17 - What Performance Studies is: version 2: Oral interpretation

Summary

While Conquergood's mapping of the issues may have derived from his own particular combination of oral interpretation and ethnography, the basic characteristics which he attributes to performance are shared pretty widely among those who come to the subject from oral interpretation.

There is a crucial difference, however. Conquergood's engagement with anthropology more or less put him in the same territory as Richard Schechner, with his enthusiasm for social sciences. Both men lionised Victor Turner. So although Conquergood's department was based in the discipline of oral interpretation he deviated from the disciplinary norm. And that norm insisted on some rather different emphases. An early statement of these comes from Conquergood's senior colleague at Northwestern, Wallace Bacon. Bacon was the great driving force behind oral interpretation's change to Performance Studies, indeed the magisterial authority of Wikipedia itself pronounces him the founder of Performance Studies. Somewhat more soberly, Strine, Long and Hopkins suggest that Bacon was one of three authors who provided ‘the conceptual framework for text-centered studies that draw on performance-related insights to supplement the textual analysis of literary scholarship’. Alongside Bacon, Don Geiger made a ‘theoretical integration of American New Criticism and principles of dramatism’ and Thomas Sloan argued for ‘the interrelationships among oral performance, rhetoric, and literary criticism’, both in the mid-1960s (Strine, Long and Hopkins 1990: 182). For all three performance is deeply connected with, bound into the analysis and effects of, text. In Bacon's words oral interpretation teaches ‘the art of performing texts – not simply the art of performing’. If some versions of Performance Studies were to pride themselves on their disciplinary inclusivity or lack of definition, Bacon does the reverse and insists on specificity: ‘we are not, in essence, anthropologists, nor folklorists, nor sociologists, nor political scientists’. For him ‘Our center is the interaction between readers and texts.’ This interaction provided the transformative power of the educational project, in that it ‘enriches, extends, clarifies, and (yes) alters the interior and even the exterior lives of students through the power of texts’. It also provides its ethical centre: the performance of texts develops ‘that sense of the other so crucial to any concept of education as a humanizing, liberalizing experience’ (1984: 84).

Instituting the inclusive classroom

Here in miniature are the aims and values that were to be so often reiterated in the work of all those who came to Performance Studies via oral interpretation.