2nd DRAFT, July 95 PERFORMANCE STUDIES TEXTBOOK Richard Schechner Chapter One: What Is Performance? What Are Performance Studies? Is Performance, As Performance, and the Performative "All the world is not, of course, a stage," Erving Goffman wrote, adding: "but the crucial ways in which it isn't are not easy to specify" (1959:72). A play, a dance, a movie, a rock band --these are all clearly performances. Ditto for a baseball game, sumo wrestling, soccer, and many other sports and games. And many people could even be persuaded that a Baptist church service, a Passover seder dinner, a Hindu temple puja, or a Papua New Guinea initiation rite are performances. All these dramas, sports, and rituals share certain key qualities. They are each rehearsed or practiced or require training. In performance, these rehearsed behaviors are heightened, marked, and framed: different than everyday behavior. Most often these not-everyday-behaviors are not fully owned by the person doing them. The ballet dancer's plie or the bull fighter's move with the cape or the Buddhist priest's hand gestures are conventional actions, scripted, authored by someone other than the performer. Such behaviors are learned, coded, tailor-made for the event, or class of events, at hand. Likewise, special clothes, costumes, or equipment are used either to make playing possible (as with much sports apparatus) or to enhance visibility, setting players or characters off from each other either individually or in teams. Sometimes the special garb is there solely to make beauty, to give pleasure to both wearer and viewer. Even time is treated specially. In a drama, the time of the story does not equal the time on your wristwatch. In sports, "the clock"--which often can be stopped--becomes a decisive element in the playing. The final two minutes "on the clock" of an American football game can take 10 minutes to play as each team and its coaches enact intricately choreographed endgames. Many rituals abolish ordinary time altogether, helping participants experience an "eternal present" or some other immeasurable existence. And, of course, each of these performances enact specific sequences of events. More often than not, these sequences tell a story, as in drama, the Mass, and the seder dinner. Or, as in sports and games, the events separate out winners from losers, forming a temporary and contested hierarchy, just as initiation rites separate out adults from children, the married from the single, even the living from the dead, creating distinctions and hierarchies of a more lasting kind. Thus performances mark identities, bend and remake time, adorn the body with costumes, and provide people 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, and process--ideas that I will define more carefully during this book. A sumo wrestler's circulation around the ring, adjusting his groin belt, swaggering, eyeing his opponent even as the spectators drink in with their eyes the enormous bulk and beauty of these young athletes, is very different not only from the Jewish family crowding around the laden seder table, but from American professional wrestlers each flaunting his own raucous identity. And all these are, of course, different than the myriad of roles enacted in thousands of dramas distinct from each other individually and generically, as Oedipus (the Greek drama of the fifth century BCE) is from Shakuntala (a Sanskrit play of the 8th century CE). The categories of performance are not fixed or static. For example, there are both sacred and secular rituals; certain dramas have the qualities of sports; and the history of the avantgarde shows how dance, theatre, music, media, and visual arts are not easily separable. Take a large-scale event like the Olympic Games. The Olympics are, as John MacAloon argues, simultaneously ritual, festival, drama, spectacle, sports-games, and political (1984). Viewed from one perspective, spectator sports are popular entertainments; from another view, they are secular rituals. The same can be said for certain popular music concerts, street demonstrations, and political campaigns. The neat categories teachers admire are not obeyed by people and events. But more can be said about the concept of "performance." You needs to understand the difference and relationship between "is" and "as" performance. Up till now, I have been talking about "is" performance, recognizably marked behaviors, no matter how varied and different genre to genre, culture to culture. This bundle of performance genres and instances is very different than "as' performance. "As" performance is a way of studying the world. Everything and anything can be studied "as" performance. Just as everything, absolutely everything, can be studied "as" physics, chemistry, law, medicine--or any other discipline of study whatsoever. For what the "as" says is that the object of study will be regarded "from the perspective of, in terms of" the discipline of study. A few examples will make this clear. I am typing this book on a small Gateway 2000 Handbook 486 subcompact computer. I may regard this computer "as" physics, in which case I would examine its physical qualities, even the qualities of the sub-atomic particles that comprise the computer's substance. Or I may regard the computer "as" mathematics, in which case I would examine the binary codes that drive its chips. Or I may regard the computer "as" law, in which case I would look at the network of legal arrangements--patents, copyrights, contracts, and so on--that make the production of my computer possible. And so on and on: through any of the lenses, approaches, perspectives that can be applied by a particular way of thinking to a particular subject or object of inquiry. The "as" is a most powerful tool, because it opens up long avenues of possibilities, different models of reality, whole "worlds" of potential arrangements. Another application of the concept of "as" is the use Konstantin Stanislavsky made of it in developing his theoretical and practical methods of acting. Stanislavksy instructed actors to behave "as if" they were in the "given circumstances" of their characters. Let's say you are playing Irina in Anton Chekhov's The Three Sisters. You would ask yourself what Irina's situation is physically, emotionally, historically, and in terms of her relationships with her sisters and the other persons in her social world. You would find out from Chekhov's text that Irina is nineteen years old, the youngest sister, an idealist who desires to work and do good in the world. You would discover that the play opens in the early spring, on Irina's birthday, which is also the first anniversary of the death of the sisters' father. And so on through many the many facts that are to be lived on stage. But how you would interpret these facts, what particular emotional weight they would carry, precisely how Irina relates to her sisters and to the other characters in the play--all that would be worked out during rehearsals. Rehearsals are the time to explore the complex interactions among the script, your own feelings, the help the director gives you, the set, and your actual playing with the other actors. This rehearsal work, if you follow Stanislavsky's instructions, would develop by means of "as if"--putting yourself in Irina's circumstances, reacting to those circumstances as you imagine Irina might. Soon, your references would no longer be to the script as such but to previous rehearsals, to scenes played with your fellow actors, to discoveries that you are making. The work of becoming "as Irina" takes on a life of its own and you, as an actor, inhabit that life both taking from it and helping shape and enliven it. ILLUSTRATION: From Stanislavksy's production of The Three Sisters. "Is" is quite another thing. Something "is a performance" when context, convention, common usage, and tradition assert that it is. The enactment of a drama "is" a theatrical performance because context, convention, usage, and tradition say so. For several hundred years in Western culture, the performing arts have been regarded as the enactment of plays, the playing of music, the choreographed movements of dance. These "genres," or types, demand of those who do them a certain high level of skill usually obtained through years of rigorous training; and they demand of their audiences a certain level of sophistication gained through education. In the 20th century, movies were added to the performing arts. Of course, each of these arts--theatre, dance, music--has many many offshoots, ranging from television soap operas and rock-and-roll to performance art, experimental theatre, and multi-media computer programs. But increasingly over the past 100 years--the period of the ascendancy of powerful avantgarde movements (from symbolism and futurism to dada, surrealism, Happenings, environmental theatre, multi-media, and virtual reality) what constitutes performance has been stretched and expanded. And beyond any and every genre of artistic performance are performances of non-artistic kinds such as sports, religious and secular rituals, political campaigns, courtroom trials, and so on. These activities do not posit "make believe" so much as "make belief," an important distinction. In make believe performances, the spectators more or less know that what they are witnessing is not really real; that the social and personal worlds of the characters are not the worlds of the performers. Or, to put it in a few words, Juliet's world is not the same as the world of the actress (or actor) who plays her. In make belief performances, there is an intentional blurring of the boundary between what is fictionalized, constructed, made to order and what might be actually real. When a President gives a speech at a time of national crisis, he intends to convey his knowledge, his authority, his commander-in-chief aura. At other times, in a "fireside chat" mode, the Chief Executive may wish to appear to be a good neighbor, an ordinary Joe, a man who sympathizes and understands his "fellow Americans." Does it matter that both speeches, their scenography, and the way the President delivers his words, makes eye contact, and uses his hands are composed? The words are mostly written by speech-writers, the set designed by interior decorators and theatre designers, the gestures and tone of voice rehearsed. The same can be said of an impassioned, even apparently possessed, preacher delivering the Word of God. In recent years, these activities--not properly of the stage but not wholly separate from theatrical work--have been called "performative." Although the word performative, as first used by philosopher J. L. Austin in his William James Lectures given at Harvard in 1955 (published as How To Do Things With Words in 1962), was meant to describe using words to actually accomplish actions (as in "With this ring I thee wed"), the concept of the performative has widened considerably since Austin's day. Today a wide range of actions, behaviors, and events are thought of as performative. These range from performative writing to various kinds of role playing in everyday life to personal identity itself, especially gendered identity. If the mark of artistic performance is its voluntariness--both the actors and the spectators can quit being who they temporarily are, as the bow taken at curtain call shows--identities can hardly be thought of as voluntary or put-ons even when they share many qualities with theatrical performance. As Judith Butler has observed about drag: I do not mean to suggest that drag is a "role" that can be taken on or taken off at will. There is no volitional subject behind the mime who decides, as it were, which gender it will be today. [...] gender is not a performance that a prior subject elects to do, but gender is performative (1991:23-24). Professional sports raises similar questions, demanding a complex, far-reaching definitions of performance and the performative. Athletes dress in costumes designed not only to enhance their ability to play but also to identify their team affiliation; the athletes enact set scripts and choreographies called "plays" or "game plans," and enact powerful conflicts that are both real and make believe at the same time. These events engage the attention and frenzied support of millions of fans (from "fanatics") for whom the game is more really real than their daily lives. Similarly, some people feel themselves fully alive while engaged in religious rituals and services. These activities also are very much like staged art performances. Even ordinary people doing ordinary things wear uniforms/ costumes, behave according to strict rules appropriate to their life roles as teacher, nurse, police, waiter, judge, student, parent, lover, and so on. Naturally, during a single day, a person may perform many different life roles, each following a careful scenario, each making performative demands. Does this mean that performing one's "life roles" is equivalent to being an actor in a stage drama? ILLUSTRATIONS: Life-role persons, police, judge, doctor, priest in costume. Maps "As" Performances Grab a globe and heft it, if you can. Some are made from plastic and you can kick the world around; some are formed from heavier stuff, anchored to stands, not budgeable. But on almost all globes political maps -- cultural maps, actually -- are drawn. Nations are marked out, cities appear as black circles, rivers and oceans are named. The territory each nation claims as its own is tinctured, and this political geography-by-color marks the ascendance of the nation state. The nation state seems so natural that "the world" cannot be correctly pictured without being divided into distinct nations. And nations cannot overlap or share territories. For more than one nation to lay claim to a place means conflict, maybe even war. This way of thinking is so dominant, so "right" and "natural" that the world as it looks from space -- a blue and white swirl with no hint whatever of any human habitation or division -- appears unreal. But at least globes are round, as the earth is. Not so maps. Maps flatten the world the better to lay territories out on a table, tack them to a wall, or tuck them in a briefcase. When the earth's roundness is translated into a flat representation, strange things happen. Every map is a particular "projection." If, as is still most common in Europe and America, you are looking at a world map drawn according to the "mercator projection," you notice that Spain is as large as Zimbabwe and Greenland is a lot bigger than Australia. North America dwarfs South America, and Europe is about one-fourth the size of Africa. This mercator projection grossly exaggerates the size of Europe and the northern hemisphere, shrinking what is below the equator- -that is, miniaturizing much of the third world. The Mercator projection -- and its many variations -- comes from the work of the Flemish geographer and cartographer Gerhard Kremer (1512-94), who produced work under the Latin version of his name, Gerardus Mercator. Starting in 1537, he mapped Flanders, then Europe, then the world. Mercator's soon-to-be famous projection first appeared in 1569. Since then, Mercator's map has become the most popular of all versions/visions of the world. Mercator worked during the early years of European global seafaring, the harbinger of colonialism. Those decades were also the epoch when the modern nation-state was in formation. Before, there were empires and rulers, armies of conquest and traders. But the idea that all persons living within defined boundaries would imagine themselves belonging to "one people," speak the same language, adhere to similar customs and religions, pay taxes to a central government, and fight in an army unified under a single national flag was new. In fact, such an articulation of what made a nation would not be enunciated until the eighteenth century and not come into full flower until the nineteenth. ILLUSTRATIONS: Mercator's first map; several examples of maps from today showing radically different interpretations of what the world is. I have examples of such maps. Maps are languages, just as culture-specific as Swahili or Korean. A map is a drawing of a desire, a specific construction depicting places -- even the whole world -- which the map-maker says exists in a definite way. But this definite way is not the only way. The modern European tradition expressed by the mercator projection, aimed at reducing the whole world to something that could be seen at a single glance, comprehended, "explored," and owned. The modern Europeans were driven by a desire to measure the earth's surfaces with exactitude, the better to sail around it and control its resources both natural and social. In a word, Mercator's map, any map, can be treated as a "performance": a playing out of the relationship between desire and data, between what is wanted and what is found. It is a kind of rehearsal, working with given materials, toward a specific end. In a rehearsal, actors, directors, designers meet to work on a play. They know part of what they want to accomplish, the words that the playscript gives them, a kind of social world inherent in the script. But much of what will happen is open at the start of rehearsals. How the script will be interpreted, how the actors as characters will relate to each other; perhaps even the precise shape of the set, the movements of the actors, the lighting and music. A map of the world is the outcome of a process that is very much like a rehearsal. Depending upon what one starts with and what one is looking for, different kinds of maps can be drawn. Certain aspects of the territory under consideration are given, other aspects remain to be explored. This relationship is complex because what exists--on a map, during a rehearsal, in a performance--is known only as it is represented: as it is thought, imagined, and "put into" this or that human system of expression--language, sound, picture, gesture, mathematics, computer code, and so on. And each of these codes is both the product of and the creator of specific cultures, historical periods, social classes, genders, ethnicities, and individuals. What of Mercator's performance, his imagined world? The world Mercator imagined, a place of neatly divided sovereign nation-states, no longer exists, even in people's imagination. The world is now thought of as something much more dynamic, much more in flux, than Mercator's maps. Just as the continents are in motion, as the geologists who track the drift of tectonic plates tell us, so the world's political and cultural maps are changing too, but much more swiftly. So swiftly, in fact, that political maps are not enough. We require economic maps, demographic maps, cultural maps, language maps--and many other systems of measurement. Maybe the newest maps can't be drawn. They may exist only as fractals, continuously changing their shapes and values. The notion of fixity has been under attack since before Werner Heisenberg proposed a mathematics of uncertainty in 1927. Such uncertainty, or "chaos," is not exotic. If you are on the Internet, you are part of a system that effortlessly transgresses national boundaries. And the time isn't far away when you will login, write in your own language, and send your message assured that an instant and automatic translation will make it available to whomever you are addressing. Thus it will be routine for Chinese speakers to address Kikuyu speakers; or for someone in Iowa to address a message to any number of people globally. The dissolution of the nation is occurring economically as well as politically and along the information highway. If, for example, you drive an American or Japanese or Swedish or German or Korean car, you may believe it came from the country whose label it displays. But where were the parts that make up the car manufactured, where assembled, where designed? The brand name does not really tell you--Japanese cars are made by the thousands in Tennessee and Fords roll off assembly lines in Canada. Car parts come from many different places. As for cars, so for clothes. Are your pants, shoes, and shirt from the same country? Do you even know where they were stitched and glued or by whom and at what wage? Cars, clothes, and many other items of culture no longer express a specific national identity. For better or worse, manufacturing is on the loose, resituating itself wherever the necessary skills can be bought cheaply. In fact, at every level of human exchange--goods, ideas, money, arts, disease--the fixity displayed by the Mercator projection has been replaced by an interactivity and interdependence previously undreamt of. Blurry Boundaries Let's review what I've been presenting to you. There are several ways to understand performance. I am suggesting that there are a number of ways to grasp the concept of performance. Any event, action, item, or behavior may be examined "as" performance. Anything at all may be studied "as" performance. Approaching phenomena as performance has certain advantages. One can consider things as provisional, in-process, existing and changing over time, being rehearsed; one sees that there usually are many players, different and even opposing individuals or groups, in every kind of social event or human product. On the other hand, there are events which tradition and convention mark off. These events "are" performances. In Western culture, up until quite 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 genres often blur or breach boundaries separating art from life. I shall discuss performance art more fully in chapter 6. As performance art grew in range and popularity, theorists began to examine how "performative behavior" works--playing out gender choices, even dressing up for a party, heightening one's constructed identity, performing as slightly or radically different selves in different situations. In an historical period of intense mediatization, where people communicate over the Internet, via phone, and fax, and where so much information and entertainment comes through the air, a complex situation has developed in which face-to-face interactions embody the media even as the media virtualizes personal relations. This is the performative Butler and queer theorists discuss. I will look at these ideas more fully in chapter 5. In fact, many different events and behaviors are not strictly the performing arts but are still performances. The recognition of how pervasive these activities are both in Western and non-Western cultures is one of the engines driving the academic discipline of performance studies. These activities-- some private or at least not for spectators, and some enormously successful popular entertainments--include children or adults playing, spectator sports, civic celebrations and secular rituals, religious rituals, everyday-life roles (teacher, parent, cop, doctor, judge, and so on), gender as constructed, and so on. This vast panoply of stuff comes under the aegis of performance and the performative. The growing acceptance of the performative as a category of theory as well as a fact of behavior has made it more and more difficult, and inadvisable, to assign "truth" to the realm of life and "artifice" (or worse) to the realm of theatre. Such distinctions between the false mask and the true face, for example, belie more the anti-theatrical prejudice than any steady examination of phenomena. It is 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. More often than not there is a layering of appearances or of depths, and what we see or immediately experience is that which is presented; reality is constructed through and through, both on its many surfaces and throughout its multiple depths. Performance Genres and Activities We can organize performance genres, performative behaviors, and performance activities into a continuum: playing--games & spectator sports--music, theatre, dance-- popular entertainments and folk performance--performance in everyday life--identity constructions--ritualizing These genres, behaviors, and activities do not each stand alone. They blur into one another at their boundaries and interact with each other from their centers. The continuum ought not be drawn as a straight line but as a more complicated figure. Playing and ritualizing are closely connected to each other. In chapter 2 I will discuss the ways playing and ritualizing replicate one another even as they are in some ways opposites. Playing underlies all the other genres, behaviors, and activities. To play is to invent new ways of doing things, readjusting rules to suit circumstances, making believe, testing limits. Rituals, in some ways, are very much like play and in other ways are the opposite of play. Rituals are marked by a certain formality emphasizing repetition rather than originality, exaggeration of gesture, and displays. The function of ritual performances vary, depending on whether the ritual is religious, secular, or personal. Most rituals express or create social, national, family, or religious solidarity. In a way, rituals are fossilized play. But rituals can also be transformative. Paradoxically, a ritual may be fixed even as the participants in the ritual undergo profound change. But rituals, as we shall see later, also can be creative or, as Victor Turner put it, "anti-structural." The middle terms--games, sports, music, dance, theatre, popular entertainments and folk performance--are the performance genres, named events with specific conventions characterizing each category and sub-category. Ballet is ballet, football is football--both are about movement, contact, lifting, and falling. But no one would confuse Superbowl with Les Sylfides. Precisely, because the characteristics of each performance genre are conventional, spectators and critics can argue about different performances, determining how good or bad each performance was, how well or poorly each performer did. Games and spectator sports are like play except that sports are played according to generally accepted rules, often moderated or enforced by umpires or referees. Public games and sports are enjoyable because spectators know the rules and the records of individual players. Fans distinguish between excellent and sloppy play. Many people take sports very seriously, not only as a way of passing time (by playing or watching), but as an object of study. With their choreographed movements, costumes, and avid spectators, public games and sports--from chess tournaments to football matches and the myriad of watched activities in between --are close to theatre and the aesthetic genres. Even so, baseball, soccer, football, hockey, and so on are not thought of as arts. But this distinction is questionable when it comes to those sports where style and skill of movement is foremost. Figure skating and gymnastics are evaluated on the basis of aesthetics more than on sheer physical strength or the ability to score points against an opponent. ILLUSTRATIONS: FILM-STRIP OF FIGURE SKATING. The terms that deal with the performative--performance in everyday life and identity constructions--are as rule bound as sports, but often less consciously so. It used to be that a person is who she is, assigned a role by birth, tradition, education, or training. But for quite some time, and especially in so-called postmodern societies, people have been able to shift roles both in the longterm (by means of sexual orientation choices, various kinds of surgery, cosmetic and more) and in the short-term (by means of dress, makeup, jewelry; selection of friends, social milieu). Even as some segments of the population seem stuck, unable to move out of poverty, or in other ways immobilized, other people seem incredibly labile, transforming themselves, or apparently doing so, with ease. ILLUSTRATIONS: A MAN VOGUEING; A WOMAN DRESSED UP FOR A PARTY Performance in everyday life permeates all aspects of peoples' lives. There are very few moments when a person is "just herself." Throughout the day, a person plays one role or another, adheres to one set of social conventions or another. This does not mean that one is pretending, being insincere, or "just" playacting. It does mean that the formation and expression of personal identity is an interaction among psychological, social, and cultural forces. Furthermore, as Erving Goffman pointed out, roles in everyday life are staged in spaces that clearly have "fronts" and "backs," comparable to onstage and offstage. Take "going to a party" where one bathes, perfumes (or deodorizes), costumes (dressing up or down), in the backstage area. Then there is a liminal time--an in between period--when you are "on the way but not yet arrived." Finally, one arrives and enters the place where others have come from their own backstages. The behavior at the party is also carefully scripted. And what can be said about the behavior, identities presented, staging, and physical environment of a party can also be said about many other encounters during an average day and night. The aesthetic genres of music, theatre, and dance generally include trained performers, spectators, well defined scores, scripts, or choreographies, costumes and sometimes masks, and special spaces marked out for the performance. The designation of a particular performance as an "art form" is, as I have noted earlier, a question of tradition and convention. A performance such as the Yaqui deer dance when done in the pueblo during a fiesta is ritual, but a similar dance when performed by Mexico's Ballet Folklorico is art. In many cultures, theatre, dance, and music are so wholly integrated that it is not possible to say which genre is dominant. Noh in Japan, kathakali in India, and Gelede in Nigeria are but three examples among many that fully integrate music, dance, and theatre. ILLUSTRATIONS: Noh performer, kathakali performer, gelede performer, Yaqui deer dancer in the pueblo and in the Ballet Folklorico Popular entertainments--things like rock music, most TV programs, Broadway or West End musicals--are not much different than fine arts. It is only convention and tradition that separate the two categories. In fact, there always has been lots of movement among categories. For example, jazz during its formative years at the start of the 20th century was not regarded as an art. It was something akin to "folk performance" or "popular entertainment." But soon enough, as scholars paid attention to the jazz sound, as a large repertory of music was archived, as particular musicians' works were not only listened to but studied, jazz came to be regarded as art. Today, "pure jazz" is more likely to be heard in concert halls and a relatively few commercial venues than in the mass media. Rock music in its many variations remains "popular," hardly studied as serious art. But that is not to say that rock will not someday be listened to and regarded in the same way that jazz or classical music is. Folk performance has long been a source of classical items, reset and "upgraded" by composers and choreographers. However, folk performance in itself has the qualities of classical art. The category of folk, in fact, has more to do with ideology, politics, and economic power than with formal qualities of performance construction. A Pocket History of "Performance Studies" The Greek philosopher Heraclitus (535-475 BCE) asserted that "You never step in the same river twice." Heraclitus believed that the whole material world was in continuous flux, that there was no ultimate reality except change. Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle asserts something similar. Performance studies--as an "approach" or a "discipline" or "field"--is a response to this kind of uncertain, always-in-flux, radically relativistic world. In a world of continuous change and uncertainty, performance studies asserts that examining a broad range of events, behaviors, and phenomena "as performance" offers a way of understanding. Performance studies deals with the broad range or spectrum of performances, from art to popular entertainments, sports to the presentations of self in everyday life, from religious ritual to state ceremony, from staged dramas to social dramas, the highly charged conflicts that mark political and economic life. As I've noted, all of these are performances, all of them, and more, can be studied as performances. Performance studies, like every academic discipline, is founded on principles encoded in key terms such as "restored behavior," "presentation of self," "ritual," "social drama," "expressive culture," and others. Working from a very broad definition of what is or can be studied as performance is not a denial or rejection of the aesthetics of theatre, dance, or the other performing arts. Nor is it a simple extension or projection of art aesthetics into social and religious life. It is to argue that there is more to performance than the artistic; that it is important to develop and articulate theories concerning how performances are generated, transmitted, received, and evaluated; that these systems of transformations vary from culture to culture and epoch to epoch. In pursuit of these goals, performance studies is insistently intercultural, inter-generic, and inter-disciplinary. THIS REST OF THIS SECTION REMAINS TO BE WRITTEN. IT WILL BE BASED ON SEVERAL ESSAYS I HAVE ALREADY WRITTEN FOR TDR AND OTHER JOURNALS, AS WELL AS WORK BY PHILLIP ZARRILLI, DWIGHT CONQUERGOOD, PEGGY PHELAN, AND OTHERS. Entertainment, Healing, Community-Making, Teaching, Dealing With the Sacred & the Demonic The five functions of performance are to entertain, to heal, to make community, to teach, and to deal with the sacred and the demonic. These may be configured as overlapping and interacting spheres. MODEL OF THE FIVE OVERLAPPING SPHERES OF PERFORMANCE. Very rarely does a performance have only a single function. A Methodist church service on Sunday morning in Peoria is likely to foster community solidarity, invoke the sacred, entertain, and teach (if the choir can sing and the sermon is tolerable). Different people among the congregation will take different things from the service. The religiously inclined will emphasize the contact with the divine, the flirtatious may take church as an opportunity to make a connection, the musical be entertained by the singing, and the scholarly be caught up in or take issue with the sermon. Most likely, if the service is successful, a number of these functions will be fulfilled simultaneously. A service at a charismatic church, though strong on entertainment, teaching, and community-making, will also emphasize healing through anointing with oil and laying on of hands. In a performance by HIV-positive Ron Athey, the artist "presents his own infected body and performs upon it. He displays his pierced and tattooed skin, dresses in rubber and leather, wraps himself and others in plastic, whips and is whipped in quasi-religious rituals, and in the final scenes [of Martyrs and Saints], like Christ and then like St. Sebastian his body is pierced onstage in front of you, right in your face, blood dripping onto the plastic-covered floor" (McGrath 1995:23). A show such as Athey's surpasses entertainment, includes elements of healing, and makes whole contact with the AIDS demon. One of Athey's functions is to teach--and to terrify. His performances surpass traditional explanations because Athey employs his own body, and his deadly disease, both actually and metaphorically. He is all at once, entertainer-icon-martyr-enraged victim. The demonic is referenced but not engaged in the Disney Beauty and the Beast as seen on Broadway. This is a show that attempts to be "pure entertainment." And yet the production generated at least one scholarly article (Nelson 1995). In contrast to both Athey's work and Disney's are Bertolt Brecht's lehrstuckes, or "learning plays," such as The Measures Taken (193-) or The Exception and the Rule (193-) and the "model Beijing operas" staged by Jiang Qing during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-76). These works were carefully shaped to both teach and entertain. The combination of these functions is nothing new. In his Ars Poetica, the Roman poet and performance theorist Horace (65-8 BCE) urged dramatists to combine teaching and entertainment in their plays. ILLUSTRATIONS: a panorama of performances: church service, Ron Athey, Broadway production, Brecht play as staged in the 30s, model opera from China Healing, community-making, and entertainment are present in many performances. In the Poetics, Aristotle (384-322 BCE) argued that tragedy was "cathartic," arousing and then purging feelings of pity and fear. The Greek philosopher, rationalist though he was, was not alone among the ancients in believing that such feelings if pent up would do irreparable harm. In its own way, does not psychoanalysis assert the same thing? And what is Freud's "talking cure" other than a solo performance arousing, experiencing, and ultimately purging various harmful emotionally charged memories--or fantasies, ghosts, demons? This intense and intimate performance is witnessed and assisted by a professional Western shaman, the psychoanalyst. Of course, the Athenian audience attending the theatre of Dionysus was also being entertained--appreciating so much the skills of actors and playwrights that the best of them were awarded prizes for their excellence. This audience of thousands did not pay admission. Ironically, the analysand who provides the analyst with the show is also the one who pays. Even today, in Korea and elsewhere, a shaman pursuing and casting out the demons presumed to cause an illness to her client is both healing the sick and entertaining family and friends gathered to witness the ceremony and assist the shaman in her performance. Something extra must be said regarding entertainment and beauty. As I use the term, "entertainment" includes the whole range of aesthetic performance, whose main intention is to bring pleasure by showing "beauty." But beauty is itself hard-to- define. It does not mean that which is pretty--for the ghastly and terrifying events enacted in many Greek tragedies, Elizabethan dramas, and performance art can hardly be called pretty. Nor is it enough to say that the skills shown by artists transforms such horrific content into beautiful events, though such is often the case. Perhaps the best one can do in defining the entertainment/ pleasure-giving/beauty aspect of performance is to refer to what Susanne Langer called "virtuality," the accomplishment by a performance of its own interior logic: It has been said repeatedly that the theater creates a perpetual present moment; but it is only a present filled with its own future that is really dramatic. [...] As literature creates a virtual past, drama creates a virtual future. The literary mode is the mode of Memory; the dramatic is the mode of Destiny (1953: 307). This virtual future is different for each performing art and each individual work; what is similar is the creation of futurity, or Destiny as Langer calls it, a virtuality sustained by a particular construction of performed events, a concrete and specific "could-be." This need not be limited to, or at all, a could-be of the narrative kind. It may be a could-be of a movement or concantination of gestures, a repeated musical motif, a certain tone of voice or song. The destiny of performance is a flirtation with the possibility of accomplishing, or veering from, a future that is proposed but not yet realized. Twice Behaved Behaviors What sets performance in all its aspects--genres, "as," the performative--off from other phenomena? This question is not so easy to answer. Take for example a surgeon performing an open heart procedure in the operating theatre. Rhetoric indicates the event is at least performative if not out-and-out performance. But from the point of view of the patient under the knife, whose life is in balance, the surgery is no performance; it is an event of consequence. Moreover, due to general anaesthesia, the patient is absent in terms of expressing her personality. The scenography also deprives her of her daily self. She is wrapped in hospital garb, the surgical site further delimited, often discolored by antiseptic, and intensely well lit. The surgeon, assistants, and nurses are veiled by their hospital blues and masks. Let us suppose that present at the operation in addition to the usual complement of staff are two interns learning from the surgeon. The surgeon is conscious not only of these students but of her whole staff. In performing the operation, the surgeon points out what she is doing and why. From the surgeon's perspective, the operation, in addition to its medical dimension, is a teaching performance. At some hospitals, there is a gallery overlooking the OR where teaching surgeons can instruct medical students as an operation is going on. This kind of medical performance is nothing new. Paintings from the eighteenth and nineteenth century amply document both medical examination, surgery, and dissection as public events, enjoyed not only for their scientific interests but as entertainments, and as demonstrations of power over the body living, dying, and dead. ILLUSTRATIONS: Medical procedures "as theatre" in 18th & 19th century paintings; a contemporary operating theatre. Were we to observe a surgery carefully, we would see that certain aspects of the procedure are emphasized, framed, and changed because this appendectomy is an "operation for learning," a procedure that is both what it is and a performance of what it is. Furthermore, isn't the "operating theatre," as the room is frequently called, similar in many ways to the aesthetic theatre? There are backstage areas, props, costumes, defined roles, a script guiding the actions, and interns who both spectate and assist. The participants are dressed in special clothes not only functionally necessary but demarking status and role (nurses from doctors from patients from observers). The actions of everyone in the operating room are known beforehand; often the surgeon in charge will outline the procedure in one kind of language to the patient and in another kind of language to the medical staff. Following a script means that whatever is going on in the operating room has gone on before; the patient changes, the medical staff may be different from operation to operation, but the appendectomy procedure remains more or less the same. Furthermore, particular hospitals, particular surgeons, have their own style, their own idiosyncratic way of following the script. A doctor's bedside manner and the way she treats her colleagues has a great deal to do with the building of a professional reputation. Of course, special circumstances, often unpredictable, evoke improvised responses; and mistakes can be fatal. The biggest difference between the operating theatre and a Broadway show is that the outcome of the surgery may have immediate life-and-death consequences. But, one might argue, the failure of a show also has its "real life" consequences for actors, producers, landlords, newspapers, and others. Another difference is that the medical students are required to watch the operation, for which they do not pay a separate admission. Their tuitions cover the whole gamut of medical training. On Broadway, audiences consist for the most part of individuals and small groups who attend voluntarily on a show-to-show basis or as part of a theatre party or subscription audience. The spectators at a show are having a good time, their activity is parsed as "leisure." The surgeons-to-be, whether or not they enjoy the operation, are there to learn, their attention is focused in a way the theatre audience's is not. But even here the situation is not altogether clear. Opera, regional theatres, and community theatres sell season tickets to subscribers; students are given discounts or whole schools attend as part of package deals paid for by the government. Classroom discussions are held the next day to discuss what went on in the theatre. And every theatre, even the hospital operating theatre, is to a large degree founded on economic exchange. Detailing precisely what form this exchange takes--individual tickets, patrons, state subsidies, tuition, medicare, managed care, and so on--will tell us a lot about the kind of performance going on and the kind of audience in attendance. Entertainment is paid for mostly on a per capita basis; education is frequently a group ticket; ritual goes by means of donation; and healing is paid by the client (and those subsidizing the client). Of course, there are many cultural variants of these basic patterns. What can be said about the operating theatre, doctors, nurses, medical staff, patients and so on can be said about almost every professional encounter. The routines that guide social life in hospitals, banks, law courts, supermarkets, police stations, dinner tables, kitchens, restaurants, wherever, are uncannily theatrical. What is interesting from the point of view of performance studies is to compare different kinds of performances and see how they illuminate each other. What is it that all these actions share? What makes them "performative" and how are they related to the "performing arts"? These behaviors, as well as fully rehearsed theatrical productions, fully choreographed dances, fully scored musical compositions are "twice-behaved behaviors," "restored behaviors" (see Schechner 1985:35-116). Restored behaviors are actions, or scripts, that can be stored, transmitted, manipulated, and transformed. Restored behavior is, to some degree, out there, separate from "me." Restored behavior is symbolic and reflexive, not empty but loaded with intended and non-intended meanings and significances. The self as encoded in restored behavior can act in/as another, whether that other is an aesthetic role like Hamlet or a life role such as "teacher." And just as every instance of Hamlet will be like the others but different, so every appearance of "teacher" will be like the others but different. The impossible ephemerality and fluidity of the immediate, of the moment, is more or less, depending on the actors, their circumstances, and the historical occasion, contained or hardened by being performed. Symbolic and reflexive behavior is the hardening into performance of social, religious, aesthetic, juridical, medical, and educational processes. Performance means: never for the first time; for the second to the nth time, twice-behaved behavior. TO COME: 1. Suggested readings. 2. Suggested videotapes. 3. Suggested doings. References Chapter 1 Austin, J. L. 1962 How To Do Things With Words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Butler, Judith 1991 "Imitation and Gender Insubordination," 13-31 in Inside/ Out, Diana Fuss, ed. New York: Routledge. Goffman, Erving 1959 The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City: Doubleday. Langer, Susanne K. 1953 Feeling and Form. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. MacAloon, John 1984 "Olympic Games and the Theory of Spectacle in Modern Societies," 241-80 in Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle, John MacAloon, ed. Philadelphia: ISHI. McGrath, John Edward 1995 "Trusting in Rubber: Performing Boundaries During the AIDS Epidemic," TDR 39, 2:21-38. Nelson, Steve 1995 "Broadway and the Beast: Disney Comes to Times Square," TDR 39, 2:71-85. Schechner, Richard 1985 Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.References: Richard Schechner email: schechnr@acf2.nyu.edu voice: 212 998 1638 fax : 212 995 4571