Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-13T02:29:52.214Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Ways of Understanding the Culture: Re-examining the Performance Paradigm

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Abstract

The tendency for ‘performance studies’ to embrace and even supplant ‘theatre studies’ can usefully enlarge our perceptions of the relevance of theatricality to other disciplines and activities – but fully extended into the ‘performativities’ of everyday life can be counterproductive when definitions are so loose as to be redundant. Here, Ian Watson considers the boundary-crossing qualities of two variants on the ‘performance paradigm’ – Eugenio Barba's bridge-building concept of ‘Barter Theatre’ and Augusto Boal's deliberately provocative ‘Invisible Theatre’. He proceeds to relate the characteristics identified to an event no less clearly staged, though less often discussed as such: the set-piece political speech, in this case President Clinton's acceptance of his renomination as Democratic candidate at his party's Chicago convention in 1996. Ian Watson is an Advisory Editor of NTQ who teaches at the Rutgers campus of the State University of New Jersey. The last of his several contributions to the journal was his report on the Ninth International Gathering of Group Theatre in Ayacucho, Peru, in NTQ58 (May 1999).

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2000

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Boal, Augusto, Games for Actors and Non-Actors, trans. Jackson, Adrian (London: Routledge, 1992).Google Scholar
Boal, Augusto, ‘Invisible Theatre: Liege, Belgium, 1978’, trans. Epstein, Susana, The Drama Review, XXXIV, No. 3 (1990), p. 2434.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boal, Augusto, Theatre of the Oppressed, trans. Charles, A. and McBride, Maria-Odilia Leal (New York: Urizen Books, 1979).Google Scholar
Bovin, Merte, ‘Provocation Anthropology: Barter Performance in Africa’, The Drama Review, XXXII, No. 1 (1988), p. 2141.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brook, Peter, The Empty Space (New York: Atheneum, 1969).Google Scholar
Evans, Harold, The American Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998).Google Scholar
Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretations of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973).Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving, Frame Analysis (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986).Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving, Interaction Ritual (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982).Google Scholar
Grotowski, Jerzy, Towards a Poor Theatre (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968).Google Scholar
Lederman, Douglas, ‘Clinton Re-Election Drive Attracts Young Delegates to Chicago’, Chronicle of Higher Education, 6 09 1996, sec. A, p. 4950.Google Scholar
Mason, Jeffery, ‘Street Fairs: Social Space, Social Performance’, Theatre Journal, XLVIII, No. 3 (10 1996), p. 301–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Singer, Milton, When a Great Tradition Modernizes (London: Pall Mall Press, 1972).Google Scholar
Taviani, Ferdinando, ‘Ways of Saying’, in The Floating Islands, Barba, Eugenio (Holstebro: Odin Forlag, 1979), p. 93113.Google Scholar
Turner, Victor, From Ritual to Theatre: the Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982).Google Scholar