The Cambridge Introduction to Performance Theory by Simon Shepherd (review)

In his preface to Introduction to Performance Theory, Simon Shepherd offers a get-out for any impatient reader (or reviewer) of his book: "If you want the short-cut introduction to 'performance theory'", he states, turn straight to the section conclusions and the closing note (x). Doing so, though, would deny the pleasures of what he calls "sensuous practices" and it is these, outlined in a middle section (Part II), which help define this latest intervention into the field of performance and theory, happily avoiding any further extensions of the scope of performance as a term, and taking us instead into some carefully constructed and well-defined historical checkpoints, centered on the 1960s.

Indeed, those looking for another ata-glance summary of the key theoretical ideas to which theatre and performance might be subjected will be disappointed with this study as it resolutely addresses performance practice and, without referencing artistic research and with just a nod to ideas of praxis as conceptualized by Stuart Hall, argues persuasively for "performance as a new sort of knowledge" (47-53). That positioning of performance is carefully distinguished from the universalizing tendency of the 'performance as' metaphor known to many undergraduates through richard schechner's work, and rests instead on the idea of performance as a dynamic, "disruptive and uncategorisable activity" (53) which is called upon at specific times and in specific contexts.

Shepherd's sensuous practices include short and lively chapter-treatments of the Situationists, the hippie movement, the architectural performance of the New Babylon project, happenings, live and Body art, the DIY protest movement and Albert Hunt's radical pedagogy practised in Bradford's Regional College of art. These stand as exemplars, drawn exclusively from Europe and the US, of how performance came to be differentiated from theatre, drama or acting, and thereby championed a mobile radicalism. Hunt's pedagogical project, as exemplified in the Russian Revolution 'game' he played with his students in 1967, is one such instance where learning through performance moved beyond the acting out of scripts and scenarios and enabled 'a new sort of thinking about apparently familiar material" (79).

Shepherd cautions at the end of this set of examples that the final section, "Part III: theorising Performance", runs the risk of dissipating the "potency" of these sensuous practices, deviating as it does to follow the concept of performance "into the classrooms of the academy" (136). But do not be tempted to jump forward to his closing note; this section if anything is more not less potent. It offers the best critique of the problematics of US-based Performance studies as a construct and a pseudo-discipline that i have encountered, arguing with precision and meticulous analysis that the narrative of Schechnerian Performance studies in all its professed inclusivity is consciously myopic and backwards-engineered. Read this book to see some alternatives.