The Dynamics of Evaluation

A defining feature of performance whether music, dance, or drama, folk, popular, or elite has been its singularity. The score or script or text may be known, it may have been performed once or a thousand times before, and yet each performance is still in some ways new, a product of that particular moment and those particular circumstances. In this singularity resides the potential that the next performance will transcend the text and all that has gone before, and this possibility informs the expectations and excites the interest of the audience and performers, producers, and critics. But the excitement and anticipation of the unexpected, that particular variation that will supersede the ordinary, has its underside: once it has been, it will never exist in exactly the same way again. So goes the reigning and attractive ideology of performance in Western culture. While it is now commonly accepted that the advent of recording technology, both audio and video, has tempered the consequences of the ephemeral nature of performance, it has become acknowledged with increasing frequency that the urge to preserve the temporal in a fixed form, to make possible some artifact of a performance, to create a collective of sorts, has always been present. In addition to the human capacities of memory that have been demonstrated by the studies of oral-formulaic composition and alternative methods of memorization, the invention of the alphabet and the arrival of printing have played their part in making possible the recording, storing, and retrieving for the future of certain aspects of a given performance

Pedagogy · Cultural Industries and Urban Development · Psychology · Theater, Performance, and Music History · Theatre and Performance Studies

• Persistence and change

  Beverly Whitaker Long, David R Shaw•Text and Performance Quarterly•1994

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