Performance Studies - R. Schechner. Chapter 6 - Performance.

Notes, quotes and ideas:

• 'Performance', according to Schechner, and lots of other people, means a lot more as a word than what most people think.
• Acting is a sub-category of performance. Other categories are roles, ways of being (which in turn poses the question, are moods and even personalities types of performance?)
• "some people work hard at performing oneself" - it takes work even to develop your own character, let alone a new character on stage. Being 'yourself' is described as a performance.
• Surveillance cameras everywhere have made us evolve into being more self-conscious, and natural performers. We seek attention more than our predecessors, and feel the need to be impressive and "on" all the time. 
• Schechner: "The more self-conscious a person is, the more one constructs behaviour for those watching and/or listening, the more such behaviour is 'performing'." - Because we are more self-conscious our 'natural' behaviours are not in fact natural, but performances. 
• Surveillance Camera Players make fun of this, putting on silent plays in front of cameras as a protest.
• Performance is a spectrum, like colours, the different categories blend into each other, and there are no fixed boundaries separating them. Roles mix into rituals, the sacred into the secular.
• Rock concerts are a performance than involve the audience to a massive extent. The audience has the opportunity to become something else, to perform themselves. They scream and shout and jump and if the performer is good he will interact with the audience and excite them more. The audience can feel free and uninhibited in such a large crowd, and be able to assume a new character - free and loud. They can put on their own performance.
• Schechner: "The minimalist actor simply performs certain actions that are received as acting by spectators because of context. By contrast, in total acting, the "other" is so powerful it takes over or possesses the performer."
• The scale: Non-acting to acting. 5 steps there.

1. nonmatrixed performing - being onstage but not acting (stagehands, eg kabuki)
2. symbolised matrix - the performer perfoms actions belonging to a character while still being themself
3. received acting - onstage behaviour where no character is developed (eg extras, non-speaking roles)
4. simple acting - a performer simulating speech and behaviour of a character
5. complex acting - performer's physical, mental and emotional capability involved in portraying the character

• Michael Kirby: "Acting may be said to exist in the smallest and simplest action that involves pretense."
• Again, emphasised that it is a spectrum, the scale does not suggest values, all types of performance have "good" aspects, and depending on personal taste and culture, and a number of other factors, some may be preferred.
• Realistic acting assumes that the emotions of the characters are like those of "real people". These are easily recognisable to the audience, very common, used widely in films and television.
• This type of acting came from Western culture, and was regarded as progressive, while the traditional forms represented outmoded social systems and beliefs.
• The daily behaviours upon which realistic acting is based change over time. The acting in old movies may look unnatural and stilted, but it was simply stylized from the time.
• Mao Tse-Tung: Lenin said that art should serve the tens of millions of working people. "Works of literature and art, as ideological forms, are products of the reflection in the human brain of the life of a given society." "The life of the people" gives us "materials in their natural form...crude...but vital, rich and fundamental; they make all literature and art seem pallid by comparison" Life is an "inexhaustible source, their only source". Tse-Tung said "we must take over all the fine things in our literary and artistic heritage, critically assimilate whatever is beneficial, and use them as examples when we create works out of the literary and artistic raw materials in the life of the people of our own time and place." - Pretty good.
• Realistic acting - Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938), find situations in the actor's life that are analogues to what happens to the character. 
• Because revealing real feelings only happens among intimates, Lee Strasberg invented "Private Moment" exercise to make an actor feel less inhibited by an audience.

will finish notes on this another time