Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

Theatre 313
Spotlight
Performance Studies
“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women
merely players,” said Shakespeare, and one of the
growing areas in theatre education is the area of Performance
Studies—or how we “perform” in everyday life.
Rather than examine staged theatre, Performance
Studies encompasses all human action as its object of
study. As a result, everything we do—make war, play
sports, take museum tours, engage in political activism—
is seen as a kind of performance. Even everyday events,
such as buying groceries, become part of an exhibition.
We perform with dialogue (“I’ll be paying with my credit
card”) and follow blocking (when the customer ahead
is finished, we move up one place in the line), and we
depend on proper costumes and properties to complete
our actions. By becoming aware of our constant dependence
on the theatre, we are encouraged to study performance
as a way of understanding the entire world.
Performance Studies is open-ended and draws influences
from many different disciplines. But its two most
prominent forefathers are anthropology and linguistics.
From anthropology, it draws an interest in ritual and
ancient practices from all parts of the world. From linguistics,
it focuses on the construction of meaning through
language. Other important influences are avant-garde
art, sociology, and cognitive psychology. What unifies
this diverse set of inspirations is the rejection of solely
text-based knowledge. Instead, Performance Studies
embraces the medium of our bodies in time and space.
Rather than pore over the written word, Performance
Studies looks at the moving actor.
As it has risen in popularity, more universities and colleges
have begun offering classes and degrees in Performance
Studies, and several academic journals specialize
in its practice. By giving us a theatrical vocabulary to
describe our lives, this exciting discipline places us all
onstage, and encourages us to think critically about the
entrances, exits, and scenes that we make every day.
Finally, does the play fit our idea of what a play
should be—or, even better, does it force us to rewrite our
standards altogether?
Judgments of this sort are subjective. What seems
original to one member of the audience may be clichéd
to another; what seems an obvious gimmick to a veteran
theatergoer can seem brilliantly innovative to a less jaded
patron. None of this should intimidate us. An audience
does not bring absolute standards into the theatre—and
certainly any standards it brings are not shared absolutely.
The theatrical response is collective, a combination
of many individual reactions.
Plays have been evaluated by audiences and prizes awarded by judges
since the days of ancient Greek theatre. Six of the most celebrated
plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were combined—using
extra-large Greek masks—in this seven-hour, 2014 production entitled
Die Rasenden (“The Madman”) at the Deutsches Schauspeilhaus in
Hamburg, Germany, as staged by the company’s artistic director, Karin
Beier. © AP Images/Markus Scholz
But each of us has our own distinct sensibility and
response. We appreciate certain colors, sights, sounds,
words, actions, behaviors, and people that please us. We
appreciate constructions that seem to us balanced, harmonic,
expressive, and assured. We appreciate designs,
ideas, and performances that exceed our expectations, that
reveal patterns and viewpoints we didn’t know existed.
We take great pleasure in sensing underlying structure:
a symphony of ideas, a sturdy architecture of integrated
style and action. We begin to develop our own sensibility
and taste, as distinct as the voice of the play itself.
RELATIONSHIP TO THE THEATRE ITSELF
As we’ve already discussed, plays are not simply things
that happen in the theatre; they are theatre—which is to
say that each play or play production redefines the theatre
itself and makes us reconsider, at least to a certain
extent, the value and possibilities of the theatre itself.
In some cases the playwright makes this reconsideration
mandatory by dealing with theatrical matters in the
play itself. Some plays are set in theatres where plays are
going on (Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search
of an Author, Michael Frayn’s Noises Off, Mel Brooks’s
The Producers); other plays are about actors (Jean-Paul
Sartre’s Kean) or about dramatic characters (Tom Stoppard’s
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead); still
other plays contain plays within themselves (Anton
Chekhov’s The Seagull, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet)