Conversational Performance and the Performance of Conversation

It was not my intention when I first collected tapes of the conversations of intimate couples in their homes to use the material for aesthetic purposes. At the time I was gathering data for my doctoral dissertation on patterns in long-term relationships. However, in subsequent years, as I worked with the material from several different research perspectives and used particularly interesting excerpts as examples for analysis in classes in interpersonal communication, relational communication, and conversation analysis, I began to appreciate the inherent entertainment value (both comic and dramatic) of some of this spontaneously created, routinely accomplished material, as well as its potential for engendering and relational insights for those who examined excerpts closely. And so, eventually, I set out to turn the material into a sort of play, reducing some 20 hours of tapes to about go minutes of performance-worthy scenes and shaping them into a unified work called Conversation Pieces: An Empirical Comedy.1 I will report here the stages of the research process and then of the ensuing process, developing along the way an argument that our everyday conversations with strangers, friends, family, and intimates are fields within which a number of types of specific acts might occur, and that these are worthy of study from a conversational performance perspective. Furthermore, in reporting on Conversation Pieces I hope to indicate that the of conversation, set within a theatrical frame and adhering closely to the details of the original, can be as rewarding for performers and audiences as the of many a dramatic or literary text. The development of Conversation Pieces was facilitated by the recent emergence in the speech communication discipline of a significantly broadened conception of performance. The discipline's long tradition of the study and practice of oral interpretation of literary texts-poems, short stories, novels-has begun to evolve into a studies paradigm with radical new conceptions of and of texts. In characterizing the emergent paradigm, Ronald J. Pelias and James VanOosting emphasize its counterelitism: all members of the culture are viewed as potential performers, all utterances are potentially aesthetic,