Alicante Journal of English Studies 26 (2013): 13-25

Performance Studies Floating Free of Theatre.

Richard Schechner and the Rise of an Open
Interdisciplinary Field

Fabrizio Deriu
University of Teramo
fderiu@unite.it

ABSTRACT
As Marvin Carlson points out, the term performance has recently developed
“as a central metaphor and critical tool for a bewildering variety of studies,
covering almost every aspect of human activity.” While there is a tendency
to stress their similarities and theoretical convergence, Performance Studies
and Cultural Studies have different origins: the roots of Performance
Studies are clearly located in theatre studies and practices. The essay
outlines a short history of the rise of Performance Studies, focussing on
Richard Schechner’s work. According to him, a Performance Studies
paradigm came to the fore in the mid-1950s, with books by Bateson,
Austin, Goffman, Caillois and others. In the Sixties Schechner started to
teach and was founder/director for influential theatre groups on the
American avant-garde scene. When his interest shifted from theatre to
performance and from aesthetics to social sciences, he found anthropology
extremely useful because in ethnographies anthropologists treat the actual
lived behaviours of people performatively. Schechner developed these
assumptions and cooperated intensely with social scientists, in particular the
anthropologist Victor Turner. In 1980 Schechner co-founded the
Department of Performance Studies at NYU. Since then many academic
institutions have started similar programs; Schechner’s books have been
translated into many languages; and worldwide a growing cohort of
scholars have been attracted to this stimulating, inter-disciplinary,
threshold-crossing approach.
14 Alicante Journal of English Studies
1. Introduction

As Marvin Carlson points out in his Performance. A Critical Introduction, the term
‘performance’ has developed in recent years “as a central metaphor and critical tool for
a bewildering variety of studies, covering almost every aspect of human activity.
Performance discourse and its close theoretical partner, ‘performativity’, today
dominate critical discourse not only in all manner of cultural studies, but also in
business, economics, and technology” (2004: ix). However, while there is a tendency to
stress their similarities and theoretical convergence, Performance Studies and Cultural
Studies should not be confused. The roots of Performance Studies are clearly located in
theatre studies and practices, with a strong emphasis on the interweaving of the two
aspects.
The essay aims to outline a short history of the rise and spread of Performance
Studies, focussing primarily on Richard Schechner’s work. Internationally recognized
as the pioneer in the field, Schechner himself gives an account of his path from theatre
to performance in the Preface to the third edition of his Performance Theory (2003: ix-
xii).

2. Origins of the performance studies paradigm

According to Schechner, a performance studies paradigm came to the fore in the mid-
1950s, with such books and essays as Gregory Bateson’s “A Theory of Play and
Fantasy” (published in 1955, the same year as J. L. Austin’s Harvard Lectures on the
“performative”, posthumously published in 1962), Erving Goffman’s The Presentation
of Self in Everyday Life (1959), and Albert Lord’s The Singer of Tales (1960).
Furthermore, Schechner recognizes in John Cage’s ideas and works a very strong
influence on his own thinking about performance. As for theatre people, above all he
considered Jerzy Grotowsky, whom he met in 1967, as a fundamental inspiration
source. Combined with his experience as a civil-rights and anti-Vietnam War activist,
and a sometime participant-creator of happenings, he opened up a whole new range of
research.

3. The Sixties: from ‘theatre’ to ‘performance’

The Sixties was a very busy decade for Schechner. Soon after his Ph.D. graduation he
started to teach at the Tulane University in New Orleans, and he was editor of the
Tulane Drama Review (then renamed as TDR. The Drama Review) from 1962 to 1969.
Under his direction TDR became, and is still today, one of the most important theatre
journals in the USA and around the world. In addition, he was a founder and director of
influential theatre groups on the American avant-garde scene: firstly the New Orleans
Group and later, when he moved to New York in 1967, The Performance Group (TPG).
Performance Studies Floating Free of Theatre 15
Among TPG’s productions, Dionysus in ’69 (based on Euripides’s The Bacchae) was a
major and controversial breakthrough in the history of the New American Theatre.
It was in this period that Schechner’s academic interest, as he says, “dramatically
shifted from theatre to performance and from aesthetics to social sciences” (2003: ix).
At the beginning Schechner was not sure what performance was, even if he knew it was
more than what was appearing on the stages of New York, London, or Paris. Thus he
found social and cultural anthropology extremely useful because in ethnographies and
theoretical treatises anthropologists treated the actual lived behaviours of people
performatively: “Taking a cue from Goffman’s 1959 breakthrough book, I sensed that
performances in the broad sense of that word were coexistent with the human condition.
Goffman did not propose that ‘all the world’s a stage’, a notion which implies a kind of
falseness or put on. What Goffman meant was that people were always involved in role-
playing, in constructing and staging their multiple identities” (ix-x).
Schechner outlined for the first time his new perspective in an essay entitled
“Approaches to Theory/Criticism”, originally published in 1966. He starts by discussing
the theory of the ritual origin of theatre in ancient Greece, supported by the so called
Cambridge anthropologists such as Gilbert Murray, Jane Ellen Harrison and Francis
Cornford, in order to make a different point: origin theories are irrelevant to
understanding theatre, but ritual is not to be excluded from the study of the performative
genres:

Ritual is one of the several activities related to theater. The others are play, games,
sports, dance, and music. The relation among these I will explore is not vertical or
originary – from any one to other(s) – but horizontal: what each autonomous genre
shares with the others […]. Together these seven comprise the public performance
activities of humans. If one argues that theater is “later” or more “sophisticated” or
“higher” on some evolutionary ladder and therefore must derive from one of the others,
I reply that this makes sense only if we take fifth century BCE Greek theater (and its
counterparts in other cultures) as the only legitimate theater. Anthropologists with good
reason, argue otherwise, suggesting that theater – understood as the enactment of stories
by players – exists in every known culture at all times, as do the other genres. These
activities are primeval, there is no reason to hunt for “origins” or “derivations.” There
are only variations in form, the intermixing among genres, and these show no long-term
evolution from “primitive” to “sophisticated” or “modern.” Sometimes ritual, sports,
and the aesthetic genres […] are merged so that it is impossible to call the activity by
any one limiting name. (Schechner, 1988b: 6)

These seven activities (later reduced to five, because theatre, dance and music
merge into a single category, now labelled as ‘performing arts’) share some basic
qualities: a special ordering of time and space; a special value attached to objects; non-
productivity in terms of goods (this does not mean that they have no economic value); a
set of rules that govern the performers’ behaviour. In any case, at this juncture
Schechner still believed that performance was an extremely difficult concept to define:
from one point of view (clearly stated by Goffman) performing is a mode of behaviour
that may characterize ‘any’ activity (a ‘quality’ of actions, rather than a fenced-off
16 Alicante Journal of English Studies
genre); and simply framing an activity ‘as’ performance – viewing it as such – makes it
into a performance (this was John Cage’s opinion). However, theatre still remains the
basic model:

I mean something much more limited: a performance is an activity done by an

individual or group in presence of and for another individual or group. […] in trying to
manage the relationship between a general theory and its possible applications to
various art forms, I thought it best to center my definition […] on certain acknowledged
qualities of live theater, the most stable being the audience-performer interaction. Even
where audiences do not exist as such – some happenings, ritual, and play – the function
of audience persists: part of the performing group watches – is meant to watch – other
parts of the performing group; or, as in some ritual, the implied audience is God, or
some transcendent Other(s). (30n)

4. The Seventies: the Schechner-Turner connection

During the Seventies, Schechner took these assumptions further, by means of both field
research and theoretical studies (as well as his artistic practice). He published and/or
edited several books and he cooperated intensely with social scientists. In particular the
connection with Victor Turner, as we will see later, added to performance theory a very
wide knowledge about ritual and what Turner called “social dramas.”
On several occasions from 1968 to 1972 Schechner travelled outside the USA
(especially in Latin America and in Asia) in order to attend to performances of many
genres and traditions, and to carry out anthropological field researches. These trips,
combined with intense studies in anthropology, social psychology, ethology and so on,
were the basis of Schechner’s belief that performance theory is a social science rather
than a branch of aesthetics. As he wrote in Environmental Theater, a book about his
association with TPG:

I reject aesthetics. […] I am concerned with definitions, categories, and classifications

because, like it or not, we carry within us cultural imprints. These are part of language,
and the very process of thinking. There is a time when one must examine these imprints
and accept or reject them. The imprint of what I call “orthodox theater” is narrow. I
want to work to expand the definition of theater so that theater practice may be
expanded, and vice-versa. (1973a: vii-viii)

A remarkable step in this trajectory was “Actuals. A Look into Performance

Theory” (1970), an essay in which he related rituals in non-Western cultures to avant-
garde performance in the Western theatrical scene, according to five features which are
found both in avant-garde performances and in those of ‘tribal people’: “1) process,
something happens here and now; 2) consequential, irremediable, and irrevocable acts,
exchanges, or situations; 3) contest, something is at stake for the performers and often
for the spectators; 4) initiation, a change in status for participants; 5) space is used
concretely and organically” (1970: 51). At the core of the notion of ‘actual’ there is the
Performance Studies Floating Free of Theatre 17
idea that art is not a way of imitating reality or expressing states of mind but an event.
The aesthetic principle of art viewed as an imitation of life (while life itself is merely a
shadow of the ideal forms) – which began in the Western epistemological tradition with
Plato – is thus overturned.
In 1973 Schechner edited a special issue of TDR entirely dedicated to establishing
in a systematic way a continuum between the social sciences and performance: “The
shared basic assumption is that people in groups – whether of two, three or dozens – in
some ways ‘ritualize’ their behaviors; ‘present’ themselves rather than just be” (1973b:
3). These patterns of presentation are susceptible to detailed study, and often the
vocabulary of the social sciences has been adapted from the vocabulary of theatre (see,
for example, the notion of ‘role’).
Also at this time Schechner read Charles Darwin’s The Expressions of the Emotion
in Man and Animals (1872), and this led him to the work of ethologists such as Julian
Huxley, Konrad Lorenz, Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt. Focus was currently on “body
language” and a whole range of expressive behaviour different from the spoken or
written word. Combined with the fascinating genres of dancing and music that he saw
in Asia, these studies helped Schechner to connect ethology to sports, play to ritual, and
art to role-playing. Here we come across a main feature of Schechner’s understanding
of what were to become Performance Studies: on one hand he uses the social sciences
to better understand theatre and the performing arts, and on the other hand he is deeply
interested in showing how the understanding of theatrical processes can enhance the
understanding of the social processes and of everyday life.
Schechner’s assumption is that the phenomena variously known as ‘drama’,
‘theatre’ or ‘performance’ occur among all the world’s peoples and date as far back as
historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists can go: “Evidence indicates that dancing,
singing, wearing masks and/or costumes, impersonating other humans, animals, or
supernaturals, acting out stories, presenting time 1 at time 2, isolating and preparing
special places and/or times for these presentations […] are coexistent with the human
condition” (1973c: 5). But in the Western world a very limited view prevailed: the
narrowness of the Western ‘orthodox’ idea of theatre was essentially based on the
supremacy of the written text, or the ‘drama’: “we in the west are accustomed to
concentrating our attention on a specialized kind of script called drama. But the avant-
garde in the west, and traditional theaters elsewhere, refocused attention on the doing
aspects of scripts, and beyond script altogether to ‘theater’ and ‘performance’” (7). He
acknowledges the difficulty of using these loaded terms; nevertheless, rather than
choose to invent new words he preferred to adopt precise definitions of the old ones:

To help this task I offer a model of concentric, overlapping circles; a set of four discs
with the largest, and least strictly defined, “performance”, on the bottom, each of the
others resting on the one immediately larger than itself. The larger the size the more
time and space covered and the broader the “idea area” occupied. Generally speaking,
though not in every case, the larger disc contains all those smaller than itself.
18 Alicante Journal of English Studies

Drama: the smallest, most intense (heated up) circle. A written text, score, scenario,
instruction, plan, or map. The drama can be taken from place to place or time to time
independent of the person or people who carry it. These people may be just
“messengers”, even unable to read the drama, no less to comprehend or enact it.
Script: all that can be transmitted from time to time and place to place; the basic code of
the events. The script is transmitted person to person, the transmitter is not a mere
messenger. The transmitter of the script must know the script and be able to teach it to
others. This teaching may be conscious or through empathetic, emphatic means.
Theater: the event enacted by a specific group of performers; what the performers
actually do during production. The theater is concrete and immediate. Usually, the
theater is the manifestation or representation of the drama and/or script.
Performance: the broadest, most ill-defined disc. The whole constellation of events,
most of them passing unnoticed, that take place in/among both performers and audience
from the time the first spectator enters the field of the performance – the precinct where
the theater takes place – to the time the last spectator leaves.
The drama is the domain of the author, the composer, scenarist, shaman; the script
is the domain of the teacher, guru, master; the theater is the domain of the performers;
the performance is the domain of the audience. (8-9)

During the Seventies Schechner’s ideas and practices were greatly nourished by his
relationship with anthropologist Victor Turner. They knew each other’s work but they
met only in 1977. Turner died in 1983, and this six-year-long period of collaboration
was extremely fruitful. Though Turner’s contribution to Performance Studies is very
extensive, it may be said to be mainly grounded in three sets of concepts: the first one is
the ‘social drama’, the second is the three-phased description of the ritual process, the
third is ‘liminality’ as the characteristic feature of the ritual process’s second phase.
Performance Studies Floating Free of Theatre 19
According to Turner, social dramas are units of disharmonic social life, arising in
conflict situations. They may occur on all levels of organization, from families to states;
and have a typical four-stage structure of public action:

A social drama is initiated when the peaceful tenor of regular, norm-governed social life
is interrupted by the breach of a rule controlling one of its salient relationships. This
leads swiflty or slowly to a state of crisis, which, if not soon sealed off, may split the
community into contending factions and coalitions. To prevent this, redressive means
are taken by those who consider themselves or are considered the most legitimate or
authoritative representatives of the relevant community. Redress usually involves
ritualized action, whether legal (in formal or informal courts), religious (involving
beliefs in the retributive action of powerful supernatural entities, and often involving an
act of sacrifice), or military (for example, feuding, headhunting, or engaging in
organized warfare). If the situation does not regress to crisis […], the next phase of
social drama comes into play, which involves alternative solutions to the problem. The
first is reconciliation of the conflicting parties following judicial, ritual or military
processes; the second consensual recognition of irremediable breach, usually followed
by the spatial separation of the parties. Since social dramas suspend normal everyday
role playing, they interrupt the flow of social life and force a group to take cognizance
of its own behavior in relation to its own values, even to question at times the value of
those values. In other words, dramas induce and contain reflexive process and generate
cultural frames in which reflexivity can find a legitimate place. (Turner, 1982: 92)

What is important in a Performance Studies perspective is the connection between

performances and the third stage of social dramas, redressive action. Turner regarded
the social drama as the “experiential matrix” from which the many genres of cultural
performance have been generated. The content of later genres (from oral and literary
narrative to theatre and film) is provided by breach, crisis and reintegrative or divisive
outcomes, while the redressive procedures provide the form: “As society complexifies,
as the division of labor produces more and more specialized and professionalized
modalities of sociocultural action, so do the modes of assigning meaning to social
dramas multiply – but the drama remains to the last simple and ineradicable, a fact of
everyone’s social experience” (78).
As Schechner notes, while investigating ritual from an anthropological standpoint,
Turner soon realized that social processes of any kind are performative. This is one of
the reasons why he became deeply interested in theatre and performance and started a
detailed exploration of the multiple relationship between ritual and theatre. The
replication that occurs in the redressive phase, be it in the rational idiom of a judicial
process or in the symbolic idiom of religious and/or artistic process, is of course a
theatrical performance, a “formal restaging” of what happened: redress “furnishes a
distanced replication and critique of the events leading up to and composing the
‘crisis’” (Turner, 1974: 41).
Turner’s emerging understanding of the relationship between social drama and
aesthetic drama relies on the three-phase structure of the ritual process, following the
Belgian ethnologist Arnold Van Gennep. In a book entitled Les rites de passage (1909),
20 Alicante Journal of English Studies
he argues that in every human group, the passing from one life stage and ‘status’
(biological as birth and death, or social as puberty, marriage, social advancement, job
specialization, and so on) is marked by symbolic actions and ceremonies. Van Gennep
observed that these rites of passage move through three steps: the first consists of some
kind of “separation” from the previous condition; the second is a period of “liminality”
(from the Latin limen that means threshold); the third one is characterised by “re-
aggregation”, in which the individual takes on the feature of the new condition. The key
moment is the second one, in which what prevails is a liminal condition, that is a period
of time when an individual is “betwixt and between” social categories or personal
identities. According to Schechner, “[t]he liminal phase fascinated Turner because he
recognized in it a possibility for ritual to be creative, to make new situations, identities
and social realities” (2013: 66). What is peculiar to liminality is the fact that the
attributes of “liminal personae are necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these
persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states
and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there” (Turner,
1969: 95). This ambiguity and indeterminacy is culturally expressed by a rich variety of
symbols and symbolic behaviours. As Turner himself argued, it is as though liminal
people “are being reduced or ground down to a uniform condition, to be endowed with
additional powers to enable them to cope with their new station in life” (95). In other
words, people undergoing the ritual become temporarily ‘nothing’, exposed to
vulnerability but open to change; then they are inscribed with their new attributes and
identities. Taking a cue from Turner’s description of the liminal state, Schechner
outlines the intrinsic affinity between the liminal personae and the condition of actors
and performers. In particular, as he says, “the workshop-rehearsal phase of performance
composition is analogous to the liminal phase of the ritual process” (2013: 66).
Whether at a social and collective level or at the individual level, Schechner and
Turner shared the belief that performances deal with transformation – how people use
performances to experiment with, act out and ratify change. As a result of this fruitful
collaboration, Schechner noted an ever-increasing confluence of anthropology and
theatre. In a 1983 essay entitled “Points of Contact between Anthropological and
Theatrical Thought” he lists some points (and “there are likely to be more coming”):
transformation in being or consciousness; state of intensity (i.e. the crossing of a
threshold); complex interactions between audience and performer; a whole sequence of
rule-governed behaviours prior to and after the main event on display (training,
workshop, rehearsal, warm-ups, public performance, cool-down, aftermaths);
transmission of performance knowledge (by means of embodied practices, because it
belongs to oral tradition and it is different from simply “knowing the great dramatic
texts”).
Performance Studies Floating Free of Theatre 21
5. Restoration of behaviour

In the second half of the Seventies, Schechner looked back to the period 1960-1975,
when there was a burst of experimental energy in American theatre (as well as in
European theatre). Directors, authors, actors and performers, designers, composers,
visual artists, and managers generated a profusion of forms, spaces, social contexts: “In
rooms, in theatres, in the streets, in the fields, in workplaces (factories, storefronts), in
hospitals, prisons, in gathering places (railroad stations, laundromats), in galleries, in
schools – theatre, live performance, literally was everywhere trying to do everything”
(Schechner, 1981a: 48). At the end of the Seventies all that activity ceased. In a critical
essay (quite ironically entitled “Decline and Fall of the American Avant-Garde”),
Schechner investigated the reasons for such a decline: he argued that the collapse of the
theatrical Avant-Garde occurred in parallel with the end of the belief in collective
systems, the shortfall of social action, the incomprehension of the press, the lack of
continuity and the shortage of financial resources. Despite the unhappy conditions, he
did not stop his compelling research, but he decided to turn to a larger set of objects,
looking for cultural expressions that in the Western world have the same function that
rituals and ceremonies have in tribal and/or non-Western societies. Since the theatrical
experimental Avant-Garde had undergone a disintegration, it was now time to find the
traces of the theatre – its inner workings or basic mechanisms – in cultural
manifestations other than the ‘orthodox’ theatre: in social rituals (religious, political,
secular rituals), and especially in popular entertainment, both live and mediated (sports,
movies, TV shows and news, theme parks, etc.).
As a result of this intense theoretical effort, Schechner conceived the notion of
“restoration of behavior”, one that is still considered the core for every definition of
performance. Restored behaviour – as Carlson put it – is “any behaviour consciously
separated from the person doing it – theatre and other role playing, trances, shamanism,
rituals” (2004: 3). Schechner wrote a lot about “restored behavior” in several essays
published between 1980 and 1983, most now collected in Between Theatre and
Anthropology (1985). It is not easy to synthesize the multiple aspects of the notion. My
choice here is to offer a long quote from the very first definition of the concept:

Restored behavior is living behavior treated as a film director treats a strip of film.
These strips of behavior can be rearranged or reconstructed; they are independent of the
causal systems (social, psychological, technological) that brought them into existence.
They have a life of their own. The original “truth” or “source” of the behavior may be
lost, ignored, or contradicted – even when this truth or source is apparently being
honored and observed. How the strip of behavior was made, found, or developed may
be unknown or concealed; elaborated; distorted by myth and tradition. Originating as a
process, used in the process of rehearsal to make a new process, a performance, the
strips of behavior are not themselves process but things, items, “materials.” Restored
behavior can be of long duration as in some dramas and rituals or of a short duration as
in some gestures, dances, and mantras. Restored behavior is used in all kinds of
performances from shamanism and exorcism to trance, from ritual to aesthetic dance
22 Alicante Journal of English Studies
and theater, from initiation rites to social dramas, from psychoanalysis to psychodrama
and transactional analysis. The practitioners of all these arts, rites, and healings assume
that some behaviors – organized sequence of events, scripted actions, known texts,
scored movements – exist separate from the performers who “do” these behaviors.
Because the behavior is separate from those who are behaving, the behavior can be
stored, transmitted, manipulated, transformed. The performers get in touch with,
recover, remember, or even invent these strips of behavior and then rebehave according
to these strips, either by being absorbed into them (playing the role, going into trance)
or existing side by side (Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt). The work of restoration is
carried on in rehearsals and/or in the transmission of behavior from master to novice.
[…] Restored behavior is symbolic and reflexive: not empty but loaded behavior
multivocally broadcasting significances. These difficult terms express a single
principle: the self can act in/as another; the social or transindividual self is a role or set
of roles. Symbolic and reflexive behavior is the hardening into theater of social,
religious, aesthetic, medical, and educational process. Performance means: never for the
first time. It means: for the second to the nth time. Performance is “twice-behaved-
behavior.” (Schechner, 1985: 35-36)

6. The Eighties: the dissemination decade and the “Broad Spectrum Approach”

Since 1967 Schechner has been teaching at New York University in the former Drama
Department. When he and his colleagues realized that they were no longer teaching
only ‘drama’ and ‘theatre’, they decided to change the department’s name. Thus, in
1980 Schechner and others co-founded the Department of Performance Studies at New
York University; the first to be so labelled in the world. Some years later TDR added
the subtitle Journal of Performance Studies to signal its more inclusive approach. The
Eighties can be considered the decade of dissemination. Many other academic
institutions, in the US and abroad, started programs in Performance Studies;
Schechner’s books were translated into many languages; a growing cohort of scholars
from many countries and many different disciplines were attracted into this stimulating,
inter-disciplinary, threshold-crossing approach.
The expansion of the field needed what Schechner called a “Broad Spectrum
Approach” (cf. 1988a and 1989): treating performative behaviour, and not just the
performing arts, as a subject for serious scholarly study. This means studying behaviour
in ordinary, professional and social life ‘as’ performance:

How is performance used in politics, medicine, religion, popular entertainments, and

ordinary face-to-face interactions? What are the similarities and differences between
live and mediated performances? The various and complex relationships among players
– spectators, performers, authors, and directors – can be pictured as a rectangle, a
performance “quadrilogue.” Studying the interactions, sometimes easy, sometimes
tense, among the speakers in the quadrilogue is what performance studies people do.
(Schechner, 1993: 21).
Performance Studies Floating Free of Theatre 23
Such a perspective assumes a very powerful and extended notion of performance.
Schechner suggests that the complex phenomena of performance genres, performative
behaviours and performance activities can be arranged into a continuum: play-games-
sports-popular entertainments-performing arts-daily life-identity construction-ritual.
But, he says, this straight-line schema is a limited representation, because each genre
interacts with the others and the boundaries among them are not rigid. A three-
dimensional view would be better: “For example, though they stand at opposite ends
[…], playing and ritualizing are closely related to each other. In some ways, they
underlie all the rest as a foundation” (Schechner, 2013: 50). The understanding of ritual
and play, as processes applying to a wide range of human activities (rather than as
something confined to religion or child behaviour) is a crucial point in Performance
Studies and a very important development in the social sciences.

7. The Nineties: performance studies in a global world

After a conference attended by more than five hundred people in New York in March
1995, under the title “Performance Studies: The Future of the Field”, an international
association (PSi: Performance Studies international) was created to promote
communication and exchange among scholars and practitioners working in the field.
Since then, PSi has held an annual conference, moving from the US to Europe,
Australia, and Asia. Many other institutions, both academic and artistic, are becoming
more and more interested in Performance Studies.
It can be certainly said that the Broad Spectrum Approach has been accountable for
both the widespread academic reception of Performance Studies and a quite significant
transformation of Schechner’s original field of interest. The various chapters in his
more recent books (cf. especially 1993 and 2004) examine various cultural
performances as Schechner experienced them, but these performances “were often more
social, political and religious than artistic. They were meant to effect and cause life, not
reflect or express it. […] Live performance increasingly happens not as art but as
religious practice, political demonstration, popular entertainment, sports match, or
intimate face-to-face encounter” (1993: 21).
Nevertheless, he has never stopped his artistic career. He has continued to direct
theatre and performance productions in the US and abroad; and in 1992 he found ECA
(East Coast Artists), “a professional ensemble dedicated to boldly reinventing classic
texts, debuting radical international work, and challenging conventional notions of
contemporary theater and performer training” (East Coast Artists, online publication).
Furthermore, Schechner has developed an innovative psycho-physical performance
technique, called “Rasaboxes”, which offers performers a physical tool to access,
express, and manage their feelings/emotions in performance: “Useful as performer
training, rasaboxes also offers many other applications in various fields including
therapy, business, and education. [It] integrates ancient theory with contemporary
24 Alicante Journal of English Studies
emotion research, studies in facial expression of emotion, neuroscience, and
performance theory” (East Coast Artists, online publication; cf. also Schechner, 2001).

8. The new millennium

At present, there is a significant interest in Performance Studies worldwide which is not

only limited to theatre scholars and practitioners. As Schnechner himself argues, the
field is unsettled, open, diverse, and multiple in its methods, themes, subjects, arts, and
persons – but in practice it has developed in a certain way. It is no coincidence that he
has brought out a third edition of Performance Studies. An Introduction, originally
published in 2002 (following a revised second edition in 2006), accompanied by a
companion website, with resources for instructors and students.
As Tracy Davis argues in her introduction to The Cambridge Companion to
Performance Studies, in the second half of the twentieth century there was first a
‘linguistic turn’ (emphasizing language’s role in constructing perception), and then a
‘cultural turn’ (“tracking the everyday meaning of culture, and culture’s formative
effect on identities”). The twenty-first century seems to be the time for a ‘performative
turn’ (cf. Davis, 2008: 1-8). Based on intense interactions between scholarly and artistic
activity, Performance Studies might indeed be considered as a new perspective in the
epistemology of the social sciences and the humanities. As Schechner writes in his new,
extensive introduction, whose words I will use as final remarks:

Performance Studies came into existence within, and as a response to, the radically
changing intellectual and artistic circumstances of the last third of the twentieth century.
As the twenty-first century unfolds, many people remain dissatisfied with the status
quo. Equipped with ever more powerful means of finding and sharing information – the
internet, cell phones, sophisticated computing – people are increasingly finding the
world not a book to be read but a performance to participate in. […] Performance
Studies is an academic discipline designed to answer the need to deal with the changing
circumstances of the “glocal” […]. My goal is nothing less than making performance
studies a method of analysis, a way to understand the world in its ceaseless becoming,
and a necessary tool for living. (2013: 25, x)

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