Nathan Stucky

Toward an aesthetics of natural performance

The recent utilization in performance of texts which arise from everyday activities, such as naturally‐occurring conversation, shares a tradition with performance studies/oral interpretation practice while suggesting a new aesthetics of natural performance. This study describes performance practices which involve the re/performance of ordinary interaction. A model of natural performance situates its aesthetics on the intersection of two continua: one which describes the level of detail available from everyday life events, and one which describes performance choices in relation to everyday life events.

Performing oral history: Storytelling and pedagogy

This essay addresses the potential of oral history performance to explore human communication across cultures. The study describes a class project in collecting and performing oral history interviews. By engaging students as field researchers to gather oral texts, and through the use of performance as a mode of historical, cultural, and interpersonal inquiry, students meet their interview subjects in a dialogic encounter designed to enhance their understanding of another persons experience.

Performing Master Han

In asking what it means to perform an ethnographic other, I, a middle-aged White American man, struggle with a performance of my older Taiwanese Tai Chi teacher. Although everyday life performance (ELP) leads me ever closer to an exact copy of Master Han’s behaviors, it simultaneously clarifies difference. Is it mimesis or alterity? Am I presenting or representing? Am I integrating participant and observer? Is autoethnography, like poetry, something that can get near but not there? When I perform my Tai Chi master, does my audience see him, me, both, or something else? What knowledge claim would I make were I to perform my own brother instead of Master Han? How do we understand knowledge that resides in the body? How do we know that we know? My experience performing Master Han leads me to further question the epistemology of representation.

Is there a doctor in the house?: Vanya on the Plains as therapy*

ABSTRACT Considering the contemporary American political and social malaise, the author finds medicine in art therapy.

The paradox of Patrick Santoro's at the mercy of ruin

Patrick Santoros At the Mercy of Ruin, featuring a surrealistic dreamscape blending cinemascope images of ruin with live action, serves as a site for investigating loss, love, ruin, and mercy. This review focuses on Santoros live performance that draws on his ethnographic fieldwork at Old Shawneetown, IL, on the banks of the Ohio river, images from the ancient city of Pompeii, and his evocative personal narratives.

Everywhere and Always Performance

The buzz and excitement at the Economies and Ethics of Performance conference at Villanova University carried echoes of previous gatherings of performance folk. Energetic conversations filled the sessions, spilled into the margins, and swirled around the dinner tables and hallways just as they had done at earlier signal events. The energy that infused the Saldado I and II conferences (1986 and 1990 respectively), and the Otis J. Aggertt Festival at Indiana State University (1995), resurfaced for those present at Villanova. It felt like making history. Like at those earlier gatherings, the kind of history being made will only be understood in retrospect, but an engaging mix of scholar and artist generations marks each of these historic moments. The special sense for the participants was that being there mattered, that the decision to attend was consequential, that something important was shifting because of the conference. The gathering itself enacted disciplinary social ties. A productive performative mixing of generations marked the room. Between sessions individuals freely picked up their coffee cups and re-settled at different tables, introducing themselves or hugging friends. This was a working conference at which we found ourselves in the midst of social labor. As keynote speakers Judith Hamera and D. Soyini Madison each demonstrated in their opening remarks, as other participants displayed throughout the sessions, and as Bryant Keith Alexander and Omi Osun Joni L. Jones made manifest in their performed conference summary, the power of performance comes through experiencing the moment as fully engaged persons. My own small part in this drama was to present some context in terms of performance studies history. Developments in the field that led from the interpretation and performance of literature of the Speech Communication Association Interpretation Division changing its name to Performance Studies (1991), to the creation of Performance Studies international (1995), seemed to me little but recent expressions of ancient human urges. So, I took a look back 17,000 years to the cave paintings in Southern Europe. I once stood in Font-de-Gaume cave near Les Eyziesde-Tayac-Sireuil, France, and wondered about the social world that led to the sophisticated artistry there. What conversations and discussions went on in the process of their creation? What schooling did they have? What prehistoric pedagogy?

It's time to boo: Resonance, resistance, and revolution

In this piece the author questions audience behavior in the 2012 Republican primary campaign for U.S. President. Why do some ideas and performances resonate to the point of producing overt response? What underlying elements condition an audience to boo or applaud? The cultural climate of talk radio and other heated rhetoric contributes to creating conditions ripe for explosion in this context. The author develops a personal poetic response to two incidents: An audience booing a gay soldier who objected to the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, and an audience cheering for the death penalty.

Minding the stops: Performance and affective stylistics

Because performance particularizes and reifies all the component elements of the literary experience, it can be a valuable test of descriptions of the reading process. A comparison of performance practice and theory with one of the most famous descriptions of reading in contemporary literary theory, Stanley Fishs affective stylistics, demonstrates the accuracy of its claims. The study concludes that Fishs later rejection of affective stylistics is inconsistent with the neo‐pragmatism he currently espouses.