Performing arts/arts of performing
The last use of the metaphor of performance is in the performing arts, in the
conduct of creative performances. The body of work produced by the performing
arts constitutes perhaps the single most sustained treatment of the metaphor of
performance. I therefore intend to treat it in greater depth than the previous three
usages. But, in providing a survey (which, given the enormous range of work, must
be indicative rather than schematic) it is important to note that the metaphor of
performance is itself contested in performance studies (see Roach 1996). To begin
with, there is the problem of what exactly counts as performance. Certainly, there
is no doubt that performance has moved beyond the theatre. For Schechner, for
example:
performance is an inclusive term. Theatre is only one node on a continuum
that reaches from the ritualism of animals (including humans) though
performances in everyday life – greetings, display of emotion, family scenes,
professional roles, and so on – through to play, sports, theatre, dance,
ceremonies, rites, and performances of great magnitude.
(Schechner 1988: xii)Thus:
any event, action, item or behaviour 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 that 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’, mixed media, ‘hap-
penings’, or ‘intermedia’, these events blur or break boundaries separating art
from life and genres from each other. As performative art grew in range and
popularity, theorists began to examine ‘performative behaviour’ – how people
play gender, heightening their constructed identity, performing slightly or
radically different selves in different situations.... The performative engages
performance in places and situations not traditionally marked as performing
arts, from dress-up to certain kinds of writing or speaking.
(Schechner 1998: 361–362)There is, as might only be expected, much argument as to whether performance
should therefore be understood as a ‘theatre-plus’ model, expanding what counts
as theatre, or whether such an understanding should be seen as a backward step,
a betrayal of the history of performance studies which in many ways has been –
and still is – antitheatre, given its genesis in post-war experimental performance
Afterwords 133