Look at this image as a line. Not just as a shape, but as a way of thinking. It appears to offer direction. It suggests that something begins, moves forward, and can be followed. At first, this makes the story feel stable, as if it exists somewhere and simply travels across time through repetition.

But stay with the image a little longer. The line only holds if we assume that something is being carried along it unchanged.

This is where Walter J. Ong unsettles what we are seeing. He writes, “Oral tradition has no such residue or deposit. When an oral story is not being told, all that exists of it is the potential in certain human beings to tell it” (Ong, 2013, p. 33). If this is the case, then what exactly is moving along the line? There is no stored story travelling forward. What we are looking at is not continuity of an object, but continuity of a possibility.

Now return to the line again. It begins to feel less certain.

With Albert B. Lord, this becomes even harder to hold. He argues, “What is important is not the oral performance but the composition during oral performance” (Lord, 1965, p. 19). If the story is being composed in the moment of telling, then each point on the line is not a repetition of the same thing. It is a new making. The line no longer connects identical points; it connects acts that are already different from each other.

Look again. The line is still there, but it is no longer stable.

Ruth Finnegan pushes this further by cautioning “to allow a sentimental romanticism to take the place of objective assessment” (Finnegan, 1974, p. 54). The idea that something pure is being preserved along this line begins to collapse. What continues is not a fixed form, but a process that allows variation to persist.

So the line does not disappear. It remains visible in the image. But it no longer means what it first seemed to mean. It cannot represent a story moving unchanged from one point to another. Instead, it begins to show its own limits. It holds movement, but not stability. It suggests continuity, but cannot guarantee sameness.

And if the line cannot hold the story in place, then it is already beginning to shift into something else.

Now look at this image as a spiral. Not just as a different shape, but as a change in how continuity is understood. Unlike the line, the spiral does not move straight ahead. It returns, but never to the exact same point. It suggests repetition, but also difference. Something continues, but not in the same way.

At first, this feels closer to what is happening in storytelling. The story seems to come back, to be told again, to carry traces of what came before. But the spiral also makes it clear that each return is slightly altered. The distance between one turn and the next is never identical.

Stay with that movement.

John Miles Foley helps shift how this return is understood. He writes, “performance is the enabling event, tradition the enabling referent” (Foley, 1996, p. 25). What we are seeing in the spiral is not a story being carried intact, but a condition that allows meaning to emerge each time the story is performed. The spiral does not store meaning; it makes meaning possible.

Look again at how the spiral holds its shape. It does not depend only on what is being told, but on how it is recognised.

This is where Marvin Carlson becomes important. He writes, “What distinguishes performance from other behavior is not what is done, but how it is framed” (Carlson, 2018, p. 4). The same act can appear different depending on how it is framed. The spiral begins to show that meaning does not come from the act alone, but from the way it is positioned and understood. Each turn of the spiral is shaped by a different framing.

Return once more to the image.

Thomas Pettitt complicates the idea of return even further by stating, “tradition is effectively a form of interpretation” (Pettitt, 2001, p. 425). The spiral is not bringing the story back to an original form. It is continually interpreting, selecting, and reshaping. What appears as continuity is actually a series of interpretations that hold the movement together.

The spiral, then, does not resolve the instability we saw in the line. It makes it visible in another way. It shows that repetition is never exact, that meaning is not carried forward unchanged, and that what continues is not a fixed story, but a process of performance, framing, and interpretation.

And even this begins to feel insufficient, because the movement is no longer only about return. It begins to spread, overlap, and move in ways that the spiral cannot fully contain.

Now look at this image as a scribble. Not as something unclear, but as something that refuses a single direction altogether. Unlike the line or the spiral, it does not offer a path that can be easily followed. It overlaps, interrupts itself, moves outward and inward at the same time. There is no fixed center, no clear return, no stable boundary.

At first, it becomes difficult to read. Where does it begin? What continues? What connects one movement to another?

Stay with that discomfort.

Dwight Conquergood shifts how this difficulty can be understood. He writes, “Proximity, not objectivity, becomes an epistemological point of departure” (Conquergood, 2002, p. 149). The scribble cannot be understood from a distance, as something to be mapped or decoded. It asks for engagement from within. What it holds is not a structure to be observed, but a set of relations that can only be experienced through participation.

Look again. The scribble is not chaotic. It is dense.

Victor Turner helps make this visible when he describes performance as “a mode of behavior, an approach to experience” (Turner, 1982, p. 13). Performance here is no longer an event that happens at a particular moment. It is a way of being, something that moves through everyday actions, interactions, and memory. The scribble begins to hold these multiple layers of experience at once.

Return to the image once more.

Richard Schechner expands this further by stating, “Performance is an inclusive term. Theater is only one node on a continuum…” (Schechner, 1988, p. x). The scribble cannot be reduced to theatre as a defined space or event. It stretches across different forms of activity, where performance is already embedded in life itself. What appears as scattered or overlapping is part of a larger continuum.

Now the image begins to shift again.

The scribble is no longer something that needs to be clarified into a cleaner form. It does not need to return to a line or settle into a spiral. It holds multiple movements at once, allowing stories to exist across people, contexts, and moments without fixing them into a single structure.

What once seemed difficult to follow begins to reveal something else. The story is no longer something that moves along a path. It is something that lives within these overlaps, within these crossings, within this constant movement that does not settle into one direction.

References
Carlson, M. (2018). Performance: A critical introduction (3rd ed.). Routledge.
Conquergood, D. (2002). Performance studies: Interventions and radical research. TDR: The Drama Review, 46(2)
Finnegan, R. (1974). Oral traditions and the verbal arts: A guide to research practices. Routledge.
Foley, J. M. (1996). Oral tradition and its implications.
Lord, A. B. (1965). The singer of tales. Harvard University Press.
Ong, W. J. (2013). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word (30th anniversary ed.). Routledge.
Pettitt, T. (2001). Oral tradition and theatre: The case of late medieval drama. Oral Tradition, 16(2),
Schechner, R. (1988). Performance theory. Routledge.
Turner, V. (1982). From ritual to theatre: The human seriousness of play. PAJ Publications.
Line, Spiral and Scribble images are drawn by Vaibhav Lokur