La storia della nascita dei Performance Studies alla New York University, seppure per molti versi la più significativa, non è però l’unica. Difatti, esattamente negli stessi anni, nella cittadina di Evanston, nello stato dell’Illinois, la Northwestern University dava vita ad un’altra tradizione di Performance Studies, la cui genealogia accademica va però rintracciata all’interno della School of Speech e, più esattamente, nel dipartimento di Oral Interpretation.
The discipline is conceived, taught, and institutionalized in a number of different ways. Broadly speaking, there are two main brands, New York University’s and Northwestern University’s. […] But over time, these two approaches have moved toward each other sharing a common commitment to an expanded vision of “performance” and
“performativity”30.
Come messo in evidenza prima da Richard Schechner in Performance
Studies An Introduction, e come ulteriormente dettagliato poi da Shannon
Jackson in Professing Performance, le origini accademiche e le specifiche declinazioni disciplinari dei Performance Studies alla NYU ed alla NWU differiscono tra di loro. Infatti alla Northwester University il perno disciplinare ruota intorno a comunicazione, interpretazione orale, retorica, speech-act theory ed etnografia31.
30 R. Schechner, Performance Studies. An Introduction, second edition, New York, Routledge, 2006, p.5.
31
Fondamentale risulta il contributo fornito da Dwight Conquergood agli studi di performance alla Northwester in materia di etnografia. Rethinking Ethnography del 1991 é un testo esplicativo in tal senso; dalla sua consultazione emergono interessanti nodi teorici che legano la peformance all’etnografia, molti dei quali rimandano al comune percorso intrapeso dai performance studies alla NYU, qui determinato essenzialmente dalla condivisione di una base antropologica.
The department of (Oral) Interpretation had a decades’ long existence in a very different institutional milieu – that is, inside a School of Speech, one that also housed distinct departments of Communication Studies, Radio/TV/Film, and Theatre. Thus, unlike the progenitors at NYU who broke from a prior institutional identity as Theatre, Northwestern’s department had considered itself something other than Theatre for its entire institutional existence. Oral Interpretation was most often
positioned as an aesthetic subfield within Speech,
Communication,and/or Rhetoric. Its proponents drew from a classical tradition in oral poetry to argue for the role of performance in the analysis and dissemination of cultural texts, specializing in the adaptation of print media into an oral and embodied environment. Northwestern was unusual for devoting an entire department to this area32.
Alla New York University, invece, come in precedenza visto, i Performance Studies nascono dalla trasformazione del preesistente Graduate Degree in Drama e le principali matrici disciplinari risultano dall’intersezione tra teatro e antropologia, grazie essenzialmente all’apporto condotto dall’antropologo Victor Turner 33
, amico di Schechner, e fondamentale figura nella elaborazione della teoria della performance schechneriana. Between Theatre and Anthropology, introdotto tra l’altro dallo stesso Victor Turner e pubblicato nel 1985, è infatti il libro di Schechner nel quale risulta possibile individuare una enucleazione di questo raccordo teorico.
32 Shannon Jackson, Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity, Cambridge University Press, 2004, pag. 9.
33 Victor Turner, oltre ad aver influenzato in maniera assai evidente l’elaborazione della “teoria della performance”, così come concepita da Richard Schechner, é stato spesso invitato dallo stesso Schechner , a volte insieme alla compagna, Edith Turner, a tenere corsi, lezioni, seminari e workshops alla New York University.
This network of ideas and practice was nourished by my relationship with anthropologist Victor Turner. Though we knew each other’s work earlier, Turner and I met in 1997 when he invited me to participate in a conference he was organizing on “Ritual, Drama, and Spectacle”. The conference was so successful, and the chemistry between Turner and me so positive, that we joined to plan a “World Conference on Ritual and Performance”, which developed into three related conferences held during 1981-81. […] These conferences very much shaped my ideas about what performance studies could become. […] Tilting performance studies toward anthropology – which was particularly strong in the 1970s and 1980s – is linked to working with Turner and people he introduced me to; other possibilities for performance studies have since
come strongly into play34.
Se la componente antropologica proviene eminentemente dal supporto costante degli studi di Turner, l’ingrediente teatrale invece ha origine quasi integralmente dal lavoro di Schechner e degli altri studiosi che, come poc’anzi evidenziato, sono convocati alla fondazione del dipartimento. Di particolare rilievo appaiono infatti, senza ombra di dubbio, le esperienze teatrali fatte da Schechner con il Free Southern Theater ed il New Orleans Group durante gli anni in Lousiana e con il Performance Group dopo il trasferimento a New York e proprio in concomitanza con la nascita istituzionale dei Performance Studies35. The
Environmental Theater, la cui prima edizione viene pubblicata nel 1973,
è il libro in cui Schechner raggruppa tutte le acquisizioni teoriche sino a quel momento compiute in relazione al “fare teatrale”.
34
R. Schechner, Performance Studies. An Introduction, second edition, New York, Routledge, 2006, pp. 16-17.
35 Nel 1991, sempre a New York City, Richard Schechner fonderà la sua ultima compagnia teatrale, la East Coast Artists.
Environmental Theater is a history book detailing my experiences first
with The New Orleans Group (1964-67) and then in New York, where I moved in 1967, with The Performance Group during the first two stages of its development (1967-69, 1970-72). Environmental Theater is also a performer training manual outlining practices and the theories underlying them that I developed in my work with TPG. These methods of training – based on whole body work, yogic breathing, sound- making, and the release of feelings (connecting these feelings, sooner or later, to social or political circumstances: “the personal is the political”) – I used, and still use, in the many performer workshops I’ve led in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and, briefly, South Africa. […]
But Environmental Theater is about more than performer training. It is also about directing, composing performances, designing spaces, site specific performances, and the formation (and destruction) of groups. […]
Environmental Theater specifies a way of working, putting this way in
its definitive historical and theoretical place36.
Di cruciale importanza nella consapevolezza teatrale via via acquisita dal regista Schechner è inoltre l’incontro artistico con Jerzy Grotowski
[…] it was through my editing that Grotowski’s work first became known in the U.S. […] wanting to understand Grotowski’s work in my body, […] I took part in the workshop [that Grotowsi taught at NYU] - and almost immediately convened a workshop of my own in order to transmit some of what I was learning to others. This new workshop became the core of what was in a few months time to become The Performance Group.
36
Richard Schechner, Environmental Theater, an exapanded new edition, Applause, New York, 1994, pag. XI-XII.
What I taught the proto-Performance Group was what I learned from Grotowski and Cieslak plus actors’ exercises that I derived and devised from a variety of sources including my reading of ethnographic and anthropological texts, Eastern philosophy, my experiences as a theatre director, Happenings participant, and sometime participant in workshops convened by Joseph Chaikin with people who were to become the Open Theatre. My work on TDR helped a lot. I was an editor who was educated by much of what I was publishing. In a real way, I followed the lead of theatre and Happenings workers and theorists whose ideas I selected for publication in TDR. It was a nourishing symbiotic relationship37.