Performance Studies - Controversies

Controversies

Richard Schechner was a professor of drama, first at Tulane University, then at New York University, before he became interested in integrating the field of theater with numerous other disciplines. At least two of his former students wrote significant criticisms of the new field.

In TheaterWeek, Richard Hornby wrote that the field of performance studies must embrace acting theory and traditional Euro-American theater if it is to have any value. Performance Studies, at least as Schechner had come to it, had little to do with stage performance, Hornby maintained.

Davi Napoleon went further in the pages of the same magazine. "Performance Studies doesn't have the integrity of any discipline," she wrote. "It's not a mix of theater and other performing arts, such as dance and opera, though these are included....There are classes in Aesthetics and Everyday Life, Autobiography and the Performing Self, Creativity in Covergence and Creolization...Performance studies covers everything, and those who want to study something, such as theater history, cannot."

Schechner said he did not reject theater but expanded the department at NYU by bringing in other disciplines. "I can eat pasta and also eat sushi."

Napoleon countered that pasta and sushi are both foods, while archeology and theater are not both performing arts. "Moreover, Performance Studies students don't digest two fields. They sample from a smorgasbord of disciplines without troubling to learn any. It may appear to be interdiscipinary, but Performance Studies is really anti-disciplinary." Napoleon also quotes Michael Kirby, a colleague of Richard Schechner's at NYU who felt Schechner was taking the department in the wrong direction.