Read the notes, then try the practice. It adapts as you go.When you're ready.
Session Length
~17 min
Adaptive Checks
15 questions
Transfer Probes
8
Performance studies is a broad, interdisciplinary academic field that examines performance as a lens for understanding human behavior, culture, and social interaction. Emerging in the 1960s and 1970s from the convergence of theater studies and anthropology, the field was shaped decisively by the collaboration between theater director Richard Schechner and anthropologist Victor Turner. Rather than limiting 'performance' to the stage, the discipline argues that performance is a fundamental mode of human activity encompassing rituals, ceremonies, play, sports, everyday social roles, political demonstrations, and digital self-presentation. The field draws on methods and theories from theater, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, philosophy, gender studies, and postcolonial theory.
At the core of performance studies is the insight that all human cultures perform and that these performances are not mere entertainment but constitutive acts that create, sustain, and transform social realities. Victor Turner's concept of social drama revealed how communities process conflict through performative phases of breach, crisis, redressive action, and reintegration. Erving Goffman's dramaturgical analysis showed that everyday social life follows theatrical principles, with individuals managing impressions through front-stage and back-stage behavior. Judith Butler extended performative thinking into gender theory, arguing that gender is not an innate essence but a repeated performance that creates the illusion of a stable identity. These theoretical contributions demonstrate the field's capacity to illuminate power, identity, and social structure.
Today, performance studies is a vibrant and expanding discipline with applications in areas ranging from activist performance art and digital culture to trauma healing and conflict resolution. Scholars investigate how performances both reinforce and resist dominant ideologies, how embodied knowledge is transmitted across generations, and how new media technologies create novel forms of performativity. Major academic centers include the Department of Performance Studies at New York University, founded by Richard Schechner, and Northwestern University's program. The field continues to challenge disciplinary boundaries and insists on the body, presence, and liveness as central categories of analysis.
One step at a time.
The capacity of language and bodily action to not merely describe but actually constitute social reality. Derived from J.L. Austin's speech act theory and developed by Judith Butler, performativity holds that repeated performative acts produce the very identities and social categories they appear to express.
Example: A judge saying 'I sentence you to ten years' does not describe a sentencing but performs it, constituting a legal reality through the utterance itself.
Richard Schechner's concept that all performance consists of 'twice-behaved behavior' or 'strips of behavior' that can be rearranged, reconstructed, and repeated. No performance is entirely original; all performances draw on previously existing actions, scripts, and repertoires.
Example: A wedding ceremony draws on culturally transmitted scripts, gestures, and words that are restored and recombined each time the ritual is enacted, even though each wedding feels unique.
Victor Turner's model describing how social conflicts unfold through four phases: breach (violation of a norm), crisis (escalation), redressive action (formal or informal mechanisms to resolve the conflict), and reintegration or schism. Turner saw these dramas as performative processes fundamental to social life.
Example: A political scandal begins with a breach (revelation of wrongdoing), escalates into crisis (media coverage, public outcry), moves through redressive action (hearings, investigations), and ends in reintegration (resignation, reform) or schism (permanent division).
A concept from Victor Turner describing the threshold state experienced during rituals and performances where participants are 'betwixt and between' established social positions. In liminal states, ordinary social structures are suspended, allowing transformation, communitas, and the reimagining of social roles.
Example: During a graduation ceremony, students occupy a liminal space where they are no longer students but have not yet fully assumed their new social identity as graduates.
Erving Goffman's sociological framework analyzing everyday social interaction as theatrical performance. Individuals are 'actors' who manage impressions through front-stage behavior (public presentation) and back-stage behavior (private actions), using props, costumes, and scripts to present desired identities.
Example: A server in a restaurant performs friendliness and attentiveness for customers (front-stage) but may express frustration and exhaustion in the kitchen (back-stage).
Diana Taylor's distinction between two systems of knowledge transmission: the archive (documents, texts, buildings, and other supposedly enduring materials) and the repertoire (embodied practices such as spoken language, dance, ritual, and gesture that require presence to transmit).
Example: Indigenous oral histories and ceremonial dances represent repertoire-based knowledge that cannot be fully captured in written archives but is transmitted through embodied practice across generations.
Victor Turner's term for the intense feeling of social bonding and equality that arises among participants in liminal ritual experiences. Communitas dissolves ordinary social hierarchies and creates a sense of shared humanity and collective belonging.
Example: Festival-goers at a music festival experience communitas when social distinctions of class, profession, and status dissolve in the shared intensity of the collective experience.
Performance practices that draw on, combine, or negotiate between two or more distinct cultural traditions. This concept raises critical questions about cultural exchange, appropriation, authenticity, and power dynamics in globalized performance contexts.
Example: Peter Brook's 1985 production of the Mahabharata, which used a multinational cast to stage a Hindu epic, sparked debate about whether intercultural theater enriches understanding or appropriates non-Western traditions.
More terms are available in the glossary.
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