Interperformance

Abstract

InterperformanceEvery folktale text is a mosaic of quotations-recurrent phrases, characters, and incidents. Formulaic openings and closings are cited verbatim; trickster repeats the behavior he exhibited last time; the youngest son is again successful. The Motif-Index ofFolk Literature is a dictionary of familiär quotations. Regarded äs performance, every storytelling event 1 is constituted by a mosaic of complex relationships to other events. 2 Belonging to a Community of craftspersons and artists, äs well äs to a Community of performer and audience, Storytellers fill their tales with "directional Signals" 3 to the discourse of their craft. For literature, the directional signals-these homages, imitations, or parodies of the work of fellow artists-have been analyzed with great thoroughness and subtlety by Gerard Genette. 4 Similar signals may also be found in folklore, where they function to produce superior performances. I call such performances superior because they are more complex, engaging, and multileveled than those which have been fashioned directly to purpose. To name the relation between homages, imitations, or parodies and their models, I coin the word Interperformance, meaning that relation of inclusion which connects storytelling events to the various types of discourse which engender them.This neologism transposes a category from literary criticism on to folklore. Intertextuality is Julia Kristeva's term for the relation between literary texts explicated at length by M. M. Bakhtin. All discourse, according to Bakhtin, and most emphatically the discourse of art, Orients itself to other discourse; everyday talk, law, religion, the human sciences, rhetorical genres all take part in the continuing conversation of mankind. 5 As intertextuality is to literary texts, so interperformance is to folklore performance: the relation of a performance of a tale, proverb, riddle to other performances. The other model for the notion of interperformance, also drawn from Bakhtin, is intergeneric dialogue, the ways in which "genres engage one another in varying degrees of Integration and exchange." 6 Interperformance exists against the background of the dialectic of tradition and Situation. There, Storytellers make use of five important directional signals: allusion, quotation, framing, metafolklore, and Variation.

Poetics and Performances as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life

“…Moreover, the chain of linkages may be extended without temporal limit, for texts may be continuously dec entered and recentered (128). In this sense the investigation of decontextualization and recontextualization continues the program of the ethnography of speaking, adding a conceptual framework, centered on discursive practice itself, that links separate situational contexts in terms of the pragmatics of textuality.…”

Commentary: Indirect Indexicality, Identity, Performance

“…What makes performance especially attractive, however, to those of us who seek to develop this powerful insight, is that the performance forms of a community tend to be among the most memorable, repeatable, reflexively accessible forms of discourse in its communicative repertoire; that is to say, they are constructed and recognized as part of a succession of intertextually linked reiterations. Richard Schechner's observation that performance means "never for the first time" (Schechner 1985:36) and Lee Haring's (1988) suggestive term "interperformance" both foreground the intertextual resonances of performance.…”