The Cambridge Introduction to Performance Theory

With its roots in literary study the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham (CCCS) picked up the idea that ritualised human interaction could be seen to have a ‘syntax’, a set of rules, that could then be analysed as text. Another way of approaching these sorts of human interaction was to see them as offering roles to their participants. Once again this approach implies that the interactions are performed, and once again it grows out of sociological interests, but this time its development moves through the formal discipline of theatre studies.

The point of origin takes us back to that crucial period, the mid-1950s. Following a conference on Theatre and Society at Royaumont, in 1956 the sociologist Georges Gurvitch published their agreed findings as to a new direction of research. These identified the following topics: ‘the diversity of audiences, their different degrees of relative homogeneity and cohesion’; analysis of the ‘performance’ itself ‘as worked out within a specific social framework’; study of those doing the ‘performance’ as ‘a social group, both as companies and more widely as an occupation’; study of ‘the functional relationship between the content … and the actual social system, particularly structural forms and social classes’ (in Burns and Burns 1973: 76–77; my elision).

This approach is based on, and justified by, an assumed affinity between theatre and society. This affinity holds true whether one begins by studying theatre or society, and it can thus give new understanding not only of aesthetic production but also of society itself:

On the basis of that analogy Gurvitch finds himself, in the very same year as Goffman's Presentation of Self, thinking afresh about the concept of social role: ‘the acting out of social roles constitutes part and parcel of the social order.