This is Not a Performance?
Greetings:
Language events, Verbal art as performance, interpretive frames: My thoughts have been jumping all over the place.
I start with my students experiencing Shakespeare through performance. Not by watching a play, but by becoming part of the play. I have taught Twelfth Night and Macbeth (not at the same time, but I am thinking of doing that this year), for nine years now by following the recommendations of the Folger Shakespeare Library: have the students on their feet with the words in their mouths from the very first day. The varied interpretations of the plays still stun me. The insights my students have into very difficult texts by having to figure out what the characters are doing as they are saying the words is always amazing. The Bauman article speaks of the very structured expectations of various performance traditions. Shakespeare’s plays, in some ways, come with I think our own culture’s performance expectations. I find that when my students are allowed into the language of the plays and expected to find meaning through the performance of these plays on their own that a fairly wide range of meaning emerges. In a Teachers as Scholars seminar I attended on Friday, Dr. Alan Friedman said, “Every performance is an interpretation.” Perhaps these ramblings of mine came about because of the proximity of the seminar and reading the Bauman article, but I found the connections to be relevant.
Another thought, much briefer I hope: Aren’t all language events, whether spoken or written, performances? And aren’t all of these performances framed within certain expectations? And aren’t how effective these performances are dependent upon how well they achieve these framed expectations as well as how they push the boundaries of these expectations?
Richard Rorty thinks that all writing should be seen as just different genres of literature. Perhaps all language from converstation to stark academic articles on psycholinguistics should be seen as different patterns of performance.
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