According to Diana Taylor, "what they have in common is their shared object of study: performance—in the broadest possible sense—as a process, praxis, and episteme, a mode of transmission, an accomplishment, and a means of intervening in the world.
This early approach to public speech delivery focused on verbal diction, physical gestures, stance, tone, and even dress.
Another actor, John Walker, published his two-volume Elements of Elocution in 1781, which provided detailed instruction on voice control, gestures, pronunciation, and emphasis.
Most significant of these to performance studies today is the Northwestern University School of Oratory, established in 1894 by Robert McLean Cumnock[4] to teach speech education on the principles of elocution.
[8] On the theatrical and anthropological front, this origin is often regarded as the research collaborations of director Richard Schechner and anthropologist Victor Turner.
An alternative origin narrative stresses the development of speech-act theory by philosophers J. L. Austin and Judith Butler, literary critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and also Shoshana Felman.
For any of these performative utterances to be felicitous, per Austin, they must be true, appropriate and conventional according to those with the proper authority: a priest, a judge, or the scholar, for instance.
[14] The question of the infelicitous utterance (the misfire) is also taken up by Shoshana Felman when she states "Infelicity, or failure, is not for Austin an accident of the performative, it is inherent in it, essential to it.
Theorists like Peggy Phelan,[16] José Esteban Muñoz,[17] E. Patrick Johnson,[18] Rebecca Schneider,[19] and André Lepecki have been equally influential in both performance studies and these related fields.
[21] In the United States, the interdisciplinary and multi-focus field has spread to Columbia, Brown, UCLA, UCI, UC Berkeley, and elsewhere.
Texas A&M University's Department of Performance Studies is unique in including both Music and Theatre degree programs.
The University of Warwick also offers a BA in Theatre and Performance Studies, in addition to leading Postgraduate programmes.
In Poland, Jagiellonian University in Kraków offers a master program in performance studies at the Faculty of Polish Language and Literature.
[22] In India, Jawaharlal Nehru University offers MPhil and PhD program in theatre & performance studies at the School of Arts & Aesthetics.
In Brazil, the Universidade Federal de Goiás, started an interdisciplinary program (masters) in cultural performances in 2012, the first in a Latin country.
The goal of this program is to analyse "rituals, games, performances, drama, dance" from a cross-cultural point of view.