Chapter 7 - Text and performance

Summary

To state that performance analysis is at the centre of theatre studies is a claim that would have met twenty years ago with a degree of sceptical reserve. Until the mid 1980s, theatre studies had consisted either of theatre history or dramatic analysis, with an emphasis on questions of staging. The idea that the performance itself could be analysed and studied was certainly recognized as desirable but was generally regarded as an impossible task. How could one analyse something that is essentially ephemeral, that disappears the moment it has been enacted? Does not analysis presuppose the existence of observable elements that can be scrutinized at length and ideally be checked and verified by other scholars? The analysis and interpretation of texts and pictures in literary studies and art history respectively, or of films or television programmes in media studies, have recourse to more or less stable artefacts. Performance analysis, it would seem, does not.

This apparent impasse was resolved by a combination of technological and theoretical advances. The technological aspect is linked to the development of cheap and accessible video technology, which made available to scholars an increasing number of recordings of performances for detailed study. While performance analysis today is not necessarily dependent on video recording (it can be done without), in most cases it is used because it allows study of movement, sound and image, albeit filtered through the perspective of one or more cameras (to this problem we shall return below).