Hello, and welcome to the Folklore & Fiction newsletter. In this edition, I'm writing about performance with help from scholars Dan Ben-Amos, Roger D. Abrahams, Richard Bauman, and others, author and playwright William Shakespeare, and the McGahan Lees Irish Dance Academy. I'm also exploring possible uses of performance in storytelling. This is the most theoretically chewy of the newsletters I've published in the last two years, but I've endeavoured to make it tasty as well, so grab a glass of water and dig in. =)
How Folklorists Understand Performance
Folklorists use the term "performance" in several contexts. The most obvious of these are staged performances of folk music, folk song, folk dance, folk theatre, and the like, and we'll be looking at an example of folk dance below. We also understand performance as a nuanced expression of intangible cultural heritage and a phenomenon that arises out of everyday life.
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