Schechner, Richard

1985 Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Keywords: Non-Western

Source, Source, American Anthropologist

His genres range from ritual, theater, dance, and other performing arts to restored
villages, tourist attractions, time machines, theme parks, and prime time television news.
The key concept in the volume is performance and the thesis is that performative
behavior is restored behavior, or twice-behaved behavior, meaning that the behavior has
been behaved before.
Schechners main contribution to anthropology is that he investigates the processes of
production of performances and tells us how performances are constructed. Rather than
describe and analyze just a given ritual, for example, Schechner suggests that we view the
final ritual as part of a sequence that begins with training, workshop (taking apart), and
rehearsal (building up), and ends with cool- down and aftermath. His processual
orientation takes the position of the performers and theater people rather than the
orientation of the audience or the outside anthropologist (12, 16).
No ritual is fixed and timeless. Schechner notes that even the most traditional Asian
forms, such as Noh or Kathakali where the training seems rote or mechanical by Euro-
American standards, d o change over time, not from innovations by young rebels but
rather from mature masters who incorporate improvisations into the corpus.
Schechners book makes us rethink such familiar terms as text, context, and
performance. We could say that a text is a script-what is contained between the pages
of a book-and that the performance is the action, the text as enacted. The text is prior to
the performance but the text is inaccessible except in performance, even if that be only
reading. Schechner distinguishes the dramatic text from the performance text, i.e., the
script from the enactment. This is fine as far as it goes, but Schechner writes that there
are performances without texts, such as avant-garde theater where one may begin with a
workshop and proceed to experiment with new mise-en-scines.
Schechner also writes about the unresolved dialectical tension between the actor and his
role, and about how the ordinary self intrudes into the performance. We learn how
culture-bound we have become in accepting recent Euro-American conventions as
natural, such as a narrative structure based on conflict and resolution, the authority of the
author, and the arrangement of a center stage before a passive audience seated in rows.

Source, Man
Chapters 1 and 3 enumerate the contact points between anthropology and performance
studies.
On the one hand, performance can radically transform its participants.
Chapter 2 argues for the importance of world-wide tourism as a powerful cross-cultural
influence on all modes of performance, including ritual.
Schechner notonly avoids the temptation to regard tourist performances as inauthentic or
exploitative but lays the foundations for understanding their dynamics. For Schechner
there is no original rite or colony to be restored; all restorations are inventions, thus
transformation.
Source, Cambridge
He tries to define the universal patterns of the production of theatrical or performative
events.
emphasis on the deconstruction/reconstruction of actualities: the process of framing,
editing, and rehearsing; the making and manipulating of strips of behaviour- what I call
"restored behaviour"' (p. 33). Restored behaviour' is regarded by him as the principal
point of departure and the core of theatre and/or performance which occur in immensely
different cultural and social contexts. It is 'symbolic and reflexive', 'broadcasting
significances'. According to Schechner this symbolic and reflexive behaviour leads to 'the
hardening into theatre of social, religious, aesthetic, medical, and educational process.
Performance means: never for the first time. It means: for the second to the nth time.
Performance is "twice- behaved behaviour"' (p. 36).
Rejecting a rigid borderline between 'life' and 'art' he hints at a new objective set in 'an
epoch of information media . . . when "authenticity" is often a highly edited, refined,
idealized (or brutalized) version of "raw" experience' (p. 309). He asks if there is any
such thing as 'human nature' understood as unmediated, direct, unrehearsed experience.
'And if there isn't (there isn't), how can understanding the whole theatrical process
rehearsals, training ... as well as the show itself - help us grasp social process: how lives
are lived ordinarily and in crises?' (p. 309).

FOREWORD by Victor Turner

All performance is restored behavior . . . the meaning breaks out from rubbing together
. . . of the past (usually embodied in traditional images, forms, and meanings) and present
of social and individual experience (xi).
(Interested in) dynamis . . . the how of performance, the shifting, evanescent, yet
sometimes utterly memorable relationships that develop unpredictably among actors,
audience, text, and the other situational verities discussed by Schechner in this book (xii).
In this book, he goes into great detail, in inter-and cross-cultural terms, as to how ritual
and theatrical traditions become enfleshed in performance and in their dynamic
incarnation act as a reflexive metacommentary on the life of their times, feeding on it and
assigning meaning to its decisive public and cumulative private events (xi).

NOTES FROM THE BOOK

I use performance text to mean all that happens during a performance both onstage and
off, including audience participation (22).
Performances in all cultures share the particular quality of twiceness . . . that
performances everywhere are restored behavior. And I think restored behavior can best
be understood processually by examining the rehearsal process (51-52).
Acting, in most cases, is the art of temporary transformation not only the journey on but
also the return (125).
The performer is changed through the work of performance (125).