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Nathan Stucky is an associate professor and the chair of the Department of Speech Communication at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He has edited Theatre Annual: A Journal of Performance Studies and has served as the chair of the Performance Studies Division of the National Communication Association and on the executive board of Performance Studies International. Cynthia Wimmer has taught courses in playwriting and performance theory at the University of Maryland at College Park. She is a founding member of the Performance Studies Focus Group of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and is the former chair of the American Drama Panel of NEMLA.

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Teaching Performance Studies

Southern Illinois University Press

Contents

Foreword Fundamentals of Performance Studies RICHARD SCHECHNER.............................................................................................................ixAcknowledgments..............................................................................................................................................................xiiiIntroduction The Power of Transformation in Performance Studies Pedagogy NATHAN STUCKY AND CYNTHIA WIMMER..................................................................1Part One. Positioning Performance Studies1 Theatre Studies/Cultural Studies/Performance Studies The Three Unities JOSEPH ROACH....................................................................................332 Critical Performative Pedagogy Fleshing Out the Politics of Liberatory Education ELYSE LAMM PINEAU......................................................................413 Speaking of God Performance Pedagogy in the Theological School RICHARD F. WARD..........................................................................................554 The Queer Performance That Will Have Been Student-Teachers in the Archive CRAIG GINGRICH-PHILBROOK......................................................................695 Performance Theory in an Anthropology Program WILLIAM O. BEEMAN..........................................................................................................856 The Poetics and Politics of Practice Experience, Embodiment, and the Engagement of Scholarship MICHELLE KISLIUK.........................................................99Part Two. Embodiment and Epistemology7 Performance Studies, Pedagogy, and Bodies in/as the Classroom JUDITH HAMERA..............................................................................................1218 Deep Embodiment The Epistemology of Natural Performance NATHAN STUCKY...................................................................................................1319 Action, Structure, Task, and Emotion Theories of Acting, Emotion, and Performer Training from a Performance Studies Perspective PHILLIP B. ZARRILLI.....................14510 Performing the Mystory A Textshop in Autoperformance MICHAEL S. BOWMAN & RUTH LAURION BOWMAN............................................................................16111 Teaching in the Borderlands JONI L. JONES................................................................................................................................17512 The Dialogics of Performance and Pedagogy ARTHUR J. SABATINI.............................................................................................................191Part Three. Negotiating Borders13 Improvising Disciplines Performance Studies and Theatre LINDA M. PARK-FULLER............................................................................................20514 "I Dwell in Possibility-" Teaching Consulting Applications for Performance Studies CYNTHIA WIMMER.......................................................................21915 Performative In(ter)ventions Designing Future Technologies Through Synergetic Performance ERIC DISHMAN..................................................................23516 Theatre of the Oppressed with Students of Privilege Practicing Boal in the American College Classroom BRUCE MCCONACHIE..................................................24717 Performance Studies, Neuroscience, and the Limits of Culture JOHN EMIGH..................................................................................................261Contributors.................................................................................................................................................................279Index........................................................................................................................................................................283

Chapter One

The Three Unities

No opera should neglect the customary explanation of the three most important points in every drama: the time, the place, and the action, indicating that the time is from 8 pm until midnight, the place such and such a theatre, the action the bankrupting of the impresario. -Benedetto Marcello, Il teatro alla moda

Students of the drama will remember "the three unities" as Aristotelian, neoclassical limitations on the scope of what plays can properly represent. Strictly interpreted, the unities restricted time to one day, place to one location, and action to one plot. Satirically reinterpreted by Benedetto Marcello in his send-up of the baroque opera, "the unities" represent something else: Rather than merely circumscribing the aesthetic limits on drama, they ironically emphasize the material considerations of performance. In teaching a performance studies course as a cultural studies elective in a department of English literature, I use an approach that, like Marcello's, centers on the materially embodied experience of time, place, and action. What follows is a description of that approach in the context of my understanding of the development of the field of performance studies itself.

Today, the dynamism and prolific variety of research on the "essentially contested term" performance is remarked by all those who attempt to summarize its trends (Carlson 10-75). The interdisciplinary, even antidisciplinary study of performance draws on theoretical and practical research in communication (including linguistics and ethnolinguistics), the social sciences (sociology, anthropology, and ethnography), and the performing arts (theatre, dance, and performance art). It has recently connected with powerful theoretical approaches to gender and sexuality, including psychoanalysis, as well as with concepts of "high performance" from business and technology. If performance is a fundamentally contested term, then it is also an extraordinarily opportunistic one, skating rings around other, more rigid concepts as they take their spills on the slippery surfaces of postmodern culture. I propose to explore the contrast between the apparent inelasticity of the three unities and the suppleness of performance theory. In that way, I hope to underscore the indebtedness of performance studies to theatre and drama as well as the boldness of its move beyond them.

The decisiveness of the transition from theatre and drama to performance studies may be measured by perusing the issues of the Tulane Drama Review, beginning in 1967, as it made the move to New York University and eventually became The Drama Review: The Journal of Performance Studies. Although criticism of Euro-American bourgeois theatre and drama continued-and still continues-to receive its due, over the years TDR has steadily devoted more of its pages to events in which the material facts of the performance outside of traditional theatrical venues predominate: "Happenings" in the 1960s and 1970s; paratheatrical interventions in political crises; ethnographic performances from an increasingly globalized network of practitioners. TDR editor Richard Schechner's collaboration with anthropologists, especially Victor Turner, exemplified the interdisciplinary claims of performance studies as the field that mediated between the arts and human sciences.

During the same years, there was another significant institutional development in the move beyond theatre and drama, not to discard them but to expand their conceptual frame of reference. The Department of Oral Interpretation at Northwestern University, the founding department of the School of Speech a century ago, changed its name to the Department of Performance Studies and broadened what had been its traditional emphasis on canonical literature; soon thereafter, the Department of Theatre at Northwestern widened the scope of its doctoral research by establishing an interdisciplinary program. Institutional innovations in performance studies elsewhere could certainly be cited-for instance, the development of performance studies programs in schools of communication at the University of Texas, Louisiana State University, and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill-but the special influence of the departments at New York University and Northwestern was evident in the 1980s and 1990s, especially in the organization of the first three national conferences in the field. Recently, the Centre for Performance Research at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, has staged a series of conferences and launched Performance Research: A Journal of Performing Arts. The majority of the contributing and corresponding editors of this new journal have affiliations as dramaturges, theatre critics, or performance practitioners. This follows a pattern similar to the work of Eugenio Barba, founding director of the Odin Teatret in 1964 and the International School of Theatre Anthropology in 1979. Barba puts the question that launched many a career in performance studies: "Where can performers find out how to construct the material bases of their art?" (Barba and Savarese 8).

The claim that I want to make after reviewing this history is a simple one. Academic fields are evaluated largely by the original research methods that they develop and the results that they achieve. Performance studies is the most prominent research tradition to have been developed by the academic study of theatre and drama in the United States, and arguably, this is true for its more recent emergence in the United Kingdom as well, though here the earlier formation of cultural studies was also instrumental. The rubric of theatre studies/ cultural studies/performance studies in my title is not meant so much to suggest contention (or harmony, for that matter) as it is to trace a genealogy of intellectual descent from drama to performance, with performance as the mediating term between the predilection in theatre studies for high-culture forms and the predominant focus in cultural studies on popular culture and media. The role of theatre practice in this process has been crucial. Many if not most of those who identify themselves with performance studies have begun by posing Barba's question to themselves and their colleagues. In other words, they have experienced firsthand the materiality of "the three unities" as directors, actors, dancers, choreographers, performance artists, or oral interpreters. They have scheduled the events. They have hired the halls. They have, now and then, bankrupted the impresarios.

With due attention to considerations of time, place, and action, practitioners have also enlarged the sphere of performance beyond the theatre to frame a great variety of other genres. Although no two performance theorists would come up with exactly the same list, the category of material events to which they attend includes carnivals, funerals, demonstrations, gender impersonations, medical procedures, guided tours, speech acts, and the practices of everyday life, such as eating dinner or walking in the city. Drawing particularly on the theoretical writings of Mikhail Bakhtin, Victor Turner, and Bertolt Brecht, the overall scheme of such a prolific material dramaturgy may be represented by the following diagram:

TIME PLACE ACTION past/future inside/outside habitual/critical Bakhtin Turner Brecht CHRONOTOPE LIMINALITY DEFAMILIARIZATION

In each case, the third term-chronotope (literally, "time-space"), liminality (from limen, or "threshold"), and defamiliarization ("making the familiar strange and the strange familiar")-dynamically unsettles the binary opposition above it. In each case, its meaning overlaps with those of the other two terms, an elision that may be demonstrated by the contingency of three questions that students of performance studies ought to be ready to pose of any event: "When is it?" "Where is it?" "What's happening?" In drama, the answers to those questions reside safely within the fiction of the play, and they may be answered by reading; in performance, they rudely spill out into the streets, and they must be answered by participation. This participation includes the critical observation of the three unities.

Time (Chronotope)

First, there is the supreme fiction, time. Bakhtin advanced the term chronotope to explain how time is created and manipulated in the novel. His theory also illuminates the construction of time in performance. This construction depends on the tensions between the clocked time one measures as having spent ("from 8 pm until midnight," as Marcello says) and the elastic experience of time one gains before, during, and after one is present in the place of performance. Here, the mind can entertain past and future events as convergent. For Bakhtin, the fiction of time is mutually constitutive with space-the question "What time is it?" inseparable from another, "Where are we?" Citing Einstein's theory of relativity in The Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin explains the relationship of interdependence of the two:

Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot, and history. This intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the chronotope. (84)

My way of explaining the chronotope derives from observing and participating in the performances most readily available to me over the past seven years in New Orleans, though my understanding of the techniques of fictionalizing time come from directing many plays.

In a performance-saturated city of memory-and New Orleans is certainly that, though not alone as that-chronotopes proliferate. There, the present can be seen as a point of struggle between conflicting versions of the past and opposed visions of the future.

At Tulane, I offered performance studies in the spring semester and used the multilayered festivities of Mardi Gras as a text for the course, supplemented by a preliminary reading of Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World and a postcarnival look at Peter Stallybrass and Allon White's The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Debating their experience of Bakhtin's "carnivalesque," with its "grotesque body" and "world upside down," against Stallybrass and White's more critical view of the liberating potential of such festivities, students could juxtapose their participation in the revels with a deepening sense of the history of Mardi Gras. That history, they discover, is performed in the present by contemporary parades, masquerades, and street parties that make claims on both the past and the future. The festive holiday compresses within its ambit "privileged moments" for retrospection and anticipation. The idea that carnival is "time out of time" is true to the extent that the everyday artifice of time is inverted: It is not that revelers are "watching the clock"; the clock is watching them.

A chronotopic performance puts flesh on memory, on dreams, on fears. In New Orleans, the predominantly white carnival "krewes," for instance, constantly recycle imagery from their own past Mardi Gras floats and costumes. They sometimes quote, wittingly or unwittingly, racist images from the days of Reconstruction and Southern Redemption, when some of the krewes served as secret societies devoted to ensuring the future of white supremacy. An ironic countermemory and an alternative future are performed by the "Krewe of Zulu," an African American parading organization that spoofs racist stereotypes by blacking up, wearing grass skirts, and passing out decorated coconuts. Each parade, following its historic route along the venerable avenues of the city, is a chronotope on wheels. Layers of the deeply troubled and conflicted past become visible as they are festively performed in the present. Like geologists standing before a freshly exposed cut in a hillside, performance studies students doing fieldwork at Mardi Gras can look back through the layers of time to earlier historical strata. The shocking meaning of the chronotope, however, is that ancient strata have been there all along, impinging upon the present, making the place the way it is now and threatening to keep it that way. The future towards which the parade wants to head looks like the past from which it emerged. Fossils come to life. The night parades of the predominantly white krewes are lit by "flambeaux," African American torchbearers, who shuffle along under the weight of tanks of fuel oil, carrying steel racks with jets that discharge open flame inches above their heads and shoulders. Balancing precariously, they bend over and scrape up coins thrown on the street as gratuities by spectators who are themselves begging for beads tossed to them by masked krewe members riding the floats and the horses. As restorations of antebellum behavior, assigning the revelers to roles as planter aristocracy, field slaves, and servile white trash, the night parades of Mardi Gras are hard to equal and impossible to excel. In such performances, as Bakhtin theorized for the novel, time "takes on flesh," while "space becomes charged and responsive to the movements" of history. In other words, the performance of time-manipulating fictions of past and future-turns space into a place.

Place (Liminality)

Victor Turner's Anthropology of Performance (1987) and its antecedents in Arnold van Gennep's The Rites of Passage (1908) enabled my students to develop a concept of place that is defined by liminality. The liminal zone is the place between the inside and the outside. It is almost always marked by performance. Van Gennep noted, for example, that the ancient triumphal arch served as a boundary marker, a literal and symbolic threshold, between the interior of the Roman imperium and the "barbaric" world outside. The victorious legions had to pass through the arch in order to purify themselves. Such a ritual journey has three parts-going outside, coming back inside, and passing across the margin "betwixt and between." Acknowledging his indebtedness to The Rites of Passage, Turner writes:

A limen, as the great French ethnologist and folklorist Arnold van Gennep has pointed out, is a "threshold," and he uses the term to denote the central of three phases in what he called "rites of passage." He looked at a wide variety of ritual forms, taken from most regions and many periods of history, and found in them a tripartite processual form. Rituals separated specified members of a group from everyday life, placed them in a limbo that was not any place they were in before and not yet any place they would be in, then returned them, changed in some way, to mundane life. (25)

A limbo is actually a very lively place to be in.

(Continues...)

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