International Association of Libraries and Museums of the Performing Arts

Société Internationale des Bibliothèques et des Musées des Arts du Spectacle

Performance in History

Bruce McConachie

Winds of Change - New Technology

21st International Congress

Helsinki, 31 August - 6 September 1996

General Description: A series of interactive programs for students and researchers to investigate the major performance genres of world history. Students/researchers should be abl& to complete the first two parts of each perfo.rmance genre unit in roughly 20 to 40 minutes. The third part, for advanced students/researchers, has no such time limit.

- Our working definition of a major performance genre: a conventionally structured and historically bounded interaction between performers and spectators. When the conventions structuring this interaction or the kinds of performers and/or audiences change significantly, the performance genre has ended or begun a different historical phase. A performance genre is "major" when many people participated in it, it had a significant effect on other genres, and/or it served an important function within its own culture.

- Examples: Baroque opera (with aristocratic auditors and such conventions as castrati singers), Maddurese Loddrok (probably two units for this, one before and the other after Indonesian independence, when governmental policy changed the genre significantly), blackface minstrelsy, roughly 1840-1870 (while the audience in the U.S. and England remained mostly working-class), Roman republican oration (in the years before Rome became a political empire), a modern era marching band (roughly 1890 to 1960 in the U.S.).

- Audience and Goals: The first two parts of these programs will be aimed at undergraduate students taking beginning and advanced-level courses. Teachers may use the units of the series in the place of a lecture, to spark discussion, to help students explore ideas for research papers, etc. The third part, for advanced students and researchers, should pose questions requiring extensive research in primary materials and a broad knowledge of contemporary scholarship. Our general goals, then, are to encourage new thinking about the teaching of interpretative and analytic skills in introductory courses, to foster new questions and research methods for advanced level courses in performance studies, and to challenge scholars with new ideas and strategies, including the possibility of collaborative research ventures.

Challenge: How to delimit a major historical performance genre? All genres are constructions of scholarship. In the case of folk and popular performance genres especially, however, determining historical "beginnings" and "endings" will not be easy, and must, at some level, remain arbitrary. Even for elite genres, it will be difficult to establish where one genre slides into another. It's clear, for example, that the performances of many dramatic genres worked within the same general conventions of historical performance (eg., mid lath century English comedy, tragedy, and farce). But how can we distinguish differences in kind of performance genre from differences in degree (eg., what about lath century English pantomime?) And what, after all, is at "major" genre? No doubt this will be determined comparatively, depending aS it does upon such words as "many," "significant," and "important." Time and careful discrimination will tell.

Challenge: If we focus on single performance genres, what do we do about festivals in which, arguably, many performance genres occurred (eg., the Festival of Dionysus in Classical Athens, Mardi Gras in the Caribbean)? Probably, we must treat festivals separately, but then how many other separate categories for the units of this series do we invent?

Challenge: Commonalities on stage are usually easier to see than commonalities among spectators. What do we do about performances that appealed to the same kinds of audiences across boundaries of nation and language (eg., blue-blouse agit prop in Russia and much of the rest of the West after 1920)? Probably we emphasize the international aspects of these kinds of performance genres and de-emphasize national and other differences. Do we then get huge international categories in the 19th and 20th centuries, such as modern circus performance and realistic dramatic theatre? Probably so and it's a good thing too; both underline the expansiveness of western performance genres in the world.

Possible design for Part I of each unit: A visual and auditory introduction that places the student in the midst of a historical audience watching a performance. Through animation techniques and point-and-click access, let the student explore: the. spatial dynamics of the meeting space for performers and.spectators (town square, circus tent, theatre -- its architecture, decor, etc.), the audience (predominant class, race, sex, dress, behavior, etc.), the performers (costuming, movement, speech, musical instruments, etc), the stage or other performance space (layout, size, major properties, lights, etc.). Then take a short excerpt from the performance event that illustrates typical performer-spectator interaction. Part I should include a glossary of terms linked to visual and textual cues.

Challenge: Without plunging the student too deeply into controversies among historians, these intros should indicate that some of the constructions the students/researchers have explored are conjectural. To investigate the empirical evidence leading (for example) to the conjectural construction of an Elizabethan/Jacobean outdoor theatre and the conventions of performance within it, however, the student/researcher would need to move beyond the introduction.

Challenge: Visual representations of past performances will generally be easier to arrive at than auditory ones. The human voice performing drama will be especially difficult; probably professional actors will need to be hired and then trained to perform using the oral conventions of the appropriate historical period. Vocal interjections from auditors to performers, clearly a part of many historical performances, will need to be "improvised." The closer we can get tothe sound of original musical instruments, the better.

Challenge: Perhaps the biggest challenge here will be to agree on our own representational conventions for this introductory material. One important goal of the series is comparability across performance genres. That is, we want students to be able to see similarities and differences among, say, romantic ballet, late 19th century dramatic performance, and a symphonic orchestra during the same period. To accomplish this, we will need to use the same software to create images of-dancers, actors, and musicians -- despite the fact that Very different aesthetic energies and inducements were at work in each performance genre.

Possible Design for Part II: Following Part I (which for comparativist purposes must address the same kinds of questions throughout the series), each program can move in somewhat different directions. The challenge for each programdesigner/historian will be to choose perhaps 3 to 10 primary pieces of evidence -- textual, visual,.aural, etc -- and then encourage the student/researcher to interpret and explain it. In general, we want students to move from questions about what happened in typical performances, to the experience and significance of those performance events in the lives of those spectators and performers, to how the typical performance event related to the larger social, cultural, and historical contours of the era. In the process, students/researchers should be encouraged to explore the mode of production for each genre (writing, rehearsing, financing, etc.), more about the dynamics of the event itself, and the ways in which the event spoke to the needs, desires, and fears of the historical audience. Also important will be the intersection of this genre with other.performance genres enjoyed by the same audience and the genealogy of the genre, especially as it helped to shape future performance genres and historical memory. For the most part, we want to encourage students/researchers to ask and pursue significant questions, not simply to collect information. The goal here is to learn methods for reaching historical understanding. Accordingly, the hypertext connections and branchings of questions and tentative answers in Part II should lead students/researchers to short, annotated bibliographies.

Challenge: The general challenge here is to create an interactive web of learning that moves the student/researcher from simple to complex questions and invites further inquiry and research. The scholars designing each program will need to know the subject area well enough both to help the beginning student toward designing a short essay and the more experienced one toward narrowing a research agenda. At the same time, questions, answers, bibliographies, etc. at this level must be kept short and general, so as not to overwhelm the beginning student.

Challenge: Working against the expectation of closure. Most students expect textbooks, even interactive ones, to give them answers, not open up a range of questions and then invite them to use other resources beyond the immediate learning tool to pursue them. So the challenge here is really twofold: to give enough information about the historical realities of the genre and its context to provide students/researchers with a coherent framework, yet to problematize the interpretation and explanation of that information and its sources so that students can see the need for further inquiry. Of course this will mean choosing the 3-10 primary sources very carefully and structuring the learning experience in such a way as to avoid confusion and prompt curiosity. In designing all of this, performance scholars will need to guard against their own desire for totalizing explanations and narrative closure.

Challenge: When the entire series has perhaps two dozen units on separate performance genres (and festivals), we will want to encourage students/researchers to move from the exploration of one genre to two or three others. Such movement across several genres is easy enough to program through hypertext, but the kinds of connections we want to encourage them to make'may be difficult to define and detail. Compare/contrast procedures among technical and formalist conventions of performance (eg., a trap door, a parade, the protagonist in drama) will be fairly easy to/ arrange because we have a well established technical and critical language with which to discuss them. But we have yet to construct a widely accepted discourse for such matters as varieties of audience response and distinctions among modes of production. Without key terms, hypertext movement cannot work. Probably we will need to construct and/or borrow such a discourse, but must strive to keep this "jargon" to a minimum.

Possible Design for Part III: This is the least developed of the three parts. Since the primary goal of III is to encourage innovative scholarship, many directions are clearly possible. Perhaps the best service this part could provide would be a continuously updated listing and indexing of on-line resources that are useful for doing further research on the performance genre (or festival) of the unit. This would avoid recapitulating much of the material already generally available in print (bibliographies, guides, collection catalogues, etc.). It might also encourage many more libraries to put their special collections on the internet. Or at least to provide more comprehensive indexes of their holdings.

Time frame for the project: "Performance in History" could conceivably encompass an enormous range of performance genres and might eventually be useful for college courses and research agendas ranging from anthropology to musicology, from primitive rituals to elite musical performances. If the series is successful, there can be no final time frame for the project; may it live and grow on the WWWeb for as long as it is a useful learning tool! (Of course, because it's on the Web, we can also modify it over time.) More realistically, however, we can limit the first phase of this project to the time it might take to design and produce at least Parts I and II of 30 to 40 units of the series. And given our immediate constituency, most of these units should probably be useful for teaching courses in theatre and dance history.(Not exclusively, however; we need to ensure comparability across many areas of performance.) So one rough time line might run as follows: about 3 years for 6 to 10 Directors to put together 4-8 units on separate performance genres (or festivals) and get them on the internet. Another 2 years to test and modify the initial programs. A final 5 years to arrange for the design and production of all other programs for phase one by the Collaborators.

The extent of the design for Part III will determine whether we can include it as a part of this first phase. Beyond that, it is difficult to predict what we might decide to add and how much longer it could take.

Challenge: There are many challenges here, of course, not the least of which is maintaining the momentum of the project over such a stretch of time. An important key is getting the right people involved, especially the initial six to ten.

Organization: Besides me, who will those 6 to 10 guinea pigs be? For the few and the brave initiating this project, there should be some (eventual) rewards. Therefore, I'd like to propose that the initial six to ten of us form ourselves into a collectiveof Directors to share the work and whatever financial profits may accrue. (It's possible, for instance, that we may decide to market some of these performance genre units on a separate CD-ROM through a publisher to make them available "in a bookstore near you.") A collective of six to ten is manageable and there are precedents for it in the world of interactive of scholarship (eg. scholars working on a hypertext version of the poetry of Emily Dickenson). The collective might be expanded later on or more likely, we might be able to attract sufficient grant money to pay collaborating scholars and technical designers for producing the additional units of the first phase. (And we might be able to pay ourselves too.)

Challenge: How to balance the work of individual members of the collective? Despite careful planning and the best of intentions, this is always a problem with collective work of any kind, and may be exacerbated by our international mix of Directors. We will need to recognize up front the many initiatives and responsibilities entailed by this project. Each of us will come with different strengths, but we will need to share a commitment to the goals of the project, a general interest and at least one area of specialization in performance history, and access to (if not expertise in) the necessary hardware and software to design and produce our programs. UVa can help us get started by putting us on a server so we can share ideas, software, animations, educational strategies, etc.

Bruce McConachie
bamcco@facstaff.wm.edu
May 1996

Creating an Interactive Tool for Teaching and Researching Historical Performances

This is a general introduction to our project, Performance in History, for scholars who might want to participate in its creation. If, after reading this overview, you'd like more information, please request it from me.

HISTORY: Last December, I sent a letter to about 75 people requesting their advice and support for a project I was organizing to create a computer-based "textbook" to teach world performance history. The letter pointed out some of the advantages of this kind of interactive learning:

Students could 'enter' an animated lath-century English playhouse, for example, and move around the auditorium, looking at the stage and audience from the point of view of box, pit,or gallery and observing the audience from the performer's point of view; they could examine how different kinds of choreography, costumes, and music shaped the bodies of dancers through the centuries; they could hear the noisiness of many kinds of stage performances before new technologies enabled managers to dim the house lights; they could investigate similarities among performance events such as parades, political rallies, and popular stage shows.

I also outlined some principles and priorities which I continue to  believe must guide the project: 

1) The series must be comprehensive -- international and intercultural in scope, inclusive of popular and elite, folk and  professional performances. Within this wide range, we want to encourage students/researchers to explore issues of aesthetics, culture, and politics at many levels.

2) The series must be inquiry-based -- the goal is to prompt curiosity and questioning that leads students/researchers from description, to interpretation and analysis, to social explanation; from performance event to historical context.

3) Eventually, the series must be affordable, accessible, and widely available -- while aiming at top quality, we must be able to control the cost and distribution of our product to ensure its widespread use.

The response to my initial request was very favorable; more than 30 scholars indicated an interest and several said they would like to participate in building the project.

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS: In the December 8 letter, I was advocating CD-ROM technology for the creation and distribution of our interactive series. For a variety of reasons, it will be more useful and cost-effective to place our learning tools on the world wide web and charge a site fee for downloading it. We lose nothing in the way of technological sophistication and animation capabilities; an interactive program at a web site can potentially do everything that a CD-ROM can do. An Internet site also offers greater flexibility for future changes. Further, it will open up more potential governmental support, since a web site can accommodate much more than an interactive "textbook."

Indeed, from talking with several people, I have decided not to attempt a "textbook" at all. As one colleague put it, we don't need "a better Brockett;" why replace one master narrative with another? Instead, we will be creating a series of discrete, interactive programs on major historical performance genres -- classical Nob theatre, 19th century American parades, commedia dell arte, etc. Each unit in the series will take the student/researcher roughly 20 to 40 minutes to work through, providing an introduction to the genre and opening up a variety of inquiries to pursue. When we have created thirty to forty of these units, we will put the series on the Internet. It's our hope that scholars from around the world will be induced to join us by the opportunity to work in their area of specialization and/or to secure funding from their own governments to produce a program on a performance genre of importance to their national history.

Other developments make me optimistic about the possibility of initiating Performance in History. IFTR has endorsed the project in principle and ASTR and ATHE (The Association for Theatre in Higher Education) are considering participation and/or endorsement. Investigating how and where such an Internet site for the project can be established and maintained, I have been talking with the Director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia. The Institute can provide data storage, networking services, grant-writing support, and a wide variety of technical advice and assistance. The Royal Holloway Centre for Multi-Media Performance History in London, currently working on a CD-ROM series on Shakespearean productions, is eager to cooperate with us. We also envision other allied sites around the globe, as different universities and libraries seek to be a part of this project.

FUTURE PLANS: The primary task for the near future is to gain commitments from performance historians willing to work on the series. We need immediate Directors and future Collaborators:

Directors: This core group will join with me to form a collective to initiate the project, secure its base of operations, seek funding, and design its first interactive programs. As a collective, we will direct the project together, edit the work of the Collaborators, and share in future profits (if, for instance, we decide to produce a CD-ROM version of Performance in.History). I estimate that it will take about 3 years before we have our programs on the net and another two to test and modify them.

Collaborators: These scholars will come on board later, probably in two to three years. Working with the Directors, Collaborators will use the formats and templates tested by them to produce interactive programs in their areas of performance genre specialization.

Bruce McConachie, May 1996

e-mail:bamcco@facstaff.wm.edu

21st Congress

URL: http://www.sibmas.org/congresses/sibmas96/hels18.html