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WHAT IS PERFORMANCE?

Marvin Carlson

The term “performance” has become extremely popular in recent years in a wide range
of activities in the arts, in literature, and in the social sciences. As its popularity and usage
have grown, so has a complex body of writing about performance, attempting to analyze and
understand just what sort of human activity it is. For the person with an interest in studying
performance, this body of analysis and commentary may at first seem more of an obstacle
than an aid. So much has been written by experts from such a wide range of disciplines,
and such a complex web of specialized critical vocabulary has been developed in the course
of this analysis, that a newcomer seeking a way into the discussion may feel confused and
overwhelmed.
In their very useful 1990 survey article “Research in interpretation and performance
studies: trends, issues, priorities,” Mary Strine, Beverly Long, and Mary Hopkins begin
with the extremely useful observation that performance is “an essentially contested
concept.” This phrase is taken from W. B. Gallie’s Philosophj and the Historical Understanding
(1964), in which Gallic suggested that certain concepts, such as art and democracy,
had disagreement about their essence built into the concepts themselves. In Gallie’s terms:
“Recognition of a given concept as essentially contested implies recognition of rival uses
of it (such as oneself repudiates) as not only logically possible and humanly Tikelv,’ but as
of permanent potential critical value to one’s own use or interpretation of the concept in
question.” Strine, Long, and Hopkins argue that performance has become just such a
concept, developed in an atmosphere of “sophisticated disagreement” by participants who
“do not expect to defeat or silence opposing positions, but rather through continuing
dialogue to attain a sharper articulation of all positions and therefore a fuller understanding
of the conceptual richness of performance.”' In his study of the “post-structured stage,”
Erik MacDonald suggests that “performance art has opened hitherto unnoticed spaces”
within theatre’s representational networks. It “problematizes its own categorization,” and
thus inevitably inserts theoretical speculation into the theatrical dynamic.*
The present study, recognizing this essential contestedness of performance, will seek to
provide an introduction to the continuing dialogue through which it has recently been
articulated, providing a variety of mappings of the concept, some overlapping, others quite
divergent. Recent manifestations of performance, in both theory and practice, are so many
and so varied that a complete survey of them is hardly possible, but this (study] attempts to

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offer enough of an overview and historical background to single out the major approaches
and sample significant manifestations in this complex field, to address the issues raised by
the contested concepts of performance and what sorts of theatrical and theoretical strategies
have been developed to deal with these issues.
My own backgroimd is in theatre studies, and my emphasis will be on how ideas and
theories about performance have broadened and enriched those areas of human activity
that lie closest to what has traditionally been thought of as theatrical, even though I
will not be devoting a great deal of attention to traditional theatre as such, but rather to
that variety of activities currently being presented for audiences under the general title of
“performance” or “performance art.” Nevertheless, in these opening remarks it might be
useful to step back at least briefly from this emphasis and consider the more general use of
the term “performance” in our cultme, in order to gain some ideas of the general semantic
overtones it may bear as it circulates through an enormous variety of specialized usages.
I should perhaps also note that although I will include examples of performance art from
other nations, my emphasis will remain on the United States, partly, of course, because that
is the center of my own experience with this activity, but, more relevantly, because, despite
its international diffusion, performance art is both historically and theoretically a primarily
American phenomenon, and a proper understanding of it must, I believe, be centered on
how it has developed both practically and conceptually in the United States.
“Performing” and “performance” are terms so often encormtered in such varied contexts
that little if any common semantic ground seems to exist among them. Both the New York
Times and the Village Voice now include a special category of “performance” — separate from
theatre, dance, or films — including events that are also often called “performance art” or
even “performance theatre.” For many, this latter term seems tautological, since in simpler
days all theatre was considered to be involved with performance, theatre being in
fact one of the so-called “performing arts.” This usage is still much with us, as indeed is the
practice of calling any specific theatre event (or for that matter specific dance or musical
event) a “performance.” If we mentally step back a moment from this conunon practice
and ask what makes performing arts performative, I imagine the answer would somehow
suggest that these arts require the physical presences of trained or skilled human beings
whose demonstration of their skills is the performance.
I recently came across a striking illustration of how important the idea of public display
of technical skill is to this traditional concept of “performance.” At a nmnber of locations
in the United States and abroad, people in period costume act out improvised or scripted
events at historical sites for tourists, visiting schoolchildren, or other interested spectators —
a kind of activity often called “living history.” One site of such activity is Fort Ross in
Northern California, where a husband and wife, dressed in costumes of the 1830s, greet
visitors in the roles of the last Russian commander of the fort and his wife. The wife,
Diane Spencer Pritchard, in her role as “Elena Rotcheva,” decided at one time to play
period music on the piano to give visitors an impression of contemporary cultural life. But
later she abandoned this, feeling, in her words, that it “removed the role from living-history
and placed it in the category of performance.” Despite taking on a fictive personahty,
dressing in period clothes, and “living” in the 1830s, Ms. Pritchard did not consider herself

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“performing” until she displayed the particular artistic skills needed to give a music recital.
Normally human agency is necessary for a “performance” of this sort (even in the theatre
we do not speak of how well the scenery or the costumes performed), but the public
demonstration of particular skills can be offered by nonhuman performers, so that, for
example, we commonly speak of “performing” dogs, elephants, horses or bears.
Despite the currency of this usage, most of her audience probably considers Ms.
Pritchard to be performing as soon as she greets them in the costume and character of
a long-dead Russian pioneer. Pretending to be someone other than oneself is a common
example of a particular kind of human behavior that Richard Schechner labels “restored
behavior,” a title under which he groups actions consciously separated from the person
doing them - theatre and other role playing, trances, shamanism, rituals. Scheduler’s
useful concept of “restored behavior” points to a quality of performance not involved with
the display of skills, but rather with a certain distance between “selP and behador,
analogous to that between an actor and the role the actor plays on stage. Even if an action
on stage is identical to one in real life, on stage it is considered “performed” and off
stage merely “done.” Hamlet, in his well-known response to the Queen concerning his
reactions to his father’s death, distinguishes between those inner feelings that resist per¬
formance and the actions that a man might play” with a consdousness of their signifying
potential.
Hamlet’s response also indicates how a consciousness of “performance” can move from
the stage, from ritual, or from other special and clearly defined cultural situations into
everyday life. Everyone at some time or another is consdous of “pladng a role” sodallv, cmd
recent sociological theorists [. . .] have paid a good deal of attention to this sort of sodal
performance.
The recognition that our lives are structured according to repeated and socially sanc¬
tioned modes of behavior raises the possibility that all human actidty could potentiallv be
considered as “performance,” or at least all activity carried out with a consciousness of
itself. The difference between doing and performing, according to this wav of thinking,
would seem to be not in the frame of theatre versus real life but in an attitude — we mav do
actions unthinkingly, but when we think about them, this introduces a consciousness that
gives them the quality of performance. This phenomenon has been perhaps most searchinglv
analyzed in the various writings of Herbert Blau, to which we also will return later.
So we have, two rather different concepts of performance, one involving the display of
skills, the other also involving display, but less of particular skills than of a recognized and
culturally coded pattern of behavior. A third cluster of usages takes us in rather a different
direction. When we speak of someone’s sexual performance or linguistic performance or
when we ask how well a child is performing in school, the emphasis is not so much on
display of skill (although that may be involved) or on the carrving out of a particular pattern
of behavior, but rather on the general success of the activity in light of some standard of
achievement that may not itself be precisely articulated. Perhaps even more significantly, the
task of judging the success of the performance (or even judging whether it is a performance)
is in these cases not the responsibility of the performer but of the observer. Ultimately,
Hamlet himself is the best judge of whether he is “performing” his melancholy actions or

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truly living them, but linguistic, scholastic, even sexual performance is really framed and
judged by its observers. This is why performance in this sense (as opposed to performance
in the normal theatrical sense) can be and is applied frequently to non-human activity — TV
ads speak interminably of the performance of various brands of automobiles, and scientists
of the performance of chemicals or metals under certain conditions. I observed an amusing
conflation of the theatrical and mechanical uses of this term in an advertisement by the
MTA (Metropolitan Transportation Authority) on the New York subway in October 1994,
when the subway was celebrating ninety years of service. This was billed as “New York
City’s longest running performance.”
If we consider performance as an essentially contested concept, this will help us to
understand the futility of seeking some overarching semantic field to cover such seemingly
disparate usages as the performance of an actor, of a schoolchild, of an automobile. Never¬
theless, I would like to credit one highly suggestive attempt at such an articulation. This
occurs in the entry on performance by the ethnolinguist Richard Bauman in the International
Encjclopedia of Communications. According to Bauman, all performance involves a conscious¬
ness of doubleness, through which the actual execution of an action is placed in mental
comparison with a potential, an ideal, or a remembered original model of that action.
Normally this comparison is made by an observer of the action - the theatre public, the
school’s teacher, the scientist — but the double consciousness, not the external observation,
is what is most central. An athlete, for example, may be aware of his own performance,
placing it against a mental standard. Performance is always performance^r someone, some
audience that recognizes and validates it as performance even when, as is occasionally the
case, that audience is the self.
When we consider the various kinds of activity that are referred to on the modern
cultural scene as “performance” or performance art,” these are much better understood
in relation to this over-arching semantic field than to the more traditional orientation
suggested by the piano-playing Ms. Pritchard, who felt that so long as she was not displaying
a virtuosic skill she could not be “performing.” Some modern “performance” is centrally
concerned with such skills (as in the acts of some of the clowns and jugglers included among
the so-called “new vaudevillians”), but much more central to this phenomenon is the
sense of an action carried out for someone, an action involved in the peculiar doubling that
comes with consciousness and vdth the elusive “other” that performance is not but which it
constantly struggles in vain to embody.
Although traditional theatre has regarded this “other” as a character in a dramatic action,
embodied (through performance) by an actor, modern performance art has, in general, not
been centrally concerned with this dynamic. Its practitioners, almost by definition, do
not base their work upon characters previously created by other artists, but upon their
owm bodies, their own autobiographies, their own specific experiences in a culture or in the
world, made performative by their consciousness of them and the process of displaying
them for audiences. Since the emphasis is upon the performance, and on how the body or
self is articulated through performance, the individual body remains at the center of such
presentations. Typical performance art is solo art, and the typical performance artist uses
little of the elaborate scenic surroundings of the traditional stage, but at most a few props.

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a bit of furniture, and whatever costume (sometimes even nudity) is most smtable to the
performance situation.
It is not surprising that such performance has become a highly visible — one might almost
say emblematic — art form in the contemporary world, a world that is highly self-conscious,
reflexive, obsessed with simulations and theatricalizations in every aspect of its social aware¬
ness. With performance as a kind of critical wedge, the metaphor of theatricality has moved
out of the arts into almost every aspect of modern attempts to understand our condition
and activities, into almost every branch of the human sciences — sociology, anthropology,
ethnography, psychology, linguistics. And as performativity and theatricahty have been
developed in these fields, both as metaphors and as analytic tools, theorists and practitioners
of performance art have in turn become aware of these developments and found in them
new sources of stimulation, inspiration, and insight for their own creative work and the
theoretical understanding of it.
Performance art, a complex and constantly shifting field in its own right, becomes much
more so when one tries to take into account, as any thoughtful consideration of it must,
the dense web of interconnections that exists between it and ideas of performance
developed in other fields and between it and the many intellectual, cultural, and social
concerns that are raised by almost any contemporary performance project. Among them are
what it means to be postmodern, the quest for a contemporary subjectivity and identity,
the relation of art to structures of power, the varying challenges of gender, race, and
ethnicity, to name only some of the most visible of these.

NOTES

1 W.B. Gallic, Philosophy and the Historical Understanding, New York: Schocken Books, 1964, 187-8.
2 Mary S. Strine, Beverly Whitaker Long, and Mary Frances Hopkins, “Research in interpretation
and performance studies: trends, issues, priorities,” in Gerald Phillips and Julia Wood (eds.).
Speech Communications: Essays to Commemorate the Seventy-Fifth Anniversary oj the Speech Communication
Association, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990, 183.
3 Erik MacDonald, Theater at the Margins: Text and the Post-Structured Stage, .Ann .Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1993, 175.
4 Diane Spencer Pritchard, “Fort Ross: from Russia with love,” in Jan .Anderson (ed.), A Living
History Reader, vol. 1, Nashville, Tenn.: American Association for State and Local History,
1991,53.
5 Like most uses of “performance,” this one has been challenged, particularly by the noted semioti-
cian of the circus Paul Bouissac. Bouissac argues that what seents to be performance is actually an
invariable natural re.sponse to a stimulus provided by a trainer who “frames” it as performance. In
Bouissac’s words, the animal does not “perform,” but “negotiates social situations by reltyng on the
repertory of ritualized behavior that characterizes its specie.s” (“Behavior in context: in what sense is
a circus animal performing?,” in Fhomas Sebeok and Robert Rosenthal (eds.). The Clever Hans
Phenomenon: Communication with Horses, Whales, Apes, and People, New York: New York .Academy of
Sciences, 1981, 24). This hardly settles the matter. As we .shall see, many theorists of human
performance could generally accept Bouissac’s alternate statement, and moreover anyone who has
trained horses or dogs knows that, even accounting for an anthropomorphic bias, these animals are
not simply negotiating social situations, but are knowingly repeating certain actions for physical or

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emotional rewards, a process that, to me at least, seems to have important features in common with
human performance.
6 Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
198S, 35^116.
7 Richard Bauman in Erik Barnouw (ed.). International Encyclopedia of Communications, New York:
Oxford University Press, 1989.

READER CROSS-REFERENCES

Schechner — performance as an organizing principle for academic inquiry

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