CHAPTER 1

GETTING STARTED

Let us go then, you and I ...—T. S. ELIOT, "THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK"

Try to remember the first time you saw a theatrical performance, or yourearliest recollections of being read to aloud when you were a child, orthe first time you performed and people watched you and reacted. Thesememories and the performances they call forth are very special. We,the authors of this book (hereafter referred to as Bruce and Carol), findthem magical. Analyzing and understanding them and creating your ownperformances are the central subjects of this textbook.

As children, both of us were forever calling on our parents to "readus a story" or "show us a picture book." We were constantly asking ourfriends and siblings to play make-believe with us. Carol recalls her motherreciting the words of the poem "The Owl and the Pussy-cat," by EdwardLear, the mischievously witty nineteenth-century writer of limericks andnonsense verse. Mother and daughter would repeat Lear's words together:"The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea / In a beautiful pea-green boat; /They took some honey, and plenty of money / Wrapped up in a five-poundnote." She can still visualize the illustrated book of Lear's verseand the pictures of the Owl and the Pussy-cat, with the Pussy-cat, wooingthe Owl, twanging on his guitar and the pair "dancing by the light ofthe moon." The poem has its origins in children's rhymes and dates backmany, many centuries. It is no wonder it has lasted so long, taking courtshipand romance as its subject and situating the lovers in exotic lands.Scholars from the Darwinian school of literary criticism (also referred to asevolutionary psychological criticism) might point to the courtship themes,mating rituals, and the like present in the poem. From their perspective,we are human animals, descended from primates, and "hardwired" toreproduce (Gottschall), and this, in part, contributes to the longevity ofthe rhyme. She can also vividly recall her British father, in his marvelousvoice, rich, textured, with an Oxford accent, reading aloud Samuel TaylorColeridge's poem "Kubla Khan," about Xanadu, the idyllically beautifulcity, and its emperor, Kubla Khan. The vision in the poem of the "statelypleasure dome" and the Abyssinian "damsel with a dulcimer" is unforgettable,as is the excitement of listening to Coleridge's phantasmagoricalpoem evoking enchanted kingdoms, romantic visions, and passionateemotions. Later she learned that the poem was thought to have taken itsorigin in one of Coleridge's opium-induced dreams. Many years later, sheperformed this poem during a performance hour at the university whereshe taught. You will find that you will want to tap into your past and yourrecollections of poems and stories that moved you when you go about thebusiness of choosing selections for performances.

Bruce remembers that while other mothers were reading fairy talesto their children, his mother preferred to recite from memory longsections from Alfred Noyes's romantic ballad "The Highwayman." Shehad learned the poem as a student four decades earlier, when she wasgrowing up in a small mining town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.He can still hear his mother's voice setting the scene with the words "Themoon was a ghostly galleon," and painting the picture vocally of "riding... riding ... riding." Even in old age, when other parts of her memorystarted to fade, his mother still held the words of this poem deeply insideher. When she had a stroke, he sat by her bedside and read the poemto her, hoping that the rhythms, images, and story would give her thepleasure she had given him and his sister in her performance. When hementioned the poem at her memorial service, his sister and his mother'sfriends and relatives nodded in assent, recalling the power and enjoymentthe poem—and his mother's impromptu performances of it—had giventhem all.

He also recalls his first sacrifice in the name of performance. OneChristmas season, the television series The Wonderful World of Disney wasbroadcasting the Hayley Mills film of the children's classic Pollyanna overthe course of three Sundays. He was invited to be the one child performerin the Christmas play at his church but was told it would mean missingthe last episode of Pollyanna (this was long before VCRs and DVDs!). Asmuch as he wanted to know what happened to the heroine (would she getto go to the church fair?), he chose to perform in the play instead. Thenext year, he was chosen for the title role in the elementary school classplay, "Nobody Listens to Andrew," about a little boy who tries, unsuccessfully,to get the attention of the adults (also played by elementary schoolstudents), finally shouting, in exasperation, "THERE'S A BEAR IN MYBED!!!" He's understood the power of performing ever since.

We both can remember playing dress-up and putting on plays. Carolvividly recalls a childhood game she played, "Death in the Streets."She and her sister were living across the Midway from the University ofChicago, a neighborhood that was pretty rough at the time, where facultymembers from the university lived alongside blue-collar workers—rudelydescribed as "slum-dwellers"—in an area that always seemed grubby, thegrass near the street thoroughly scuffed, mothers standing with switchesin their hands, gabbing with each other while idly threatening their kidsto behave or get a "lickin'." In the game, played in the street, one child,demanding to be the victim, was the character who got to fall to theground repeatedly, while another leaned over her and began screaming"Death in the street," and a third played the self-important doctor, whowould come quickly to make a huge fuss over the fallen body. The wholegame had been scripted and was played over and over again, reversingthe roles. Later, there were school plays, the business of memorizing atext, assembling props, and putting on costumes. Dance classes, singing,playing the piano, wanting to see a play and go to a real live performanceopened up worlds that have held her captive ever since. These worlds,with their sense of wonderment, lush language, rich imagery, characters,and their all too obvious melodramatic qualities, as well as their secretplaces, have served both of us all our lives. They awaken passionateemotions and they offer deep comfort, even during some of the loneliestand darkest times we have experienced. They actively involve us as agentsand as performers who can call forth, at will, performances that can berelived, re-created, shared, and made the stuff of performance for others.

We also loved that special kind of excitement that is aroused whenthe lights in a theater house or movie theater are dimmed and the hallbecomes dark, and we are held, enthralled, by actors on a stage orpictures on a screen. There is always a sense of risk, of being a little afraid,of needing to pay attention, and of knowing that we'll see live performersor media images that can inspire us, or frighten us, or make us laugh, orweep, or both together at the same time. There is also the excitement ofa prospective role that we can play. Very often, it is we who are the heroesor heroines of our imagined and real plays.

This textbook asks you to reenter the world of imagination, language,and performance and learn how to use your talents as a performer andreader to bring numinous performances to the classroom throughout yourcourse and to experience for yourself the thrill of creating, rehearsing, andsharing them. We also want to equip you with a performance methodologythat offers you the tools you need to refine your skills and enhanceyour performance, analyze texts, understand the materials you use inperformance, talk about performances, and write about them.

The textbook will introduce you to the art and craft of performingliterary and cultural texts. It will teach you how to read closely and criticallyand how to learn to use your voice and body to perform texts for anaudience. The immediate audience we have in mind is your classmates,but later, it could be extended to a much larger and more diverse audience,depending on the directions life takes you and the way you shapeyour performing self in everyday life. In addition, some of you may planto make performance your career, either as a theatrical performer or asan eloquent public speaker, an intellectual, a politician, lawyer, or leaderof business or industry. Others may have little or no performance experienceand want to use this textbook and the college course it accompaniesto acquire skills in communicating with and performing for an audiencein any number of everyday ways. In short, our designs in this book areambitious: we want to introduce you to a performance experience that issupple and can be shaped to enhance the quality of your life and sharpenyour powers of attention. To see keenly, to imagine vividly, to use yourbody and voice expressively, and to communicate passionately and wiselyare some of the qualities and skills that you will acquire as you practicethis art of performance and employ a performance methodology.

We have deliberately drawn on our own personal experiences ofreading and performing in this introduction in order to encourage youto trust yourself and share your performances with others. Your ownvoice and body are inextricably involved in your performances, and weencourage you to be introspective and reflect on your life and how itinforms your performing self. We also want you to recognize the ways inwhich the personal figures in performance.

Performance is such a popular term these days that it threatens toencompass almost any and all human behaviors, at the risk of losing anyintelligible meaning. Consequently, we will spend a little time consideringwhat the term means in the context of this book and in a discipline thatonce called itself "oral interpretation" and is now named "performancestudies." Some programs in performance studies take their origins intheater and alternative theater in the 1960s. The program at New YorkUniversity is one such program, mounted by Richard Schechner andothers. The other tradition, much older, grew out of the elocution movementin the late nineteenth century in America. In the academy, it was adiscipline known by a number of different names, culminating originallyin oral interpretation and then, during the mid-1980s, renaming itselfperformance studies.

The term performance incorporates a whole field of human activity.It includes verbal acts derived from everyday life, such as rapping, whichmay occur on urban streets or in neighborhood or Broadway theaters, andcan be seen in the movies and other media. Some rapping is featuredin "slamming" or "headlining" and can be experienced in poetry jamsand slams and the coffeehouses where they are shared. Performance,especially performance of poems, stories, nonfiction, and drama, can befound in classrooms and onstage, whether at colleges and universities orin public auditoriums or outside venues, such as parks. And, of course,a whole host of performances can be found in digital forms and on theInternet.

We are particularly interested in student performances that featureeither a solo performer or a group of performers and occur in classroomsand, on occasion, are taken to larger theatrical stages or open publicspaces. The classroom performances typically take advantage of an openplaying space and desks, stools, music stands, scripts, props, and costumes.In these cases, the performer or performers create their performances tobe shared with classmates and the teacher. Students enjoy performingwith lecterns and music stands or performing in open stage space, orclassroom space, where they can use simple props and create a minimalistset using desks, chairs, lamps, and media, all objects that are readily availablein college and university classrooms and in the home. They caneasily create costumes, or the suggestion of a costume, drawing from theirclosets and using items such as hats, scarves, suit jackets, peacoats, orsweat clothes to convey the sense of a character or speaker in the workthey are performing. Sometimes students take their performances outsideand make use of special places on campuses to perform.

Lectern is the term used to refer to a reading stand of the kind you seein church pulpits or on ceremonial occasions, such as graduations, publiclectures, or presidential inaugural addresses. Performers often use musicstands or reading desks to substitute for the lectern. The advantage of alectern is that it anchors the performer, freeing him or her to use gestureand the art of suggestion to evoke characters and scenes. The surface ofthe lectern provides the performer a place to rest a script, a book, or aprop, and it also serves as an object that can be used during performance;in fact, the entire lectern can be tilted, lifted, or rested on its side on thefloor, becoming an elaborate prop or piece of stage furniture, allowingthe performer to work from the space around it. The lectern performancecan also make use of props or a costume piece that is easily adaptable toassist in creating a character or characters and scene to bring a text to life.Performers can also choose to stand or sit in front of their audience withno props and speak the words of the literary or cultural text from memory.Memorization, which we will speak more about later, is often requiredfor classroom performances. However, it is also important to know howto perform a text that is not memorized and for which one must rely onthe written text, using it as a script. A well-rehearsed performance wherethe text is not memorized can be astonishingly effective. Scripts canbe cunningly concealed, and they can also be decked out with a booklikecover and very visibly displayed. And, of course, they can be read inperformance. What should be avoided is the reliance on a messy-lookingtext or bunch of papers, unless the messy or sloppy appearance is part ofthe performance.

The beauty of these classroom performances is that they can easilybe made portable and carried to other settings. They can be shared in adorm room, and they can also be designed for bigger audiences, such asthose who attend performance hours, festivals, or public readings. Manyperformances that originated in a class become stock pieces in a student'srepertoire and are performed in more professional settings, emergingfinally on theatrical stages or other environmental or public places wherelarger audiences can participate. Performances are also developed to servepolitical ends, to produce change in our society. Many student activistsfind performance a powerful tool for change. When we discuss later theuse of nonfiction materials and cultural texts, we will show you how performancescan serve an activist political agenda. And of course, literary texts,such as poems and short stories, can also be put to political purpose.

Let us turn now to consider the nature of this "performance" that youwill be creating and sharing and discuss its purpose. In an earlier textbook,Performance: Texts and Contexts, we defined performance, stating,"a performance act, interactional in nature and involving symbolic formsand live bodies, provides a way to constitute meaning and to affirm individualand cultural values" (p. 3). The italicized terms in this definitionare used in a technical sense. To increase your comfort with the definitionand to show you what it means and what it does not mean, we willoffer an exegesis of it.