Performance tells it slant

Abstract

The National Communication Association [NCA], the professional organization that sponsors TPQ, recently celebrated its 100th anniversary and, significantly, performance scholars have been influential in defining the academic discipline from its inception. Currently, these scholars call their work performance studies, a label that includes those interested in the “study, criticism, research, teaching, public awareness, and application of the artistic, humanistic, and cultural principles of performance” (Performance Studies). Yet, for NCA's first 75 years, these scholars identified their work using terms that signified conspicuous aesthetic performance practices: elocution, expression, oral interpretation. During these years, scholars understood performance as performing art, literary study, communicative act, self-development, or some amalgam of these perspectives (Whitaker, “Critical Reasons” 192). For each of these approaches, performance was an act comprised of some combination of performer, text, and audience. While these approaches endure, and many remain invested in traditional notions of performer, text, and audience, expanded definitions of these elements, as well as a growing interest in the contexts of performance, warranted a name change to performance studies, which necessarily broadened what we might study as well as how we might proceed.