Performance Studies
Performance studies is an interdisciplinary field that examines performance in the broadest sense—theatre, ritual, play, sport, and everyday social behavior—as a way of understanding human action and culture.
Definition
The interdisciplinary study of performance in all its forms, from theatre and ritual to play, sport, and the performance of everyday life.
Scope
This area surveys the field that emerged from the encounter of theatre studies with anthropology and sociology, expanding the object of study from staged drama to ritual, ceremony, play, sport, popular entertainment, and the performance of everyday life and identity. It covers foundational concepts such as restored behavior, the ritual–theatre continuum, performativity, and embodiment, and treats performance as both an art and an analytical lens on social and cultural processes.
Sub-topics
Core questions
- What counts as performance, and where are its limits?
- How do ritual, theatre, and everyday behavior relate as performance?
- How does performance construct identity and social reality?
- What does treating culture as performance reveal about human action?
Key theories
- Restored behavior and the broad spectrum
- Richard Schechner's framing of performance as restored or twice-behaved behavior spanning a continuum from ritual and play to theatre and everyday life, the founding paradigm of performance studies.
- From ritual to theatre
- Victor Turner's anthropological theory of social drama and liminality, linking ritual process to theatrical performance and grounding the field's interdisciplinary scope.
History
Performance studies took shape in the 1970s and 1980s, especially through the collaboration of theatre director and scholar Richard Schechner with anthropologist Victor Turner, drawing also on Erving Goffman's dramaturgical sociology and J. L. Austin's performative utterances; it institutionalized as a discipline distinct from but related to theatre studies, broadening inquiry from the stage to the full spectrum of cultural performance.
Debates
- Breadth versus coherence of the field
- Scholars debate whether expanding performance to encompass nearly all human behavior gives the field analytical power or dilutes it into an unbounded category lacking a specific object.
Key figures
- Richard Schechner
- Victor Turner
- Erving Goffman
- Marvin Carlson
Related topics
Seminal works
- schechner2013
- turner1982
- carlson2018
Frequently asked questions
- How does performance studies differ from theatre studies?
- Theatre studies centers on staged drama, while performance studies treats theatre as one case within a much wider field that also includes ritual, play, sport, and the performance of everyday life and identity.
- What is 'restored behavior'?
- Restored behavior is Richard Schechner's term for the rehearsed, repeatable, 'twice-behaved' actions that make up performances of all kinds, from rituals to plays to social roles.