Richard Schechner. Performance Studies: an Introduction.

Kolin, Philip C.

Richard Schechner. Performance Studies: An Introduction. New York. Routledge. 2002. vii + 288 pages, $80 ($27.95 paper), ISBN 0-415-14620-8 (14621-6 paper)

RICHARD SCHECHNER, one of the architects of performance studies as a discipline and the highly respected author of TDR: A Journal of Performance at New York University, has written an invaluable guide to this interdisciplinary scholarly area. A vibrant and emergent field (developed within the last two to three decades), performance studies combines the inquiries and insights of anthropology, art, dance, ethnology, music, philosophy, theater, theology, and a host of other subjects. According to Schechner, performance refers to a "broad continuum of human actions ranging from ritual, play, sports, pop entertainment, performing arts ... everyday life performance ... healing, the media, and the Internet." Illustrating the hybridity of performance worldwide, Schechner surveys everything from Shakespeare to chimpanzee theater, urban happenings, Ramlila (or the play of Ramal, which takes thirty-one days to perform in Ramnagar across "the holy city of Banaras"), colonial mimicry, gender and racial "passing," British prime minister Tony Blair's performance of "informality" before a television camera, the pig-kill dance in Papua New Guinea, and terrorism as a performance event. Eddie Murphy, Leadbelly, and the Road Warrior Wrestling Team share billing with Chekhov, Gandhi, and Shakespeare. For Schechner, "performance studies resists fixed definitions." In fact, like polymers, it may be easier to say what performance is rather than what it is not.

Schechner offers eight invigorating chapters on the modalities of performativity. The earlier ones interrogate the foundational and taxonomic issues of who, how, and why, embracing such topics as "Eight Kinds of Performances," ethical issues of acting, and changing and inventing rituals. His middle chapters turn to the origins, places, and times of performances (sacred and secular); the qualities, bias, and messages of play; and then, in chapters 5 and 6, he offers an exceptionally cogent and lucid philosophical grounding for performance studies in poststructuralism and postmodernism. Using the works of Derrida, Jameson, Foucault, and Richard Foreman, to cite only a few of the many theorists whose insights are included, Schechner demonstrates how "the collapse of categories" and "the evaporation of audience" play major parts in the evolution of performance events. In his final chapter, "Global and Intercultural Performance," Schechner moves into new arenas of Internet (digital vs. written) performances, Hollywood hi-tech scripts, and transcultural diversity.

Of special interest to students of world literature, Schechner judiciously incorporates a goodly amount of modern theater into his analysis of the performance process. Brecht's views on actors, directing, and the audience's alienation illustrate for Schechner a theater that challenges instead of corroborates, one that, like so many other types of performances, "proposes alternative actions, and demystifies events." Schechner also liberally incorporates the theories, scripts, and actor's exercises of Jerzy Grotowski, and Vsevelod Meyerhold before him, to zero in on staging in an "environmental theatre" and performer-actor relationships, which counter traditional views of the audience as passive as the set: perfunctorily realistic, defined, and present. Further demonstrating Schechner's deep knowledge of performance theorists, he surveys the views of Guillermo Gomez-Pe a, a Mexican artist and writer, to explain this new intercultural performance that is, in Gomez-Pe a's words, "cross-racial, polylinguisic, and multicultural."

Schechner's extraordinary breadth of coverage and carefully tuned interpretations of performance studies are complemented by two special features--nearly two hundred photos and drawings of people, events, art, and architecture engaged in the performance process and at least one hundred extracts, or boxed inserts, from the "many voices" who supply "alternative opinions and interruptions," much like "open conversation" and "hyperlinks." Thus, even in its design Schechner's book--a veritable vade mecum--weaves readers and writers, and the author him-sell into the montage of performance.

Philip C. Kolin

University of Southern Mississippi