Richard Schechner

What Is »Performance Studies« Anyway?

Abstract
This essay maps the development over the past thirty-five years of Performance Studies
as an academic discipline. It is also a theoretical statement about the parameters of
Performance Studies. Interdisciplinary and intercultural in its approach and methods,
Performance Studies assumes that we live in a postcolonial world, where cultures are
colliding, interfering with each other, and energetically hybridizing. In terms of
Performance Studies, this means a discipline operating between theatre and anthropol-
ogy, folklore and sociology, history and performance theory, gender studies and psy-
choanalysis, performance events and performativity. Performance Studies resists the
establishment of any single system of knowledge, values, or subject matter.
Performance Studies is unfinished, open, multivocal and selfcontradictory. Thus any call
for a move towards a »unified field« is a misunderstanding of the fluidity and playfulness
fundamental to Performance Studies.

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
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 »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«.1 In 1970 followed »Actualize«,2 the fruit of my 1960s thinking
about ritual in non-Western cultures and contemporary avant-garde 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/cul-
tural anthropology, semiotics, ethnography, pre-history, Ritual Studies, Theatre
1
The Drama Review, vol. 10, no. 4 (1966), pp. 27-28.
2
The essay was first published in a festschrift for Francis Fergusson, The Rarer Action,
eds. Alan Cheuse and Richard Koffler (New Brunswick/NJ, 1986), pp. 97-135, and
was reprinted in Theatre Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 2 (April-June 1971), pp. 49-66. It had
much currency and was reprinted again as the leadoff of my Essays on Performance
Theory (New York, 1976).
2 Richard Schechner

Studies and both the historical and current avant-garde. For the first time, I used
the term »performance theory« to describe my ideas. In 1973 in the introduction
to a special issue of The Drama Review (TDR) on »Performance & the Social
Sciences« I wrote that »performance is a kind of communicative behaviour that is
part of, or continuous with, more formal ritual ceremonies, public gatherings,
and various means of exchanging information, goods, and customs.« This issue of
TDR was probably the first Performance Studies collection. In 1976 I co-edited
with Mady Schuman, Ritual, Play, and Performance, an anthology carrying for-
ward the same ideas.3
In the spring of 1979, the first »Performance Theory« course at New York
University 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.

Over the next couple of years, the »visiting faculty« included Jerzy Grotowski,
Victor Turner, Barbara Myerhoff, Jerome Rothenberg, Paul Bouissac, Donald
Kaplan, Joann Kealinohomoku and Squat Theatre. Here, possibly for the first time
in a single course, one could find anthropologists, a psychoanalyst, a semiotician,
a dance scholar, an oral poet and expert in shamanism, and leading experimental
theatre artists. 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, Brian Sutton-Smith, Ray Birdwhistell, Edward T.
Hall, Julie Taymor and 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«. What
was missing - I can see this now as clear as day - was feminist performance, post-
structuralism, speech act theory and popular entertainments. These pillars of
Performance Studies were brought to NYU by my colleagues Brooks McNamara,
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Peggy Phelan.
But I have jumped ahead. By the end of the 1970s, the faculty of Graduate
Drama - Ted Hoffman, Michael Kirby, McNamara and myself knew we were not
teaching »drama« or »theatre« in the ways it was taught elsewhere. In many cours-
es, we were not teaching drama or theatre at all. So in 1980 we officially changed
our name to Performance Studies. We were experimenting, but we were not col-
lectively coherent. Each of us was doing his own thing. And by 1980 we needed
more than a new name, we needed strong, consistent leadership. Enter Barbara

Ritual, Play, and Performance: Readings in Social Science / Theatre, eds. Richard
Schechner and Mady Schuman (New York, 1976).
What is »Performance Studies« Anyway? 3

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. BKG, as she is known by all, came to NYU from the

Department of Folklore and Folklife at the University of Pennsylvania. Her far-
ranging interests spanned Jewish Studies, museum displays (from colonial expo-
sitions to living history museums), tourist performances and the aesthetics of
everyday life. BKG became chair of Performance Studies in 1981 and served for
twelve years. BKG was truly the first chair of Performance Studies. 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 conferred with
deans, scholars in other departments and around the world. What happened dur-
ing BKG's chairship 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. The
Department's mission statement in the 1982-1984 Bulletin, the first crafted by
BKG, 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 recent 1996-1997 edition.4
But that did not mean that things were static. Marcia Siegel joined the faculty
in 1983, Peggy Phelan joined as an adjunct in 1985, and on a tenure-track line in
1987. She was tenured and promoted when she assumed the chair of Performance
Studies in 1994, a job she will leave after the current term is over. Michael Taussig
came as a full professor in 1988 - and left for the anthropology department of
Columbia University in 1993- The impact of Siegel, Phelan and Taussig was imme-
diate. Siegel developed and led work in dance, emphasized 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 teaching style was also important. Rambling and
digressing, he interrogated more than transferred information. Phelan plunged
into courses in feminism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, autobiography and sexual-
ity on stage. Guest faculty included Sue-Ellen Case, Kate Davy, Holly Hughes and
Deb Margolin. Performance Studies was moving in strongly theorized and wide-
ranging directions. My own teaching interests remained steady, centering around
Asian performance, experimental theatre and performance theory.
4 Richard Schechner

We knew that we could not cover the whole range of what we collectively con-
sidered to be Performance Studies. What we wanted to do instead was offer some
consistent methodological means for approaching what was a vast, almost unlim-
ited field; and to explore - according to each faculty member's passions and inter-
ests - aspects of the whole. This approach emphasized by example the multivo-
cality and plurality of Performance Studies. It also meant a shifting subject matter,
the ongoing introduction of new courses, a careful selection of adjunct and visit-
ing faculty. We took a cue from Victor Turner's admonition, »Chaps, not maps!«
which meant developing curriculum not according to an abstract theme, but crys-
tallized 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 theo-
ry. Classical theater forms are contrasted with post-modernism and performance art, as
well as intercultural performances. [...] Courses in performance theory explore the con-
cepts informing particular genres of dance, theater, ritual, folklore, sports, processions,
and festivals.

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 stimu-

lates 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 per-
formance, 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 department's experimental
approach: openness, flexibility, rigorous thought, and a preference for questioning,
rather than accepting.

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.
What is »Performance Studies« Anyway? 5

A period of change
Beginning in the late 1980s, and continuing into the new millennium, changes in fac-
ulty and disciplinary focus accelerated, bringing both opportunity and instability.
Hoffman, Kirby, Siegel and McNamara retired. Barbara Browning, May Joseph, Jose
Munoz and Fred Moten joined the faculty. These younger professors brought their
own interests and approaches and were less theatre, stage, dance or concert-orient-
ed than those who left. Browning's Resistance in Motion (1995) is a study of
Brazilian samba »from the inside«, as Browning learned the dance and was ritually ini-
tiated as a sambaista. Her most recent Infectuous Rhythm (1998) traces the
metaphors of contagion in their relation to African and diasporan cultures and per-
formances. Joseph's Nomadic Identities (1999) deals with a wide range of subjects,
including how persons displaced within and outside their birth-countries construct
new senses of themselves. Joseph left the department in 2000. Munoz's work con-
nects queer theory and performance theory. Fren Moten's interests combine
African-American performance, particularly music, and Derridean post-structural-
ism. When BKG stepped down as chair in 1994, Joseph Roach accepted the post but
left after only a single term.4 Phelan agreed to chair the Department for three years,
from 1994 to 1997. In 1998, Diana Taylor, noted for her work on Latin-American per-
formance and politics, joined as full professor and chair to the Department. Taylor's
Disappearing Acts (1997) is a Performance Studies take on Argentina's »Dirty War«.
In the 1990s, interest in African and Afro-American performance emerged with-
in the department. J. Ndukaku Amankulor joined the faculty in 1992 teaching
African popular performance, mask-dance-theatre and ritual performance.
Suddenly and sadly, in 1995 Amankulor died of a brain tumor. In 1993, the
Comparative Literature Department recruited renowned novelist-playwright-
activist Ngugi wa Thiongo'o who requested a joint appointment to Performance
Studies. Although not on a Performance Studies line, Ngugi teaches, participates in
faculty meetings and colloquia and advises Ph.D. students. His courses centre 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:
postcolonial 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 the per-
formative, some on behaviour - performance »itself«. 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?
Roach's hire was spousal and although a job was found in the English Department
(where she wanted to be) for Janet Carlisle, ultimately things did not work out and
Roach went back to Tulane (how history inverts itself!). In 1997, both Roach and
Carlisle left Tulane.
6 Richard Schechner

Beyond NYU

By the late-1990s, the NYU department and the discipline were independent of
each other. The discipline of »Performance Studies« is flourishing on many fronts.
The list of books resulting from Ph.D. dissertations at NYU or Northwestern
University is too long to be listed here; several book series and journals carry
»Performance Studies« in their title; many university departments now advertise
courses in Performance Studies.
Not only the title, but also the idea of an expanded range of performance gen-
res has been generally accepted. In 1984, Northwestern University (NWU) estab-
lished its Department of Performance Studies. Starting in 1995, an annual
Performance Studies Conference has drawn hundreds of participants from the
United States, Canada, Latin America and Europe. This year's conference in
Atlanta will have as its theme »Performance and Technology«. TDK, now subtitled
»The Journal of Performance Studies«, is no longer alone in the field. Similar mate-
rial regularly appears in Theatre Journal, Performing Ans Journal and Theatre
Topics. In 1996, Performance Research was launched by the Centre for
Performance Research in the U.K. The »performance paradigm« is strong in the
social sciences and in Cultural Studies. All this signals the maturing and dissemi-
nation of a discipline larger than any single institution.
NYU's branch of Performance Studies is rooted in drama and theatre,
Northwestern University's in oral interpretation and speech. These are not only
genres, they are separate academic traditions. NWU's nineteenth-century
Department of Elocution became its Department of Oral Interpretation and then
Performance Studies. By whatever name, the theoretical foundation of speech
departments was rhetoric; their practical work was based on oral interpretations
of texts, but usually not dramas.5 In a 1993 Internet discussion of »What is
Performance Studies?« Nathan Stucky of Southern Illinois University wrote:

Performance Studies at [the Speech Communication Association] [...] seems a logical

development over a few decades. By the late 1960s and early 1970s many (then Oral
Interpretation) programs were really practicing what was called »Performance of

The reasons for the aversion to drama is itself an interesting side story. Back in the
nineteenth century, when the anti-theatrical prejudice was very strong, persons with
a dramatic flare could practice public speaking without invoking opprobrium. After
all, such speakers were not »imitating« anything, »impersonating« anyone, wearing
deceptive costumes, or anything like that. Furthermore, there was in the young
United States a grand tradition of oratory, public debate and passionately embodied
religious preaching. Chattaquas, revivals, travelling reverends, stump-shouting politi-
cians: all this was within the American Puritan grain. Such an attitude underlies the
establishment of speech departments, the study of rhetoric, the competitive mount-
ing of debate teams and the performance of literature orally. Of course, here is where
drama slipped in through the back door. Although seated on stools, dressed in con-
cert clothes rather than costumes, and often reading from scripts set on music stands
- oral interpreters still identified with the characters whose words they were reading.
What is »Performance Studies« Anyway? 7

Literature«. However, the view of literature quickly broadened to include cultural per-
formances, personal narratives, everyday-life performances, non-fiction, ritual, etc. This
view suggests a very wide notion of the concept »text«. [...] By this point in time, ethno-
graphic work, as well as folklore and anthropology, began to be of some interest. [...]
These threads connect logically and historically through relatively recent literary/criti-
cal foci to the oral tradition which has always been part of these approaches to per-
formance. [...] So, Performance Studies must be conceived in rather broad strokes.

Stucky succinctly shows how Performance Studies NWU - especially the research-
es of Dwight Conquergood - connect to Turner, Goffman, Geertz and Milton
Singer, thinkers certainly important to my work, if not to all my NYU colleagues.
Stucky's allusion to the »performance of literature« underscores 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.
Conquergood, currently chair of NWU's Performance Studies Department and
a major theorist of Performance Studies, raised in 1991 what he called »new ques-
tions that can be clustered around five intersecting planes of analysis«:

1. Performance and Cultural Process. What are the conceptual consequences of think-
ing 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 field-
work as performance differ from thinking about fieldwork as the collection of data? [... ]
3. Performance and Hermeneutics. What kinds of knowledge are privileged or dis-
placed 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?6

The »planes of analysis« Conquergood proposes are closely aligned to what goes
on at NYU. What NYU has emphasized more than NWU is dance, movement
analysis, popular entertainments and gender in its multifaceted possibilities.
But there is more to Performance Studies than academic departments.

Dwight Conquergood, »Rethinking Ethnography: Towards a Critical Cultural Politics«,

Communications Monographs, vol. 58 (June 1991), pp. 179-94 (p. 190).
8 Richard Schechner

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 lec-
ture Clifford Geertz was giving at Columbia University. After the lecture, we went
to one of those grungy beer halls near Columbia, where our conversation ranged
all over the place, from Ndembu ritual to Grotowski. Turner invited me to par-
ticipate in the Burg Wartenstein Symposium No. 76 on »Cultural Frames and
Reflections, Ritual, Drama, and Spectacle«, to be held in a castle in Austria in
September 1977. There were to be no public sessions - just ten days of intense,
passionate interaction among anthropologists, artists, historians and humanists,
including many I would later invite to NYU. For the Symposium I showed a film
of Dionysus in 697 and discussed ritual in relation to experimental performance.
My essay would become »Restoration of Behaviour«.8
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
Tadashi Suzuki. The culminating gathering was in New York from 23 August to 1
September 1982. Taken as a whole, the World Conference compared traditional,
modern and postmodern performances in Native America, Asia and Africa. By
Means of Performance (1990) was edited from the papers, lectures and demon-
strations of the Conferences.9 For a 1980 planning committee meeting, Turner
articulated our goal:

The movie, made by Brian de Palma, Robert Fiore, and Bruce Rubin, was shot during
two of the last showings of Dionysus in the summer of 1969.
After being privately distributed at the 1977 Burg Wartenstein Conference, I revised
»Restoration« for Studies in Visual Communication, vol. 7, no. 3 (1981), pp. 2-45. A
shortened version appeared in A Crack in the Mirror: Reflexive Perspectives in
Anthropology, ed. Jay Ruby (Philadelphia/PA, 1982). The definitive version appeared
in my Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia/PA, 1985). Ironically,
because it had been published, »Restoration« was never was where it actually
belonged, as part of the proceedings of the Burg Wartenstein conference, Rite,
Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals Toward a Theory of Cultural Performances,
ed. John MacAloon (Philadelphia/PA, 1984).
The World Conference was a big and expensive production, something not really
possible anymore as we have entered a prolonged period of downsizing. The confer-
ence involved lots of collaboration, both fiscally and organizationally. Those sponsor-
ing and/or funding the conference included the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Asian
Cultural Council, the Asia Society, the International Theatre Institute, the American
Theatre Association (now reconstituted as the American Theatre in Higher
Education), the Tisch School of the Arts and the National Endowment for the
Humanities.
What is »Performance Studies« Anyway? 9

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 per-
formance 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 behaviour. 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.10

Turner's vision was not only of the conference but a Utopian project 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 died earlier, Myerhoff shortly
after. All died young.
In 1989 and 1990,1 was the principal planner of a conference on Intercultural
Performance sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation and convened in Bellagio,
Italy from 17 to 22 February 1991. This conference was not so large as the World
Conference, but its participants were more tightly associated with Performance
Studies. Among the twenty-one attendees were Kirshenblatt-Gimblett,
Amankulor, Phelan, Taussig and myself 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, Masao Yamaguchi, Gayatri Spivak and
Drew Hayden Taylor. Anna Deveare Smith, Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Sanjukta
Panigrahi each performed as well as participated in the discussions. Smith per-
formed 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,
which was raging at that time). 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 pre-
sentations and performances. Topics included »Postcolonial 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 star participants, this conference was not as
successful as the two previous ones. The very problems of interculturalism - dis-
junctures of meaning and intention, the difficulty of really communicating across
All the papers relating to the Conference, in its planning phases and in its realization
- including full audio tapes of all sessions - are available at the Wenner-Gren
Foundation for Anthropological Research.
10 Richard Schechner

ideological and methodological borders, barriers thrown up by charges of sex-

ism, both conscious and unintended, made for rough going over the six days.
These three conferences - stretching over fifteen 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 peo-
ple in touch with each other and working together. The conferences were impor-
tant both as field-defining events and as a means of dissemination.

So what is Performance Studies anyway?

Having come this far, it is time to give my own answer to the $64 million ques-
tion. Performance Studies is »inter« - in between. It is intergeneric, interdiscipli-
nary, intercultural - and therefore inherently unstable. Performance Studies
resists or rejects definition. Performance Studies assumes that we are living in a
postcolonial 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 inter-
faces. In terms of Performance Studies, this means the interactions between the-
atre 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
will disappear. Accepting »inter« means opposing the establishment of any single
system of knowledge, values or subject matter. Performance Studies is unfin-
ished, open, multivocal and self-contradictory. Therefore, 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 again, the
endlessly creative double negative at the core of restoration of behaviour.
Closer to the ground is the question of the relation of performativity to per-
formance 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 behaviour 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 to 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 particular-
ities of experience, structure, history and process.
Any event, action, item or behaviour may be examined »as« performance.
Approaching phenomena as performance has certain advantages. One can con-
sider 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, per-
What is »Performance Studies« Anyway? 11

formances were of theatre, music and dance - the »aesthetic genres« of the per-
forming arts. Recently, since the 1960s at least, aesthetic performances have
developed into directions which cannot be defined precisely as theatre or dance
or music or visual arts. Usually called either »performance art«, »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 behaviour« - how people
play gender, heighten their constructed identity, performing slightly or radically
different selves in different situations. This is the performative, which Austin
introduced and Butler and queer theorists discuss.
The performative engages performance in places and situations not tradition-
ally 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 behaviour 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 over-
laps, tensions and loose spots, separating and connecting these two categories.