From Text to Performance: The Rise of Theatre Studies as an Academic Discipline in Germany

Abstract

In the course of the 1990s, a new paradigm in cultural studies seems to have arisen. In the humanities, the metaphor of ‘culture as text’ held true until the late 1980s; culture as a whole and different cultural phenomena were understood and interpreted as structural sequences composed of single elements (signs) to which a particular meaning can be attributed. In the 1990s, however, the focus of interest shifted to the processes of making, producing, creating, doing and to the actions, processes of exchange, negotiation and transformation as well as to the dynamics which constitute the agents of these processes, the materials they use and the cultural events they produce. Thus, it seems that the metaphor of ‘culture as performance’ is gaining ground. Whereas the humanities prevailingly dealt with texts and monuments as the results, manifestations and greatest achievements of modern European culture, they are now concerned with all kinds of performative processes which are, by their very nature, bodily processes. Thus, it seems that the discovery of the performative nowadays directs the humanities and cultural studies in particular.

Investigar la Dramaturgia del Actor: la antropología teatral y sus aplicaciones científicas

“…Of all of them, we want to highlight how from the 1980s, there was a shift of methodological approaches applied to theatre studies stemming from the introduction of a new paradigm: culture as performance as opposed to culture as text developed by semiotics (Fischer-Lichte, 2004). This direction shift led to an interest in the analysis of artistic phenomena, ranging from socio-anthropological perspectives, where the scenic fact was not presented as a text with great thickness of meanings but as a dynamic reality or shared experience in continuous motion where the focus of interest was in its process, on how things work, more than in what they mean.…”