Performance Analysis

1. DECODING THE ARTEFACT

The first chapter speaks about decoding the artefact with the help of the
Sign, Myth, Structure and the Frame. The common ground for the 20 th
century theories thought is trying to figure out the distance between the
material world and our perception. I would like to present the theories of
Sigmund Freud, Saussure, Einstein, and Friedrich in my understanding
with an example.
Example: I am dancing.
Sigmund Freud says My unconscious experiences would affect my
performance.
Saussure says I am never seen as the real me. But perceived by the way
I do (with the help of signs)
Einstein says I am understood by the audience according to their relative
position with me.
Friedrich says I am never understood. Only attempts (projections) are
made to understand me.
Two key assumptions:
1. Meaning doesnt exist in some abstract realm of thought but always
involves the concrete.
2. Meaning is always social in origin.
The Sign
The linguistic sign unites not a thing and a name, but a concept and a
sound image. There are two terms related to a sign the signified and the
signifier. If language is a sheet of paper, thought is its front face and
sound is its back face. One can neither divide sound from thought nor
thought from sound. A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound
combined with a series of differences of ideas.
Charles S Peirce says that Sign is a Vehicle which stands for its object and
this object conveys its meaning. He further explains three kinds of signs.
1. Diagrammatic sign or icon
2. Index (Like a pronoun) forces the attention to the particular object
intended without describing it.
3. Symbol general name or description which signifies the object.

Anything that startles is an index.

Example: Thunderbolt
Words, sentences, books etc are Symbols.
Exercise: To choose a performance and identify the icons, indices and
symbols in it.
The Myth:
Myth is also a type of speech. Myth cannot possibly be an object, a
concept or an idea; it is a mode of signification, a form, entirely illusory.
Mythical speech is made of a material which has already been worked on
so as to make it suitable for communication. Picture, cinema,
photography, reporting, sport, shows and publicity serve as support to
mythical speech. They provide different types of consciousness.
The structure:
Levi Strausss Structural Anthropology provided many of the conceptual
principles informing the broad movement of modern structuralism. Culture
as a whole function and the meaning of their individual parts is
determined by their systematic relations with all others. Such relations are
of two kinds: diachronic relations govern the combination of elements in
sequence, over time, as in the historical development of a language or the
word order of a specific utterance (or parole); synchronic relations are
those which structure relations typically organize meaning in the form of
dichotomies of male/female, raw/cooked, etc. In this section, the author
tries to sequence the story of Oedipus in a structure and decode the myth.
The frame:
Frame describes the perceptual mechanism by which actions are
recognized as other than functional or literal; as play. An understanding
shared by he who acts and he who views the act, the frame indicates the
nature and purpose of a behaviour, and hence how it is to be interpreted.
It thereby offers a tool for understanding the implicit agreement of
performer and audience on the symbolic fictional status of performance.