On Performance...

"Living Folklore's" chapter on performance was, I believe, the most important chapter that we have thus read this semester. I feel this way because it takes most of the elements we have discussed so far as well as various genres and has their purpose in a way fulfilled through performance. I agreed with the book when it stated how performances are not mainly thoes events that occur on a stage or an altar but happen most often in every day conversations and occurences in our daily lives. Performance is all around us. A basic way the book said that performances happen is in the saying of proverbs. I really do not agree with this. Well, I can see the point that the book is trying to make here, I guess, but I feel that saying a proverb is more of a recitation. I see performance as a point in time where a situation moves from the ordinary of life such as a conversation and is purposely adjusted to where a performer or performers and an audience are created or emerge from the situation. The most basic example of this I can think of is someone giving their representation of a conversation or situation that they witnessed or were a part of earlier in the day or week. Emergence was another topic that made a whole lot of sense to me. Emergence is the idea that things that are familure such as stories and jokes can be repeated over and over and still have the ability to grow and change to where they still are entertaining or contain new elements. The best example I can think of is my roomate Lucas and his friends telling stories. One of their favorite things to do with each other is tell, or perform, for each other stories of high school. Most of the stories everyone has either heard or witnessed, but they continue to tell them because of their emergence quality that these performances contain. The book did also mention the idea of a texture aspect associated with performances, but it did not make all that much sense to me. They stated that virtually all adjectives associated with describing physical texture can be applied to performance texture. I guess i am just having a hard time picturing what a lumpy performance might be like....