WAR (Erin) on the Keyword Performance

I wanted to add something to our discussion about the meaning of the word performance:

My most immediate take on the term is related to how I perceive it to be replacing the word 'Theatre' in contemporary practice (at least in the UK and to some extent North America).

In April this year, I organised a panel called "On Theatrical Behaviour." The panel was in part about one venue's shift away from using the word 'theatre', opting to re-brand/re-imagine its annual 'Theatre Festival' calling it simply: Behaviour instead... In preparation for the panel, I asked Deborah Richardson-Webb, now head of performance pedagogy at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, if she could tell me a bit about why a course that she developed at the Academy, formerly called Contemporary Theatre Practice, had been renamed Contemporary Performance Practice. She shared with me a document she had written called: Troublesome Horses: Radical Performance Pedagogy in the Conservatoire. I thought I would share a paragraph from this document that addresses this semantic shift:

In the title of the Programme we chose to use the word ‘Performance’ not ‘Theatre’ in order to clarify its position in relation to the education of its students within the broadest field of performance practices. By ‘Performance’, it is understood that whilst drawing upon the tradition of British and European Theatre, the Programme seeks to address the wider phenomenon of performance in human cultures from ritual practices, through performance in everyday life to art-making processes. The Programme draws upon and synthesises a wide variety of disciplines and discourses including, improvisation, physical performance, writing for performance, voice, movement, visual art, feminist studies, gender studies, queer theory, semiotics, ethology, pedagogy, media and popular culture theory and cultural studies.

This seems relevant to the title of our course as well.

Performance for me, in part, means a shift in thinking about/experiencing/making contemporary 'theatre'--it is in some respect a way of distinguishing the old from the new.