Performed Imaginaries by Richard Schechner (review)

When in the course of disciplinary formation it becomes necessary to borrow, break, or blend the methods cherished within other existent fields and cleave the benefits of their aims with a new set of epistemic claims, a deep faith in provocation demands at every turn a wariness of disciplinarity itself, an openness to critique, an eagerness continually to engage with the emergence of other interventionist formations. Those of us gathered within the ongoing project of performance studies may hold such imperatives to be self-evident; but as our own uncomfortable institutionalization becomes more concretized year over year, it bears reminding that we have been assembled both by provocation and a distinct distrust of the very disciplinarity that now often seems to define us.

The figure most often associated with our institutionalization, at least in the contemporary era, is of course Richard Schechner: the prolific provocateur whose literatures of expansion have enabled our (now taken-for-granted) promiscuous wanderings through methods and fields, across geographies of difference, betwixt and between modes of thought. It is perhaps ironic—or, in a different light, the ultimate sign of having fully arrived on the institutionalized scene of academia—that a field like ours would lay any claim to a founding father; but here we are, or seem to be: it is hard to imagine being able to read Schechner’s latest, Performed Imaginaries, as just another offering to the growing list of performance studies texts. To his great credit, Schechner’s name has never quite become anything like a brand; still, it gathers unto itself an aura of disciplinary authority in part by the persistent historicity of its recitation, in part by the self-referential manner in which it circulates (and circulates itself).

Also to his great credit, Performed Imaginaries is not a scriptural text nor does it seem to want to be. Like the field itself, the book eschews expectations for an entitled, over-arching claim with component chapters aggregating under a single banner beyond the inviting query “What if . . .?” That is to say, the plural imaginaries of the book’s title are distinct and diverse, traversing multiple routes of conceptual traffic that do not intersect at any single rhetorical node, that do not chart any singular orientation, that do not collectively embody any single-minded aim. Linked instead by the elocutionary position of their author—by the very historicity of work that gives his name weight—the chapters represent vibrant revisions of previous moments in Schechner’s long career, situated here firmly in the twenty-first century. For this reader that may be the book’s most generous gift: it is relentlessly, unapologetically personal, gracious (although not exactly humble) in those moments when Schechner questions and revises previous arguments, eccentric and even delightfully cantankerous in its wide-flung insistence that performance is endlessly complex in its profound value to make other worlds, and wildly uninhibited in the competing interests it can serve.

But for this reader, this is also the book’s greatest frustration: as a text that will no doubt find itself on performance studies syllabi in many different (and different kinds of) classrooms, Performed Imaginaries is particularly uneven in its citational summoning of many crucial collectives of scholars who have worked in or adjacent to the field. Nowhere is this more evident than in what is arguably the chapter most likely to appear on introductory syllabi (at least in how it construes a disciplinary narrative for new initiates), “The 1960s, TDR, and Performance Studies.” Read as intellectual memoir, this interview-based chapter is fascinating in its account of the many cross-pollinations—across continents, cultural institutions, practices, and scholarly traditions—that have given breath and wind to Schechner’s work and legacy. But read as genealogy—and because it is included here, in this book, by this author, it will be read as genealogy—it seems almost willful in its omission of the many directions (beyond New York University) the field has taken: the intimate ethnographies of Dwight Conquergood and D. Soyini Madison, the insistent spectatorial generosity...