Location: BSECS 2024, St Hugh’s College, Oxford

In the eighteenth century it was common to a call a poem, a statue, or a painting a ‘performance’. One of the things that the word meant, for Samuel Johnson, was ‘composition’ or ‘work’. Nowadays this meaning of ‘performance’ has faded, marked as rare in the second edition of the OED (1989), and then, in 2005, as obsolete, eclipsed by a set of meanings that all position performance as a kind of ‘action’. Johnson also defined performance as ‘action; something done’, but it is the central contention that the range of meanings recorded for the word ‘performance’ suggest a historic way of conceiving of performance that might change the way we think about past performances, especially those in the theatre. The frequent contestation between actors and authors in the 1700s, for example, can now be understood as between two sets of people who both create ‘work’. The application of theories from painting to the theatre is also made easier when an actor’s performance is seen as the same kind of thing as a painter’s performance: a composition. And acting theory that considers the performance of a Garrick or a Siddons in toto rather than as something that is ‘different every night’ makes sense as a historical approach that sees that performance as a composition created by an artist rather than – as many in the modern discipline of performance studies would have it – as an action that takes place in particular circumstances.