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Ways of Understanding the Culture: Re-examining the Performance Paradigm

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Ian Watson
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Abstract

The tendency for ‘performance studies’ to embrace and even supplant ‘theatre studies’ can usefully enlarge our perceptions of the relevance of theatricality to other disciplines and activities – but fully extended into the ‘performativities’ of everyday life can be counterproductive when definitions are so loose as to be redundant. Here, Ian Watson considers the boundary-crossing qualities of two variants on the ‘performance paradigm’ – Eugenio Barba's bridge-building concept of ‘Barter Theatre’ and Augusto Boal's deliberately provocative ‘Invisible Theatre’. He proceeds to relate the characteristics identified to an event no less clearly staged, though less often discussed as such: the set-piece political speech, in this case President Clinton's acceptance of his renomination as Democratic candidate at his party's Chicago convention in 1996. Ian Watson is an Advisory Editor of NTQ who teaches at the Rutgers campus of the State University of New Jersey. The last of his several contributions to the journal was his report on the Ninth International Gathering of Group Theatre in Ayacucho, Peru, in NTQ58 (May 1999).

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 16 , Issue 4 , November 2000 , pp. 333 - 346
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2000

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