WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT: CULTURAL

PERFORMANCE THEORY

Cultural performance theory offers an approach for understanding culture

within the activity of everyday life. It serves as a means to conceptualize culture
by placing culture at the center of hegemonic, or dominating, messages and
revealing the hierarchical structure of society through lived experience.
Performance is foundational to the study of human communication.
Performance has no singular definition, nor is it situated in any singular
discipline of study. Performance offers value and insight to theater studies and
to social sciences, and it can be viewed through the lens of cultural and critical
studies. Performance theory views humans as Homo narrans, or creatures who
communicate through stories as a way of crafting their social world and making
meaning of it.
Performance implies an act of doing, practice, and theatricality, while
simultaneously encompassing both the subject of research and the method of
doing research. Created from perspectives on human behavior, culture, and
ritual, cultural performance theory explores the relationship between the
foundations of human experience: community, culture, and performance. It also
serves as a challenge to traditional theory by bringing together differing
domains of knowledge—the objective, scientific, and observable—with the
embodied, practical, and everyday. Cultural performance theory radicalizes, or
identifies as the root issue, the binary opposition between theory and practice
by providing a model of communicative practice in which culture and
performance are inextricably joined and integral to the communal experience of
everyday life.
The term cultural performance refers to discrete events, or cultural
performances that can be observed and understood in any cultural structure.
These events include, for example, traditional theater and dance, concerts,
recitations, religious festivals, weddings, and funerals, all of which possess
certain characteristics: limited time span, a beginning and an end, a set of
performers, an audience, a place and occasion, and an organized program of
activity. This approach to cultural performances would later influence
anthropological and theatrical theory in the 1970s and give rise to the study of
folklore from the perspective of culture and performance.

https://communication.binus.ac.id/2016/06/01/what-you-need-to-know-about-
cultural-performance-theory/