Intercultural Performance and Dialogue. From Richard Schechner Performance Studies Onwards

Through a historical, theoretical and methodological excursus, this thesis analyzes the birth, development and current identity of Performance Studies, an academic research field that, born in the United States at the end of the Seventies, has always been reluctant towards any attempt to be defined. If Performance Studies conceives performance both as an object of analysis and as a methodological lens, and if, as pointed out by Richard Schechner, everything can be studied "as" performance and so investigated according to the analytical categories of this discipline, then, with a transitive and "meta-methodological" shift, this doctoral research takes Performance Studies as its object of study, observing it "as performance" and using the same methodological tools suggested by its object of analysis. This work investigates how the object of study of Performance Studies is, following Schechner’s theory, the "behaved behavior", and thus how, as a result, the repertoire, even before the archive can be regarded as the true custodian of "embodied practices". Focusing on examples of performative "reenactment" such as those by Marina Abramovi? and Clifford Owens, as well as on the efforts undertaken by the UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage section, it suggests valid examples of "archiving performance". The paper then examines cases that exemplify the successful identification of "studying performance" and "doing performance", it underlines the crucial and inescapable role played by the on-field research, understood as "participant observation", and highlights the constant social and political commitment of Performance Studies. This dissertation addresses and supports the effectiveness of Performance Studies in itself as an innovative tool able to analyze a world increasingly performative in its dynamics. Thanks to its both interdisciplinary and intercultural nature, Performance Studies seems to be a proper lens through which to promote different levels of performance dialogue among cultures which are locally different but globally comparable.