ABSTRACT
To aempt to dene performance studies requires an aention not only to its diverse and at times contradictory histories and challenges, but also to how these intellectual and artistic epistemologies translate into a discipline. Scholars including John MacAloon, Jon McKenzie, and Richard Schechner locate the incipient theoretical trajectories of Performance Studies in the emergence of cultural performance scholarship in the 1950s, aligning Victor Turner’s experiential conception of “social drama,” “Milton Singer’s ‘cultural performance’, Kenneth Burke’s ‘dramatistic pentad’ and Erving Goman’s ‘social psychology of everyday life’” with Gregory Bateson’s and Roger Callois’ theories of play and Schechner’s theory of “restored behavior” (McKenzie 2009, 33-34; Schechner 2002, 10). ese encounters-as anthropology embraced theatre and ethnography conversed with quotidian ritual-opened up new intellectual, disciplinary, and pedagogical relationships that pressured traditional institutional delineations of subject and discipline. In 1980 these interdisciplinary dilemmas producedor as Peggy Phelan describes the meeting of Turner and Schechner-“gave birth to,” the rst institutionalized Performance Studies Department at New York University (Phelan and Lane 1998).
