By Means of Performance: Intercultural Studies of Theatre and Ritual

by Richard Schechner (Editor), Willa Appel (Editor)

Overview

The field of performance studies covers all kinds of performance behavior in all contexts. This volume investigates performance behavior in a variety of circumstances and cultures. The contributors consider such issues as the relationship between training and the finished performance; whether performance behavior is universal or culturally specific; and the relationships among ritual and aesthetics, popular entertainment and religion, and sports and theater and dance.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521339155
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	05/25/1990
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.71(d)

Table of Contents

List of figures; Notes of contributors; Introduction; 1. Are there universals of performance in myth, ritual, and drama?; 2. Magnitudes of performance; 3. Liminality: a synthesis of subjective and objective experience; 4. The Yaqui deer dance at Pascua Pueblo, Arizona; 5. The Yaqui point of view: on Yaqui ceremonies and anthropologies; 6. Performance of precepts/precepts of performance: Hasidic celebrations of Purim in Brooklyn; 7. The significance of performance for its audience: an analysis of three Sri Lankan rituals; 8. What does it mean to 'become the character': power, presence, and transcendence in Asian in-body disciplines of practice; 9. Korean shamans: role playing through trance possession; 10. The practice of noh theatre; 11. The profanation of the sacred in circus clown performances; 12. Ethnographic notes on sacred and profane performance; 13. The spatial sense of the sacred in Spanish America and the American South and its tie with performance; 14. Space and context; 15. The transformation of consciousness in ritual performances: some thoughts and questions; 16. Universals of performance; or amortising play; Appendix; Bibliography; Index.