"What is Performance?" from Performance Studies: An Introduction by Richard Schechner

Performance studies have been in my periphery for about a year now as something that feels close to the areas of theory around theater I'm interested in and yet still not exactly on it. This introduction gives a wide berth of information around the theory of performance including actions "as" performance, action "is" performance, restored behavior, play, ritual, genre, etc. There's a lot of really esoteric and circular language describing performance theory because it is a very lofty headspace to get into, but this chapter particularly accentuated the potential for pretension in this field. There are some good nuggets around how all actions can be examined as performance because of the way that they are executed in order to be perceived in a particular way or can be measured to a particular standard and all those standards and expectations of perception are governed by specific societal and cultural norms. However, the world is far too complex and as the chapter talks about, culture and society are too loose and intermingled for that to be where this introduction stops when discussing why things can be performative in certain circumstances and contexts in different ways. This author also practices a lot of exotification and othering towards non-Western cultures by continually calling out potentially "strange" or "foreign" practices and tying them to specific populations or countries but then not applying the same labeling and specificity to his examples from the US. Generally just makes it hard to fully digest the information when it's so steeped in marking particularities of "us vs them".