The Particularities of Comprehending the Concepts of “Performativity” and “Performance” in Contemporary Music Scholarship in Russia and Other Countries

Abstract

Performativity and performative forms have become an intrinsic part of almost all academic
genres, and have contributed to their renewal: in musical theater, under the influence of performative
forms, such varieties of opera performance as post-opera and documentary musical theater have
appeared; in instrumental music the interest in instrumental theater has not subsided for several
decades. In the present-day musical culture, performative forms have become a type of platform
for uniting together the academic, classical and the non-academic, popular traditions, which
has been vividly demonstrated by the festive culture, in which synthetic performative forms,
absorbing the features of historical-ritual and secular festivals, have produced many new ideas.
However, in humanitarian scholarship, when comprehending the concepts of “performance art”
and “performativity”, a field of debate has been thereby created. In Russian musicology, the issue
of studying performativity and the performative forms of contemporary art has not received any
proper elucidation. The questions related to the development of this issue currently remain open
and provide ample opportunities for research.
The article is devoted to the issue of comprehending the concepts of “performativity” and
“performance”. An attempt is made in this work to trace the peculiarities of their formation in
modern scholarship in Russia and in other countries, to consider the approaches to the study of
performance art and performativity as they have been developed in related fields of humanitarian
knowledge, to identify the questions of discourse in art criticism, and to outline the prospects of
further research relevant for musicology. The authors propose and substantiate the interpretation of
performance art as a form of presentation which combines theater and ritual and assume a special
interpretation of the role of the audience member as a direct participant in the events taking place.
This point of view makes it possible not only to unite such different spheres as the academic,
classical musical genres and art practices, but also to consider the performative forms of their
presentation as a unified phenomenon of musical culture in the last third of the 20th century the
beginning of the 21st century.

Keywords: the concepts of “performance” and “performativity”, theater and ritual, discourse in
art criticism.