Moving Performance to Text: Can Performance Be Transcribed?

Introduction

Transcription is the production of a written version of material originally presented in performative form. In its highest aspiration, it would be the attempt to record transparently and objectively in writing every significant detail of a performance, including the tone and emphasis, pacing and synchronization, and momentum and intensity of events, in the order in which they occur. A transcript differs considerably from a script—even a script with actor's and director's notes. A script is an outline, a prescriptive guide, for the production of a performance—for what a performance may be. It mandates an indefinite number of possible performances. A transcription, by contrast, is a record of a specific performance event. It is, in this sense, a kind of historical document whose purpose is to record every detail of something that has already actually occurred. One might say that a script prescribes the performance, the performance interprets these prescriptions in playing them out, and the transcription attempts to detail the result in writing. Because a transcription records actual rather than prescribed events, it aspires to be the ultimate form of entextualization of performance.

It is interesting, then, given the quality and uniqueness of famous performances, that transcription is regarded as an inferior genre among the many literatures that relate to performance. The bookstores of the National Theatre, the Barbicon, or the Globe bulge with scripts, commentaries, and histories relating to great performance pieces, but no transcripts. My main purpose in this paper is to explore the production and use of this orphaned form of performance-related text and to consider what kind of a representation of a performance a transcript is.

In what follows I will restrict myself largely to discussion of the transcription of verbal and aural components of performance materials. This restriction is not to slight the special complexities of visual transcription but for simplicity, because encompassing the special issues of visual transcription would not add to the general points I wish to make.

What is special about the transcription of verbal art performance? What are we trying to get at in moving a performance to text in this way? To start with, transcription entails much more than the transfer of the verbal content of a performance into text. For me, and I speak as a cultural anthropologist rather than a historian or theorist of the arts, a performance is first and foremost a living event. When it is over, it is gone. There may be another similar performance tomorrow if it doesn't rain, but that is another performance.

The transcription of a performance, if it is to capture its performative qualities, is always more than the entextualization of the verbal or musical content. What seems to me to be of central interest in a performance, especially when studied cross-culturally, is its mode of process: how it works, how it brings about the effects that its participants intend. While this is not the only focus in performance studies, all other concerns—of history, genre, form and practice, aesthetic sensibility and theory, production complexities, dramatic means, and so on—all converge around, or ultimately refer to, the strategic processes by which a performance works. What does it mean to say, in a given culture, that a performance works? For scholars of non-western literatures, as well as for anthropologists, this issue begs the question about the culture within which the performance is embedded, from which it arises as a creative entity, and which it in turn addresses. For an anthropologist, the approach to all these questions, including those about performance, must be ethnographic.

An ethnographic perspective views any performance, in the first instance, as a social event. From this perspective, a performance works only because it has a relationship with (and an effect upon) others: in effect, an "audience." Thus, insofar as a performance is addressed to a responsive audience, it must be investigated as, in...