STUDY MATERIAL on Generic Elective (ENGLISH) Paper TEXT AND PERFORMANCE
Theatre and performance
During the last quarter of the 20th century, the term performance gained an ever-greater prominence in relation to theatre studies, first in the United States, then in Europe, and by the end of the century, around the world, owing in significant measure to the predominant position that Europe, especially Western Europe, and the United States held in theatre studies and in the development and the dissemination of new theories and practices in this and related fields. As performance became increasingly a matter of concern to theatre scholars in Europe and the United States, its spread to other parts of the globe was inevitable.
Although some variation of the word theatre can be found in many European languages, doubtless due to the general European agreement that this art originated in classical Greece, from which the term is drawn, the linguistic background of the term performance is quite different. Like many modern English words, the ancestry of ‘perform’ is French, from the Old French term ‘parfournir’ meaning ‘to do’ or ‘to carry out’. Although the modern French word ‘fourni’ (and the closely related English word ‘furnish’) is descended from ‘parfournir’, there is no modern French word corresponding to performance, especially in the many rather varied meanings it has developed in English. The same is true of the other Romance languages, and of other European languages as well. Thus, although the term performance is now familiar around the world, it is as a borrowed modern English term, like ‘computer’ or ‘Internet’. Along with the term have been borrowed various applications of the term, almost entirely derived ultimately from theorists in the United States, where the modern concept of performance developed. Even there, the term refers to a wide range of phenomena, but the best way to gain an idea of the implications of performance, and its impact on theatre, is to begin with its development and the concerns it has addressed in the United States. There the modern usage of the term developed along with various models of its relationship to theatre.
Performance and the art world
The modern interest in performance can be traced to several different developments in the early 1970s, in the art world, in academic theatre, and in the social sciences, particularly sociology and anthropology. Within the art world, a certain interest in the operations of the live body as an artistic medium, quite distinct from the concerns of traditional theatre, can be found in various experimental art movements throughout the 20th century, in futurism, in Dada, in the happenings of Allan Kaprow, in the work of Fluxus, but on the whole these remained confined to the world of the visual arts. Indeed, some of the most influential artists involved with such work, such as Kaprow, specifically denied any association with theatre, with its already fixed procedures, assumptions, and rules.
In the early 1970s, works particularly concerned with the activities of the living body became an increasingly important part of the conceptual art movement outside the boundaries of traditional artistic materials. The terms ‘body art’, ‘performance art’, and sometimes ‘life art’ then began to be applied to such work. Some of these followed the example of the Kaprow happenings of the previous decades, displaying everyday activities such as walking, sleeping, eating, or drinking. Others pushed the body to extreme physical conditions, even to real danger, most notoriously perhaps in the 1971 performance piece Shoot, in which a friend of the artist Chris Burden shot him in the arm with a real rifle bullet.
While such spectacular examples of performance attracted the most attention from the media, these extreme cases represented only a very small part of what was becoming a very important new means of artistic expression, located somewhere between theatre and conceptual art and involving the living body, usually appearing alone. Although Kaprow and others continued to demand a separation of performance art from theatre, the two forms grew steadily closer together during the 1970s. Perhaps most important in this convergence was feminist performance, which almost by definition was rarely if ever totally devoid of discursive content and which often followed a long tradition of monologue performance in the theatre but devoted to the specific topic of the experience, often autobiographical, of women in contemporary society. Men and male performance dominated early performance art but the 1970s saw a flourishing of feminist performance, reflecting the rapid growth during that decade of women’s concerns throughout art and culture, especially in the United States. Southern California took an early lead in such work, with artists like Linda Montano and Rachel Rosenthal, but New York was another important centre, with many of the best-known women performance artists, including Yoko Ono, Carolee Schneeman, and Laurie Anderson.
The term ‘performance’ in the English theatre tradition
While the concept and practice of performance art were growing in importance and visibility (by the 1980s the New York Times Arts and Leisure section regularly included a division ‘performance’ alongside ‘theatre’ and ‘music’), the term ‘performance’ was during these same years taking on a new significance in the social sciences and in the theatre. The term performance has had a long association with theatre in the English language, though not, as has been noted, in other, even closely related European languages. The verb ‘perform’ goes back to the late Middle Ages, but by the time of Shakespeare, it had developed a particular association with the presentation of theatrical and musical works. The noun ‘performance’ is said to have been first used in 1709 by Richard Steele in an early issue of his journal The Tatler, in reference to a benefit presented by the actor Thomas Betterton. Since that time, a performance has become the common English term to indicate either the work of an actor on a particular theatrical occasion, as in ‘Richard Burton’s performance of Hamlet was outstanding,’ or to refer to the theatrical occasion itself, as in ‘The play ran for 300 performances.’ It is, in English, a term as familiar as ‘theatre’ or ‘drama’. During the 1970s, however, the term ‘performance’ began to be used with distinctly different connotations, so much separating itself from theatre that today academic departments, conferences, and publications devoted to ‘theatre and performance’ can be found throughout the English-speaking world, and indeed beyond. Although this shift occurred within the world of academic theatre studies, it was essentially inspired by developments in other academic disciplines, particularly the social sciences, not by the appearance and proliferation during this same decade of modern performance art, which would seem a more direct possible influence.