From Text to Performance: The Rise of Theatre Studies as an Academic Discipline in Germany

In the course of the 1990s, a new paradigm in cultural studies seems to have arisen. In the humanities, the metaphor of ‘culture as text’ held true until the late 1980s; culture as a whole and different cultural phenomena were understood and interpreted as structural sequences composed of single elements (signs) to which a particular meaning can be attributed. In the 1990s, however, the focus of interest shifted to the processes of making, producing, creating, doing and to the actions, processes of exchange, negotiation and transformation as well as to the dynamics which constitute the agents of these processes, the materials they use and the cultural events they produce. Thus, it seems that the metaphor of ‘culture as performance’ is gaining ground. Whereas the humanities prevailingly dealt with texts and monuments as the results, manifestations and greatest achievements of modern European culture, they are now concerned with all kinds of performative processes which are, by their very nature, bodily processes. Thus, it seems that the discovery of the performative nowadays directs the humanities and cultural studies in particular.