Context and the emerging story : Improvised performance in oral and literate societies

In this paper I examine why the Balinese continue to improvise in performance in spite of the presence of writing, which leads me to investigate the more general supposition in Western scholarship that the advent or presence of literacy will, over time, supersede orality, and thus reduce the domain of oral (improvised) performance. Such an assessment can provide insights into other traditional systems, specifically the Greek performances of the Homeric poems. To provide a background to what follows I will briefly describe the relevant developments in orality research, from its initial framing to its current, more open, position