The structuration and definition of disciplines – an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century project – gave way, in the second half of the twentieth century in the European and American academies, to their destructuration, although certainly not everywhere, nor to unanimous approval. For all the resistance that it has encountered, however, this movement towards the dissolution of disciplinary boundaries has taken root. It can be traced back to the 1960s, a period whose economic growth and economic optimism freed up mental space, allowing energies to focus on political and sociocultural injustices and inequalities and thereby fermenting that ‘cultural revolution’ for which the 1960s are now most remembered in the affluent ‘western’ world. ‘Cultural’ here embraces, as it did at the time, the anthropological notion of culture as belief, knowledge, morals, customs and, among others, symbolic representation, thus also theatre and performance.

The boundaries of theatre as an academic discipline have never been particularly clear, and its relationship to other disciplines has been the focus of constant struggle and negotiation. This essay traces that negotiation, focusing upon its process in American universities. Competing with literature departments for the study of dramatic texts, American theatre departments drew their own new disciplinary model, based primarily on German Theaterwissenschaft, with emphasis upon the staging history and historical context of dramatic texts. More recently such emerging fields as performance studies and cultural studies have sought to transcend such traditional disciplinary boundaries. Despite some resistance from existing academic and publishing structures, the trend towards the breaking down of these traditional boundaries seems clear. Our academic culture seems headed towards a considerably more fluid organization of its materials of study than the traditional organization into fairly discrete disciplines could offer.

Feminist studies resulted from activist challenges to the very institutionalization of knowledge. Feminist studies, like studies of performance imagine their ground in embodied actions performed, somehow, socially, breaking down disciplinary boundaries to create a ‘field’ of study regarded as ‘interdisciplinary’. However, the term ‘post-disciplinary’, now in current usage, announces a different relationship to fields of study than the earlier term ‘interdisciplinary’ might connote. ‘Interdisciplinary’ is a term that signals a sense of a unified field, produced through the historical convergence of subcultures, social structures, and training practices. ‘Post-disciplinary’ retains nothing of the notion that a shared consciousness, or a shared objective, brings together a broad range of discrete studies. Instead, it suggests that the organizing structures of disciplines themselves will not hold. Only conditional conjunctions of social and intellectual forces exist, at which scholarship and performance may be produced.

Two broad areas within Theatre Studies have been characterized as interdisciplinary. The first concerns approaches inspired by the human and social sciences, and, more recently, cultural studies. The second concerns artistic practices that may be described as interartistic, intermedial (since they involve different media and, thus, different technological developments), and intercultual. It is argued that the epistemological paradigm for theatre studies has changed over the last thirty years, and can be broken down roughly according to decades, each defined by its particular contribution to the interdisciplinary thrust of theatre studies. Most current theoretical debates no longer deal with epistemology or methodology, but almost exclusively with the extension of the field of performance. It is suggested that the theoretical and practical worlds must be connected more closely, ‘actor’ and ‘text’ here serving as examples.

After a brief examination of the roots of interdisciplinary elements in classical theatre, the practice of this tradition in selected forms of modern folk and tribal theatre is discussed. The featured example is a prominent folk theatre form belonging to Central India, Pandwāni, which was not widely known even two decades ago, but which, today, has come to the forefront of attention. Increasingly it is attracting performers who work in such metropolises as Delhi, Mumbai and Calcutta, and serves to point out the tradition of interdiscplinarity which has long been a major characteristic of Indian theatre.

Each year local amateur actors in small, rural communities all over Norway stage a large number of open-air performances. Most of them are performed annually, and indeed some have been performed for almost fifty years. The interdisciplinary nature of these performances is founded on the principle of dugnad (community cooperation and participation) which brings to the performances local knowledges and skills. These productions thus attract large audiences because of their fusion of elements from theatre, music, dance, sport and crafts performed by skilled professionals turned amateur actors from the community. These interdisciplinary rituals are repeated annually by rural communities as the expression of local cultural disciplines harnessed together in performance.

This exploration of theatre as a ‘political poetics’ is based on a methodology developed through the study of theatre in Chile in the period of the Pinochet regime (1973–1989), and uses this as a way of reading the theatre of the transition and return to democracy. The understanding of a series of spaces that theatre negotiates, manipulates and occupies is seen to allow access to the fissures between these spaces. The essay explores the way these gaps might give access to a range of presences and absences in the dominant discourse, especially the national narrative around the historical present of the regime and the return to democracy. It is an exploration that leads to an unexpected insight into a central absence in the poetics of the stage during the dictatorship.

The cinema's developments in lighting, sound and image technology have helped the theatre, and have also allowed its aesthetics to become lighter (Strehler) as well as more complex (Langhoff). Films have originated in plays (not least Louis Malle's Vanya on 42nd Street, which has been accused of wiping away all traces of the theatre, when, in fact, this eradication was part of the staged work itself); and films have passed into plays (for example, Miracle in Milan staged by Zadek in 1993 after De Sica's film). The distinction between text and image, which defined the theatre/cinema split, is far less useful than distinctions between different types of images. The flux of audiovisual, informational and advertising images today has put the relationship between image and truth, as conceived by Bazin in the 1950s, into deep crisis. The theatre film transfers the dialogue between the stage and the audience into a dialogue between theatre and cinema, and is a meeting, rather than a fusion, between these two arts.

The recent performance work, Genesi: From the Museum of Sleep, directed by Romeo Castellucci for his company, Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, explores the ‘crisis of creation’, brought on by the scientific revolutions of genetics and nuclear physics and the cultural atrocity of the Holocaust. Genesi is analysed against Eduardo Kac's art installation, Genesis, which combines advanced media for telepresent interactivity and genetic engineering. Genesi and Genesis relate not only in the cultural concerns of science and technology studies, but in their interdisciplinary strategies, which include combining aspects of theatre, visual art, sculpture, and technology. Castellucci and Kac engage the risks inherent in the destruction possible through creation (both aesthetic and scientific) and isolate manners in which contemporary constructions of the human are challenged. The works signal an awareness of the constantly shifting boundaries and borders of aesthetic genres and the developing convergence of the disciplines of science and art.