to Ten Articles Main Page
Abrahams, Roger D. 1981. “In and Out of Performance.”
In Folklore and Oral Communication (special issue of Narodna
Umjetnost, Yugoslavia), pp. 69-78.
“In and Out of Performance”
Roger D. Abrahams
[beginning of page 69]
By altering the focus of folklorists from the study of texts
in transmission
to the analysis of “artistic communication in small groups,” we have
rearranged
our primary concerns from the lore to the folk. That this has
been
a useful move is not under dispute, for we now are able to characterize
the socio-cultural environment of traditional expression in ever-finer
detail. But in the excitement of entering into this important
discussion
of man’s creative capacities, we have manufactured a number of problem
points which now need discussion and clarification. By allowing
ourselves
to redefine folklore with regard to its artistic dimensions, and how
the
size and social character of the community enter into the creative and
recreation process, we have forgotten that a great number of our basic
concerns are not, in fact, artistic performances. Games,
festivals,
and rituals, for instance, are alternative traditional expressive
occasions
which are neither artistic nor held in small groups. To be sure,
their very expressivity has led us to describe these activities in
performance
terms. But a game is a game, not a performance, and to regard the
one as an example of the other is to commit an error of common
sense.
We need to develop a methodology for describing games (and festivals,
and
rituals) which is appropriate to them but which can utilize some of the
insights developed in the performance-centered methodology.
Another critical problem has arisen with the change in the
definition
of folklore. By emphasizing the expressive and artistic factors
in
small group communication, we now find ourselves in need of making
discretions
in regard to what communications are artistic and what aren’t. In
essence, this means that we find ourselves confronted with the need to
place performances within the communication system of the community
under
investigation. It is this problem which I will address in this
essay,
seeking to show what resonant meanings performance has in English and
thus
where we might begin to describe the continuities and contrasts between
everyday unselfconscious expressive [beginning of page 70]
activities
and the more reflexive stylized activities of folk groups, however they
may be defined.
Using performance as the central term for any
cultural argument
involves certain obvious problems, for in everyday talk and academic
discussion
we employ the term in a number of different senses. (See
especially:
Hymes 1972; Goffman 1974, p. 224 ff; Bauman 1976; Ben-Amos and
Goldstein
1975.) One special difficulty -- it has been appropriated as a
term-of-art
in Chomskyan linguistics, referring to ‘rendered talk’ in contrast to
competence.
But there is an ordinary sense in which a performance refers to
the unique coming together of a special occasion, a performer or
performers,
a tradition involving past experiences on similar occasions, and an
audience
capable of observing and judging by aesthetic criteria. In this
pure
sense, the term operates distinctly, describing a special kind of
focused
interaction in which a great many conventions and uses are called into
play so that we know what to look forward to, and how we may
appropriately
respond should our expectations be lived up to.
Performance, when it is used on less specially licensed and
set-aside
occasions, operates in analogy to performance-proper. By
employing
pure performance or performance-proper for this state of
socio-aesthetical
excitation and celebration, as I noted, I do not mean to ignore in any
way the self-conscious dimension of other kinds of scenes. To the
contrary, what I attempt here is to establish the continuities between
behavior in other kinds of scenes and events, and these more fully
focused
and stylized enactments.
Dell Hymes make an imposing contrast between behavior,
conduct, and
performance that is useful here: “there is behavior, anything
and
everything that happens; there is conduct, behavior under the
aegis
of social norms, cultural rules; there is performance, when one
or more persons assume responsibility for presentation” (Hymes 1975, p.
18). These three vary directly with the degree of attention to
the
ordering of particulars of acts, especially the ways in which they are
carried out. Conduct would seem to involve the sort of monitoring
with regard to the obligatory that we discussed with reference to
ritual.
On the other hand, performance achieves its status because
responsibility
is assumed by the designated performers, and because of the openness of
the presentation by which the activities are underscored as morally and
aesthetically significant. Responsibility, then, relates both to
the level of self-consciousness in the form and subject of the
enactment
and to the social norms by which those highlighted actions are judged
as
good or bad, graceful or awkward.
In both behavior and performance we observe interactional
rules.
But in everyday behavior, the rules act as guidelines by which
participation
and exchange are facilitated; in performance-play, on the other hand,
the
behavior options, including both the interactional languages and the
activity
itself, are considerably more restricted. The transaction occurs
between individuals who are, in some way, “not themselves.” In
ordinary
interactions an attempt is made by each participant to establish
identity
by self-casting in a role and by pursuing an expressive “line”
consistent
with that role. In pure-performance, role is
self-consciously
divided -- the performer establishing distance between his real-self as
player and the role he is playing.
This division between the real- and the player-self is a
tricky one
at best, for there are those performers, even in the most unelaborated
societies, who use the license of performing to allow the more real
self
to speak out. Lyric poets, given the conventions of the closeted
performance (i.e., both writer and reader address each other in
seclusion,
discoursing on the social state of seclusion) draw upon this
subjunctive
modality of [beginning of page 71] presentation of self,
speaking
as if they are both fictional and yet more real in that situation than
in any other. The performer has these many stances of self
constantly
available, and often manipulates pronouns and terms to keep one
guessing
as to how personal his points of reference are getting. The “I”
is
confused with the impersonal or proverbial “they” or “one”; the “is”
becomes
the “ought” or “will be” in many strange ways.
Not that this is either a confusing or even a weak strategy
of presentation.
In fact, it is precisely this ambiguity which the poetic system employs
as a means of establishing maneuvering space for performers, as playful
means of testing the boundaries between the real and the fictive
worlds.
Furthermore, performers themselves often play in this ambiguity.
In the United States, for instance, bluesmen have been especially
articulate
on the subject because of the identification, by the audience, of the
singer
and the songs he composes and sings. Especially if he performs
for
white audiences, he is constantly asked about the relationship between
his songs and his life. For instance, the noted bluesman John Lee
Hooker responding to such a question, notes that:
You can hear a certain type of record be
playin’. You
can be feelin’ very normal, nothin’ on your mind, period. But
it’s
somethin’ that have happened in your life, and sometime if you can’t
stand
to listen to the record you take a walk or take a ride or get in your
car
because you don’t want to be hurt so deep that it cause heartache and
things.
Because you’d rather not to hear it than to hear it. Because
there’s
somethin’ sad in there that give you the blues; somethin’ that reach
back
in your life or in some friend’s life of yours, or that make you think
of what have happened today and it is so true, that if it didn’t happen
to you, you still got a strong idea -- you know those things is goin’
on.
So this is very touchable, and that develops into the blues.
(Oliver,
p. 164)
The songmaker-performer then finds his place, bringing focused energies
and craft into the moment of performance. Through fabricating an
artistic object, an item of performance, the reception accorded
the performer relies all-too-obviously on the responses of others, on
how
much coordinated response is triggered by the enactment. The
response
itself will be determined by how well the performer controls his medium
and successfully channels his energies; but it also relies on how fully
the item responds to actual scenes from life -- or, as Hooker puts it,
how “touchable” a common situation is, and therefore how much it “hits
you” as a human being who is also a member of an audience and a
community.
The dialectic between art and life: on the one hand, we
witness the
interplay of artist and genre; on the other, between the artist as
voice
of tradition and as one who speaks in his own voice from personal
experience.
In non-traditional communities, the performer must increasingly demand
that the audience wonder how much he sings of himself and how much he
draws
on conventional observation and artistic fabrication. Even
artists
who perform the works of others beg the question of originality and
authenticity
in choice of repertoire of which works they play on which occasion, and
by the intensity and stylistic nuance by which they are played on that
occasion. Again, this is not simply a problem confronted by the
sophisticated
artist who expresses himself reflexively, like a Hemingway or a Proust,
making his life a work of art. Listen to another blues singer,
Henry
Thomas, holding forth on “me, not me,” speaker in his songs:
[beginning of page 72] There’s several types
of blues
-- there’s blues that connects you with personal life -- I mean you can
tell it to the public as a song, in a song. But I mean, they
don’t
take it seriously which you are tellin’ the truth about. They
don’t
always think seriously that it’s exactly you that you are talkin’
about.
At the same time it could be you, more or less it would be you for you
to have the feelin’. You express yourself in a song like
that.
Now this particular thing reach others because they have experienced
the
same condition in life so naturally they feel what you are sayin’
because
it happened to them. It’s the sort of thing that you kinda like
to
hold to yourself, yet you want somebody to know it. I don’t know
how you say that two ways; you like somebody to know it, yet you hold
it
to yourself. Now I’ve had the feelin; which I have disposed it in
a song, but there’s some things that have happened to me that I
wouldn’t
dare tell, not to tell -- but I would sing about them. Because
people
in general they take the song as an explanation for themselves -- they
believe this song is expressing their feelin’s instead of the one that
singin’ it. They feel that maybe I have just hit upon somethin’
that’s
in their lives, and yet at the same time it was some of the things that
went wrong with me too. (Oliver, pp. 164-5)
This is not to argue that life follows art, or vice-versa, or that
to sing the blues you must experience them. Rather, there is a
space
between life and art within which the performer and his audience
exchange
the particulars of aesthetic and moral experience, an exchange held
self-consciously.
This is a space in which we expect, indeed count on, a mix-up of
personal
pronouns, an inner discussion as to whether the lyric exposes the
singer
or just life itself, including the experience of the hearer.
This self-consciousness of the performer is one of the
defining characteristics
of performance. Indeed, there seems to be a minimal set of
conditions
for events of pure performance: 1) occasions and situations in which
performance
is approved, indeed, expected, and which therefore carry a residuum of
energies which the performance brings into focus or coordination; 2)
members
of the community who are given license to perform; 3) conventional
patterns
of expectation, stylized ideal types of expression announced by the
framing
of the event by which the participative energies of the performer and
audience
may be coordinated to some degree; and 4) a repertoire of actual items
of performance which fill the formal requirements of the generic
expectations
that are available to performers, and thus are regarded as appropriate
to these performance events (cf. Hymes 1974, pp. 51-62).
For a performance to occur then, there must be a coming
together of
acknowledged performers, marked times and places and occasions of
performance,
a generic sense by which the performance may be followed and
participated
in (i.e., energies shared) and a tradition which carries with it items
of performance appropriately employed by performers on those specific
occasions.
This argument would pose no descriptive problems were it not that one
school
of commentators or another has defined performances with reference to
only
one of those dimensions -- for example, when an item of performance is
mistaken for the whole event. Each of these dimensions may be
observed
in communicative interaction other than in performances; the more they
are found together, the more we tend to agree that a performance is
going
on, and that a social activity has also become an aesthetic event.
[beginning of page 73] The problems of definition
have been confounded
because performance terms have been employed to describe the ordering
of
everyday behaviors. Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic model has been
paralleled
by the work of the symbolic interactionist and role-theory sociologist,
all drawing upon the language of theatrical performances to describe
the
“acting out” of non-theatrical scripts (Burke 1945; Goffman 1959;
Burns;
but see Messenger et al. 1962). Yet the difference between
situated
behavior and a theatrical or literary piece is patent: the analyst must
interpose his own description of behavior to make an interaction a
“scene”
or a text. It is the reporting and not the behavior itself then
which
is subject to “literary” analysis. But this act of interpretation
is, after all, merely a more self-conscious and finely-articulated
rendering
of part of ordinary social process -- we all interpret behavior as
gossips
and friends-in-common constantly if not quite so fully as either
apologists,
novelists, or semioticians.
Whether we agree on what the underlying patterns are and how
many alternative
modes of behavior may be accommodated within a scene or event, we have
little difficulty in agreeing on some portion of that underlying set of
rules or expectation patterns that make up the basis of our
socio-cultural
lives. These norms, in fact, provide the kind of expectations
which,
when fulfilled, make us feel comfortable, so that we can “be
ourselves.”
Or they are the sort of patterning which, when they are not understood
fully or not accepted wholly by others, are potential sources of
embarrassment,
confusion, or a judgment that others must be insane. Each
familiar
scene that we enter into, then, has a kind of scenario, a schema which
is part of a community’s equipment for living, carried into recurrent
scenes
in common by the participants. And each event has an equally
patterned
set of scenes, a cluster of interrelated interpretable activities that
are related in an equally familiar way. Each scene and event,
however,
is brought to life most fully by those entering into it with these
expectations,
but with a need to push them to the limits of unacceptability.
That
is, in describing the ‘norms’ of behavior one should never forget the
ones
in our midst who constantly test that norm for purposes of social
enlivenment.
All enactments share this sense of underlying form and
patterned expectation
of development. But it is through the mimesis, the imitation of
life
in performances, that we come to recognize these familiar occasions and
the sentiments conventionally attached to the scenes as they
develop.
Which is not to argue that it is only through performance that
we
come to recognize the typical. But the involvement of
performances
in helping us become conscious of typicality, and in getting our
sentiments
within the enactment, provides us with a common sense way of being able
to think about and talk about life as well as live it. This is
why,
of all the enactment forms, performances are the ones which most nearly
approximate everyday life, and in which we can therefore draw on the
relationship
most often and most fully.
It is precisely these shared patterns of expectation which,
when they
are employed in a state of pure performance, we call genres.
Genre, especially as the term is employed in performance-centered
discussions,
means the accrued patterns of expectations carried in common into
aesthetic
encounters by performers and audience members. Such a generic
approach
underscores the means by which participation and interpretation is
encouraged.
As Jonathan Culler notes with regard to literary performance: “Genres
are
no longer taxonomic classes, but groups of norms and expectations which
help the reader assign functions to various elements of the work”
(Culler,
p. 28). Insofar as all interactional events involve formalities
and
appropriate languages (variously referred to also as media, [beginning
of page 74] ‘codes,’ ‘registers,’ ‘varieties,’ or ‘dictions’), the
differences between performance on the level of genre and other more
casual
interaction lie primarily in the intensive way in which the formal
elements
are marked and framed, so that the occasion carries with it that
special
cue that announces that that special kind of intensive play called
performance
is going on.
As with any language development, for the performance event
to succeed,
there must be a mutual competence of both performer and
audience
arising from the common expectations and understandings surrounding the
genre. Thus we may distinguish between the productive
competence
of the performer and the receptive competence of the
audience.
The former recognizes that performers draw upon genres as “an
invitation
to form” (Guillen, p. 107), utilizing conventional pattern-markers in
channeling
their creative energies and in terms that can be followed by the
audience.
The latter points to the audience’s capacity to accept this invitation,
their familiarity with the pattern and the markers, and their ability
to
bring their past experience with similarly situated performances to
bear
on the present experience as a means of understanding, participating
in,
and judging what is going on.
Though performances are highly stylized modes of
interaction, the recognition
of generic schemas is no more immediate than the similar naming of
scenes
and events in less formal and marked occasions. Furthermore, the
same competencies are involved in everyday scenes, though we don’t
judge
behavior by quite the same criteria as performance. But there is
a very great difference between the competencies and the expectation
patterns
carried in common into the interaction when the communication is
conversational,
and when it is openly designated a performance. In the case of
the
former, it is openly designated a performance. In the case of the
former, it is precisely these patterns which the interactants, by
convention,
decide to bracket out, to overlook; while in the latter, the patterns
provide
the basis of what is foregrounded, highlighted, defining the occasion
as
performance. To be sure, in performances a similar bracketing out
occurs in the very dimension of the interaction which is most fully
stressed
in conversational scenes. Conversations openly mark those
dimensions
of the communication which stress the relationship between the
participants.
Any elements of formal style in conversation must, therefore, be made
to
seem to arise by chance and must be explained away or overlooked.
Performances, on the other hand, highlight such stylistic
efforts.
This emphasis on style is what Bauman refers to when he notes that
performance
holds up communication to aesthetic judgment by causing us to focus on
manner and formal control as well as content (Bauman 1977). But
it
should also be noticed that by so doing, performances tend to bracket
out
any markings of interpersonal exchange taking place between performer
and
audience. This is not to say that there are no such reminders --
to the contrary, it is just such meta-devices which are crucial in
maintaining
the interpersonal dimension -- but we agree by this fiction about
fictions
to judge these as non-defining features of the genre (Babcock, in
Bauman
1977). With performance items and genres we agree to recognize
only
the formal and stylized features of expression and mask out those
informal
means by which the impersonal contact is obtained.
With both items and genres of performance the most profound
structural
feature is the “idea” of the genre or item. We would expect one
who
has a performance competence (productive or receptive) to be able to
give
a schematic rendering of generic characteristics and constraints, as
well
as the general lineaments of representative items as [beginning of
page
75] they conform to the genre. But we could point to a
similar
capacity for a rendering of the scenarios or scripts of everyday scenes
and events.
Scripting indicates that the interaction is usefully to be
interpreted
as a dramatic narrative which develops through accumulated experience,
direct and indirect (through reportings of the sexual activity of
others,
through personal observation).
Participants in sexual interactions, for instance, are
mutually aware
of such a scripting. By engaging in the requisite exchanges, they
implicitly accept the roles and role-relationship suggested by the
existence
of the scripts. In fact, lovers (or would-be lovers) must make a
number of moves or this particular dance of life breaks down. Not
that such interactions are wholly determined; there are, obviously
enough,
a wide variety of ways in which seduction or some other kind of sexual
coming together may be carried out, thus a number of places in the
script
at which vital choices are to be made.
With the love-making script the differences between life and
art are
clear; though there may be a recognition by the participants that they
are following a script, they also maintain the fiction that this
recognition
will not be openly acknowledged. “Just playing a role” or
“walking
through a scene” destroys the very basis of trust on which the
relationship
is predicated. Furthermore, such accusations may be made if the
lovers
are not in full agreement as to where they are in the script.
Not only is learning to “make love” thus scripted; it is an
observable
part of a longer script, that of courtship, which is itself one kind of
drama in the even larger epic movement of growing up. The
relationship
between the various levels of scripting is crucial, of course, in an
understanding
of the developmental pattern. The question asked by a beginner in
any developing set of scenes, “What do I do next?”, indicates that
there
is not only a recognition of wholeness to the scripting, but an ability
to discuss the vital interrelation of the parts as well as an
apprehension
of the overall conformation of the pattern.
Perhaps I am arguing little more than that communication
events may
have a beginning, middle, and end, and that there are stylistic cues
arising
from the event which not only give persistent clues as to what kind of
interaction is being carried on, but approximately where the
participants
are in the life history of the event. The same may be said, only
more so, of performances. A difference lies in the openness by
which
the exchange is marked, and therefore the degree of stylization,
predictability,
and redundancy acknowledged as a formal part of the scene.
Openness
of framing, cuing, and underlining, moreover, permits a potentially
higher
degree of coordination and focus.
Performance is thus characterizable in terms of the formal
integrity
of the items and the use of conventional and highly marked
characteristics
as a means of maintaining a high level of participation. But this
degree of self-conscious formalization is only one of the set of
defining
characteristics of performance. Furthermore, there are a number
of
scene and event-types which are notable for their high degree of
formality
and predictability, but which are clearly not pure-performances --
scenes
such as conferences, receptions, formal dinners, even saying mass.
Indeed, one way we classify scene-types is with regard to
their relative
formality and singularity of focus. We have, for instance, a
number
of scenes, all of which might be termed “conversations” because the
register
employed is conversational, and the basic interactional rule is the
“I-talk-you-listen;
you-talk-I-listen” one associated with nearly all states-of-talk in
Western
Culture. All participants ideally have access to entering the [beginning
of page 76] conversation. Obviously, the more formal the
scene,
the greater the limitations on where one may gain this access.
These
scenes vary with regard to formality or role-relation or situation, and
with the intensity of the discussion. Thus we distinguish such
conversational
scenes as “just talking,” having a conversation, brainstorming, holding
a seminar, having a meeting, and so on, with regard to how much
formality
is brought to bear on the occasion -- that is, how overt the rule
system
is which guarantees access to the state-of-talk. Notice also that
the more formal the occasion, the longer the period each participant is
given to talk, the more careful his presentation must be (i.e., the
point
being made must be kept clear, as must the relevance of each segment of
talk to that point), the more the spatial environment will be clearly
divided,
the more fixed to a place in the environment the participant becomes,
and
so forth.
There are other dimensions of conversation which may reflect
increasing
depth and intensity. For instance, the more fully an occasion is
framed and prepared for, the greater the formality and therefore the
more
monitoring of the interactional code will occur. Though we may
feel
that we are talking personally and in ordinary conversational ways when
we bump into a friend in the street, when we meet at a cocktail party,
a formal dinner, in a receiving line, or at a funeral, we also know
that
there is an increasing sense of formality in this set of scenes, that
we
are more self-conscious about our relationships on the more formal
occasions,
and we are therefore more studied about how we speak and what we
discuss.
Furthermore, on some of these occasions everyday roles may be so
intensified
that the interaction becomes stylized to the point of virtually making
“canned” speeches (such as a father-of-the-bride makes to even his best
friends at the wedding reception). Such rehearsed or learned
strips
of talk are more likely to arise during periods of great stress, such
as
when we know we are going to ‘have a scene’ with someone, and we
consequently
go over, in our heads, what we are going to say, so that it may not
only
“come out right” but also eloquently.
Not only a sensing of social hierarchy induces this growing
use of formulaic
and formal convention, dramatizing antagonisms will do the same,
especially
in situations in which the conflict is, by consent, controlled.
Again
one can observe a progression (or declension) from “conversations” to
"discussions”
to "heated discussions” to “having it out.” Furthermore, there
are
other scenes of conflict which still maintain the conversational back
and
forth ways of talking but which are even more fully preformulated --
scenes
such as debates, trials, hearings, and so forth. In such events,
not only are the rules of access to talk more fully spelled out, but
rule-keepers
are appointed to guarantee that success.
With the increasing formalization and the accompanying
growth of self-consciousness
in the interaction, the scenes become more performance-like. The
closer to the surface the marking places in the schema are, the more we
judge behavior by the performance criteria of appropriateness of style
as well as content. But so long as conversational rules apply,
the
fiction of spontaneity and open access to the state-of-talk must be
maintained.
Though such scenes may seem rehearsed, they are not in fact rehearsable
in the same sense that pure performances are. This is obvious
enough
if one compares real and a dramatized conversation in a play, for the
staged
interaction contains many cues which remind the audience that they are
not just overhearing the interaction but are being “let in” on
it.
These cues consist of a number of stylistic features, all of which
represent
modification of conversational patterns to help the audience “overhear”
more clearly. Thus, there is considerably less voice overlap (a
stylistic
intensification of the [beginning of page 77]
“I-talk-you-listen,
you-talk-I-listen” rule), a slower pacing, amplification, a
modification
of eye-contact possibilities so as to include the audience, and so
on.
The pacing of the stage-conversation also allows for audience response,
especially in the case of comedy. Furthermore, the staged
enactment
is framed in a very different manner given the occasion, the stage
setting,
and the behavioral cues that announce that the roles being enacted are
not “real” -- i.e., are not to be employed by these players in any
place
but in this setting and on this occasion.
Intensification and formalization then bring the everyday
closer to
pure performance. The same could be said for introducing playful
motives into the encounter, for joking also makes participants more
conscious
of the formal dimension of any expressive transaction.
Furthermore,
play of any sort (performance-play or otherwise) may deepen in response
to a growing social investment. With performance, game, or even
festive-play,
the more agonistic the motive of playing, the greater will be the
formality,
the greater the amount of “practice” is appropriate, and the more
self-conscious
the rules and the stylistic niceties become (Geertz, 1973, pp.
412-53).
Though agon is the prime feature of game-play, it also operates in some
kinds of performances (like flyting, scolding, playing the dozens, and
other such formal yet playful castigations). Of course, agon
provides
the dramatic interest in theatrical performances and much mummery in
dialogue.
The numerous types of intensifying procedures operate in
performances,
drawing on vocabularies of heightened awareness characteristic of this
mode of enactive playing. The most obvious of such devices arise
from the meta-dimension of performances -- with the use of, say, plays
within plays, or songs about writing songs or the experience of singing
them. Such reflexivity underscores the special position in which
the performer puts himself forward as leader of the revels. But
meta-performance
factors will also confuse the performer-audience relationship because
of
the pronoun-questions they bring up. When a singer, for instance,
sings about his guitar, his song, his experiences as a singer in front
of an audience or on the road, he is casting doubt on the assumed
distinction
between the singer and the speaking persona within the song. Does
he represent himself, in his situations and sentiments, or simply an
idealized
singing figure, reflecting on the conventional situations presented
within
the song?
With sung songs we enter into the situation of
performance-proper in
the main. Singing, with its shifting of vocabularies, codes, and
conventions, is also available in less intense scenes, ones in which a
song or a snatch of one simply is used as a quotative device in the
midst
of a more casual, conversational interaction. Embedding a song in
a conversation is certainly more strange-making than introducing, say,
a proverb into this kind of interaction; but obviously the differences
are of degree rather than kind. Both involve a shifting of the
pronoun
system, and by extension, a diminution in the degree of responsibility
for the quoted words of the proverb or song taken by the speaker.
This shift of “voice” is one of the most common devices of heightening
awareness.
To express oneself at all, one must be given license to
engage in talk.
What we are really concerned with in pure performance however is
obtaining
the license to suspend everyday interactional rules, “to hold the
floor”
as it were, to engage in a range and intensity of expressive activities
that play around with interactions, roles, and other social norms and
ordering
devices. To successfully seize such license, one must develop
capacities
which justify, through the demonstration of expressive control, the
relaxation
of these rules.
[beginning of page 78] In each culture conventions
accumulated
through experience remind community members of when and how
performances
may occur. These conventions assist in interpreting the event, in
framing it and providing the cues that tell us constantly where we
are.
These conventions prepare us for the rhythmic consistencies and
repetitions
which are essential to the experience and to participation in community
entertainment and celebration.
[This essay is an excerpt from a book-in-progress, presently
entitled
A
Poetics of Everyday Life. In it, I attempt to distinguish
between
different types of play: games, festival and celebration, and
performance.
Each type of expressive occasion is discussed in its pure form and in
relation
to the employment of its play motives in everyday interactions.
The
argument is marked by the semantic limitations of drawing on the key
terms
as they are used in American English.]
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