Performance Theory by Richard Schechner (review)

Book Reviews comparatists who have obviously done research in mher fields. Despite itsedilOrial flaws and imperialist exclusions, Performing Feminisms is therefore a rich book worth buying and reading. JEANNETI'E LAILLOU SAVONA, TRINITY COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO RICHARD SCHECHNER. Peiformance Theory. London: Roulledge 1990. pp. xv, 304, iIlustraled. £'4.95 (PB). Performance Theory is a "revised and expanded edition" of Essays OIl Performance Theory 1970-1976. The earlier, more precisely titled, volume contained "Kinesics and Performance" an essay written with Cynthia Mintz, now excluded. In its place we find two additional essays, onc dated 1966 and the other from 1982, in its earliest version. The latter, "Magnitudes of Perfonnance," venturing boldly into a comprehensive semiotic categorization, dominates the new book. The other essays have been revised in minor and more substantial ways. Whatever it was that was alluded to as "the New Dance" fourteen years ago is now re-designated "postmodern dance" (p. 77) - but with no change in the context or argument in which the phrase appears. Likewise our once "post-industrial" situati.on has become "postmodcrn" (p. 65) by mere syllabic apocopation. Schechncr has always been rather insistent on knowing where it's at, and of writing, ostenSibly, from that address. In a more significant revision, Schechner now provides an elaborate account of his group's performance text of Shepard's The Tooth 0/ Crime. He responds thus to Shepard's aggrieved question about lack of respect for the playwright's vision, but without directly meeting Shepard's challenge. Schechner's answer, in effect, is that the playwright provided a point ofdeparture for the production, which was then recorded in written and photographic form and now emerges, with a permanence rivalling that of the subJated play, as an alternative vision and "script." "Script" is one ofSchechner's four key terms. (They constitute the title ofone of the essays and are used elsewhere in the volume.) "Script" means roughly what J have just called "performance text": what is played and is rehearsable but is not necessarily written down and makes no claims to be literature. Schechner's other three terms are "drama" (the performance of plays - by the luckier playwrights!); "theater" (specific occasions of performances) and "performance" itself. In the earlier essays, this last term is scarcely distinct from whatever could be described as behaviour, human or non-human. In the last essay, however, "performance " becomes a yet more inclusive category. Here the objects of study are "performances of different magnitudes, from the very longest, lasting months or even years, to split-second events; from the largest, spanning millions of miles, to the smallest 'brain events' of conceptual art - performances making no spatial claims at all; from clear examples of theater, dance and music to what Clifford Geertz might lift his eyebrows at as the blurriest ofgenres: the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-1980, a bar mitzvah, famous 570 Book Reviews murder trials (like those of Klaus von Bulow or Jean Harris), Hindu temple services, title boxing matches, TV soap operas, the Yaqui Easter Passion play, orthodox EuroAmerican theater and dance, noh drama, ramlila, etc." (p. 257). In Schechner, "perfonnance" is not identifiable with "ritual" and is not its derivative (as enthusiastically and influentially proposed by the Cambridge anthropologists in the earlier years of the century, who are here recalled); neither is it precisely the same as " play." which Schechnerdeploys as ritual'5 antithesis. His "perfonnance" is an essential something in human and animal behaviour that is fundamental to both ritual and play. Schechner would probably find congenial T. S. Eliot's remark (in an early essay, "The Beating of a Drum") that the desire to beat a drum precedes the reason for doing so whether to end a drought or whatever - that plausibility requires. Like its predecessor, the present volume is not the exposition of a coherent theory but rather a series of speculative essays that throw off richly suggestive notions as they attempt to forge links between Schechner's anthropological observations of the (almost exclusively patriarchal) rituals of "primitive peoples" (p. 39), his readingsofsuch works as Goodall's on chimpanzee behaviour and Huizinga's Homo Ludens, and his own experiments in the theatre. He is particularly ambitious...