Informing Performance: Producing the Coloquio in Tierra Blanca

The attractions of performance as a focus of anthropological and folkloristic analysis are many, but in general terms they derive from four characteristic properties of performance: 1. performances are artful, the locus of aesthetic behaviors, forms, responses, and values, as enacted in social life; 2. performances are reflexive, cultural forms about culture, social forms about society, communicative forms about communication, in which meanings and values are cast in symbolic form and placed on display before an audience; 3. performances are performative, in J. L. Austin’s (1962) sense of the term: they are consequential and efficacious ways of accomplishing social ends; 4. performances are both traditional and emergent, contexts in which the already done is done anew, recontextualized, shaped by and shaping the unfolding agendas of the here and now. In simple terms, then, we look to performances as sources of insight into art, meaning, values, social efficacy, and the dynamics of tradition and creativity (Bauman 1992; Bauman and Briggs 1990). Little wonder, given our investment in all these sociological, epistemolological, axiological, and textual resonances of performance, that we concentrate our attention overwhelmingly on full, finished performances. If it is aesthetics we are after, we want behaviors and forms at their artful best, open to critical evaluation for the skill and effectiveness with which they are done. If it is the reflexive display of meaning and value that we intend t