Performance is often labeled a disappearance. By the time it’s happening, it’s already done. The moment performed is always already in the past. My present performance has already happened. And sure, we can wax philosophical all day long about such a statement but it feels like it’s just another way to say that it’s really hard to talk about what performance is. Performance scholar Richard Schechner says that performance is “restored behavior,” that when we perform, we’re always performing that which has been performed before, albeit in a slightly different way, if for no other reason than the space and time has disappeared. In this way, performance is about bringing the past into the present. It’s about remembering. Now this remembering is often unconscious. When the President, for example, gives an inaugural address, he is very clearly calling on the performances of presidents past, restoring the genre of the address but putting his own flair on it. Now, there’s no doubt that the whole thing is about pomp and circumstance, but it is a pomp and circumstance that is American. In this framing of the event, we forget (as a public) that the restored behavior of past president’s is a
