By Means of Performance
Intercultural Studies of Theatre and Ritual

These essays by leading anthropologists, artists and performance theorists, explore performance behaviour in different social contexts.

Richard Schechner (Edited by), Willa Appel (Edited by)

9780521339155, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 25 May 1990

320 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm, 0.51 kg

The field of performance studies embraces performance behaviour of all kinds and in all contexts, from everyday life to high ceremony. This volume investigates a wide range of performance behaviour - dance, ritual, conflict situation, sports, storytelling and display behaviour - in a variety of circumstances and cultures. It considers such issues as the relationship between training and the finished performance; whether performance behaviour is universal or culturally specific; and the relationships between ritual aesthetics, popular entertainment and religion, and sports and theatre and dance. The volume brings together essays from leading anthropologists, artists and performance theorists to provide a definitive introduction to the burgeoning field of performance studies. It will be of value to scholars, teachers and students of anthropology, theatre, folklore, semiotics and performance studies.

List of figures
Notes of contributors
Introduction
1. Are there universals of performance in myth, ritual, and drama?
2. Magnitudes of performance
3. Liminality: a synthesis of subjective and objective experience
4. The Yaqui deer dance at Pascua Pueblo, Arizona
5. The Yaqui point of view: on Yaqui ceremonies and anthropologies
6. Performance of precepts/precepts of performance: Hasidic celebrations of Purim in Brooklyn
7. The significance of performance for its audience: an analysis of three Sri Lankan rituals
8. What does it mean to 'become the character': power, presence, and transcendence in Asian in-body disciplines of practice
9. Korean shamans: role playing through trance possession
10. The practice of noh theatre
11. The profanation of the sacred in circus clown performances
12. Ethnographic notes on sacred and profane performance
13. The spatial sense of the sacred in Spanish America and the American South and its tie with performance
14. Space and context
15. The transformation of consciousness in ritual performances: some thoughts and questions
16. Universals of performance
or amortising play
Appendix
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Anthropology [JHM], Theatre studies [AN]