The Performance Studies Reader: Summary & Key Insights

When we talk about performance studies, we must begin with its ancestors—anthropology and theater studies. The historical foundations of the field rest on a rethinking of ritual and play as social and symbolic performances. In the early twentieth century, anthropologists like Bronisław Malinowski and Émile Durkheim investigated ceremony as the heartbeat of community—ritual as both symbolic action and social cohesion. Later, Victor Turner advanced this lineage by describing ritual as liminal space, a passage where social structures dissolve and identities are reconfigured. For Turner, a ritual was not simply an enactment of tradition; it was a dynamic drama that mirrored and transformed the society performing it.

Similarly, theater scholars began to look at the relationship between performance and the social world. Richard Schechner—whose work anchors much of this reader—expanded Turner’s ideas into what he called performance theory, where ‘restored behavior’ describes the way actions can be repeated, rehearsed, and refashioned across contexts. Schechner argued that performances exist both in art and in everyday life, across cultures and histories. This genealogy reveals a shift: performance moved from being a metaphor for social function to being a model for how humans reproduce meaning through action.

From these foundations, we see the emergence of performance studies as an interdisciplinary project, one that resists confinement to a single academic tradition. The anthropology of ritual and the study of theater merged to form a field committed to analyzing how humans use performance to create and contest reality. In tracing this lineage, we recognize how deeply the act of performing is tied to the essence of being human.

To define performance is to encounter a question without a single answer. In this reader, I gathered contrasting voices to illuminate this diversity. Schechner’s definition—‘twice-behaved behavior’—suggests repetition as a central quality, while other thinkers emphasize immediacy, embodiment, and transformation. To perform is to do something with intention in front of someone else, but it can also mean enacting identity in private or performing for oneself. Performance studies therefore crosses art, ritual, and daily life, refusing to confine itself to theater alone.

This ongoing debate underscores a crucial insight: performance is not merely representation but presence. Peggy Phelan, for instance, insists that performance’s essence is disappearance—it exists in time, unrepeatable and ephemeral. Others counter that documentation, reenactment, and mediation extend performance beyond immediacy. The reader’s variety of viewpoints mirrors the field’s openness: definitions of performance must always account for context, for performer, audience, purpose, and power.

I include these voices to encourage the reader to dwell in the tension between performance as aesthetic form and performance as social act. When we ask what performance is, we inevitably ask what it does—how it brings worlds into being, how it shows us ourselves and each other, and how it constructs the reality we inhabit.