This chapter discusses the ways in which I implement Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing into my process as a First Nations performing arts practitioner, working to create resources for Australian schools to support all educators in approaching First Nations content in Indigenous ways. Examining the design of two projects as case studies, the Kings, Brothers and Heroes exploration (a verbatim performance ceremony intended as a resource for secondary school students and teachers) and the Totems program (an immersive creative arts program for students from Foundation to Year 6), I discuss the ways in which I related ways of Indigenous knowing, being and doing to the work. This includes connecting to First Nations oral traditions, creating a space of free creative expression, discussion and engagement for students around story, history and culture that maintains, supports and preserves community ownership while recognising the importance of the Outsider relationship into which practitioners enter when working with community.

Chapter 9 moves the discussion from not-knowing to not-doing in the acts of everyday life. Here, the focus is on people’s willingness and purpose to stop knowing, to pause, or to put a stop to the meaning of the world by engaging in subversive acts of not-doing. This concept is derived from the work of the controversial anthropologist and ethnographic fiction writer, Carlos Castaneda. This chapter centers on various forms of deliberate immersion and transportation of subjects into the negative and enigmatic realm of not-knowing. Therefore, we perceive not-doing as purposely creative, devising practices with the intention of altering consciousness in order to introduce individuals to experiences commonly referred to as paranormal, esoteric, mystical, divine, artistic, and subjunctive.

This chapter explores the double bill of Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci – first presented at the Metropolitan Opera in 1893 in the context of increasing Italian emigration to New York, and becoming a staple of New York’s operatic life. Mascagni’s one-act opera had been a huge success at its Roman world premiere and capitalised on widespread interest in the economically impoverished Italian South on the part of Northern and Central Italian audiences. The two operas became a focal point for wider discussions in New York about Italian identity and Italian opera’s position within the cultural hierarchies of the time: ones in which distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow were being negotiated, and Italian opera shifted between social allegiances and degrees of cultural (and racial) capital. Tracing the operas’ ongoing critical reception and performance history, I indicate how the operas fluctuated between contemporary politics and aesthetic escape and argue for the formulation of italianità as much as an expressive mode as a cultural category, during a period of emerging interest in (and monetisation of) human psychology and emotional behaviour.

This chapter positions William Burroughs within the radical tradition of avant-garde manifesto writing, arguing that his cut-up experiments, pamphlets, tape texts, and prose manifestos from the late 1950s through the early 1970s exemplify the genre’s urgency, performativity, and call to action. Drawing on the lineage of Marx, Futurism, and Dada, Jimmy Fazzino explores how Burroughs weaponized language and media to dismantle structures of “Control” through techniques of textual sabotage and sonic disruption. Works like Minutes to Go, The Exterminator, BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS, and The Revised Boy Scout Manual are read not only as aesthetic provocations but as revolutionary acts aligned with the manifesto’s historical function. Addressing Burroughs’s contradictions – including the inflammatory rhetoric of his guerrilla texts – Fazzino examines how Burroughs redefined literature as a site of resistance, merging art and life in a performative praxis designed to make things happen.

Chapter 6 outlines the ways different practitioners of peithō’s arts managed her ambiguity through expressions and performances of piety toward her divinity. The chapter examines diverse figures from ancient Greek comedy and oratory who used prayerful reverence toward Peithō to bolster their own ēthos and secure success for their rhetorical projects. The chapter surveys the persuasive work of characters from the Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and Menander’s Epitrepontes as well as historical speeches from Demosthenes and Isocrates. Each of the orator-like figures examined reveals both the advantages and pitfalls of partnering with Peithō and the degrees to which the coercive or corrupting qualities of her influence might be deflected. These performances offered the ancient audience a variety of educational models for how one might productively harness Peithō’s assistance in rhetorical speech: by cultivating respectful deference toward her divinity and reconciling oneself to a lack of complete control before her power.

The Introduction explains the collection’s argument, structure, and its interventions in the field. We challenge the fetishization of firsts in early modern drama studies, first performances, and first editions and highlight problems with privileging “maiden” performances and print “inceptions” of Renaissance plays over their ghost-like “afterlives” on the stage and page. Engaging with recent work in theatre and book history and editorial studies, the Introduction explores the idea that plays are indelibly marked and transformed by their transhistorical movement through different cultural sites of production and reception. We argue, in short, that the social, political, and aesthetic meanings of Renaissance drama were shaped by processes of renewal.

Although book historians have tended to date the beginnings of an established market for printed plays to the mid 1590s, the first year of play publication, 1584, saw four plays printed, two of them in multiple editions. More plays were printed in this year than the rest of the decade combined; it would be another sixteen years before a play went into multiple editions in a single year. This chapter asks what this strange year tells us about plays as printed, reprinted, and revived commodities. The four plays discussed are John Lyly’s Campaspe and Sappho and Phao, Robert Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London, and George Peele’s The Arraignment of Paris. All four plays have things to say about reviving stories and performance, and three went on to be reprinted. Attending to them as a kind of corpus, this chapter investigates their place in the histories of revival, reprinting, and dramaturgy.

This chapter considers a range of Latin documentation and poetry composed in the late ninth and early tenth centuries, with a particular focus on the social settings in which the material was produced, consumed and performed. The chapter opens with an overview of the contemporary charter corpus, which is a rich mix of Latin and Old English documents drawn up in the names of royal, non-royal, ecclesiastic and lay individuals. This survey provides several points of comparison with the material examined in Chapters 2 and 3, and it allows us to consider the possible impact of Alfredian education reform. Consideration is given to the linguistic dynamics of the corpus and to examples that employ Latin specifically to enhance the performative potential of the document. Two sets of Latin poetry are then introduced – acrostic verses in praise of King Alfred and the ‘Metrical Calendar of Hampson’ – both of which were most probably composed within, and for, the milieu of the West Saxon court. The authorship, transmission and possible sources of inspiration for this poetry are considered. It is then argued, through a comparative discussion, that the performances of this Latin documentary and poetic material were critical to their value.

Chapter 2 turns to the evidence of royal diplomas produced by the kings of Mercia and Wessex during the reigns of Æthelwulf, Berhtwulf and Burgred. With Æthelwulf’s diplomas, we find the earliest clear evidence for centralised production of diplomas for an Anglo-Saxon king. It is in this centralised West Saxon context, furthermore, that Old English boundary clauses are likely to have been established as a royal diplomatic feature. Contemporary Mercian diplomas lack evidence for comparable production processes. Novelty nevertheless is apparent: with a royal diploma in Old English, and in the literary flair of diplomas issued for the community at Breedon-on-the-Hill. Overall, the continued importance of the Latin charter tradition for both Mercian and West Saxon kings is clear, yet there was space for experimentation, innovation and reflection on the qualities and potencies that specific languages could carry. Moreover, people were increasingly interested in the performative potential of charter production, as an opportunity for ritual action that would generate and reaffirm authority for participants.

This chapter addresses the crucial interpretative issue of the relationship between performance and text in Pindar’s odes. What elements do we have to reconstruct the circumstances of their first performances? How important are these elements for the interpretation of the poems? In what manner was the wording of the texts themselves meant to reflect and interact with the extra-textual elements pertaining to the performance?The first parts of the chapter focus on the less studied fragments of Pindar’s cultic poetry, offering both a survey of the evidence and some novel interpretative contributions. The following sections move to the examination of the epinicians and the enkomia, as well as the question of the reperformances of his poems. The analysis of the whole corpus highlights the productive tension between the emphasis on performance and the emphasis on the text’s capability to transcend it, arguing that this is one of the key defining traits of Pindaric poetry.

This chapter examines a series of court cases in Hong Kong in which a number of newly elected legislators were disqualified from taking office in part because the ways in which they took their oaths during the swearing-in ceremony were deemed too flamboyant, too extravagant and too theatrical to be taken seriously. Implicit in the legal and political objections to their oath taking is the view that theatre has no place in the hallowed chambers of the law courts or the legislature, a view that is all the more surprising given the intertwined histories and representational strategies between law and theatre. Taking these cases as a starting point, I explore what may be at stake in this legal anti-theatricality, and argue that law’s determination to expurgate the theatrical could be read as part of an attempt to render invisible its own performative nature.

Appearing at the tail end of this volume, I begin with a brief meditation on the coda. A (musical) ending, the vulgar form of cauda (tail or privy member), figure of our fallen state, the coda may also be a whip or goad to inspiration or even exaltation. Attempting to turn my posterior position to good ends, I have, in the place of an ending, used the chapters here as provocations and inspirations. Recognizing in them a more expansive account of legal performance than my own, I point to how they unbind law and performance from the rigid definitional strictures on which I have relied, how they challenge the boundaries between text and performance, performance and law, law and world, world and fiction (the veritas falsa of theatre and the falsitas verus of law), how they show the methodological Über-Ich (with its rules and dogmas) to be unseated by an ontological Id that scoffs at its laws. That force – like the comedic cauda in the courtroom – answers legal solemnities with impudent laughter and other “minor jurisprudences of refusal,” creating heterotopias, wild zones, rehearsals for alternative futures.

Ignatius Sancho is largely known for a collection of his letters that were published by his friend after his death. Less well known is the fact that he holds the distinction of being the first published Black composer in Britain known to historians. In contrast to most of his letters, Sancho chose to write and publish at least one book of vocal music and four books of instrumental music over a period of thirteen years. In exploring the meanings of music in Sancho’s life through both production and consumption, this chapter argues that no one aspect of Sancho’s identity can be understood apart from his work in music. Music for Sancho was many things, including a personal avocation, a means of profit, and a vehicle for communicating his political opinions and honoring his friends and family. First and foremost, however, it was a sociable practice and a communal experience.

Ignatius Sancho had a rich artistic life, from music to literary criticism to engagement with the theater. Unfortunately, little is known about the latter – Joseph Jekyll’s 1782 short biography of Sancho offers only a few sentences about what appears to have been a failed attempt at playing the titular leads of William Shakespeare’s Othello and Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko. However, Jekyll’s biography offers an important window into eighteenth-century thinking about race and performance, in spite of (and, in part, because of) its limited and compromised nature. Crucial to Jekyll’s explanation for Sancho’s theatrical failure is a supposedly “defective and incorrigible articulation,” most often read along the lines of disability. This chapter examines how vocal and linguistic performance in the eighteenth-century created and disrupted popular narratives about race.

Law, with its seemingly endless paperwork, is almost overwhelmingly textual. From contracts to briefs to opinions to treatises, law lives in its texts. Simultaneously, law requires performances to produce authenticity and authority. Witness testimonies, pleadings, and trials all enact the law through participants’ bodies. There is no law without text. There is no law without performance. Legal texts and performances produce and reproduce each other: Legal texts record or script legal performances; legal performances generate or stage legal texts. Because law entwines text and performance, this chapter considers the law’s material textuality and its theatricality in tandem by probing how law brings performance to book. Drawing on theater studies and the history of dramatic texts, I offer methods for reading legal texts as scripts that precede or follow legal performances. Examples from Anglo-American law reveal that legal documents’ typographical conventions uncover law’s reliance on performance and its anxiety about deviating from textuality. More sophisticated legal attention to the relationship between text and performance would better serve law and, more importantly, justice.

This chapter argues that to truly understand Emerson, we need to see and hear him at the lectern. It sketches Emerson’s place within the performance culture and popular lecture circuit of antebellum America and contends that we should regard his works as a form of “voiced essay.” The chapter brings to life Emerson’s dramatic, modulated style as a performer of his own work, showing how his writing simulates these spoken elements at the levels of both style and theme, and inviting readers to become active listeners. The “voiced essay” ultimately dissolves strict boundaries between orality and writing, energizing a new form of social engagement. By encouraging readers to hear Emerson as a figure with a strikingly modern grasp of media forms and the synergy between orality and textuality, the chapter underscores Emerson’s ongoing relevance to debates about performance, intellectual virality, authority, and the transmission of ideas.