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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...