Blog Post #8

The Archive and the Repertoire 

• Performances function as vital acts of transfer, transmitting social knowledge, memory, and a sense of identity through reiterated, or what Richard Schechner has called ‘‘twice-behaved behavior.’’
• What one society considers a performance might be a nonevent elsewhere
• Civic obedience, resistance, citizenship, gender, ethnicity, and sexual identity, for example, are
• rehearsed and performed daily in the public sphere
• 6 For Turner, writing in the 1960s and 1970s, performances revealed culture’s deepest, truest, and most individual character. Guided by a belief in their universality and relative transparency, he claimed that populations could grow to understand each other through their performances.
• For others, of course, performance means just the opposite: the constructedness of performance signals its artificiality—it is ‘‘put on,’’ antithetical to the ‘‘real’’ and ‘‘true.’’ 
• Supervisors evaluate workers’ efficacy on the job, their performance, just as cars and computers and the markets supposedly vie to outperform their rivals.
• Science too has begun exploration into reiterated human behavior and expressive culture through memes: 
• ‘‘Memes are stories, songs, habits, skills, inventions, and ways of doing things that we copy from person to person by imitation’’—in short, the reiterative acts that I have been calling performance, though clearly performance does not necessarily involve mimetic behaviors
• Performances may not, as Turner had hoped, give us access and insight into another culture, but they certainly tell us a great deal about our desire for access, and reflect the politics of our interpretations.
• By taking performance seriously as a system of learning, storing, and transmitting knowledge, performance studies allows us to expand what we understand by ‘‘knowledge.’’ 
• This move, for starters, might prepare us to challenge the preponderance of writing in Western epistemologies.
• Writing, though highly valued, was primarily a prompt to performance, a mnemonic aid.
• Nonverbal practices—such as dance, ritual, and cooking, to name a few—that long served to preserve a sense of communal identity and memory, were not considered valid forms of knowledge. 
• Many kinds of performance, deemed idolatrous by religious and civil authorities, were prohibited altogether.
• ‘‘Archival’’ memory exists as documents, maps, literary texts, letters, archaeological remains, bones, videos, films, cds, all those items supposedly resistant to change. 
• The repertoire requires presence: people participate in the production and reproduction of knowledge by ‘‘being there,’’ being a part of the transmission. 
• As opposed to the supposedly stable objects in the archive, the actions that are the repertoire do not remain the same. The repertoire both keeps and transforms choreographies of meaning. 
• The repertoire too, then, allows scholars to trace traditions and influences
• Certainly it is true that individual instances of performances disappear from the repertoire. This happens to a lesser degree in the archive. 
• The question of disappearance in relation to the archive and the repertoire differs in kind as well as degree. The live performance can never be captured or transmitted through the archive. 
• A video of a performance is not a performance, though it often comes to replace the performance as a thing in itself (the video is part of the archive; what it represents is part of the repertoire)
• Performances also replicate themselves through their own structures and codes. This means that the repertoire, like the archive, is mediated.
• . The process of selection, memorization or internalization, and transmission takes place within (and in turn helps constitute) specific systems of re-presentation
• The archive and the repertoire have always been important sources of information, both exceeding the limitations of the other, in literate and semiliterate societies. They usually work in tandem and they work alongside other systems of transmission—the digital and the visual, to name two

My Experience With Performance & Identity

This is going to get a bit personal, but I thought this was important to share. There was a point in my life that I did not like the person that I was. I hated how people perceived me and how I felt about myself. Our talk today reminded me of this and helped me make sense of how I was able to change my performance in order to alter my identity. Essentially, I was annoying to most people and did not have many friends. I was picked on a lot and I really wanted a change to happen in my life, and the one way that I thought to do this was to change who I was. The way I went about this was altering my performance, this means that I would take my old actions and personality that I did not like, and determine a more favorable way to compose myself around others. After a while, people began to internalize this change in performance that I had made, and I was not the same person anymore. I know this can simply be seen as "maturing" or merely growing up, but I think that is what growing up is about. It is about a major change in your social performance that results in the formation of a new identity.

I finally grew into someone I liked being