Performance and the Socialized Text

Textual scholarship has dealt at length with the socialization of the texts of novels, poems, and essays, genres that audiences experience by reading texts directly off the page (texts thus read might be called “page texts”). But much less attention has been given to the socialization of the texts of plays, music and choreographed dance (these might be called “stage texts”). There is a reciprocity between stage texts and the performers who use them that has no counterpart in the relationship between page texts and their reading audiences. Performers often depart from their received texts when performing, and they often alter the texts from which they perform to reflect such departures. They add memoranda for performance, they cut or change content, and they add material, sometimes to meet the requirements of specific productions, venues, or audiences, and sometimes to accommodate their own performing strengths or weaknesses. Moreover, performing works travel through time in both textual and (textless) performing traditions; often elements from performing traditions pass into textual traditions. Performing works traditionally seek novelty of interpretation, and this means that in their “natural” states, performing works are continuously changing, responding to the imperative “adapt or die”. The texts of performing works both insure a measure of stability and accommodate controlled change by selectively incorporating altered or added material into the textual tradition.