More on Schechner and Performance Studies

There is plenty to dislike in Schechner's introduction to

Performance Studies (second edition, 2006): the way he presents himself as 'a Jewish Hindu Buddhist atheist', carefully avoiding mention of his whiteness, his American citizenship and his maleness; his refusal of citations and, by implication, the authority of academic writing; his suggestion that 'performance studies is so broad-ranging' that it doesn't really need a limiting definition. The switch into third person when he offers his biography, and the division of performance into the dualism of 'Western' and 'non-western' when the latter could be subdivided into African, Asian, et cetera et cetera... 

However, his definition of performance is adorable.

Performances are actions... performance studies scholars... their dedicated focus is on the "repertory", namely, what people do in their activity of doing it. Second, artistic practice is a big part of the performance studies project... the challenge is is to become as aware as possible of one's own stances in relation to the positions of others.

(page 1- 2)

It's here that performance studies shows its debt to dramaturgy, and the dramaturgy designed by Diderot and the Enlightenment. Both labels include the study of performance as phenomenology, as events and not documents or literary texts. 

Sites and Spectacles

Richard Schechner's 1992 speech in Atlanta is one of those melodramatic moments in theatre history, when a professor delivered a speech intended to change the path of theatre studies. It's the birth of 'performance theory', a rhetorical plea for the expansion of the subject, an advertisement for Schechner's department disguised as a polemic against conservatism and Eurocentrism. 

Despite its optimism - theatre studies could be the way to address the problems of multi-culturalism - and ahead-of-its-time interest in intersectionality, the Atlanta Speech extends the colonial reach of the academy into minority, non-Western and popular performances. The assumption that both 'healing' and 'ritual' are performance forms is unsupported and suspect: the enthusiasm for the plethora of popular performances lumps religion and wrestling into a shared category, and the weakness of existing (USA) drama programmes justifies Schechner's call for radical rather than qualitative change. 

Schechner does makes a series of trenchant points: he observes that multiculturalism in the arts disguises the focus of political power in a monocultural elite; he recognises the exclusion of rich philosophies from outside the Western tradition; he worries about the emphasis given to vocational training within the academy, and the easy elision of art and science training. 

Yet these points only disguise the colonial land-grab Schechter achieves. Not only does his NYU faculty set itself up as the moral and intellectual arbiter of theatre studies, it incorporates all manner of 'performances' into some vague championing of 'intercultural' inspiration. He invites experts from their fields to come teach and learn with him, but suggests parity between 'hot gospel' and kabuki warrior codes without having any apparent knowledge in depth. 

The intention and the consequences were revolutionary.  

What does ‘Glasgow’ mean?

The question poses two immediate and difficult questions: what is meant by Glasgow, and performance, in this context. Discussions about performance - its boundaries and the application of its critical theories - have been complicated since Richard Schechner applied the logic of  Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) to theatre studies, the ideal of a ‘broad and inclusive’ study has encouraged the reading of all walks of life as forms of performance. And while Glasgow can be found on maps and in encyclopedia, its geographical limits are hardly fixed - in 1996, the Conservative government dismantled the existing Strathclyde Region and, through restructuring, reduced the size of the city and the population by 50 000. The 2001 census revealed that the population of Glasgow had nearly halved since 1938, and areas served by the city’s public transport system, such as Rutherglen, are no longer part of Glasgow but have become self-governing.

There is also the Glasgow of the imagination: the violent streets conjured in the novel No Mean City, or Tom McGrath’s play The Hard Man. It has provided the landscape for films: from the apocalyptic World War Z, the social realism of Ken Loach’s Sweet Sixteen or Carla’s Song, to the horrific science fiction of Under The Skin. This Glasgow is associated with brutality and exercises a fierce hold on the public perception of the city: the actor Brian Cox recently noting that ‘the humour in Glasgow is darker, because it's much more gloomy, there's a perpetual misery there.’

This is more than an abstract problem of definition, since similar problems emerge in the discussion of national theatre identities and history. Nadine Holdsworth, in Theatre and Nation (2010) observes that a tension exists between ‘ethnic nationalism’ - based on bloodlines - and ‘civic nationalism’ - a matter of shared laws and customs. While the latter form allows anybody within the nation’s boundaries, theoretically, to be included as a citizen, ethnic nationalism can insist on a far purer population. Applied at the level of the city, this can resolve into the problematic division between ‘true Glaswegians’ (born in the city) and incomers (arriving for economic or educational reasons). In Scotland, the relationship between the two sets is partially explored in the provocative essay Settlers and Colonists by Alasdair Gray (Unstated: Writers on Scottish Independence 2012), which condemned English professionals who migrated north of the border for short term career gains.

Rather than attempting to fit the existing ideals about Glasgow into these existing descriptions, a working definition of Glasgow - tentative and open to expansion or contraction - can be developed, based around the network of important sites for performance. This will be a geographical framework that relates artists to their places of work or education.

However, this still leaves the problem of performance.