THE INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDY OF CREATIVITY IN PERFORMANCE

Creativity researchers have tended to neglect the creativity of perfor mance in music, theater, and ritual. But several other disciplines hav e analyzed the creativity of performance, including folkloristics, eth nomusicology, and linguistic anthropology. In this article, I summariz e recent developments in these and other fields and suggest how these fields are beginning to come together in a truly interdisciplinary stu dy of performance creativity. psychology can draw on research in these disciplines as it begins to extend creativity theory to the study of performance creativity. These other disciplines can, in turn, benefit from relevant research in the psychology of creativity. The interdisci plinary study of performance is a case study of how interdisciplinarit y can benefit psychology more generally, as performance research touch es on many issues that are central in current psychological theory-the relation between behavior and context, the influence of social groups and cultural situations, and the importance of events and actions as units of analysis.