Performance Studies

1.Theories and Thoughts

What is performance? What is Performance Studies anyway? Theoretically, performance involves the following four aspects: being, doing, showing doing and explaining showing doing.

The first aspect is the most complicated from a philosophical point of view. Being is being-itself. Being is constantly developing and changing; therefore, it is doing. In effect, being is on the move not static. The same can also be said of human beings, psychologically, physically, individually and socially speaking.

Being and doing alone cannot constitute performance. Performance in Chinese “biaoyan” is in its narrow sense, referring to performance in films and TV dramas. However, performance in Performance Studies refers to the performance in daily life. Some special species of animals, especially human beings (but not only human beings) consciously show their own doings, which is performance. For example, when I just walk on the street, I am not performing; but when I show my walking to you, I am performing, performing walking. The theories and process of explaining performance constitute Performance Studies.

What Performance Studies will provide is the understanding of performance of people from all walks of life such as social politics, religions, and rituals. It offers a critical theory and fosters a critical ability. The critical theory encourages people to question the established knowledge and authorities. To improve the critical ability, an open society is necessary in inspiring the free pursuit of and the discussion on truth.

2.The Past and the Present of Performance Studies 

Performance Studies officially gained its name from the Department of Performance Studies set up in New York University in 1979. It was a combination of the theatrical research initiated by Professor Schechner and anthropology. Anthropology, born in Europe, from the very beginning put its emphasis on the studies of pre-modern people, often in the research of the ritual performance in non-western primitive tribes.

Theatrical scholars like Schechner were once into the avant-garde theatre. The anti-Broadway, non-commercial and non-mainstream plays broke through the frame of the traditional theatre. When theatre not only broke through “the fourth wall” between the stage and the audience, but also out of the walls of the theatre houses onto the streets, they found that the performances in pre-modern primitive tribes or agricultural society had always been on without walls, let alone “the fourth wall”. That is to say, their post-modern avant-garde theatre coincided with the pre-modern ritual theatre in this regard. In the 1970s, after the acquaintance with the anthropologist Victor Turner, who studies the relationship between rituals and theatre and the “social theatre”, Schechner initiated the interdisciplinary development and set up the Department of Performance Studies, emphasizing the studies of rituals in primitive tribes and post-modern avant-garde theatre, the two extreme phenomena of performance in time.

Performance Studies involves different schools, among which the school led by Schechner in New York University is the most influential. Another school is based in Northwestern University in Chicago. The Department of Performance Studies there was set up in 1984. The courses there focus on the performance practices but they cover a larger range including activities like rituals, carnival performance, and parades. In 2001, University of California, Berkeley renamed its Department of Theatre into Department of Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies. The discipline of the graduates is called Performance Studies. In the recent years, more and more western universities officially founded this discipline, including the Performance Studies Centre in the University of Wales and the Department of Performance Studies in the University of Sydney, Australia, etc. In addition, thousands of western universities set up the related courses, not necessarily in the specialized department. Many scholars from humanistic and social disciplines who take interest in this field opened related courses, in the Department of Communication, Literature, Politics, Psychology, Sociology and Anthropology, etc. Scholars and practitioners are in the research and exploration of the concrete curriculums and use of Performance Studies from various points of view.

3. TDR China

The Drama Review, TDR has a history of over fifty years, edited by Professor Schechner for most of the time. In the recent thirty years it has become the flagship publication of Performance Studies in the world. The editorial office of TDR based in New York has granted to the Centre the copyright on all the articles published in TDR. The best papers selected from TDR and a certain number of papers by Chinese scholars will be published in TDR China. Up to 2009, the center has published two issues. 

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