Theatrical Paradigm

How can the theatrical paradigm explain the social conditions?

Using a paradigm to view and analyze a certain phenomenon means to apply a specific research pattern or model. In this case vocabulary, notions and structures deriving from Western theatre theory are employed to analyze a social phenomenon.

Anthropologist Victor Turner introduced “social drama” to approach social processes.

Social drama: a unit of harmonic or disharmonic social process arising in conflict situations. The scheme has four phases.

1. Breach of regular social relations
2. Crisis: the breach tends to widen, crisis is in focal point
3. Redressive action: informal or formal (juridical/legal) mediation
4. Reintergration of the disturbed social group or Irreparable schism

This is a pattern that can be traced in Western dramaturgy and story-telling.

Performance is what makes this conveyance from the theatrical to the social sphere possible. According to Turner ” performance is the basic stuff of social life [… it is] the presentation of self in social life”. There are social performances and cultural performances.

In Turner’s own words: “As I insisted earlier the truly ‘spontaneous’ unit of human social performance is not a role-playing sequence in an institutionalized or ‘corporate group’ context, it is the social drama which results precisely from the suspension of normative role-playing, and in its passionate activity abolishes the usual distinction between flow and reflection, since in the social drama it becomes a matter of urgency to become reflexive about the cause and motive of action damaging to the social fabric.”

“I regard the ‘social drama’ as the empirical unit of social process from which has been derived, and is constantly being derived, the various genres of cultural performance.”

“The performative genres are secreted from the social drama and in turn surround it and feed their performed meanings back to it.”

In my mind it sounds like this: in a certain society a kind of theatre with specific features appears and evolves. With time someone extracts some of these features to create a model and apply it to analyze the aforementioned society. The emerging reflection is intergrated as feedback with both the social and the cultural performance.