Shawyer dissertation May 2008 final version - The University of ...

no one should expect “a specific, and usually vast, change in the social order” from asingle performance moment because “cultural practice is so diffuse and is composed ofso many interdependent elements that the immediate impact of actions . . . are difficult toascertain” (30). While of course I don’t expect the Yippies’ specific performancemoments to effect widespread social change, the telegrams and letters do offer cluesabout individual Americans’ responses to the performances, and through them, it ispossible to argue that the Yippies did manage to change minds.One way a performance can be efficacious is by creating communitas, a feeling ofgroup togetherness. Turner defines communitas as an experience of unity in a socialsituation that nevertheless “preserves individual distinctiveness” (45). Actors on stageworking together to entertain the audience can feel communitas. A live performance canalso create the feeling of communitas between actors and audience, as they share theperformance experience together. The affect of that shared feeling has the potential toproduce effects after the performance has finished. In Utopia in Performance: FindingHope at the Theater (2005), theatre scholar Jill Dolan describes the feeling ofcommunitas as a “cohesive if fleeting feeling of belonging” (11). She builds on the notionof communitas to argue for the utopian performative, “small but profound moments inwhich performance calls the attention of the audience in a way that lifts everyone slightlyabove the present, into a hopeful feeling of what the world might be like if every momentof our lives were as emotionally voluminous, generous, aesthetically striking, andintersubjectively intense” (5). If a performance creates this powerful affect, then bothactors and audience might experience the hope of a utopian performative. The utopian18