Professing Performance
Professing Performance
Contemporary academic discourse is filled with the word "perform". Nestled among a variety of prefixes and suffixes (re-, post-, -ance, -ivity?), the term functions as a vehicle for a host of inquiries. This development is intriguing and complex for students, artists, and scholars of performance and theater. By examining the history of theater studies and related institutions and comparing the very different disciplinary interpretations and developments that led to this engagement, this study offers ways of placing performance theory and performance studies in context.
- Shows the relationship between past institutional histories and tradition and current scholarly and artistic practices in performance
- Shows both the opportunities and hazards of using performance as an interdisciplinary site of inquiry
- Critiques rather than perpetuates the professional underpinnings of the opposition between the scholar and the artist
Reviews & endorsements
"Highly recommended for its detailed treatment of the obstacles and promise of performance studies." Theatre Journal
"Although a relatively slim volume, Professing Performance is an unusually ambitious, far-ranging and richly textured study." The Drama Review David Savran
Product details
April 2004Paperback
9780521656054
268 pages
217 × 139 × 18 mm
0.38kg
Available
Table of Contents
- 1. Discipline and performance: genealogy and discontinuity
- 2. Institutions and performance: professing performance in the early twentieth century
- 3. Culture and Performance: structures of dramatic feeling
- 4. Practice and performance: modernist paradoxes and literalist legacies
- 5. History and performance: blurred genres and the particularising of the past
- 6. Identity and performance: racial performativity and anti-racist theatre.
