Volume VI Special Issue III March 2026

Name of Author : Sramana Banerjee

Title of the paper : Performance and Behavior The points of a Continuum

Abstract: This paper tries to reexamine the relationship between performance and behavior by proposing a shift from categorical thinking to scalar understanding. Although performance studies have broadened definitions of performance, it often preserves an underlying divide between deliberate, framed action and habitual, unselfconscious behavior. This binary, while analytically convenient, overlooks the fluid interplay between intention and conditioning within embodied experience. Instead of identifying boundaries between performance and behavior, this study approaches them as positions along a continuum shaped by shifting intensities of awareness, habit, and social orientation. Drawing on a practice as research methodology, the paper reflects on observations from both staged performance contexts and everyday, unscripted encounters. Attention to subtle variations in gesture, movement, and self awareness reveals that routine actions can acquire performative charge without formal framing, while intentional performances frequently expose residual patterns of habituation. By emphasizing degrees rather than divisions, this paper reframes embodied action as a dynamic field in which agency and habit remain in constant negotiation. The proposed continuum model tries to offer a lens for understanding how performance emerges not as a separate category, but as a modulation within ongoing lived experience.

Keywords : Behavior, Continuum, Embodiment, Interplay, Performance, Practice as Research

DOI :

Page Number : 252-256