is declarative of our shared humanity, yet it utters the uniqueness of particular cultures. We will know one another better by entering one another's performances and learning their grammars and vocabularies. Turner's vision was not only of the Conference but a utopian project for a world community based on mutual respect and enjoyment of cultural differences, exchanges of feelings as well as ideas, and the desire to experience each other's cultural identities. For me, this utopian project still informs performance studies. Turner's death in December, 1983 cut short his life work. Goffman had died earlier, Myerhoff shortly after. In 1989 and 1990, I was the principal planner of a conference on Intercultural Performance sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation and convened at its Bellagio, Italy villa from 17 to 22 February 1991 (the precise moment of the Gulf War). This Conference was not so large as the World Conference, but its participants were more tightly associated with performance studies. Among the 21 attendees were BKG, Amankulor, Phelan, Taussig, and me as well as former and present NYU Performance Studies students: William Sun, Deborah Klens, Radhika Subramanian, and Laura Trippi. Others in attendance included Eugenio Barba, Jean Franco, Judith Mitoma, Falabo Ajayi, Trin Min-ha, Yamaguchi Masao, Gayatri Spivak, and Drew Hayden Taylor. Anna Deavere Smith, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, and Sanjukta Panigrahi each performed as well as participate in discussions. Smith performed the Conference attendees based on phone interviews (including one with Homi Bhabha who did not come because he refused to fly during the Gulf War). One of the most telling encounters came when Panigrahi intervened in a panel discussing her work with Eugenio Barba to protest that she did not want to be referred to in the third person, that her odissi dance was not a "natural object" but the product of long and conscious training and that she certainly knew exactly what she was doing when she participated in Barba's experiments mixing Indian and European practices. During each of the four working days of the Conference different issues were explored through presentations, and performances. Topics included "Post-Colonial Situations," "The Gulf War and Interculturalism," "Problems of Translation," "Collections, Exhibitions, and Festivals," "Playing Across Cultures," "The International School of Theatre Anthropology," and "The Divergence/Convergence of Cultures." But, finally, for me, despite all good intentions and stellar participants, the Intercultural Performance Conference was not as successful as the two previous meetings. The very problems of interculturalism-- disjunctures of meaning and intention, the difficulty of really communicating across ideological and methodological borders, barriers thrown up by charges of sexism, both conscious and unintended, made for rough going over the six days. I went away thinking I had learned more about problems than solutions. I was not able during the two following years to put together a book based on the Conference. These three conferences--stretching over 15 years--extended the reach of performance studies far beyond NYU. They gave to the field a worldwide scope both in terms of participants and subject matter. They kept a core of people in touch with each other and working together. The conferences were important both as field- defining events and as a means of dissemination. Northwestern Univerity's Brand of Performance Studies The story I'm telling is incomplete in at least two ways. First, someone else with access to the same data, Brooks McNamara for example, would stitch it together and interpret it very differently. Second, I conflate wide-ranging and diverse work, done by many people in many places, into the project of a single academic department and those who have been associated with it. On the other hand, if I don't regard the field from where I stand within it, I fail in conveying the experiential immediacy of my own involvement. Having thus alerted readers, let me look briefly at Performance Studies at Northwestern University. NYU's branch of performance studies is rooted in drama and theatre, Northwestern's in speech and oral interpretation. These are not only genres, they are academic traditions. At one time the disciplines were fused in "Theatre and Speech" departments. Then, after the World War II, these departments began splitting, each branch developing in its own way. There were also many Speech and Oral Interpretation departments that never were associated with theatre. For example, NWU's nineteenth century Department of Elocution became its Department of Oral Interpretation and then in 1984 the Performance Studies Department. By whatever name, the theoretical foundation of speech departments was rhetoric; the practical basis, staging oral interpretations of various texts, but usually not dramas. In a 1993 internet discussion of "What is Performance Studies?" Nathan Stucky of Southern Illinois University wrote: Performance Studies at SCA (Speech Communication Association) [...] seems a logical development over a few decades. By the late 1950s and early 1970s many (then Oral Interpretation) programs were really practicing what was called "Performance of Literature." However, the view of literature quickly broadened to include cultural performances, personal narratives, everyday-life performances, non-fiction, ritual, etc. This view suggests a very wide notion of the concept "text." By the mid-1970s the Interpretation Division of SCA would have more accurately been called the "The Studiers and Performers of Diverse Texts Division." By this point in time, ethnographic work, as well as folklore and anthropology, began to be of some interest. Questions raised concerning various conceptions regarding how performance functions in relation to culture and society (and comes to constitute same) especially in terms of human communication began to be explored. So, along with the literary, theoretical, and critical models of performance that one might associate with "Interpretation" has been the emergence of interest in cultural and social elements, as well as interest in performance as a way of knowing. These threads connect logically and historically through relatively recent literary/critical foci to the oral tradition which has always been part of these approaches to performance. Performance Studies, SCA, then, describes an independent (but not unconnected) evolution stretching back a number of years. So, performance studies must be conceived in rather broad strokes. Stucky succinctly shows how performance studies NWU--especially the researches of Dwight Conquergood--connect to Turner, Goffman, Geertz, and Milton Singer--thinkers certainly important to my work, if not to all my NYU colleagues. Sally Harrison-Pepper, an NYU PhD, added this to the internet discussion: Performance Studies is a difficult field to define. I studied at New York's University's Department of Performance Studies in the early 1980s, where the quest for a single definition was part of an on-going debate and discussion among NYU grad students and faculty. As I presently teach and practice it, and always subject to change, I define Performance Studies as "a broadly interdisciplinary field in which scholars study the varieties of expressive behavior in culture." Performance Studies scholars may include the arts (theatre, music, dance) as one of several focus areas, but that is not our only--or even necessarily our central-- concern. We look at a wide variety of public and private behaviors. We employ the social sciences (anthropology, sociology, psychology, and o son) as some of our analytic tools, and have recently begun to also use feminist theory, semiotics, comparative linguistics, and a variety of other important emerging critical systems. We are very interested in, for example, the ethnography of communication, and in areas such as sociolinguistics, thus our use of the word "performance" is a much broader organizing idea than it may appear to some. Stucky and Harrison-Pepper underscore a parallel between performance studies and cultural studies--the development in literary theory from the 1970s onward of an exploration of the performative: regarding literature from the perspective of speech acts, social and political contexts, and historiography. In their preface to Performance Texts and Contexts (1993), Carol Simpson Stern (former chair of the NWU department) and Bruce Henderson commence: The term performance incorporates a whole field of human activity. It embraces a verbal act in everyday life or a staged play, a rite of invective played in urban streets, a performance in the Western traditions of high art, or a work of performance art. It includes cultural performances, such as the personal narrative or folk and fairy tales, or more communal forms of ceremony--the National Democratic Convention, an evensong vigil march for people with AIDS, Mardi Gras, or a bullfight. It also includes literary performance, the celebration of individual genius, and conformity to Western definitions of art. In all cases a performance act, interactional in nature and involving symbolic forms and live bodies, provides a way to constitute meaning and to affirm individual and cultural values (1993:3). Stern and Henderson continue by citing familiar sources: Turner, Goffman, Sartre (phenomenology), and me. They construct a continuum--not unlike the one I devised in 1966 for "Approaches" --situating various kinds of performances along a line running from "ordinary everyday experiences" to "extraordinary experiences" (15). They outline what they determine to be the four key "elements of performance: performer, text, audience, and context" (16). Conquergood, currently chair of NWU's Performance Studies Department, and a major theorist of performance studies, raised in 1991 what he called "new questions that can be clustered around five intersecting planes of analysis": 1. Performance and cultural process. What are the conceptual consequences of thinking about culture as a verb instead of a noun, process instead of product? Culture as an unfolding performative invention instead of reified system, structure, or variable? What happens to our thinking about performance when we move it outside of Aesthetics and situate it at the center of lived experience? 2. Performance and Ethnographic Praxis. What are the methodological implications of thinking about fieldwork as the collaborative performance of an enabling fiction between observer and observed, knower and known? How does thinking about fieldwork as performance differ from thinking about fieldwork as the collection of data? [...] 3. Performance and Hermeneutics. What kinds of knowledge are privileged or displaced when performed experience becomes a way of knowing, a method of critical inquiry, a mode of understanding? [...] 4. Performance and Scholarly Representation. What are the rhetorical problematics of performance as a complementary or alternative form of "publishing" research? What are the differences between reading an analysis of fieldwork data, and hearing the voices from the field interpretively filtered through the voice of the researcher? [...] What about enabling people themselves to perform their own experience? [...] 5. The Politics of Performance. What is the relationship between performance and power? How does performance reproduce, enable, sustain, challenge, subvert, critique, and naturalize ideology? How do performances simultaneously reproduce and resist hegemony? How does performance accommodate and contest domination? (1991:190). Several of the "rethinkings" Conquergood proposes are strong themes in my own and others' work. Working on the same problems relates the NYU and the NWU approaches to each other. What NYU has emphasized more than NWU is movement analysis, popular entertainments, and gender in its multiplex possibilities ranging from feminist performance to queer theory. So What is Performance Studies Anyway? Having come this far, it's time to give my own answer the $64 question. Performance studies is "inter"--in between. It is intergeneric, interdisciplinary, intercultural--and therefore inherently unstable. Performance studies resists or rejects definition. Performance studies assumes that we are living in a post-colonial world where cultures are colliding, interfering with each other, and energetically hybridizing. Performance studies does not value "purity." In fact, academic disciplines are most active and important at their ever-changing interfaces. In terms of performance studies, this means between theatre and anthropology, folklore and sociology, history and performance theory, gender studies and psychoanalysis, performativity and actual performance events, and more--new interfaces will be added as time goes on, and older ones dropped. Accepting "inter" means opposing the establishment of any single system of knowledge, values, or subject matter. Performance studies is unfinished, open, multivocal, and self-contradictory. Thus any call for or work towards a "unified field" is, in my view, a misunderstanding of the very fluidity and playfulness fundamental to performance studies. That sidewinder rattlesnake again, the endlessly creative double negative at the core of the restoration of behavior. Closer to the ground is the question of the relation of performativity to performance proper. Are there any limits to performativity? Is there anything outside of the purview of performance studies? To answer we must distinguish between "as" and "is." Performances mark identities, bend and remake time, adorn and reshape the body, tell stories, and allow people to play with behavior that is "twice-behaved," not-for-the-first time, rehearsed, cooked, prepared. Having made such a sweeping generalization, it is necessary to add that every genre of performance, even every particular instance of a genre, is concrete, specific, and different than every other. It is necessary to generalize in order to make theory. At the same time, we must not lose sight of each specific performance's particularities of experience, structure, history, and process. Any event, action, item, or behavior may be examined "as" performance. Approaching phenomena as performance has certain advantages. One can consider things as provisional, in-process, existing and changing over time, in rehearsal, as it were. On the other hand, there are events which tradition and convention declare "are" performances. In Western culture, until recently, performances were of theatre, music, and dance--the "aesthetic genres," the performing arts. Recently, since the 1960s at least, aesthetic performances have developed that cannot be located precisely as theatre or dance or music or visual arts. Usually called either "performance art," or "mixed-media," "Happenings," or "intermedia" these events blur or breach boundaries separating art from life and genres from each other. As performance art grew in range and popularity, theorists began to examine "performative behavior"--how people play gender, heightening one's constructed identity, performing slightly or radically different selves in different situations. This is the performative Austin introduced and Butler and queer theorists discuss. The performative engages performance in places and situations not traditionally marked as "performing arts," from dress up to certain kinds of writing or speaking. The acceptance of the performative as a category of theory as well as a fact of behavior has made it increasingly difficult to sustain the distinction between appearances and facts, surfaces and depths, illusions and substances. Appearances are actualities. And so are what lies beneath appearances. Reality is constructed through and through, from its many surfaces or aspects down through its multiple depths. The subjects of performance studies are both what is performance and the performative--and the myriad contact points and overlaps, tensions and loose spots, separating and connecting these two categories. Notes