Performance Studies refuses to submit itself to fixed categories or labels. It demands the right to co-opt whatever it finds useful in other disciplines, incorporating anthropology, semiotics, and other disparate fields of inquiry into its studies and performances. It strives to be, in the words of Amanda Kemp, “a way of knowing and a way of showing” (Conquergood 152, emphasis added).
As a scholarly pursuit, its origins are steeped in theatrical innovation, semiotics, and other “new” theories of theater, as well as in anthropology. One of the “Creation Myths” surrounding Performance Studies involves the collaboration of anthropologist Victor Turner and theatre theorist Richard Schechner, particularly their collaboration on Between Theater and Anthropology. Elin Diamond finds early hints of it in the Sixties’ experimentation with, and rejection of, standard Western models of theater (Jackson). The “theaterwrights” of the Sixties embraced “…poststructuralist theorizing (Barnes on Brecht, Derrida on Artaud)” to create a theater that sought to de-centralize the notion of textual authority without completely debunking it (Worthen 1093).
One of the core problems with traditional theatrical studies, as elucidated by Dwight Conquergood, is a virtual line of demarcation between study and performance. He notes that this line amounts to a virtual “academic apartheid,” under which both branches suffer. The “division of labor between theory and practice, abstraction and embodiment is an arbitrary and rigged choice, and like all binarisms, it is booby-trapped” (153). Text and author, for Conquergood, should never be elevated above performance. Neither should performance seek a coup d’état against text and author. The solution is to unite them, to explore the intrinsic value of all.
Theorizing from a very different place, anthropologist/sociologist Erving Goffman, in his seminal work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, finds a useful analogy in the vocabulary of theatre to describe the performances enacted by any person when he or she steps into the great stage that is the world. Performance studies, then, is a field formed on these two distinct yet interrelated projects. On the one hand theoreticians like Turner and Schecner were expanding the notion of what theatre was, constrained by the limiting definitions with which earlier theatrical theory had provided them; Goffman, recognizing something decidedly performance-like in the way people were going about real life, shifted the way of thinking about real life, in fact questioning the very authenticity suggested by a loaded word like “real.” Together they formed a movement in which daily life can, and is, naturally interrogated as a performance, whether it’s an off-hand remark at someone’s “phoniness” or a media-driven investigation into the wardrobe of vice-presidential candidates. Goffman identifies three facets of day-to-day performance that will be particularly relevant to our discussion of video blogs. “…[W]hen an individual offers a performance he typically conceals something”(43); “…individuals often foster the impression that the routine they are presently performing is their only routine or at least their most essential one” (48); finally, “the routine character of the performance is obscured…and the spontaneous aspects of the situation are stressed”(49). We will chart the considerations identified by Goffman in the videos of Lemonette, hoping to determine whether, as Steve Dixon says, espousing an essentially undifferentiated view towards performances of self in real life and online, “Cyberspace merely offers an alternative space in which to re-rehearse the always-already divided, fragmented and plural self (http://www.robat.scl.net/content/PaiPres/presencesite/html/dixon00.html).”
