Performance Theory

Every performance draws on behavior that has been lived before, stripped from its original context, and rehearsed into something new.

The Strip and the Rehearsal

Schechner calls this process restored behavior: action that once belonged to a specific moment is lifted free, stored, and put back into play elsewhere. The original moment is gone; what remains is a portable strip of doing.

This idea reframes what performance is. It is never raw spontaneous life. It is always material that has been worked on, shaped, and used again, even when it feels immediate.

Twice-Behaved: The Core Logic

The phrase twice-behaved action names the essential quality: the behavior has been done at least once before and is now being done again in a new context. Schechner insists the performer does not fully own the strip. It exists independently, like a film reel that can be run in different machines.

A Ritual Becomes a Drama

Consider a harvest ritual performed annually in a village. Over generations, the gestures, songs, and spatial arrangements are rehearsed and refined. When an ethnographer records them and a theater director later uses those same gestures in a stage production, the strip has been restored a second and a third time.

Each instance is twice-behaved relative to the one before.

Where This Matters Most

Recognizing restored behavior changes how a director, actor, or researcher approaches their work. Nothing in performance arrives from nowhere. Every gesture has a history, and tracing that history reveals whose traditions are being borrowed, transformed, or erased.

The Mechanics of Stripping and Restoring

A behavior becomes a strip through a kind of abstraction. Specific cause, emotional pressure, and social obligation fall away, leaving the observable shape of the action. That shape is what can travel.

Restored behavior

=

Action detached from its original context, stored, and reused in performance.

Twice-behaved action

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Any behavior performed again, after at least one prior instance, in a new frame.

Strip

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The portable unit of behavior: patterned, repeatable, and independent of any single performer.

Restoration

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The act of recontextualizing a strip, giving it new meaning by placing it in a different surround.

The strip's independence from its origin is what makes performance powerful and also ethically complicated. A mourning gesture lifted from one culture and placed in an entertainment context carries the shape but loses the weight, unless the restoration is handled with care.

When the Strip Holds and When It Breaks

This table maps the range of outcomes. Restoration is not a single event but a continuum, and where a given performance falls on that continuum depends on the knowledge, intention, and social position of everyone involved.

Working With Strips in Practice

1. 1Identify the source: Ask where the gesture, text, or sequence originally lived and what function it served.
2. 2Name the gap: Acknowledge how far the new context is from the origin, culturally, temporally, and emotionally.
3. 3Decide on transparency: Choose whether to mark the restoration openly for the audience or absorb it seamlessly into new material.
4. 4Rehearse the seam: Practice the moment where borrowed and new material meet; that seam is where meaning concentrates.
5. 5Evaluate the exchange: After performance, assess whether the strip was transformed or merely consumed.

These steps apply equally to a director staging a classic text, a choreographer sampling a folk dance, and a ritual specialist adapting a ceremony for a new community.

Twice-Behaved Across Scales

Restored behavior does not operate only in formal theater or ritual. Everyday social interaction is saturated with strips. A handshake, an apology, a toast at a wedding are all twice-behaved actions, drawn from cultural storage and performed with personal variation each time.

Schechner's insight is that performance theory, built on this concept, therefore does not draw a hard boundary between theatrical and ordinary life. The same logic governs both. This is what makes the concept generative far beyond the stage.

Edge Cases That Test the Idea

• Improvisation: a performer who claims to act spontaneously still draws on rehearsed movement vocabularies and cultural scripts. The strips are there, less visibly arranged.
• First-time ritual: a ceremony performed once and never repeated is still twice-behaved if its elements were rehearsed beforehand, since rehearsal is itself a prior instance.
• Trauma and compulsion: when someone involuntarily re-enacts a past event, the logic of restoration applies, but control over the strip is absent. The strip performs the person rather than the reverse.
• Digital performance: a viral gesture copied across social media platforms is stripped of context with unusual speed and scale, making restoration nearly continuous and attribution nearly impossible.

Second-Order Effects on Identity and Authorship

If behavior is always restored, then the self that performs it is also assembled from strips. Identity becomes a repertoire, not a fixed origin. This challenges any simple idea of authentic self-expression, since every expression draws on prior patterns.

Objections Worth Sitting With

One strong objection: if everything is restored behavior, does the concept explain anything at all? The answer is that Schechner uses it diagnostically, not as a universal solvent. The concept directs attention to which strips are chosen, by whom, under what conditions, and with what effects.

That specificity is where the analytical work happens.

A second objection: the term twice suggests only two instances, making repetition beyond that invisible. Schechner's broader argument implies n-behaved action, with twice simply marking the threshold at which restoration begins. The number is a figure, not a limit.

Restored behavior does not flatten the difference between sources. It insists on it. The distance between origin and restoration is exactly where interpretation, power, and meaning live.