When you are studying any form of performance art, you are studying something that is embedded in a context. Without knowing something about that period and context, it is difficult to understand a work of art.
One of the major difficulties with studying performance is that, paradoxically, with a very limited number of exceptions, we are not actually studying the performance. For example, when you study Antigonein a classroom, you are reading a book...
When you are studying any form of performance art, you are studying something that is embedded in a context. Without knowing something about that period and context, it is difficult to understand a work of art.
One of the major difficulties with studying performance is that, paradoxically, with a very limited number of exceptions, we are not actually studying the performance. For example, when you study Antigone in a classroom, you are reading a book containing an English translation of a Greek text. Antigone, however, was not written in English and was experienced by its original audience not as a text but as a performance. If you watch a video of Antigone, you are experiencing a medium that was invented over 2,000 years after the death of the playwright Sophocles. Moreover, 21st century interpretations may be very different from the original staging. Many of the gender issues in both ancient and Elizabethan drama were affected by the fact that female characters were played by male actors.
Even if your interest is only in contemporary performance theory, many of the traditions of modern performance are grounded in historical traditions. For example, it is difficult to understand the notion of "breaking the fourth wall" unless you have a sense of how the proscenium arch evolved and the development first of realism in drama and then the rebellion against it.
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