RC Series Bundle: Performance Theory (Routledge Classics)

428 Pages·2003·4.43 MB·english

by  Richard Schechner

Performance Theory
“Reading Performance Theory by Richard Schechner again,
three decades after its first edition, is like meeting an old
friend and finding out how much of him/her has been with you
all along this way.”
Augusto Boal
“It is an indispensable text in all aspects of the new discipline
of Performance Studies. It is in many ways an eye-opener par-
ticularly in its linkage of theater to other performance
genres.”
Ngu˜g˜ı wa Thiong’o, University of California
“Richard Schechner has defined the parameters of con-
temporary performance with an originality and insight that
make him indispensable to contemporary theatrical thought.
For many years, both scholars and artists have been inspired
by his unique and powerful perspective.”
Richard Foreman
“Schechner has a place in every theater history textbook for
his ground-breaking work in environmental theater in the
1960s and 1970s and for his vision in helping to found the
discipline of performance studies.”
Rebecca Schneider
“Richard Schechner is the master teacher and the master
conversant on the transformative power of performance to
both performer and spectator, at its deepest level. Perform-
ance Theory is the essential book which brilliantly illuminates
the world as a performance space on stage and off.”
Anna Deveare Smith
A highlands Papua New Guinea man takes a break from dancing
(see chapter 4, “From ritual to theater and back: the efficacy–
entertainment braid”).
Richard
Schechner
Performance Theory
Revised and expanded edition, with a
new preface by the author
London and New York
Essays on Performance Theory published 1977 by
Ralph Pine, for Drama School Specialists
Second edition first published 1988
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
First published in the United Kingdom 1988
by Routledge
First published in Routledge Classics 2003
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.
© 1988, 2003 Richard Schechner
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0-203-42663-0 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-44047-1 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0–415–31455–0(Print Edition)
To my brothers
William Arthur David
To my sisters
Danice Judi Norma

CONTENTS
Preface to the Routledge Classics Edition ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Author’s Note xv
Introduction: The Fan and the Web xvii
1 Approaches 1
2 Actuals 26
3 Drama, script, theater, and performance 66
4 From ritual to theater and back: the efficacy–
entertainment braid 112
5 Toward a poetics of performance 170
6 Selective inattention 211
7 Ethology and theater 235
8 Magnitudes of performance 290
9 Rasaesthetics 333
References 368
Index 383

PREFACE TO THE ROUTLEDGE CLASSICS EDITION
With two exceptions, I wrote the essays in this book between 1966 and
1976. It was a very busy decade. My interests had dramatically shifted
from theater to performance and from aesthetics to the social sciences.
Today I write “performance,” but at the time I wasn’t sure what per-
formance was. I knew it was more than what was appearing on the
stages of New York, London, or Paris. From the advent of Happenings
in the early 1960s to the vibrant enactment on American streets of
what Victor Turner termed “social drama” – the freedom movement
led by thousands of ordinary people but iconicized in the eloquent
words and enacted testimony of Martin Luther King, Jr. – I discovered
that performance can take place anywhere, under a wide variety of
circumstances, and in the service of an incredibly diverse panoply
of objectives.
My experiences as a civil-rights and anti-Vietnam War activist, and a
sometime participant-creator of Happenings, pointed me toward a
whole new range of research. I “found” social and cultural anthropol-
ogy extremely useful because in ethnographies and theoretical treatises
anthropologists treated the actual lived behavior of people performat-
ively. Taking a cue from Erving Goffman’s 1959 breakthrough book,
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, I sensed that performances in the broad
sense of that word were coexistent with the human condition. Goffman