“Theatre is something which engages both the eye and the ear. The two public senses are seeing and hearing…the reason I want to make my definition of theatre that simple is so once could view everyday life itself as theatre.” (Sandford, 1995, p.51)
“In the arts ‘to perform’ is to put on a show, a play, a dance, a concert” (Schechner, 2002, p.28). This was what I had always thought of when asked the question, What is performance? Therefore, to look at performance as something which we do in everyday life was a new idea to me.
As children, we are taught how to act in a certain situation – how to play a role. You play the role of the student in the class. You play the role of the daughter in the family. You play certain roles when you are put in to certain situations. This is because our identity isn’t fixed, we are not one dimensional, we are a series of different roles ready to be performed depending on the situation we are put in to. Essentially, identity is a construct, a performance, that we decided to belong to and we construct these identities by accepting and rejecting the social restored behaviours.
Restored behaviour is what we are taught as children, it is “the training and practice, of learning appropriate culturally specific bits of behaviour, of adjusting and performing one’s life roles in relation to social and personal circumstances” (Schechner, 2002, p.28). But why do we perform these roles? It could be said that we do this for some kind of profit, such as love, friendship, money, etc. However, as we are all well aware from our own life experiences, we do not always profit. It could be suggested that we experiment throughout our lives with certain ‘roles’, discovering which we profit from.
Intimacy – a restored behaviour
“Performances – of art, rituals, or ordinary life – are ‘restored behaviours’, ‘twice-behaved behaviour”, performed actions that people train for and rehearse…But everyday life also involves years of training and practice, of adjusting and performing one’s life roles in relation to social and personal circumstances.” (Schechner, 2002, p.29)
If we were to apply this to the notion of intimacy, can we say intimacy is a restored behaviour? As we grow up we learn how to behave in different situations, and we learn the difference between how we act in public to how we are in private. Intimacy is defined in a variety of ways and each of the different types of intimacy come with their own set of rules, as such ,of what is allowed by social conventions. For example, a sexual intimacy is kept in the bedroom, but the intimacy between a mother and child is readily accepted in public. This view of intimacy varies greatly in different cultures, in most western cultures kissing in public is accepted, however in some strictly orthodox Muslim countries, kissing in public is illegal.
It is interesting to look at intimacy in this light as it provides us with more questions to ask; why are certain types of intimacy publicly accepted whereas others are not? What would happen if those private encounters were made public? How would our piece be viewed in different cultures? Our piece begins to deconstruct intimacy and its meaning. Therefore, what we are taught about intimacy and how it is viewed in our culture is important in the construction of the piece.
Works Cited
Sandford, M.R (1995) Happenings and Other Acts, London:Routledge.
Schechner, R (2002) Performance Studies: An Introduction. London:Routledge.
