The raison d’être for Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field is summarized at the end of the book: “not to perform theoretical and interpretative analyses for passive consumption, but to provide critical tools for others to employ, adapt, and expand upon” (132). Authors Sarah Bay-Cheng, Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, and David Z. Saltz foreground “taxonomies” in their title and approach by organizing systems for study that draw on extant research to define and analyze developments in the interactions among theatre, performance, and media. The critical frameworks proffered pinpoint ways in which scholars, artists, and audiences understand and continue to shape those interactions. Historical productions are compared alongside recent performance practice to demonstrate the effectiveness of applying analytical paradigms to interpret any mediatized exchange in the theatre.

Three initial contextual chapters, written collectively by the authors, set up the book's premise in an accessible fashion and invite the reader into the debate around approaches to, and the usefulness of, taxonomies for the interlocking of performance and media. The “Introduction” provides an overview of the field and clearly sets out the strategy that the authors take throughout the book, establishing a discourse for examining and interpreting the broad range of work that fits under this banner. Three questions are posed in framing the scope of the book: (1) How might new scholarship “keep up with a dynamic, growing, and globally dispersed field of media and performance intersections?” (2) How might it “attend to the dynamic connections without reifying certain connections at the expense of others?” (3) How might new research regarding the changing relations between digital technologies and the participant in social, as much as performance, contexts account for these “spectatorial interactions” (8)? Readers are then urged to propose and position their own taxonomies, using the proceeding models as a template for alternative critical frameworks.

“Texts and Contexts” then surveys relevant literature and practice, setting the historical background to study in the area while introducing the work of leading researchers publishing, as well as practicing, in the field. The authors identify affinities and points of divergence across perspectives. In so doing, they highlight how this book is positioned within, and evolves beyond, current scholarly analysis in the field: not merely creating another survey or history, they strive to equip the reader with a “refined and dynamic” set of tools for analysis, “eschewing essentialism and conceptual calcification” to reconsider not only the “what” but also the “how” of study in this broad, interdisciplinary area (27; emphasis added). The third chapter, “History of Taxonomy,” assesses the expediency of classification in general, in any mode of study, and specifically in relation to this field, valuing taxonomic practice as both analysis and historiography. The authors compare the opportunities afforded (in terms of researching and defining new species) by the increasing ease of travel across the world in the past centuries to the current rapid and global shifts that occur around media practices—shifts that necessitate evolution in modes of analysis with each new technological discovery made.

The second half of the book consists of three individually authored chapters, each offering a particular taxonomy for media and performance. Bay-Cheng's “Taxonomy of Distortion” opens up debate around what defines media (being already multiple forms) and the relations that exist between media and liveness in theatre across the axes of body, space, and time. Bay-Cheng raises a vital point that performance practice is inherently interdisciplinary and, in taxonomic terms, always “occupies several places simultaneously” (48). Jennifer Parker-Starbuck's chapter, in the “spirit of proposing, but not fixing,” goes on to explore a matrix for theorizing the relationships between bodies and technologies (65). She offers a stimulating “cyborgean interweaving” as a way of reading bodies in performance in general (67). The uninitiated reader may find the “abject,” “object,” and “subject” terminology a bit of a challenge as these are advanced concepts (67). That said, Parker-Starbuck defines her terms with that reader in mind and provides a critical framework for unfixing bodily constructs. She signals the pleasures—political and artistic—of employing technologies to these ends, wittingly or otherwise, and employs diverse examples of practice, each grouping a “taxon,” as illustration (75). Following these more “macro-level” (130) approaches, Saltz's taxonomy enables “micro-level” (131) analysis of specific moments of performer–media interaction. The complex layering of possible roles that media might take in a performance event, as summarized by his chapter's tables and illustrations, indicates a more technical approach to thinking around the practice. Saltz's chapter, “Sharing the Stage with Media,” concludes by pointing out that inventive, hybridized, nonhierarchical, and dramaturgical approaches in process and aesthetic have arisen in certain companies precisely because of the potentials of media deployment in live performance.

A concluding chapter entitled “Intersections and Applications” reunites the authors as they mobilize readers to exploit the alternative approaches to making and analyzing performance that these taxonomies offer. The authors provide a model for this by applying each of their taxonomies in turn to the same case study. This is followed by sample exercises that, although perhaps a little dry, can be useful to classroom discussion and/or as a starting point for individuals embarking on their own analyses of live performance in workshop or written form. Readers are encouraged to follow a specific approach or combine elements from each to set the parameters of their own strategies for practice and appreciation.

Overall this book expertly guides the reader to contextualize and interpret the range of practice that exists within the field of performance and media, surveying a rich and international range of practice to demonstrate the taxonomies prescribed. The introduction to online platforms at the end of the book points toward the ultimate ambition of the project: to expand from print scholarship to online, real-time debate. Performance and Media thus closes in the way that it opened: generously encouraging its readers to join its community and interact with scholarly practice that is flexible and responsive to changes, evolutions, and developments in the field.