Performance Studies Glossary
25 essential terms — because precise language is the foundation of clear thinking in Performance Studies.
Showing 25 of 25 terms
The methodological commitment in performance studies to analyzing a wide range of activities as performance, extending well beyond traditional theater and dance.
The emotional purging or release experienced by audiences through witnessing dramatic performance, especially tragedy. Derived from Aristotle's Poetics.
The spontaneous, egalitarian sense of community and shared humanity that arises among people in liminal states, dissolving ordinary social hierarchies.
Erving Goffman's sociological framework that analyzes everyday social interaction using theatrical metaphors such as actors, roles, front-stage, back-stage, and impression management.
The transformative, ritual, or healing function of performance, as opposed to its entertainment function. One pole of Schechner's efficacy-entertainment continuum.
Knowledge held in the body and transmitted through physical practice and performance rather than through written texts or verbal instruction.
Goffman's spatial metaphor distinguishing between the public area where social performances occur (front-stage) and the private area where performers relax their roles (back-stage).
Avant-garde performance events of the 1950s-1960s, originated by Allan Kaprow, that dissolved boundaries between art and everyday life.
The process by which individuals attempt to control the perceptions others form of them, a central concept in Goffman's dramaturgical analysis.
Performance practices that negotiate between or combine elements from two or more distinct cultural traditions, raising questions about exchange, appropriation, and power.
The sense of bodily movement and position. In performance studies, kinesthetic awareness and empathy are central to understanding how audiences experience and relate to performing bodies.
The threshold or in-between state experienced during rituals and transitional periods, where normal social structures are temporarily suspended.
The quality of being live or present in performance, debated as a defining feature that distinguishes performance from mediated forms. Contested by scholars like Philip Auslander.
The concept of imitation or representation in art and performance. A foundational concept in Western aesthetics debated since Plato and Aristotle.
In performance studies, a broadly defined category encompassing any activity framed, presented, highlighted, or displayed for an audience or participants, including theater, ritual, play, sports, and everyday social behavior.
An art form in which the artist's body and live actions constitute the primary medium, often emphasizing presence, duration, and audience engagement.
The capacity of speech and bodily action to constitute social reality rather than merely represent it. Extended by Judith Butler to theorize gender as a repeated performance.
Performance practices and theories that address the legacies of colonialism, centering the voices, bodies, and traditions of formerly colonized peoples.
Richard Schechner's concept that all performances consist of recombined strips of previously performed behavior, making all performance fundamentally repetitive and citational.
Arnold van Gennep's model of transitional rituals consisting of three phases: separation, transition (liminality), and incorporation.
Formalized, symbolic, often repeated actions that mark transitions, maintain social order, or enact spiritual beliefs. A central category in performance studies.
J.L. Austin's philosophical framework distinguishing between constative utterances (descriptions) and performative utterances (actions accomplished through speech).
In Diana Taylor's framework, the system of knowledge stored in supposedly enduring documents, texts, buildings, and material objects.
Diana Taylor's term for embodied practices (dance, ritual, oral tradition, gesture) that transmit knowledge and memory through bodily participation and presence.