Published together with the companion website (https://semioticsofperformances.com), Paul Bouissac’s new book The Semiotics of
Performances further develops the author’s life-long research on the nature of circus and clowning, this time extended to other types of live performances such as concerts, plays, and comedy shows—staged events in which the audience is subjected, to their delight, to a sensory barrage of visual effects, colours, physical action, plot, words, songs, dance, music, and other sound effects. A semiotician’s task is to find order,
meaning, and purpose in this premeditated attack on our senses, cognition, and emotions. Why do we agree, and pay, for this onslaught on our nervous systems, to be not only entertained but also often shocked and horrified? Bouissac’s book sets out to disentangle the many strands of the information overload converging during a live performance, to explain how it creates a meaningful and essentially enjoyable experience. A systematic semiotic analysis that goes beyond a mere impressionistic response can be of benefit to the audience trying to figure out what it is about the show that makes it so enjoyable, to critics and scholars seeking conceptual tools with which to interpret a live performance, and to aspiring performing artists anxious to learn how to impress their audiences.

Paul Bouissac, Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto, world renowned semiotician and pioneer of circus studies, is well placed to give an authoritative account of the nature of live performances. The author of 13 books on semiotics as well as linguistics and literary fiction, Bouissac is a dynamic and prolific scholar and author, with over sixty miscellaneous publications alone since his retirement in 1999—a role model for all academics looking with some trepidation towards their own retirement. The Semiotics of Performances is not only a continuation of Bouissac’s life-long preoccupation with circus studies, but a new departure towards a more general investigation of live performance as a cultural universal. Individual case studies presented in the book deal with examples as diverse as rock concerts, stand-up comedy shows, theatrical plays, opera, ballet, circus, pantomime, and street busking. Originally staged live, these performances are analysed by Bouissac as recorded events, with the important technical, perceptual, and processing differences between live and recorded events always carefully considered.

The analysis of the design and production of live performances is comprehensive and detailed throughout, from initial conception to the full enactment, including such elements as the choice of genre and style; construction of performing identities with their individual acting styles, costumes and makeup; the relations between performers and spectators; the social impact in the form of fan clubs and celebrity culture; and the performances’ lasting power to manipulate the spectators’ emotions and world views. In Bouissac’s book performance is considered in the light of the classic communication process consisting of an addresser (the performer), a message (the performance), a code (shared cultural rules), an addressee (the audience), and a context (the socio-cultural environment to which the message refers). The details of this communication framework follow Bouissac’s own semiotic approach, supported by the classic linguistic models of Ferdinand de Saussure, Karl Bühler, and Roman Jakobson, the anthropology of Bronisław Malinowski, and the information theory of Claud Shannon, Warren Weaver, and Norbert Wiener.

Live performances are accordingly interpreted as multimodal and multisensorial holistic “texts” bounded in space and time and embedded in historical and cultural contexts of their production. Following the ancient aesthetic metaphor of the world as a stage, Bouissac also considers the interrelations between stage performance and life, both in the sense of dramatic fictions imitating life and of social behaviour conceived
as performance, in which we create a “persona,” an image of ourselves which we project when interacting with other people in social contexts such as job interviews, a first date, or a business negotiation—situations in which success depends on the right performance supported by appearance, choice of clothes, manners, and ways of speaking. The resemblance of real life to a theatrical play holding “as ‘twere the mirror up to Nature” (Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.2.21-22), is indeed one of the reasons for our cognitive involvement in fictitious performances. This is also why, as Bouissac points out, the effect of performances extends beyond the live event: the fictions we see enacted on the stage affect our personalities in long term by transforming our attitudes and social behaviour. We take lessons in life from performances which alert us to social and political issues by stimulating ethical reflection and promoting activist causes.

With the human body as the central element of performance, obvious in the case of dance, singing, acting, and circus clowning, the focus of the spectators’ attention remains the face. A particularly interesting part of Bouissac’s book is devoted to the semiotics of the human face, both natural and enhanced by makeup. Face-to-face interactions are the basic form of social non-verbal communication, and our ability to
interpret a face as an index of individual identity, emotions, intentions, and personality appears to be genetically hard-wired and instinctive. Apart from live and recorded performances, our fascination with faces underlies their ubiquitous presence on magazine covers, in painted portraits, on television and cinema screen, on emoji icons, and not least on portrait photographs and selfies exchanged daily by hundreds
of millions of people around the world. No other part of the human body, on stage as in life, is better capable of expressing the subtleties of emotions such as sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust, contempt, or happiness. Only the face has the power to make the observer jump into quick emotional and moral judgment about a person, by describing him or her as beautiful, charming, sexy, warm, funny, serene, anxious,
radiant, beaming, or else plain, ugly, menacing, tense, frowning, unpleasant, gloomy and so on. The semiotics of the human face and makeup, of body and costume, speech and behaviour, can help assess both the effectiveness of a scripted performance and success in navigating one’s way in the spontaneous flow of social life.

Ultimately, what matters, for performers and spectators alike, is the quality of the creative process; how it affects everyone involved, emotionally and cognitively; is the effect transitory or lasting; is the performance judged as “super” or does it “suck”; is it a hit or a flop—problems addressed in the concluding chapters in Bouissac’s book, in which the conceptual tools of semiotics offer practical guidelines to measure the success of a performance. It could be argued, however, that a forensic, coldly conceptual semiotic analysis cannot fully explain the subjective, intuitive, difficult-to-verbalize if psychologically real effect of a stage performance. For the legendary actress Sarah Bernhardt, for example, the “magic” created by a successful performance focused on human body and personality was as real as it was elusive—“that mysterious something that draws the attention of the public. For wantof a better word, this mysterious thing has been called ‘charm.’ … It is made of everything and of nothing, the striving will, the look, the walk, the proportions of the body, the sound of the voice, the ease of the gestures” (The Art of the Theatre, London: Geoffrey Bless, 1924, 23–24). Valid and ultimately crucial as intuitive judgments on artistic performance are, a more formal analysis such as that offered by semiotics can be just as helpful, by identifying the rules that underlie a felicitous performance in terms of social communication and experience. Bouissac suggests that the level of audience satisfaction can be measured using the following diagnostic criteria: 1/ accountability, referring to an implicit contract between the performers and their audience, as in avoiding audience disappointment by delivering a show with a content and quality as advertised; 2/ effective communication, in keeping the audience constantly in mind by making sure that the show is properly seen and heard, and that its content is comprehensible; 3/ relevance, in sharing with the audience a knowledge code that makes the message of the performance meaningful; and 4/ maintaining propriety, depending on the genre, as in respecting the “fourth wall” in shows that do not involve the audience directly, or in addressing the audience directly within the constraints of propriety and cultural acceptability, as in standup comedy. 

At the same time, the success of a performance can never be fully predicted or guaranteed, even with all the care and professional expertise used in planning and preparation. Audience expectations and artistic trends and fashions change in an often capricious way, and what was cool and relevant in one season may be passé, boring, and up for ridicule in the next. Uncertainty and black swans are part of life, not just in show business, but disappointments and failures can be reduced by research and rational planning provided by science, including semiotics as a formal study of communication and meaning.

Piotr Sadowski
Department of Film and Creative Media
Dublin Business School
www.piotr-sadowski.com