Schechner

Works

Two theoretical books, a textbook, and a company.

• Between Theater and Anthropology (1985) contains restored behaviour and the broad-spectrum approach that made performance studies a field.
• Performance Theory (originally Essays on Performance Theory, 1977) sets out the efficacy-entertainment continuum and the relation between ritual and theatre.
• Performance Studies: An Introduction (2002) is the textbook through which most people meet the field.
• The Performance Group and later The Wooster Group are the practical side; environmental theatre was worked out in production rather than on paper.

Central ideas

Three, and the first is what the lineage disagrees about.

• Restored behaviour: twice-behaved behaviour, strips of action separable from their origin and recombinable. Performance is repeatable by definition, which makes training, ritual and rehearsal one kind of thing rather than three.
• The broad spectrum: performance runs from ritual through theatre to everyday life and play, and the analytic tools travel across the range. Widening the object is the founding move of the discipline.
• Efficacy and entertainment as a continuum rather than a distinction: whether a performance is meant to change something or to please an audience is a matter of emphasis, and the emphasis shifts historically.

Distinctive vocabulary

Three terms whose loose use empties them.

• Restored behaviour: action separated from its origin and repeatable. Not imitation and not habit.
• Performance, in the broad-spectrum sense: a category covering ritual, theatre, sport, play and daily conduct. Not a theatrical event.
• Efficacy: the pole at which a performance is meant to accomplish something. Not effectiveness in the ordinary sense.

Debates and disagreements

The field's founding move is also its main problem.

• Whether a category broad enough to include ritual, sport, theatre and ordinary conduct still has analytic content, or whether performance becomes a word for anything a person does with others watching.
• The intercultural charge: the comparative method draws on ritual traditions through Western theatrical categories, which is the same objection that lands on theatre anthropology generally in this work.
• Whether the ritual-to-theatre developmental story he and Turner worked out is history or a schema imposed on it.

Intellectual relationships

A collaboration between a director and an anthropologist made the field.

• Victor Turner, a reference in this work's cultural-anthropological lineage, is the central collaboration: social drama and liminality on one side, restored behaviour and theatre on the other, each borrowing from the other for a decade.
• Goffman, in this same lens lineage, supplies the everyday end of the spectrum, though from sociology rather than from theatre.
• Eugenio Barba, a reference elsewhere in this work, is the adjacent theatre anthropology, more focused on the performer's craft and less on the comparative frame.
• Grotowski's laboratory work is the practical influence on the company as well as on the theory.

How it changes this reading

Schechner is named in the lineage of the Performative-dramaturgical lens, completing it.

• He supplies the lens its widest claim: that the same analytic tools reach ritual, trained practice and ordinary conduct, which is what lets a lens built from theatre be applied to a life at all.
• Restored behaviour is the specific borrowing, and its useful edge is that repetition is not a falling-off from an original. A practice that has been rehearsed is not less genuine than one performed once; twice-behaved is the normal condition rather than a degraded one.
• The caution is the breadth. A category that covers everything explains nothing in particular, so the lens has to say which end of the spectrum it is working at before it can claim anything.
• It is not evidence about any performance, practice, or repetition.

Useful comparisons

The lens is complete with him, and its members disagree about whether performance persists.

• Richard Schechner: restored behaviour — performance as repeatable by definition.
• Peggy Phelan: performance as disappearance — non-reproducible by definition.
• Marvin Carlson: ghosting — what carries over between performances in memory and reception.
• Erving Goffman: everyday conduct, documented at length and with no stage in view.

Where the ideas meet

All four treat performance as constitutive rather than decorative.

• None treats a performance as a decoration over a truer unperformed version.
• All treat the presence of others as part of what is happening.
• Each takes the event as the unit of analysis rather than a script behind it.

Where they part

He and Phelan hold contrary accounts of what performance IS, inside one lineage.

• Restored behaviour makes performance repeatable by definition; the ontology of disappearance makes it non-reproducible by definition. Two members of this lineage are not describing the same thing differently — they disagree about the object.
• Carlson's ghosting sits with Schechner on persistence but locates it in reception rather than in the transmissible strip of behaviour.
• Goffman's performers are untrained and unrehearsed, which is precisely the case restored behaviour is least equipped for, so the broad spectrum joins them at the cost of the concept's sharpness.

Limits

• A category built to cover ritual, theatre and daily conduct at once is weak on any particular case, so it frames a question rather than answering one.
• Restored behaviour describes a structure of transmission and establishes nothing about whether any particular action was rehearsed or repeated.

Criticisms

The objections are about breadth and about method.

• The broad spectrum is charged with dissolving its object: if everything is performance, the term stops discriminating.
• The comparative method reads non-Western ritual through Western theatrical categories, which is the standing intercultural objection to the whole enterprise.
• The developmental story running from ritual to theatre is a schema whose historical support is thin.
• The textbook's synthesis has made the field's contested claims read as settled to successive cohorts of students.

Common misreadings

Four uses this placement does not license.

• Using performance in the broad-spectrum sense while borrowing the authority of close theatrical analysis.
• Treating restored behaviour as imitation or as habit rather than as transmissible action separable from its origin.
• Reading repetition as a falling-off from an authentic first time, which inverts the concept.
• Citing the lens as a single position when two of its members disagree about what performance is.

What remains outside this idea

• It cannot establish that any action was rehearsed, repeated, or transmitted.
• It cannot convert a category about performance into a fact about a person.