'Street' Performing

The word performance has been used to describe an array of different disciplines. The article this week discussed its increasing popularity in describing not only art and literature, but in social sciences as well. It notes that when one performs, they have the recognition of the act and are implementing their own interpretation. Strine, Long, and Hopkins in a 1990 survey article argues that performance is “developed in an atmosphere of ‘sophisticated disagreement’” by participants who “do not expect to defeat or silence the opposing positions.” This to me could be looked at in the ‘performance’ of daily human activities and the ‘roles’ that people carry out. There are certain ways people interact in different situations, even if their semantic overtone are kept the same; some of these are done unintentionally, yet the performance itself is still conscious. Performance can be judged not only in displaying ones skills or talents in a specific venue, but a basic competence to fulfill a task at hand. Furthermore in the social realm, linguistics has found itself in the performative mindset as it displays consciousness if on stage or on the street. When actors are playing a role, they speak in a way that they feel the character would say; so the actor becomes an elusive ‘other.’ All the emotions that the actor is trying to portray are collaborations of their own relationships with the world and others. It seems to me that it is easier to spot bad acting rather than good acting. With good acting, a person is expressing themselves in a diagetic setting, with a conscious acknowledgement and appears natural. When an actor is spotted doing or saying something that isn’t contextual to the scene, it doesn’t reflect the speaker's competence for the situation. I have found myself at times finding a loss of words to describe a situation; when this happens there is a failure not only linguistically but socially as well. If one steps back and looks over just one day of their life and all the performances during, they would find a pretty interesting relationship with the world.