The notion of “performance” is broad. It appears on different occasions and has many uses, including theatrical practices. As a way to understand social and cultural phenomena, it is an important dimension of tourism studies.
Identifying performance
Performance has been debated extensively in the humanities and social sciences, especially since the 1940s and 1950s when it was associated with the early use of the concept of “play” (Huizinga 1955). At that time, performance was defined as the entire set of activities “of a given participant on a given occasion which serves to influence in any way any of the other participants” (Goffman 1959: 15). In the following decades, performance has become an extremely popular term used to indicate a number of very different activities, including linguistic acts, rituals, and folklore.
Performance has been extended far beyond its initial association with theatricality, to be employed more widely to understand human behavior (Schechner 2006)....
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Zhu, Y. (2016). Performance. In: Jafari, J., Xiao, H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Tourism. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01384-8_144
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