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Each volume in the Theatre and Performance Theory series introduces a key issue about theatre's role in culture. Specially written for students and a wide readership, each book uses case studies to guide readers into today's pressing debates in theatre and performance studies. Topics include contemporary theatrical practices; historiography; interdisciplinary approaches to making theatre; and the choices and consequences of how theatre is studied; among other areas of investigation.

  • General Editors: Tracy C. Davis, Northwestern University

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9 results in Theatre and Performance Theory

Performance and Translation in a Global Age
  • Edited by Avishek Ganguly, Kélina Gotman
  • Published online:
    10 August 2023
    Print publication:
    29 June 2023
  • This global overview of how translation is understood as a performative practice across genres, media and disciplines illuminates the broad impact of the 'performance turn' in the arts and humanities. Combining key concepts in comparative literature, performance studies and translation theory, the volume provides readers with a dynamic account of the ways in which these fields fruitfully interact. The chapters display interdisciplinary thinking in action across a wide spectrum of performance practices and media from around the world, from poetry and manuscripts to theatre surtitles, audio description, archives, installations, dialects, movement and dance. Paying close attention to questions of race, gender, sexuality, embodiment and accessibility, the collection's rich array of methodological approaches and experiments with scholarly writing demonstrate how translation as a performative practice can enrich our understanding of language and politics.

State of the Arts
  • An Ethnography of German Theatre and Migration
  • Jonas Tinius
  • Published online:
    03 August 2023
    Print publication:
    17 August 2023
  • This is a bold and wide-ranging account of the unique German public theatre system through the prism of a migrant artistic institution in the western post-industrial Ruhr region. State of the Arts analyses how artistic traditions have responded to social change, racism, and cosmopolitan anxieties and recounts how critical contemporary cultural production positions itself in relation to the tumultuous history of German state patronage, difficult heritage, and self-cultivation through the arts. Jonas Tinius' fieldwork with professional actors, directors, cultural policy makers, and activists unravels how they constitute theatre as a site for extra-ordinary ethical conduct and how they grapple with the pervasive German cultural tradition of Bildung, or self-cultivation through the arts. Tinius shows how anthropological methods provide a way to understand the entanglement of cultural policy, institution-building, and subject-formation. An ambitious and interdisciplinary study, the work demonstrates the crucial role of artistic intellectuals in society.

International Theatre Festivals and Twenty-First-Century Interculturalism
  • Ric Knowles
  • Published online:
    11 January 2022
    Print publication:
    16 December 2021
  • Ric Knowles' study is a politically urgent, erudite intervention into the ecology of theatre and performance festivals in an international context. Since the 1990s there has been an exponential increase in the number and type of festivals taking place around the world. Events that used merely to be events are now 'festivalized': structured, marketed, and promoted in ways that stress urban centres as tourist destinations and “creative cities” as targets of corporate enterprise. Ric Knowles examines the structure, content, and impact of international festivals that draw upon and represent multiple cultures and the roles they play in one of the most urgent processes of our times: intercultural negotiation and exchange. Covering a vast geographical sweep and exploring festival models both new and ancient, the work sets compelling new standards of practice for post-pandemic festivals.

Theatre in Market Economies
  • Michael McKinnie
  • Published online:
    12 February 2021
    Print publication:
    04 February 2021
  • Theatre in Market Economies explores the complex relationship between theatre and the market economy since the 1990s. Bringing together research from the arts and social sciences, the book proposes that theatre has increasingly taken up the mission of the 'mixed economy' by seeking to combine economic efficiency with social security while promoting liberal democracy. McKinnie situates this analysis within a wider context, in which the welfare state's tools have been used to regulate, ever more closely, the lives of citizens rather than the operations of markets. In the process, the book invites us to think in new ways about longstanding economic and political problems in and through the theatre: the nature of industry, productivity, citizenship, security and economic confidence. Theatre in Market Economies depicts a theatre that is not only a familiar cultural institution but is, in unexpected and often ambiguous ways, an exemplary political-economic one as well.

Real Theatre
  • Essays in Experience
  • Paul Rae
  • Published online:
    27 December 2018
    Print publication:
    27 December 2018
  • Theatre is often said to offer unique insights into the nature of reality, but this obscures the reality of theatre itself. In Real Theatre, Paul Rae takes a joined-up approach to the realities of theatre to explain why performances take the forms they do, and what effects they have. Drawing on examples ranging from Phantom of the Opera and Danny Boyle's Frankenstein, to the performances of the Wooster Group and arthouse director Tsai Ming-liang, he shows how apparently discrete theatrical events emerge from dynamic and often unpredictable social, technical and institutional assemblages. These events then enter a process of cultural circulation that, as Rae explains, takes many forms: fleeting conversations, the mercurial careers of theatrical characters and the composite personae of actors, and high-profile products like the Hollywood movie Birdman. The result is a real theatre that speaks of, and to, the idiosyncratic and cumulative experience of every theatre participant.

Copyright and the Value of Performance, 1770–1911
  • Derek Miller
  • Published online:
    11 August 2018
    Print publication:
    16 August 2018
  • In the nineteenth century, copyright law expanded to include performances of theatrical and musical works. These laws transformed how people made and consumed performances. Exploring precedent-setting litigation on both sides of the Atlantic, this book traces how courts developed definitions of theater and music to suit new performance rights laws. From Gilbert and Sullivan battling to protect The Mikado to Augustin Daly petitioning to control his spectacular 'railroad scene', artists worked with courts to refine vague legal language into clear, functional theories of drama, music, and performance. Through cases that ensnared figures including Lord Byron, Laura Keene, and Dion Boucicault, this book discovers how the law theorized central aspects of performance including embodiment, affect, audience response, and the relationship between scripts and performances. This history reveals how the advent of performance rights reshaped how we value performance both as an artistic medium and as property.

Acts of Activism
  • Human Rights as Radical Performance
  • D. Soyini Madison
  • Published online:
    04 May 2010
    Print publication:
    14 January 2010
  • This book was first published in 2010. Madison presents the neglected yet compelling and necessary story of local activists in South Saharan Africa who employ modes of performance as tactics of resistance and intervention in their day-to-day struggles for human rights. The dynamic relationship between performance and activism are illustrated in three case studies: Act One presents a battle between tradition and modernity as the bodies of African women are caught in the cross-fire. Act Two focuses on 'water democracy' as activists fight for safe, accessible public water as a human right. Act Three examines the efficacy of street performance and theatre for development in the oral histories of Ghanaian gender activists. Unique to this book is the continuing juxtaposition between the everyday performances of local activism and their staged enactments before theatre audiences in Ghana and the USA. Madison beautifully demonstrates how these disparate sites of performance cohere in the service of rights, justice, and activism.

Professing Performance
  • Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity
  • Shannon Jackson
  • Published online:
    30 March 2010
    Print publication:
    08 April 2004
  • Today's academic discourse is filled with the word 'perform'. Nestled amongst a variety of prefixes and suffixes (re-, post-, -ance, -ivity?), the term functions as a vehicle for a host of contemporary inquiries. For students, artists, and scholars of performance and theatre, this development is intriguing and complex. By examining the history of theatre studies and related institutions and by comparing the very different disciplinary interpretations and developments that led to this engagement, Professing Performance offers ways of placing performance theory and performance studies in context. This 2004 book considers the connection amongst a range of performance forms such as oratory, theatre, dance, and performance art and explores performance as both a humanistic and technical field of education. Throughout, she explores the institutional history of performance in the US academy in order to revise current debates around the role of the arts and humanities in higher education.

Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems
  • Nicholas Ridout
  • Published online:
    04 December 2009
    Print publication:
    17 August 2006
  • Why do actors get stage fright? What is so embarrassing about joining in? Why not work with animals and children, and why is it so hard not to collapse into helpless laughter when things go wrong? In trying to answer these questions - usually ignored by theatre scholarship but of enduring interest to theatre professionals and audiences alike - Nicholas Ridout attempts to explain the relationship between these apparently unwanted and anomalous phenomena and the wider social and political meanings of the modern theatre. This book focuses on the theatrical encounter - those events in which actor and audience come face to face in a strangely compromised and alienated intimacy - arguing that the modern theatre has become a place where we entertain ourselves by experimenting with our feelings about work, social relations and about feelings themselves.