THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO THEATRE

AND PERFORMANCE

What is theatre? What is performance? What connects them and how are they
different? How have they been shaped by events, people, companies, practices and
ideas in the twentieth century and after? And where are they heading next?
The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance offers some answers to
these big questions. It provides an accessible, informative and engaging introduction
to important people and companies, events, concepts and practices that have defined
the complementary fields of theatre and performance studies. Three easy-to-use
alphabetized sections include more than 140 entries on topics and people ranging
from performance artist Marina Abramović, to directors Vsevolod Meyerhold and
Robert Wilson, theorists Walter Benjamin and Jacques Rancière, the Living Theatre’s
Paradise Now, the haka, cultural materialism, political protest and physical theatre.
Each entry includes important historical and contextual information, extensive cross-
referencing, detailed analysis and an annotated bibliography.
The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance is a perfect reference
guide for the keen student and the passionate theatre-goer alike.

Paul Allain, Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Kent, has
published extensively on Jerzy Grotowski, Polish and Russian theatre and intercul-
tural performer training processes.

Jen Harvie, Professor of Contemporary Theatre and Performance at Queen Mary

University of London, has published widely on relationships between contemporary
performance and cultural identities, including in Theatre & the City (2009) and Fair
Play – Art, Performance and Neoliberalism (2013).
Also available from Routledge

Stanislavski The Basics

Rose Whyman
978-0-415-49297-3

Acting The Basics

Bella Merlin
978-0-415-46101-6

Fifty Contemporary Choreographers

Edited by Martha Bremser and Lorna Sanders
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Theatre Studies The Basics

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Dance Studies The Basics

Jo Butterworth
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THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO
THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE

Second Edition

Paul Allain and Jen Harvie

 Second Edition published in 2014 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2006, 2014 Paul Allain and Jen Harvie
The rights of Paul Allain and Jen Harvie to be identified as authors of this
work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
First edition published 2006 by Routledge
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-415-63630-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-415-63631-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-77901-0 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Saxon Graphics Ltd, Derby
 For Joanna Labon,
and
for my mother,
Judy Harvie,
and in memory of my father,
Eric A. Harvie
This page intentionally left blank
 CONTENTS

List of figures xi
Acknowledgements xiii
Introduction 1

Part I People and companies 13

Abramović, Marina 15
Anderson, Laurie 17
Artaud, Antonin 19
Athey, Ron 22
Bakhtin, Mikhail 24
Barba, Eugenio 25
Bausch, Pina and the Wuppertal Dance Theatre 27
Benjamin, Walter 30
Bharucha, Rustom 31
Boal, Augusto 33
Bread and Puppet Theatre Company 34
Brecht, Bertold 36
Brook, Peter 38
Butler, Judith 40
Cage, John 41
Christo and Jeanne-Claude 43
Cixous, Hélène 45
Copeau, Jacques 46
Craig, Edward Gordon 48
Cunningham, Merce 49
Forsythe, William 50
Goffman, Erving 52
Gómez-Peña, Guillermo 53
Grotowski, Jerzy 54
Hijikata, Tatsumi 56
Kantor, Tadeusz 57
Laban, Rudolf Von 59
Lecoq, Jacques 60
Lepage, Robert 61

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 CONTENTS

Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, Las 64

Market Theatre 65
Meyerhold, Vsevolod 67
Orlan 69
Phelan, Peggy 71
Rancière, Jacques 73
Schechner, Richard 74
Sistren Theatre Collective 76
Soyinka, Wole 78
Split Britches 80
Sprinkle, Annie 81
Stanislavsky, Konstantin 83
Stelarc 85
Suzuki, Tadashi 86
Turner, Victor 88
Wilson, Robert 89
Wooster Group 92
Zeami, Motokiyo 94

Part II Events 97
4’ 33” 99
Arab Spring 100
Balinese Dance-Theatre 102
Cabaret Voltaire 103
Cherry Orchard, The 104
Constant Prince, The 106
Coyote: I Like America and America Likes Me 107
Dead Class, The 108
Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men 110
Dionysus in 69 112
Einstein on the Beach 113
Government Inspector, The 116
Haka 117
Holocaust memorials and museums 118
Mahabharata, The 121
Mother Courage and her Children 123
Olympics 125
Paradise Now 127
Reincarnation of Saint Orlan, The 129
Route 1 & 9 (The Last Act) 130
Shoot 132
Sports 134
Temple of Confessions, The 136

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 CONTENTS

Tiananmen Square demonstrations 137

Trio A 138
Ubu Roi 140
Waiting for Godot 141
Yaqui Lent and Easter Ceremonies 142

Part III Concepts and Practices 145

Acting 147
Affect, feeling and emotion 149
Animals 151
Applied theatre and socially-engaged performance 152
Asian performance 154
Audience and spectator 156
Body art 158
Butoh 160
Camp 161
Carnival 163
Circus 164
Cultural materialism 166
Dada and surrealism 168
Dance 169
Devising 172
Directing 173
Documentation 176
Dramaturgy 178
Environmental theatre and site-specific performance 179
Everyday life 181
Expressionism 183
Feminism 184
Festivals 187
Futurism 188
Happenings 189
Historiography 191
Immersive theatre and one-to-one performance 192
Improvisation 195
Installation art 196
Interculturalism 198
Internet 199
Lighting and sound 201
Liveness 203
Masking/body adornment 204
Megamusicals 206
Mise en scène 208

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 CONTENTS

Movement 209
Multimedia performance 210
Museum display 212
Music, theatre and performance 213
Naturalism and realism 215
Paratheatre 217
Performance/performing 218
Performance art/live art 220
Performative/performativity 222
Phenomenology 224
Physical theatre 225
Play 227
Popular theatre 228
Postdramatic theatre 230
Postmodernism 231
Practice as research 233
Presence 235
Protests, demonstrations and parades 236
Psychoanalysis 238
Puppetry 239
Rehearsal 241
Ritual 243
Scenography 245
Semiotics 247
Space 248
Theatre 250
Theatre anthropology 252
Theatre of the absurd 254
Theatre of the oppressed 255
Training 256
Visual theatre and theatre of images 258

Appendix: A chronology of world/performance events, births and deaths 261

Bibliography 269
Index 281

x
 LIST OF FIGURES

1 Bread and Puppet Theatre march in protest on the anniversary of

the invasion of Iraq, 2004 © Nancy Kaszerman/ZUMA/Corbis 35
2 Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Wrapped Reichstag (1995). Photo
by Wolfgang Kumm/AFP/Getty Images 43
3 Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on
3 December, 1986. Photo by Rafael WOLLMANN/Gamma-
Rapho via Getty Images 64
4 Einstein on the Beach (1976) directed by Robert Wilson, music
by Philip Glass; performed by the Philip Glass Ensemble,
Avignon Festival, 1976. Photo Philippe Gras/Haytham Pictures/
ArenaPAL 114
5 The haka performed by the New Zealand national rugby team,
the All Blacks (2012). Photo ‘Action Plus Sports Images’ 117
6 Helene Weigel as Mother Courage in Bertold Brecht’s Mother
Courage and Her Children (1949). Photo akg-images 124
7 A poster for the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Olympia Part I: Fest
der Völker (Festival of the Nations). (Germany 1936; directed
and written by Leni Riefenstahl; documentary of the Olympic
Games in Berlin 1936). Photo: akg-images 126
8 Chris Burden, Shoot, F Space, Santa Ana, CA, November 19,
1971: ‘At 7:45 p.m. I was shot in the left arm by a friend. The
bullet was a copper jacket .22 long rifle. My friend was standing
about fifteen feet from me.’ 132
9 Sankai Juku perform HIBIKI – Resonance from Far Away (1998)
© Angel Medina G./epa/Corbis 160

xi
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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to warmly thank the following: Talia Rodgers who commissioned the
book, Rosie Waters who steered it patiently towards initial production, and David
Avital and Andrea Hartill for the final delivery of the first edition. We would like to
thank Iram Satti for assisting us so attentively in preparing the second edition. We
are grateful to Ellen Grace, Rob Brown, Sunja Redies and Diane Parker for their
eager readiness to help, and to all the marketing team at Taylor & Francis working
behind the scenes. We are especially indebted to the many anonymous readers whose
reports shaped our entries and selection of contents for the first and second editions
and who often helped our task beyond the call of duty. For giving us the time needed
to research and write this book, we would both formally like to thank the Arts and
Humanities Research Council as well as our respective institutions, past and present:
the University of Kent, Queen Mary University of London, and the University of
Roehampton. For reading and commenting on specific entries we are grateful to
Jason Arcari, Christopher Baugh, Peter Boenisch, Honor Ford-Smith, Adrian
Heathfield, Dominic Johnson, Peggy Phelan, Duska Radosavljevic and John Rudlin.
We thank Maggie B. Gale, Patrice Pavis, Simon Shepherd and Heather Smyth for
their help in diverse ways, as well as colleagues and students at Queen Mary
University of London, Kent and Roehampton. Paul is also grateful to Ken Pickering
for his friendly discussions. We would like to thank Sumaya Partner for her help with
the illustrations. Finally, though not least, we are immensely grateful to Joanna
Labon and Deb Kilbride for their patience and support throughout.

xiii
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 INTRODUCTION

This second edition provides accessible and updated critical description and analysis
of important people and companies, events, concepts and practices in the fields of
twentieth and twenty-first century theatre and performance. It aims to be useful for
students, theatre-goers, scholars, teachers, theatre-makers and artists. But it is also
for anybody who is interested in engaging with these fields of cultural practice at a
time when theatre and other forms of live performance continue to thrive and expand
– both despite and because of the proliferation of recorded media – and when
performance has become one of the most influential contemporary paradigms for
understanding identities and how we interact with and in the world. For this second
edition, as well as updating the whole book, we have taken out three entries whose
moments have passed and introduced eighteen new ones, across the book’s three
sections.
This companion is organized primarily into three A–Z lists of entries on people
and companies, events and concepts and practices. Entry topics are selected to reflect
a broad-based intercultural interdisciplinarity and they focus largely, though not
exclusively, on Western performance from the twentieth and beginning of the
twenty-first centuries. The entries aim to provide information and to answer ques-
tions, but they also raise new questions, pointing out the critical issues that each topic
raises within the academic disciplines and artistic practices of theatre and perfor-
mance, and suggesting where readers could pursue further research. Each entry thus
includes important historical and contextual information but also extensive cross-
referencing, detailed analysis and an annotated bibliography. Part I, People and
companies, includes entries on theorists, performers, directors, designers, artists,
teachers, writers and groups who have made a defining contribution to the fields of
theatre and performance. Part II, Events, selects a small sample of theatre perfor-
mances and other events that are either important in themselves or exemplify the
ways particular kinds of activities have shaped theatre and performance and their
significance in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The third and largest part,
Concepts and practices, introduces practices and ideas that are central to these fields,
both in theatre- and performance-making and in their analysis. Throughout, the book
integrates practice, theory and history, framing these areas as necessarily comple-
mentary rather than exclusive and separate.
This introduction develops two important frameworks for understanding what we
have aimed to do in this book and the critical issues we have had to address. First, it
considers why we have written the book the way we have: why we have selected

1
 I NTRODUCTI ON

certain topics and omitted others, made choices about structure, and included a chro-
nology and bibliography. Second, it explores some of the issues that we have had to
attend to in writing the book, such as canon formation, critical bias, disciplinary
boundaries and, as the twenty-first century progresses, where the practices of theatre
and performance and the fields of theatre and performance studies are now going.

THE ENTRIES
Before we began writing this book, we proposed notional word lengths for each
entry, both to contain them and to help us project how many entries we could include
and how they should be balanced. Entries then expanded or contracted, largely as we
responded to the interest different topics have elicited among scholars, practitioners
and audiences, but also as we developed a sense of dialogue with – and within – the
book. An entry’s length should not, therefore, be equated with its importance as
some kind of objective rule, though we recognize that entry length does articulate at
least one of the book’s structural logics. In content, each entry is designed to provide
both description and analysis. In practice, we have also tried to let each entry dictate
its own particular needs and shape.
The entries in Part I, People and companies, provide basic biographical data, list
some key productions, practices, achievements, or writings where relevant, and
mention antecedents, influences, collaborators and followers. More importantly,
they try to present the main debates, ideas and practices that have gathered around
each of the people, plotting how these have evolved with time (or not) and tracking
their subsequent influence.
The list of people in this section includes a range of mostly twentieth-century
theatre and performance practitioners, artists and theorists. The prominence and
influence of directors in theatre from the late nineteenth century throughout the twen-
tieth and after compelled us to include many of them. In response both to the rise of
performance art in the twentieth century and to the distinctiveness of its practices –
within theatre and fine art – we also include many performance artists. Closely
following are the writers and theorists, though we have largely omitted those who are
known predominantly as playwrights, another large area of influence which we could
not address in these pages. Those playwrights we have included, like Hélène Cixous
and Wole Soyinka, are acclaimed as much for their ideas on the theatre or on the
social role and function of writing as for their works and craft. This is not to deny the
impact and importance of many playwrights and their plays, but we wanted to focus
on the live event and those who have somehow commented on or inspired it, rather
than considering the theatre as a primarily literary domain. Those theorists we have
selected have analysed theatre practice, performance, performance studies, and
more. Some people to whom we have given space – like Erving Goffman, Mikhail
Bakhtin, Jacques Rancière, Walter Benjamin and Judith Butler, to cite five examples
– were or are not principally theatre or performance scholars. We have included them
because their ideas have had profound influence on theatre and performance studies
and have even affected theatre practice, although this may be less immediately

2
 I NTRODUCTI ON

apparent. Many of the people chosen for inclusion in this section are the usual
suspects, but we hope we have also included some surprises. Our participants hail
from Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas, though the nature of their acclaim
means nearly all of them have travelled widely and often relocated from their birth-
place or been educated elsewhere, like Rustom Bharucha and Wole Soyinka. In this
section, we also include companies whose work is recognized collectively rather
than simply through individual figureheads. Finally, we have included las Madres de
la Plaza de Mayo who are united not by their artistic vision or theatrical practice but
by their desire to make known – through their actions – the terrible and often uncertain
fate of their own families. As well as illustrating their own tragic case, las Madres
demonstrate the ascendance of performative protest throughout the twentieth century
and into the twenty-first, as a form now ‘practised’ by people worldwide, including
participants in the Occupy movement and in events such as the Arab Spring, a new
entry in this second edition. The list of entries across this section is diverse, indi-
cating the broad range of activities encompassed by the theatre – and especially
performance.
Each entry in Part II, Events, briefly introduces the event itself and its documen-
tation (if any exists), and charts the impact the event has had by explaining its signifi-
cance, be it for other practitioners, theories of performance, or communities of
audiences and the public or particular participants. As history reveals, some events
pass by and are paid scant attention, while others are important partly because of the
attention given to them at the time. It is interesting to note that the only three entries
we deleted from the first edition of the book were all events – ones which we believe
have much less resonance in 2014 than when we constructed the first edition between
2000 and 2006. Other events still, like the opening of the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916,
have gained importance by being considered subsequently as defining moments in
theatre and performance. Performance is extended and elaborated by its aftermath
and context, its writings and reflections, as well as its subsequent provocations to
action or to thought. This helps to explain why so many practices of performance
analysis are derived from other disciplines like sociology, anthropology, cultural
studies, and increasingly the hard sciences, most recently cognitive science. We need
to consider so much more than just the event itself in its own narrow time frame – the
study of any performance needs to account for what happened prior to and after the
event as much as during it, something the new entry Shoot clearly demonstrates, for
as a performance it was actually over and done with in seconds. Some events stay
with us all our lives, shaping our personalities and even our daily reflexes, impacting
well beyond the specialist discourses of academia. Others are forgotten the moment
we leave the auditorium. But while theatre has fairly clear parameters, performance
also includes how we play, rest, interact, present ourselves to each other or strive to
change our society and surroundings. Accordingly, some of the events entries in this
book deal with one moment in time, others reflect on ongoing processes and some
are concerned with manifestations of human behaviour that are culturally, politically
or socially highly charged. We refer to theatrical events – including plays that have
been particularly influential, usually exploring them through première performances.

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 I NTRODUCTI ON

But we also look at real-life expressions and activities that might be informed by
political or social imperatives. And we look at cultural or social events (sports
meetings such as the Olympics and protests such as at Tiananmen Square) that
function also as public spectacles, many on a global scale.
The range of work we might have included in this section is of course vast. But
the parameters of the book as a companion rather than a dictionary were a given, and
this set some limits. We felt that some events had to be included because they have
become central to discourses on performance and the theatre. Others are well-recog-
nized landmarks in theatre or performance history. Others still, we believe, exem-
plify the kinds of activities that are increasingly important to theatre and performance
scholarship and help us indicate broader trends in interest and critical approach. As
well as being wary about trying to include too much, we were also concerned not to
present a list of events as definitively ‘the most important’. This kind of canon
formation raises questions about the bias of any given selection and the risks of
devaluing things simply by excluding them. We therefore include in our selection of
what we consider to be influential moments and practices, both past and continuing,
some which are firmly established and some which lie on the periphery of both
academic and public consciousness of theatre and performance.
Interestingly, we have seen live, witnessed or participated in hardly any of the
chosen events ourselves. But live experience of given events is not essential to
analysing them in our field (as demonstrated by the extensive subdiscipline of theatre
history); though many scholars are vitally concerned with this very issue and the
question of what it means to be present at a work live rather than experiencing it
through mediation. This very presence or ‘liveness’ is also crucial because it distin-
guishes our discipline from film, media, television or literary studies. The complex-
ities of liveness aside, the twenty-eight events selected represent for us those
occasions in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that have partly defined our
fields, their questions and their practices. We include nothing from the twenty-first
century other than the Arab Spring, perhaps because, just over a decade into it, we
cannot yet see, or have not yet experienced, what will shape or is shaping it. Obviously
‘9/11’, as it is known in the United States and many other places, was a serious
contender for inclusion and has been much discussed in academic and social circles.
Its influence has been monumental. But it is not yet clear how it has altered the ways
we do and think about performance and theatre. There are nascent signs of a renewed
politicization of practice, and of playwriting especially but at the time of writing, it
is hard to gauge the long-term significance of this development. Putting aside the
difficulty of prophecy, clearly mass public protests and demonstrations have revealed
the continuing efficacy of performance and performative actions now accelerated
and augmented by new technologies. These events have often taken place in squares
such as Tiananmen in Beijing, Tahrir in Cairo and Independence in Kiev, and their
images, speeches and actions have spread both globally and instantly, facilitated by
social media. At the time of writing, these have erupted most recently across the
Middle East, as well as in Turkey, Brazil, Greece, Quebec and Ukraine. Even without
being present at these marches and protests it is possible to feel somehow close to

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 I NTRODUCTI ON

them, highly engaged, an affect which in turn can increase the likelihood of protests
emerging elsewhere or can sustain them, and not least increase their impact. In such
a way, the whole notion of what it means to be a spectator and what spectatorship
involves is changing.
In the largest section of the book, Part III, Concepts and practices, there is even
more variability in content and format. Some terms, such as presence or puppetry,
are only briefly discussed because they are also addressed within more complex
entries on liveness or masking. Some entries are necessarily largely pragmatic, like
lighting and sound, though we never approach practical issues without exploring
contextual ones. Other entries are more abstract and try to clarify thinking or extrap-
olate central concerns. With many entries in this part – like theatre, performance,
acting and dance – the vast field opened up before us as we attempted definitions and
tried to rein them in. The terms theatre and performance are so embedded throughout
this book that we decided not to include them in bold for cross-referencing. It is,
though, through the complexity of cross-referencing, as well as in the specific context
of these terms’ usage, that these words start to build real value and meaning.
Throughout, the book treats performance mostly as it relates to theatre, though it
also refers at times to dance, performance art and fine art. It was often impossible to
separate these disciplines completely, particularly in the section Concepts and prac-
tices. The same argument can also be made about music, though not to the same
degree. The category of music as music is not something we particularly engage with
here, however central it is to the range of practices that constitute performance. For
example, we exclude pieces that may have defined or pushed back the parameters of
musical performance, like Igor Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale (1918) or his Rite of
Spring (1913). There is no space to analyse such innovations here, despite their
influence and significance. But we have included music-based practitioners like John
Cage and Laurie Anderson, whose works have stimulated and introduced issues and
techniques of performing that cut right across disciplinary boundaries. Anderson’s
cross-media work shifts into acting with her construction of multiple stage personas.
The beguiling ‘silence’ of Cage’s 4' 33" (1952) articulates as much about the acts of
playing, performing, listening, the audience, liveness and presence as it says some-
thing about music itself.

OUR SELECTIONS, PERSPECTIVES AND PRACTICES

We realize that readers will be drawn to consider what we have left out as much as
what we have included. This Companion is neither an encyclopedia nor a dictionary
and makes no claims to be comprehensive. Due to restricted space, we have included
a selective and limited range of entries in an expanding field of activities and theories.
This is necessarily partial and suggestive, a way of mapping the main trajectories.
We avoided the word ‘key’ to clarify that we do not aim to present a canonical
selection. Performance is about play and fluidity more than fixity of terms; canons
soon become out of date or at least set themselves up to be challenged; and most
importantly, theatre and performance are both living practices that are in process,

5
 I NTRODUCTI ON

evolving. We aim to convey this sense of our fields’ dynamism by including entries
that are both recognized as important and ones which might be seen as emergent or
indicative, and by acknowledging the limits and selectivity of our coverage. This
book invites the reader to examine theatre and performance through ideas, through
people, and by describing the significance of certain events that have shaped these
fields. But we emphasize the limits of what we have included here and encourage the
reader to see our entries as only a portion of what might be considered. We also
appreciate that those included did not work alone. More than most disciplines and
arts, theatre and performance are truly collaborative.
We have not tried to mask or ignore our biases, which have been made highly
evident to us throughout the process, especially through anonymous readers’
responses and their suggestions regarding what else we might include as we have
drafted the Companion at first and second edition stages – across a span of fourteen
years. We acknowledge that we are writing from particular positions and with
particular interests and we have tried to capitalize on these to produce a book that
benefits from the enthusiasms, commitments and knowledge we can bring to it.
However, we have also tried to acknowledge and explore our own prejudices and
subjective interests and to go beyond them: through our collaboration, through
responding to readers’ reports and editors’ insightful suggestions and through our
university teaching, which keeps us aware of developing curricula as well as students’
interests. To further offset the limitations of our biases, we would encourage readers
to actively search for our prejudices and positions, take issue with our emphases,
challenge our synopses, and form your own opinions about the main components that
comprise our fields. Write between the lines and the entries in the white spaces that
surround them. Fill in the gaps in the chronology and bibliography. This Companion
has been designed to travel with you rather than to sit idly on the reference shelf.
While the selection process was one challenge, another was to synthesize without
oversimplifying. We wanted to limit jargon but still articulate the specificities,
complexities and contradictions of our fields. We also acknowledge this complexity by
marking cross-references in bold, widening each individual entry beyond its own
narrow terms. The annotated bibliographies suggest further reading and explain briefly
why we consider certain texts useful or important. Our bibliographies focus largely on
books rather than articles, primarily to prioritize material that is most widely available.
Again, these are highly selective and suggestive, hopefully encouraging further reading
and research. The final bibliography mainly collates texts from individual entries that
have general rather than specific application but also adds some more interest while
still maintaining the Companion’s focus. The Chronology is drawn from the entries
and materials mentioned in the book but also includes major world events. These addi-
tions should therefore be seen not as serving theatre and performance in general, but as
providing another way of approaching the book’s content. Reading the chronological
timeline in one sweep rebuilds the linear shape of a history that we have broken into
three categories and disorganized by alphabetization. Through the Chronology’s
mapping you can read clusters of activity, strange conjunctions of births and deaths,
and feel the sweep of change in the twentieth century and after.

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 I NTRODUCTI ON

The Companion is inevitably informed by the fact that it was written in Britain in
the first decades of the twenty-first century. We thought hard about the geographical
scope of the book and its historical focus. Restrictions needed to be set, though these
did not necessarily reflect our own personal tastes or desires. As theatre and perfor-
mance scholars, our research has drawn us frequently to other countries’ practices,
especially in Canada, Japan, Eastern Europe and Russia, as much as to practices in
Britain. Our choices and writing are inevitably informed, though, by living and
working in Britain, even if this is not explicit in the content of our selections. Our
own interests in international work aside, performance practice and study in Britain
have been wide-ranging and cross-cultural for decades, even if the language to
describe such interculturalism only developed fully as late as the 1990s. The primacy
of the playtext and the playwright has shifted with the growing interest in postdra-
matic theatre, devising and visual approaches to performance-making. Dance has
continued to encroach on theatre’s territory. The technologies of multimedia perfor-
mance have eroded the mimetic tradition that dominated for so long, overtly showing
representation as multiple and fractured and revealing the processes by which perfor-
mance is made. Similarly, performance art has laid bare the theatre’s tools and tech-
niques, discarding many of them on the way and inventing its own.
In the light of such developments in theatre and its practices, it is alarming that
British theatre is still rarely identified as European. Quite why this is so is seldom
discussed, but is clearly problematic and tied into complex questions of national
identity, cultural histories and cultural investments. There is no denying British thea-
tre’s impact on mainland European theatre, through interest in the plays of Sarah
Kane, Mark Ravenhill and Simon Stephens and directors like Katie Mitchell. The
backward flow into Britain is equally evident in the influence of Jacques Lecoq,
Jacques Copeau and Jerzy Grotowski. Festivals like the Edinburgh International
Festival, BITE at London’s Barbican Centre and the London International Festival of
Theatre have opened up British theatre thinking and practice by bringing the best of
world performance to Britain. One result is that the study of plays as the primary
focus of theatre or drama studies has been increasingly challenged as being far too
limited. However, we still need to articulate more accurately these national and
cultural differences and similarities, as well as focusing on rich cross-currents. The
vexed questions about European theatre and the United Kingdom’s place in it are
only implicit in these entries and their selection, but they have been present throughout
the book’s process. We have attempted to speak from our own locales and preoccu-
pations without being parochial, while honouring the trajectories of the past and
anticipating the potentials of the future.
Our book might be founded on Western practices, principles and theories, even if
we ourselves are caught somewhere between Europe and North America. But just as
our histories are inseparable from North American and continental European prac-
tices and concepts, it is impossible to isolate ourselves from African, Asian or
Australasian performance, even if we wanted to. We have not had space to focus
specifically on non-Western practices per se, but we have occasionally stepped
outside our declared focus – in the entries on Motokiyo Zeami, Wole Soyinka and

7
 I NTRODUCTI ON

the haka, for example – to question the hegemonies and priorities we are repro-
ducing. Tadashi Suzuki is a world director as much as a Japanese one, partly because
of the widespread influence of his training method and his writings as they are
published in English. Where, too, does Wole Soyinka belong? Our small provoca-
tions are a reminder that the frames this book uses are only a structure we have
created, driven by the demands of such a publication. Such rigidity must not carry
over into the freer domain of thinking. We welcome the new eclecticism of our fields
and their much wider cultural, geographical and disciplinary purview, while recog-
nizing the (particularly academic?) need to limit, catalogue, archive, document and
list.
We also had to limit our historical parameters. Writing in the first decades of a
new century made the process of retrospection neater and logical. The scope of the
twentieth century also allowed us to explore the great changes wrought by the
movement from modern to postmodern ways of thinking and the impact this had on
making performance.
The process of returning to the book for the second edition, over a decade after
writing began, has been both revealing and challenging. Routledge kindly allowed us
to expand the Companion, so the removal of three Events entries was our choice
alone, as mentioned above. Our four new People entries are two theorists (Walter
Benjamin and Jacques Rancière) and two practitioner/theorists, one from dance
(William Forsythe) and one from performance art (Ron Athey). We have only three
new entries for Events, representing everyday events, dance theatre and performance
art. The main additions therefore are in Concepts and practices, for it is here where
things have moved on, both within the profession and the academy. Whilst our
selection of people, companies and events was always, by its nature, more arbitrary
and dependent on our own tastes, experiences and knowledge, the Concepts and
practices section is constrained by more objectively-defined parameters. The
inclusion now of entries such as Affect, feeling and emotion, Applied and socially-
engaged performance and Physical theatre shows the growth of new areas of study
and practice, or at least of newly-established taxonomies and terminologies.
Inevitably these follow on from the practices that feed such theorising and naming.
But they can also be prompted by specific academic works. The inclusion of the
entry Postdramatic theatre shows a certain vulnerability regarding publications, in
that our Companion was first published also by Routledge in the same year (2006) as
Hans-Thies Lehmann’s seminal work of that title, seven years after its German publi-
cation. It is clear in such a case to see how a publication can begin to define a field as
much as it documents, analyses and describes it.
The inclusion now of Documentation and Practice as research as separate entries
is also quite telling, indicating not only a shift towards recognizing the significance
and value of practical research within the academy but also indicating how new – and
mostly digital – technologies have enabled and supported this. The ubiquitous
recording of everyday life as well as performance and theatre events is transforming
the way we teach, research and learn in our field, making the object of study much
more accessible and retrievable, whatever else is revealed in discussions about

8
 I NTRODUCTI ON

liveness that are still unfolding around us. We are delighted therefore that as part of
this evolution this Companion now exists as an ebook. But we are also very pleased
that it has been selected by Routledge to provide the main framework for their online
Routledge Performance Archive (www.routledgeperformancearchive.com). On this
archive, as well as being able to read several of this Companion’s entries, curious
readers can find audio-visual materials that back up many of our discussions here as
well as specially commissioned writing and previously published articles. In order to
benefit from this link to the archive, we have included in the annotated bibliographies
the initials ‘RPA’ wherever specific materials link to an individual entry that can be
discovered in the online archive.

THEATRE STUDIES AND PERFORMANCE STUDIES

Given some of the changes outlined here and reiterated in this new edition, there is
no denying that the field of theatre studies has undergone a paradigm shift. The
advent of theatre studies was already an innovation beyond the study of drama
because it emphasized that theatre’s meaning is produced not just through its texts
but through all its significations and practices – including training, uses of space and
technology, performance style and scenography, for example. Beginning in the
United States in the 1970s – but burgeoning in the 1980s and 1990s and moving well
beyond the US – performance studies began to explore non-theatrical cultural prac-
tices that shared performance characteristics with theatre. This was partly motivated
by expanding interdisciplinary links that proposed new ways of understanding
things, and by growing interest in redressing theatre studies’ potential focus on
cultural practice that was both elite and Western. In one direction, led by Richard
Schechner at New York University, this new scholarship explored links with anthro-
pology in particular; examined such activities as religious and other social rituals,
including rites of passage and sporting events; and observed performance practices
in Asia and in Native communities in the Americas. In another direction, led by
scholars at Northwestern University in Chicago, performance studies developed out
of speech communication studies to examine such things as rhetoric and graffiti.
Performance studies also responded to the increasing diversification of performance
practices, especially the rise of performance art and body art and the growth of instal-
lation art and site-specific performance. In this context, again, performance studies
was interdisciplinary, overlapping with fine art and various critical fields such as
feminism, sociology and philosophy. Finally, performance studies introduced new
critical concerns that were shared by new forms of performance as well as more
traditional theatre forms. These concerns include liveness and the ephemerality of
performance, the politics of protest, and innovative critical practices such as perform-
ative writing. Performance studies has received much criticism – for proposing too
vast a field, for dehistoricizing and taking things out of their social context, and for
being amateur in its efforts to practise interdisciplinarity. But it has also demon-
strated the profound resonance of thinking of a huge range of cultural practices as

9
 I NTRODUCTI ON

performance, and it has greatly expanded the strategies through which we can think
about performance.
Whether the paradigm shift from theatre to performance studies has ended or is
still just beginning is hard to tell. In Britain, performance studies appears to be in its
infancy in relation to the large family of drama and theatre departments that exist.
Yet, whatever the titles of the courses we teach, there is no denying the substantial
impact of this shift from theatre to performance – to put it at its most basic. In this
book, the ‘broad spectrum’ approach of performance studies has encouraged us to
include such entries as Holocaust memorials and museums, Sports, and the Olympics
within Part II, Events. Concepts and practices includes numerous terms derived from
the study of performance, rather than the theatre as such. Since the commissioning of
this book’s first edition in 2000, its working title has changed, from a Companion to
Performance to a Companion to Theatre and Performance. This might seem to argue
against the increasing dominance of performance just outlined. But paradoxically, in
fact it attests to the deepening entrenchment of performance and performance studies
in Britain which is continuing in the second decade of this century. The extent of this
swing has meant that we wanted to reinstate the theatre at the centre of our Companion,
to locate the book within a practice of theatre history in which performance studies’
development is deeply embedded. Even if our writing is located in a field that at
present is increasingly hybridized and all the more exciting for that, we can ignore
neither the theatre’s history before performance studies nor performance studies’
practical and conceptual links to theatre. Finally, because we wanted this Companion
to be as useful as possible for its readers, we felt it must recognize and demonstrate
the current co-dependence of theatre studies and performance studies.
We have also not ignored the professional context in which we and our students
now operate. Almost as striking as the paradigm shift from theatre to performance
studies is the fact that the boundary between theatre and performance’s makers and
thinkers has become increasingly thin in British higher education. Residencies,
artists’ fellowships, the growth of practice as research and the very practical nature
of many university programmes have all eroded mutual suspicions and doubts. We
wanted to address a range of audiences in this Companion, and we also needed to
present together theatre and performance’s thinkers and doers; the two are inextri-
cably linked.
With a growing university-level student body in Britain, in spite of rapidly rising
higher education fees, and the quick expansion of our subject fields, there has recently
been a fervent publication of readers, dictionaries, sourcebooks and guides to theatre
and performance. It is important to ask why there have been so many such books of
this sort. The growth and change in the discipline sketched here have resulted in a
greater need for orientation. And no two books are the same when they try to cover
wide ground. Many of the books that already exist are either theatre dictionaries or
edited collections of theoretical texts. Few have attempted to make such an overt
bridge between the two fields of theatre and performance studies, or have embraced
practice and theory as closely as we do here, combining the pragmatic and the
analytical.

10
 I NTRODUCTI ON

It might be tempting to try to define what performance and theatre are, to close
down. This is not a book of definitions, however, but a guidebook. Our subject is
currently too open and its practices too dynamic to be best served by prescriptive
statements. We want the entries, the networks and links these create, and the map
they draw to be a topography to guide you through a quickly shifting and enlarging
field which now has a well-established and well-documented history and has not
only come of age as an academic subject, but is also moving on.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

Words that have their own entry are normally indicated in bold in their first reference
in any individual entry. There are exceptions to this rule. As mentioned above,
because the words theatre or performance occur so frequently throughout the book,
we have decided not to put them in bold, except where they are part of a composite
term. We also do not put entry words in bold when we are using them in ways not
implied by the entry. Finally, we have chosen to put in bold words which are varia-
tions on entry titles; for example, we sometimes put the word devised in bold although
the actual entry is titled devising.
Paul Allain and Jen Harvie
Canterbury and London
April 2014

11
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 Part I
PEOPLE AND COMPANIES
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 ABRAM OVI Ć , M ARI N A

ABRAMOVIĆ, MARINA (SERBIAN PERFORMANCE ARTIST/TEACHER,

1946–)
Calling herself the grandmother of performance art, since the 1970s Abramović has
been making work that is intimate, physically and emotionally exposing, dangerous,
and which extrapolates such practices of everyday life as walking, screaming and
simply being to explore their latent power. In work that bears some resemblance to
that of fellow body artists Orlan and Stelarc, she has pushed the limits of her
body’s endurance, art practice, and the relationship between performer and audience,
consistently investigating the social responsibilities of art, artist and audience.
Some of her earliest work was probably the most dangerous because it invited not
only audience participation but potential violence as well. In Rhythm 0 (1974), she
invited her audience to do what they wanted to her using a selection of seventy-two
available objects, ranging from the relatively benign (a feather, lipstick, honey), to
the potentially harmful (matches, scissors, knives, a whip, a saw, an axe), to the
potentially lethal (a bullet, a gun). Concerned spectators halted the performance after
six hours, by which point all of Abramović’s clothes had been cut off, she had been
painted, cleaned, cut and decorated, and a loaded gun had been held to her head. As
Richard Schechner’s Performance Group discovered in Dionysus in 69 (1968–69),
breaking conventional performer/audience boundaries can produce exciting, unex-
pected outcomes, but it can also expose the performer to uncontrollable risks.
In subsequent performances, Abramović reduced her audience’s potentially
sadistic access to her, but she continued to explore the limits of her endurance as well
as her own masochism, her audience’s relationship to it, and the powers of endurance
to transform herself and her audiences, physically, emotionally and psychically.
Throughout 1975, she performed several body art pieces that tested physical limits:
screaming until she lost her voice in Freeing the Voice; running repeatedly into a
wall until she collapsed in Interruption in Space; and using a razor to cut a five-
pointed star into her stomach, whipping herself, and lying on a cross of ice for thirty
minutes in Lips of Thomas. Clearly these works staged violent physical transforma-
tions, but they also explored the potential for these somewhat ritualized acts to
effect less visible psychic transformation, both for Abramović as performer and for
her audience as witness.
From 1976 to 1988, in one of contemporary art’s most famous long-term collabo-
rations, Abramović continued to test the limits of endurance with her partner, the
East German artist known as Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen). After a long series of works that
continued to explore the endurance of pain, the couple shifted to making pieces that
required them more obviously to endure time. In Night Sea Crossing (1981),
performed in various locations around the world, they sat still, silent, and without
eating, facing each other across a table for seven to twelve hours at a time over
several days. The culmination of their collaborative endurance art was The Lovers:
Walk on the Great Wall (1988, China). Over ninety days, she walked approximately
2,500 kilometres from the eastern end of the wall, he from the western end, to meet
in the middle, where they ended their relationship. Here, they staged endurance in

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 PEOPLE AND COM PA N I E S

time and space, literally and metaphorically enacting their journey/life together as at
once shared, separate and separating.
In the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, Abramović continues to make dura-
tional work but often with a much more explicitly social reference than in her earlier
work. Balkan Baroque (1997) referred directly to the ethnic cleansing of then-recent
wars in her homeland. The installation juxtaposed a triptych of videos showing her
parents and herself, three copper vessels, and a pile of 1,500 beef bones. For six
hours a day over five days she sat on the bones and scrubbed them with disinfectant.
As in her earlier work, Abramović’s enactment explored physical and emotional pain
as well as feelings of shame, using video to contextualize her live actions and reli-
gious references to suggest confession and the potential of forgiveness. Again,
Balkan Baroque challenged her audience to witness and take responsibility for the
violence she committed against herself. In a shift from the predominantly personal
references of her earlier work, however, Balkan Baroque also challenged her audience
to take responsibility for the larger political contexts to which it referred.
In 2002, she performed The House with the Ocean View, living without talking or
eating for twelve days in a New York gallery installation of three exposed rooms
elevated 1.5m above the floor and ‘approached’ only by ladders with butchers’ knives
for rungs. (The piece gained notoriety not least because it featured in the popular
HBO television programme Sex and the City in 2003.) Audiences were asked to keep
silent but to participate in what Abramović called an ‘energy dialogue’, in which she
engaged the gaze of individual audience members one at a time. At the end of the
work, she explained that it was a response to the events of 11 September 2001, and
was dedicated to the people of New York. Again, she used personally depriving
durational work to stage presence as well as personal and social contemplation,
reflection and – possibly – transformation. She reiterated these features of intense
performer/audience presence and engagement in the very high-profile 2010 retro-
spective of her work, The Artist Is Present at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of
Modern Art – MoMA’s very first retrospective on performance. Here, daily for three
months, for a total of 700 hours, she sat at a table with individual gallery visitors
sitting across from her, one by one, engaging her gaze.
While Abramović’s media, strategies and profile may have shifted over the years,
she has remained relentlessly committed to exploring art and performance as means
for expressing and encountering violence and pain, as media for challenging the
limits of conventional performer/audience – or human – boundaries and possibilities
of communication, and as ritual acts that can effect personal and social psychic trans-
formation. In the twenty-first century, she has formalized her commitment to
preserving and documenting live and durational art. In 2005, she presented Seven
Easy Pieces at New York’s prestigious Guggenheim Museum, in which she
re-enacted her own and others’ live artworks principally from the 1960s and 1970s.
In 2013, she founded the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI) which will open a large
premises in Hudson, New York in 2015 dedicated to presenting and preserving long
durational art work. This ‘institutionalization’ of live art and of Abramović herself
coincides with her ascendance as an icon of live art: she was the focus of Robert

16
 ANDERSON, LAURI E

Wilson’s spectacular show The Life and Death of Marina Abramović presented at
the Manchester International Festival in 2011. It also coincides with her approach to
pop cultural household-name status: in 2013, she collaborated with the likes of pop
musicians Lady Gaga and Jay-Z who supported her crowd-funding campaign to raise
funds for MAI.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abramović’s Artist Body briefly describes her works, illustrates them with photos
and provides commentary and biography. Richards’ book is a detailed illustrated
review of Abramović’s career. Goldberg and Warr’s books provide useful context.
Iles’s book collects several critical articles and is extensively illustrated. The
collection, edited by Orrell, documents plans for the MAI premises and Seven Easy
Pieces (2005).

Abramović, Marina (1998) Artist Body: Performances 1969–1998, Milan: Charta.

—— (2003) Marina Abramović: The House with the Ocean View, Milan: Charta.
—— and Dobrila De Negri (1998) Performing Body, Milan: Charta.
—— Germano Celant and Sergio Troisi (2001) Public Body, Milan: Charta.
Goldberg, RoseLee (1998) Performance: Live Art Since the 60s, London: Thames and Hudson.
Iles, Chrissie (ed.) (1995) Marina Abramović: Objects, Performance, Video, Sound, Oxford:
Museum of Modern Art.
Orrell, Paula (ed.) (2010) Marina Abramović + the Future of Performance Art, Munich,
London and New York: Prestel Verlag.
Richards, Mary (2010) Marina Abramović, Abingdon: Routledge.
Warr, Tracey (ed.), survey by Amelia Jones (2000) The Artist’s Body, London: Phaidon.

ANDERSON, LAURIE (AMERICAN MULTIMEDIA PERFORMANCE ARTIST/

COMPOSER/MUSICIAN/WRITER/VISUAL ARTIST/FILMMAKER, 1947–)

Laurie Anderson works across a range of media to tell stories in which she observes
society and makes social critiques – gently and with humour, but pointedly. She
consistently challenges performance’s conventional forms, combining and juxta-
posing its media to make theatre/concerts, ‘talking books’ and technological body
art. She rejects realism to produce dreamlike disembodied voices, androgynous
bodies, large-scale, surreal stage pictures, and postmodern non-linear series of
observations, thereby provoking her audiences to look and listen anew. From within
her strange but generally calm, even languid, performances, she subtly explores
themes of power, gender relations, communication and technological development,
often focusing on apparent social contradictions such as her own impulses to be both
private (for example, to whisper) and public (to perform), and American culture’s
simultaneous propensity for both puritanism and violence.
Although her initial training was in sculpture, Anderson quickly shifted into
performance art when she began incorporating sound and herself into her work. In
the happening Duets on Ice (1974–75), performed in a variety of public settings,

17
 PEOPLE AND COM PA N I E S

Anderson wore skates embedded in blocks of ice and, until the ice melted, she ran her
bow over her self-playing violin, which was fitted with a speaker to play recordings
of cowboy songs. Minimalist works like this explored properties of sound, time, site-
specificity, balance and contrast, and challenged the autonomy of the art object and
artist by opening the piece up to chance and outside influences, like John Cage’s 4'
33". It also deliberately placed Anderson outside of the institutions and economies of
fine art. Although her subsequent work moved indoors and onstage and took on a
larger scale and more technology, it retained the surprise of her early work because
it pioneered multimedia performance, combining live performance, video and slide
projections, synthesized music, and amplified and/or sonically altered monologues.
Her stock of signature eerie and disembodied sounds includes her own voice,
deepened an octave, slowed and amplified through a vocoder to produce what she has
called ‘the voice of authority’ (subversively mimicking a male voice). Along with
sound, her performances characteristically distort space (especially scale), often by
placing her as the tiny and lone live performer in an oversized suit on a large stage
dominated by outsized furniture or gigantic rear-projected silhouettes or videos.
Through sonic and spatial juxtapositions like this, Anderson happily explores tech-
nology’s pleasures and potentials but she does not sell out to it, because she simulta-
neously scrutinizes its dominance over humans, especially in contemporary American
culture. She also explores the performativity of identity, speaking and appearing as
male and female, human and cyborg. And she simultaneously exploits and chal-
lenges the apparent value of liveness by technologically mediating her own
performance.
Anderson’s ongoing sonic and spatial experiments further indicate her dedication
to exploring new ways of communicating with audiences. While her early small
gallery exhibitions and handmade books used intimacy and contact to effect commu-
nication, subsequent live shows such as Songs and Stories from Moby Dick (1999)
use altered instruments, songs such as ‘O Superman’ (1981) tap into popular music
markets, and her internet and CD-ROM work uses electronic and cyberspatial inter-
activity (for example, the CD-ROM Puppet Motel, 1994). Her foray into popular
musical performance probably garnered her biggest audience but nevertheless
remained experimental. ‘O Superman’, which she first performed in an early version
of the performance United States (1980), reached the Number 2 spot in British pop
music charts but was – atypically for the charts – eight minutes long. Her dual
commitment to experimentation and communication has led her to collaborate with
some of the twentieth century’s most famous innovative artists. For example, she has
produced sound for choreographer Trisha Brown’s Set and Reset (1983), Robert
Wilson’s production of Alcestis (1986) and Robert Lepage’s solo show The Far
Side of the Moon (2000), and she has co-written songs about their respective super-
power nations with dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei (2013).
Much of her earliest work was predominantly autobiographical and often explicitly
feminist. Throughout her work, Anderson advocates the expression of personal
feelings, dreams and aspirations even as she appraises society (for example, American
politics and culture from the era of Reagan to that of George W. Bush). Although, as

18
 ARTAUD, ANTONI N

she claims in Stories from the Nerve Bible, she ‘ran out of stories’ and switched from
talking about ‘I’ to talking about ‘you’, her work maintains an ethereal, dreamlike
quality and intimacy (see psychoanalysis). For example, her famous ‘performance
portrait of the country’, the eight-hour United States, I–IV (1983), coupled social
critique with observations of everyday events, autobiographical material and personal
expression. Anderson continues to perform internationally and to explore innovative
means of expressing personal feelings as well as social analysis. In particular, she
continues her strongly ambivalent relationship with technology, having accepted a
position as NASA’s first artist-in-residence in 2003.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Stories from the Nerve Bible idiosyncratically documents Anderson’s artwork from
the 1970s into the 1990s. Howell, Jestrovic and McKenzie all provide suggestive
analyses of her work. Goldberg’s book gathers numerous photographs, long sections
of performance text, commentary, biography and a bibliography.

Anderson, Laurie (1984) United States, New York: Harper and Row.
—— (1994) Stories from the Nerve Bible: A Retrospective, 1972–1992, New York: Harper
Perennial.
—— Online www.laurieanderson.com/home.shtml (accessed 11 October 2013).
Goldberg, RoseLee (2000) Laurie Anderson, London: Thames and Hudson.
Howell, John (1992) Laurie Anderson, New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press.
Jestrovic, Silvija (2004) ‘From the Ice Cube Stage to Simulated Reality: Place and Displacement
in Laurie Anderson’s Performances’, Contemporary Theatre Review 14.1: 25–37.
McKenzie, Jon (1997) ‘Laurie Anderson for Dummies’, The Drama Review 41.2: 30–50.

ARTAUD, ANTONIN (FRENCH ACTOR/THEORIST/WRITER, 1896–1948)

There is no denying how central Artaud has been to the development of twentieth-
century performance, with his advocacy of physical, visual and non-verbal aspects of
theatre. Artaud’s main theoretical investigations concentrate on his notions of
‘Theatre of Cruelty’ and theatre as a ‘plague’, contained within his writings in The
Theatre and Its Double, published in 1938. Though an actor, Artaud’s actual practice
is minimally articulated and offers few concrete techniques. The essay ‘An Affective
Athleticism’ depicts a systematic training of breathing, based partly on theories
from the Jewish Cabala, through which an actor can supposedly tap into emotional
memories rooted in the body. But beyond this rather esoteric hypothesis there are few
indications of what the performer might actually do in Artaud’s theatre, though he
did chart some basic staging scenarios as well as scenographic and aural possibil-
ities. It is predominantly his theories, therefore, that have driven forward later inves-
tigations. Many of his ideas were visionary and ahead of their time and only
posthumously has Artaud achieved great acclaim.

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 PEOPLE AND COM PA N I E S

Artaud worked at a time of economic hardship between the two world wars as he
witnessed the departure of mass audiences from theatres into cinemas and the music
hall. He therefore championed the theatre’s role as providing a liberating and
purgatory experience that could cleanse society of its violent excesses through a kind
of ‘soul therapy’.
Operating almost as a contagion or plague that subconsciously passes out into the
world through mass audiences, theatre could reveal society’s hidden side. Artaud
believed that performance could tap into the kinds of energies and unconstrained
behaviour that a plague unleashes, as people struggle for survival against all odds.
The physicality of the theatre event should wake audiences up, sensitize them and
penetrate beneath the skin, enlivening their ‘hearts and nerves’ by attacking and
stirring their unconscious. Artaud was strongly influenced by Sigmund Freud’s
psychoanalytic theories about the unconscious as well as the surrealists, with whose
philosophies and aesthetics he identified. Another important inspiration was Alfred
Jarry, the author of Ubu Roi (1896) – in 1926, Artaud co-founded the Alfred Jarry
Theatre, with which he worked for three years.
Artaud berated the limitations of naturalism for appealing only to our rational
verbal side. Instead he argued for a ritualistic form of communication where words
could operate as incantation rather than meaning. The Cambodian and then Balinese
dance-theatre that he saw in 1922 and 1931 respectively provided a model for this,
though he mistakenly conceived the very precise symbolic gestures and mudras (or
hand gestures) of the Balinese dancers as non-specific communication with their
gods. But the synthesis of music, dance, elaborate costuming and mask all helped
Artaud to forge his vision of a total theatre.
Artaud advocated seating the audience in revolving chairs so that they could take
in the action surrounding them as the actors moved throughout the auditorium. They
would then also witness their fellow audience’s responses rather than just seeing the
backs of heads (as in proscenium arch theatre), endorsing his notion of contagion.
Giant puppets were to appear alongside the actors in a mise en scène that empha-
sized rhythm, movement and complex theatre technologies based on lighting and
sound effects. This interest in current technology was inspired in part by Artaud’s
acting in films such as Abel Gance’s epic Napoléon (1927). The subject matter of the
performances he described was to be drawn from real-life events (tales of love,
crime, invasions and war), with actors and puppets enacting violent actions or
murders. These stories of grand historical figures should become as vivid as dreams or
visions, so that the stage event has a sort of hyperrealism. This is Artaud’s ‘double’:
theatre should recall those moments when we wake from dreams unsure whether the
dream’s content or the bed we are lying in is our reality. The theatre could mirror life
but also move on from naturalism’s mimetic representation to appeal also to our
unconscious, thus revealing life in its totality. In a response to Artaud, eminent
critical theorist Jacques Derrida developed this concept in relation to deconstruction
in his much-discussed essay ‘The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation’
(1978). He extended Artaud’s attack on the facile and passive mimesis of naturalism,
questioning whether representation in the theatre is actually possible.

20
 ARTAUD, ANTONI N

Artaud’s understanding of cruelty must not be oversimplified. He is referring as

much to rigour, precision and the demands made on the actors and audience – ques-
tions of process – as to the style or content of performance. He stated that people had
forgotten how to scream, and that the actor had an imperative to use his or her entire
physical resources to make contact with a hidden ‘ur-self’ in order to express primal
emotions and touch the spectator. His desire to reconfigure the theatre event neces-
sitated redefining the spectator’s as much as the performer’s role. Although he
directed few productions himself, he did put his ideas into practice in productions of
August Strindberg’s The Dream Play (1928) and much more emphatically in Percy
Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1935). His theories can also be read through his short
plays such as A Spurt of Blood (1925).
Following the failure of The Cenci, in 1936 and 1937 Artaud made journeys to
Mexico, Brussels and the Aran Islands in Ireland, after which he was confined as a
patient in a Paris mental institution for several years. Poor mental health afflicted him
for much of his life. He then became a heavy drug user (including opium and heroin),
which further destabilized him. Many of his written statements, manifestos and letters
are couched in a complex and meandering language, which is undeniably passionate,
if at times frustrating in its abstraction. His ideas have most tangibly been put into
practice by those who came after him. This influence was particularly strong in the
1950s and 1960s in happenings, in the dedicated work of Jerzy Grotowski’s actors,
in the spatial and experiential experiments of the Living Theatre and pieces like
Paradise Now (1968), and in Peter Brook’s 1964 Theatre of Cruelty season in
London. Aspects of an Artaudian vision have persisted with subsequent physical
theatre pieces such as DV8’s 1988 Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men. Following
on from these theatrical or dance-based experiments, performance and body artists
including Chris Burden with Shoot, Stelarc, Ron Athey and Marina Abramović
and Ulay have, with their extreme physical plundering of the body’s resources and
limitations, explored what cruelty means on quite a personal and embodied level.
These practitioners have often cited Artaud as a direct influence with Orlan even
reading his texts during her surgical operations (Reincarnation, 1990–93). Even if
not ‘Artaudian’ per se, spectacular events and multimedia performances by groups
like La Fura dels Baus, as well as immersive theatre performances by companies
such as Punchdrunk, show how pervasive and persuasive Artaud’s vision of a total
theatre still is.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Artaud’s writings appear in various places in English, from The Theatre and Its
Double to Sontag’s collection. Barber and Esslin introduce his life in accessible
ways, and the 2001 collection has a very helpful commentary.

Artaud, Antonin (1970) The Theatre and Its Double, trans. Victor Corti, London: Calder and
Boyars Ltd.
Barber, Stephen (1993) Antonin Artaud: Blows and Bombs, London: Faber and Faber.

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Derrida, Jacques (1978) Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Esslin, Martin (1976) Antonin Artaud, the Man and His Work, London: John Calder.
Schumacher, Claude and Brian Singleton (eds) (2001) Artaud on Theatre, London: Methuen.
Sontag, Susan (ed.) (1988) Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings, trans. Helen Weaver, Berkeley:
University of California Press.

ATHEY, RON (AMERICAN BODY AND PERFORMANCE ARTIST, 1961–)

Ron Athey makes uncompromising body art and is one of the most influential
performance artists since the early 1990s. Whether performed solo or in collabo-
ration, his works feature bodies in situations of acute physical extremity, consistently
provoking questions about sexuality, desire, homophobia, disease, resilience, affect,
the cultural politics of HIV/AIDS, death and the death drive, queer culture, represen-
tation, witnessing, consent and more.
Athey presents his solo and collaborative art and theatre projects mostly at
festivals, in galleries and in clubs in the USA, the UK and elsewhere across Europe.
His work is usually composed of a series of tableaux and rituals featuring a range of
repeating images, acts and figures. Chief amongst these is his own pierced, tattooed,
naked or near-naked body engaged in acts of physical extremity and endurance. In a
collaboration with Juliana Snapper, Judas Cradle (2004), he is impaled or ‘seated’
on a wooden, pyramid-shaped, Spanish Inquisition-age torture apparatus. In Solar
Anus (1999/2006), his face is stretched taut by hooks. Again and again, he bleeds
profusely, for example, in Self-Obliteration I (2008). His ecstatic imagery and rituals
reference religion, SM and death and draw directly on his background. Raised a
Pentecostal Christian who learned to revere ecstatic speaking-in-tongues, he became
a prominent member of the queer, punk and SM club scenes in Los Angeles in the
1980s. He was diagnosed HIV positive in 1985, over a decade before antiretroviral
treatment was widely introduced in the West, ending HIV/AIDS being seen (and, for
many, experienced) as a terminal illness here. Athey’s work is developed not only
from autobiography and intuition but also from complex research sources, particu-
larly in literature (for example, Georges Bataille), theatre (Jean Genet, Reza Abdoh,
Antonin Artaud), film, music and visual art (Pierre Molinier, David Wojnarowicz).
The extremity of Athey’s acts is not designed gratuitously to shock or titillate.
However, as a form of uncompromisingly difficult socially-engaged performance, it
does explicitly provoke, compelling audiences to explore things they might find
disturbing, including social issues such as homophobia, and important but some-
times challenging human experiences like ecstasy, desire and death. Composed of
live acts such as cutting and bleeding, his performances are emphatically real, rather
than merely representational, as in so much theatre and other arts and media. This
realness obliges audiences literally to face acts and images that are queer, frequently
painful and not only usually culturally marginalized but often explicitly or implicitly
censored, sometimes violently so. His exploration of his own body as a site of atrocity
forces audiences to gaze on cultural homophobia – a homophobia that both

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stigmatized male homosexuals and fatally delayed the development and distribution
of treatments in the first decade at least of HIV/AIDS. His exploration also requires
audiences, as witnesses to genuine acts of violence, to confront their relationship to
and potential complicity with such violence. His performances frequently focus in
comparatively celebratory ways on his own anus – as a source of metres-long banners
in Deliverance (1995) and strings of pearls in Trojan Whore (1995) and Solar Anus,
for which he had his anus spectacularly tattooed. This focus insists that audiences
pay attention to a part of the body usually attributed derogatory cultural meaning and
that they witness the celebration, plenitude, wonder and magic with which Athey
presents it. Acts in his performances are often resonantly both devastating and beau-
tiful. The ensemble show 4 Scenes in a Harsh Life (1994), for example, was staged
in what Athey has called his ‘plague years’ before the introduction of antiretroviral
therapies, and it portrayed a landscape marked by tragic, violent and catastrophic
loss but also extraordinary gestures of mutual care and compassion. For both
supporters and detractors, Athey’s performances provoke strong feelings, ranging
from disgust to desire, distress, concern and more. For his supporters, this is part of
the profound social and aesthetic work of his practice, compelling engagement and
response.
Athey performs at and tests limits of the body, art, taboos, morality and more.
These provocations have drawn the attention and censure of some observers on the
liberal left, for example parts of the gay press, who perceive his work as too nihilistic
and destabilizing to strategies of cultural assimilation. But his work – or misrepre-
sentations of it – has been most violently condemned by some observers on the far
right – most famously, US Senator Jesse Helms – for whom it provokes moral panic
and who have used it to legitimate calls to rescind American federal arts funding
through the National Endowment for the Arts. For many audiences and fellow artists
though, Athey’s practice offers a profound and appropriately challenging engagement
with the catastrophic times and effects of the era of AIDS, with the consequences of
survival, and with the acutely affective powers of performance.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Johnson’s interview in Contemporary Theatre Review provides a succinct intro-

duction to Athey’s work; his edited collection offers a magnificent range of images
and critical commentary as well as an extensive bibliography. Califia, Doyle and
Jones all offer analysis of key works by Athey and/or issues relevant to his practice.

Califia, Patrick (2002) ‘The Winking Eye of Ron Athey’, in Speaking Sex to Power: The
Politics of Queer Sex, San Francisco: Cleis Press, pp. 357–64.
Doyle, Jennifer (2013) Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art,
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Johnson, Dominic (2008) ‘Perverse Martyrologies: An Interview with Ron Athey’,
Contemporary Theatre Review 18: 4, 503–13.

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—— (ed.) (2013) Pleading in the Blood: The Art and Performances of Ron Athey, London and
Bristol: Live Art Development Agency and Intellect.
Jones, Amelia (2006) ‘Holy Body: Erotic Ethics in Ron Athey and Juliana Snapper’s Judas
Cradle’, The Drama Review 50: 159–69.

BAKHTIN, MIKHAIL (RUSSIAN LITERARY CRITIC, 1885–1975)

Bakhtin is best known in the West for his theories of dialogism, polyphony and
carnival. All of these are concerned with literary, linguistic and cultural forms and
their ideological effects, especially the potential resistance they offer to authoritarian
control.
Bakhtin argued that one of the ways official culture attempts to assert its control is
through monologic discourse – language and expression that appear to be coherent,
unified in voice, and ‘the last word’. Dialogism, on the other hand, admits and articu-
lates differences, combining a number of independent voices, consciousnesses and
styles, and incorporating laughter, irony and indeterminacy. Polyphony, similarly,
describes the inclusion – but not assimilation – of many voices or, literally, many
sounds. Although this many-voiced-ness might seem to be most characteristic of
drama with its numerous characters, Bakhtin claimed that drama assumes a mono-
logic authorial voice, which quells difference. He argued that the quintessential
dialogic form was the novel, with its contradictory, contesting, overlapping voices,
and its author’s and characters’ discourses interacting on equal terms (apparent most
impressively, for Bakhtin, in the novels of Dostoyevsky). Despite his dismissal of
drama, Bakhtin’s theories of dialogism have been recuperated for drama and perfor-
mance, particularly as a means of exploring the anti-authoritarian impulses and
variegated forms of much modernist, postmodernist and postdramatic performance
(in, for example, Dada and the work of Bertold Brecht, the Wooster Group,
Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Laurie Anderson).
Probably more influential in performance studies, however, is Bakhtin’s theory of
carnival developed in his book on early Renaissance writing, Rabelais and His
World. For Bakhtin, the term ‘carnival’ could describe the fair, its environment and
its participants’ behaviours, but also unconventional or lowbrow behaviour more
broadly: colloquial language, bawdy humour and scatological references to bodily
functions, whether these were experienced in real life or through fiction like Rabelais’.
Bakhtin’s central concern with carnival was with its social function, especially its
relationship to dominant cultures. On one hand, carnival could be seen to disrupt and
challenge authority by being other – unruly, indecorous and transgressive. On the
other hand, because carnival was socially sanctioned or allowed to happen – through
the granting of official permits for carnivals proper, for example – its ability to break
and challenge rules was always contained and, therefore, ultimately ineffectual. For
Bakhtin, carnival’s social role was ambivalent, both transgressive and contained,
something that challenged cultural limits and simultaneously enforced them. It is this
dynamic, ambivalent social effect of carnival that many have used to think about the

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social function of theatre and performance, from the official (for example, ‘national’
theatre and state parades) to the subcultural (street festivals and protests).
Bakhtin wrote many of his most influential texts in the 1920s and 1930s. However,
their influence was delayed initially because of censorship in Stalin-era Russia (in
1929, Bakhtin was sentenced to six years’ exile in Soviet Central Asia). His work
was only rehabilitated in the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s and translated into
English in the 1980s. Since then, however, critics across a range of disciplines – from
linguistic and literary studies, to philosophy, ethics, cultural studies and feminist and
postcolonial studies – have found in his writings excellent tools for exploring the
social production of meaning and the political potential of expressive activities,
including performance.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bakhtin, M. M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson
and Michael Holquist, Austin: University of Texas Press.
—— (1984) Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky, Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Holquist, Michael (1990) Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World, London: Routledge.
Lechte, John (1994) Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers: From Structuralism to Postmodernity,
London: Routledge.

BARBA, EUGENIO (ITALIAN DIRECTOR/THEORIST, 1936–)

Since the mid 1960s, Barba has directed numerous performances while simultane-
ously developing sophisticated theoretical models for analysing processes of
performing, performer training and dramaturgy. Barba’s theatrical explorations
began in Opole, Poland, where he worked as assistant director to Jerzy Grotowski
from 1960 to 1964. Barba’s apprenticeship with Grotowski led to a rich relationship
that Barba has described as being akin to that between a master and his disciple. In
1968, Barba edited Grotowski’s Towards a Poor Theatre under the auspices of his
own company, Odin Teatret, which he founded in Oslo in 1964 with actors rejected
from Oslo’s drama schools. Since 1966 Odin has been based in the small town of
Holstebro, Denmark. Barba was instrumental in introducing the work of Grotowski
to an international public and his practices drew closely on the Laboratory Theatre’s
approach. This can be seen explicitly in early performances such as Kaspariana
(1967), My Father’s House (1972), but even in later pieces like The Castle of
Holstebro (1990). Odin’s productions have toured to great acclaim, praised in
particular for the immense technical ability of the highly-trained actors. Some of
these, like Iben Nagel Rasmussen and Elsa Marie Laukvik, have worked with Barba
from the beginning.
As well as touring performances at international theatre festivals, Barba has taken
his work to south Italian villages and to the Yanomami Native Indians in the Amazon,
leading what he calls ‘barters’. These involve the cultural exchange of training

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exercises, songs and performances. For Barba, it is not the quality or value of the
goods exchanged that counts, but the action of exchange itself. Although the inter-
action is always performance-based, outcomes might be more concrete or permanent:
in one Italian village the audience gained access to Odin’s performance not with
tickets but by bringing books, thereby starting a local community library which the
village desperately needed. Barba has frequently led exchanges with ‘third theatre’
groups, whom he defines as those working on the margins of society, often with
minimal infrastructure and high artistic ideals, and whose primary motivation is
experimentation. Odin Teatret’s own emphasis on research and a broad notion of
collaboration has enabled company members to develop solo pieces and specialisms,
be they documentary filmmaking, vocal training, or organizing the large company
archive. In addition, Odin work closely with their local community of Holstebro, not
least on the Festuge week which comprises both professional and amateur activities,
and which has taken over the Danish town at irregular intervals since 1989. Company
members have also established their own international networks and festivals,
including with the Magdalena Project and Transit Festival.
Barba has attempted to create a working vocabulary to discuss performance (and
especially performing), under the umbrella of theatre anthropology. He invented
this term to examine what lies behind performance and performer techniques from a
broad international spectrum of performance modes and cultures. He has articulated
the findings of his research through regular meetings of the International School of
Theatre Anthropology (ISTA), founded in 1979. These events have hosted performers
from a range of disciplines and from East and West, to demonstrate and share the
principles that underlie their work. Barba has considered such techniques to be pre-
expressive, focusing on that which is happening before (but also at the same time as)
a performer expresses herself in a particular role. Pre-expressivity emphasizes how
the performer stands, the space the body occupies, and even involuntary physical
processes such as the pulse rate, which all affect the performer’s communication. It
concerns the energy (or bios as Barba prefers to call it) that exists even before the
performer has any intention to express herself. Pre-expressive principles are thus part
of a panoply of techniques that might be called pre-cultural, or which are at least not
culturally encoded or located.
Barba has shown numerous performances at ISTA events, sometimes as barters.
ISTA productions have included the multicultural performance sequence Theatrum
Mundi (1982), which places performers from different countries alongside each
other in an integrated cross-cultural practice and attempts to apply techniques and
principles from diverse disciplines in performance. These pieces demonstrate Barba’s
ability to negotiate new terrains and terminologies for examining the nature and craft
of performance as well as pre-performance techniques. Many of his practices and
ideas have had a substantial influence on physical theatre companies and artists.
With his emphasis on the pre-cultural, interest in intercultural and cross-cultural
theatre, seen in his invention of terms like ‘Eurasian theatre’, Barba has frequently
been attacked by critics like Rustom Bharucha for ignoring cultural and social
conditions. Barba maintains that his perspective is only one way of deconstructing

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performance and in his numerous articles and books he has argued that his approach
has pragmatic value for performers. It is also an antidote to the distance with which
Asian performance is often viewed and, importantly, has shown what performing
arts across cultures have in common – what unites rather than separates them.
Through his range of practices, Barba has made a significant contribution to broad-
ening the parameters of Western performance and experimentation, helping to refine
not only performance craft but also studies of performance.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Turner and Watson provide useful background and contextual information, including
on Odin Teatret, supplemented by Ledger’s particular focus on Odin’s community
work. Several videos are commercially available about the company’s different
modes of work, especially from the 1970s. Details of these can be found on their
website. RPA

Barba, Eugenio (1979) The Floating Islands: Reflections with Odin Teatret, Denmark:
Thomsens Bogtrykheri.
—— (1985) Beyond the Floating Islands, Denmark: H. M. Bergs Forlag.
—— (1994) The Paper Canoe – A Guide to Theatre Anthropology, trans. Richard Fowler,
London: Routledge.
—— (2010) On Directing and Dramaturgy: Burning the House, London: Routledge.
—— and Nicola Savarese (eds) (1991) A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art
of the Performer, London: Routledge.
Ledger, Adam J. (2012) Odin Teatret: Theatre in a New Century, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Odin Teatret. Online. Available www.odinteatret.dk (accessed 26 June 2013).
Turner, Jane (2004) Eugenio Barba, London: Routledge.
Watson, Ian (1993) Towards a Third Theatre: Eugenio Barba and the Odin Teatret, London:
Routledge.
—— and colleagues (2002) Negotiating Cultures – Eugenio Barba and the Intercultural
Debates, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

BAUSCH, PINA AND THE WUPPERTAL DANCE THEATRE (GERMAN

CHOREOGRAPHER/DANCER, 1940–2009)

Although she was principally a dance choreographer, Bausch was also profoundly
influential in theatre through her pioneering work in the hybrid form of dance theatre.
Her choreography’s emphasis on social experience and emotional expression success-
fully challenged the formalism, abstraction and aestheticism typical of much ballet
and contemporary dance. In the way that she has theatricalized dance and responded
to classical forms and techniques such as ballet – by questioning and updating them
– she has something in common with William Forsythe, even if their performance
aesthetics are very different. And her demonstration that performing bodies (and not
just voices) can be acutely expressive, both emotionally and socially, has provoked

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theatre-makers to develop their use of performers’ bodies and movement to produce

both emotional expression and social critique.
Bausch’s fundamental interest in the expressive potential of the body was estab-
lished early through training with expressionist choreographer Kurt Jooss in
Germany. Following further training in New York at the Juilliard School of Music,
Bausch returned to Germany in 1962 to work as a solo dancer and, later, a choreog-
rapher. The Wuppertal Opera Company, in Germany’s industrial Ruhr Valley,
invited her to choreograph for them in 1972 and appointed her director in 1973. She
promptly changed the company name to Wuppertaler Tanztheater (Wuppertal Dance
Theatre) and, soon after, to Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch.
In making these name changes, Bausch signalled the company’s movement away
from the conservative classical dance – whether ballet or modern – that was predom-
inant in Germany at the time. What she was moving towards was both a different
kind of dance – or content – and a different kind of performance event – or form. She
revived German traditions of expressionism, notably Ausdruckstanz, or expressive
dance, which had been popular in the interwar years and had influenced her early
training, and she sought in everyday movement a physical vocabulary for expressing
personal experience. Using performers’ autobiographical material, her dances are
devised through improvisation. Sequences within each dance may appear elegant,
heroic and extraordinary, but they are just as likely to appear fatigued, defeated and
ordinary, expanding the emotional range of dance movement. She also aimed to
develop dance’s theatrical potential, most importantly scenographic and costume
design, ‘non-dance’ movement, and the use of the spoken word, sometimes in direct
address. Often, the ‘theatricalization’ of the event facilitates the expressiveness of
the dance. For example, Bausch’s settings in real elemental materials, with floor
coverings of a layer of earth in Rite of Spring (1975), dead leaves in Blue Beard
(1977), carnations in Nelken (1982), and ankle-deep water in Arien (1985), provoked
different (including everyday) movements from her dancers as well as emotional
responses from her audiences. Norbert Servos has called Bausch’s sets like these
‘poetic playgrounds’ (see visual theatre).
Bausch’s shows characteristically use montage and repetition and are several
hours long, circling around themes of love, loneliness, fear and exploitation in a style
reminiscent of dreams, everyday life, popular theatre and cultural forms such as
music hall. In these and many other respects, Bausch’s dance aims to be democratic,
using material devised by her international dancers, many of whom are long-time
collaborators, and developing a form and a physical vocabulary that is not elite, like
ballet’s, but is inspired by everyday contexts, movements and music. Her familiar
costumes of satin evening gowns and tuxedos are reminiscent of social dance as
distinct from theatrical dance, and she sources music from 1930s and 1940s popular
culture. While Bausch’s dance aims to explore democratic expressiveness, however,
part of what it demonstrates is that individual expression is profoundly controlled –
or, more precisely, produced – by material conditions (physical obstacles), social
expectations (taboos and codes of dress and behaviour) and social contexts (the
group). Movement may be expressive but, because it is socially conditioned, it is

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rarely genuinely spontaneous. Identity, likewise, is shown to be ‘accumulated’

through the performative repetition of patterns of social movement, play and games,
rituals and – in this context, of course – dance sequences (see Judith Butler).
Bausch’s dance has aesthetic appeal – being by turns beautiful, harrowing, kineti-
cally exciting, eccentric and funny. But she was not satisfied with providing attractive,
escapist illusions, and her work was designed more precisely to provoke emotional
reactions. She admitted she was less interested in how people move than in what
moves them. Thus she aimed to articulate and challenge some of the problems of
daily life, especially those arising from gender relations. By repeatedly costuming
her female performers in stereotypical social costumes of high heels and cocktail
dresses and her male performers in suits, for example, her work evoked the oppres-
sions of gender categories even as it stimulated nostalgia for them (see feminism).
Further, she challenged her audience to engage with and respond to her work by
provoking them out of their passivity, whether by using iconoclastic movements, sets,
costumes or music and sometimes surreal compositions, or by making her shows
overlong or open-ended (see postdramatic theatre and postmodernism). By
constantly invoking the dress and music of the 1930s and staging her work in land-
scapes that frequently ended up devastated, she also invited her audiences to think
about historical events and transitions, especially in Germany.
Bausch’s demonstration of dance theatre’s potential has inspired many other
choreographers and companies – including London-based DV8 Physical Theatre –
to adopt and develop the form, and has inspired many theatre directors to enhance
their use of the body in performance. Her work is known and celebrated interna-
tionally, not least through her company’s long-time touring to major world festivals.
Following her death in 2009, the Wuppertal Dance Theatre continues to present
Bausch’s choreography, led by long-term members Dominique Mercy and Robert
Sturm.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

For analysis, see Cody, Fernandes, Gradinger and Mulrooney. Servos provides lavish
photographic illustration in both books cited here and Gradinger offers an extensive
bibliography. Climenhaga has compiled a comprehensive, international and up-to-
date collection of essays on Bausch and the company (2013) and written a shorter
overview (2009).

Climenhaga, Royd (2009) Pina Bausch, Oxon: Routledge.

—— (ed.) (2013), The Pina Bausch Sourcebook: The Making of Tanztheater, London:
Routledge.
Cody, Gabrielle (1998) ‘Woman, Man, Dog, Tree: Two Decades of Intimate and Monumental
Bodies in Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater’, TDR: The Drama Review 42.2 (TDR 158): 115–31.
Reprinted in Rebecca Schneider and Gabrielle Cody (eds) (2002) Re:Direction: A
Theoretical and Practical Guide, London: Routledge, pp.193–205.

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Fernandes, Ciane (2001) Pina Bausch and the Wuppertal Dance Theater: The Aesthetics of
Repetition and Transformation, New York: Peter Lang.
Gradinger, Malve (1999) ‘Pina Bausch’, in Fifty Contemporary Choreographers, Martha
Bremser (ed.), London: Routledge, pp. 25–29.
Mulrooney, Deirdre (2002) Orientalism, Orientation and the Nomadic Work of Pina Bausch,
New York: Peter Lang.
Pina Bausch. Online. Available www.pina-bausch.de (accessed 1 July 2013).
Servos, Norbert (1984) Pina Bausch Wuppertal Dance Theater, or, The Art of Training a
Goldfish: Excursions into Dance, trans. Patricia Stadié, Cologne: Ballett-Bühnen Verlag
Rolf Garske.
—— (2008) Pina Bausch Dance Theatre, photographs Gert Weigelt, trans. Stephen Morris,
Munich: K. Kieser Verlag.

BENJAMIN, WALTER (GERMAN LITERARY AND CULTURAL CRITIC,

1892–1940)
Walter Benjamin was a German Jewish literary and cultural critic whose work ranged
formidably and eclectically across a huge variety of subjects, from German tragic
drama to film, translation, capitalism, allegory, book collecting and the role of crit-
icism. His writings, recordings and discourses with other important twentieth-century
artists and thinkers including his friend Bertold Brecht have made him one of the
most influential modern critics. Three sets of his ideas have had the most impact
within theatre and performance studies for their conceptualization and advocacy of
the political effects of art and culture. They relate specifically to art’s technological
reproduction, Brecht’s epic theatre and theories of urban life.
Benjamin’s most influential essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction’, published in a variety of versions between 1935 and 1939, examines
how the social function of art changes with the introduction of mass technological repro-
duction, especially through photography and film. Before this era, individual artworks
held what Benjamin calls ‘aura’; they required individual contemplation and therefore
supported a bourgeois capitalist economy as well as, potentially, fascism, since they
cultivated elitism. With mass reproduction and distribution, art became available to
mass audiences, undermining the auratic artwork’s elitism and recognizing everyone as
a ‘quasi-expert’. Benjamin’s arguments about auratic and technologically reproduced
artworks resonate with more recent debates about the comparative value of perfor-
mance’s liveness set against its multimedia transformation and its documentation.
In ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Benjamin expresses
an appreciation for film montage which chimes with his advocacy of epic theatre in
‘What Is Epic Theatre?’; both film montage and epic theatre interrupt attention in
ways that shock audiences into recognizing political meaning and taking political
action. While Benjamin’s theory was deeply influenced by the work of other philoso-
phers such as T. W. Adorno, it was also influenced by the cultural materialist
practice of Brecht. For example, Benjamin admired how Brecht’s epic theatre
demonstrated the ways that forces produce history (and the present), but might also

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be acted on by human agents and changed. Benjamin investigates the social and
cultural history of urban life in such works as the massive Arcades Project (incom-
plete and unpublished in his lifetime) and various writings on the nineteenth-century
poetry of Charles Baudelaire. He explores the kinds of social life that are made
possible – or inhibited – as urban circumstances change through the advance of
consumer capitalism. One of his principle focuses is the flâneur, a leisured urban
wanderer who features in Baudelaire’s poetry as well as Paris’s famous covered
shopping arcades and who observes his fellow citizens and the city. For Benjamin,
the flâneur is a magnificent urban explorer whose leisure betrays his (sic) privilege
but who nevertheless is not compelled or distracted by consumerism. He presents an
everyday urban creativity endangered, for Benjamin, by the rise of consumerism and
its imperative to buy, rather than simply to observe. In The Arcades Project, Benjamin
examines the glass-covered shopping arcades that proliferated in Paris in the early
nineteenth century, suggesting they create a sort of scenographic playground for the
display and fetishization of commodities.
Benjamin was writing during a period of enormous social, economic and political
transformation and of critical scepticism about the potential of art to bring about
positive social change. He investigated art’s limitations, such as the problem of the
flâneur’s privilege. But he also advocated for a committed, materialist – not ‘just’
intellectual – engagement with art’s effects, and he championed art’s potential to
make constructive social interventions.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Understanding Brecht gathers several texts related to Brecht and epic theatre,
including ‘What Is Epic Theatre?’, which is also included in Illuminations. Hannah
Arendt’s ‘Introduction’ to Illuminations provides helpful biographical, historical and
intellectual contextualization and excellent critical analysis.

Arendt, Hannah (1970) ‘Introduction: Walter Benjamin, 1892–1940’, in Walter Benjamin,

Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, London: Jonathan Cape, pp. 1–55.
Benjamin, Walter (1999) The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin,
Cambridge, MA, and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University.
—— (1973) Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry
Zohn and Quintin Hoare, London: NLB.
—— (1970) ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in Walter Benjamin,
Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, London: Jonathan Cape, pp. 219–53.
—— (1973) Understanding Brecht, London: New Left Books.
—— (1970) Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, London: Jonathan Cape.

BHARUCHA, RUSTOM (INDIAN THEATRE DIRECTOR/THEORIST, 1946–)

Bharucha has had an influential impact on intercultural theories and practices, ques-
tioning the motives and processes of the likes of directors Jerzy Grotowski,

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Richard Schechner, Eugenio Barba and Peter Brook. He has harshly exposed
misrepresentations and mystifications of Asian performance and culture in their
practice and research processes, particularly in Brook’s The Mahabharata (1985).
His views have been strongly criticized. He has also decried what he considers the
biases and shortcomings in Western (though not exclusively) scholars’ and practi-
tioners’ attempts to mix cultures or develop theories based on cross-cultural prin-
ciples and methodologies. His materialist approach has led him to refute the acultural
thinking and claims for universalism of many intercultural projects, and he has turned
his attention to the problematics of work by Singaporean company Theatreworks.
Too much theorizing and too many performances, he has argued, are apolitical and
ignore the specificity of local culture, local interests and needs, as well as overriding
the specific traditions in which performers might be based. Bharucha takes issue with
Barba’s notion of Eurasian theatre, arguing that Barba misleadingly conflates
culturally- and socially-specific processes in a way that ignores historical and gender
difference, for example. His most notable condemnation of Western thinkers and
practitioners appeared in his collection of essays Theatre and the World (published in
1990 in India and three years later by Routledge). This book also describes an Indian
intracultural project that looked to local grassroots sources and influences as a model
of good practice. Social activism has been central to Bharucha’s work.
A product of cultural mixing, Bharucha taught for several years in New York,
though he has worked and lived predominantly in India, where he has led his own
dramaturgical and creative projects. He has often directed classical Western and
Indian plays, searching for Asian and especially Indian traditions of acting that can be
used in the performance of European texts, like his realization of Franz Xaver
Kroetz’s Request Concert (1986–89). Interestingly, these performances have
received little critical attention in Western circles, and nothing like that he has paid to
others’ work.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bharucha has written several books and articles about Indian theatre and cultural
traditions and politics, the complexities of Asian cultures (e.g. 2009’s Another Asia),
as well as works including Theatre and the World that are known more widely in the
West.

Bharucha, Rustom (1993) Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture,
London: Routledge.
—— (1997) ‘Somebody’s Other: Disorientations in the Cultural Politics of our Times’, in The
Intercultural Performance Reader, Patrice Pavis (ed.), London: Routledge, pp. 196–212.
—— (1999) In the Name of the Secular: Contemporary Cultural Activism in India, Delhi and
New York: Oxford University Press.
—— (2000) The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking Through Theatre in an Age of
Globalization, London: Athlone.

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 BOAL, AUGUSTO

—— (2004) ‘Foreign Asia/Foreign Shakespeare: Dissenting Notes on New Asian

Interculturality, Postcoloniality, and Recolonization’, Theatre Journal 56: 1–28.
—— (2009) Another Asia: Rabindranath Tagore and Okakura Tenshin, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

BOAL, AUGUSTO (BRAZILIAN THEATRE DIRECTOR/TEACHER,

1931–2009)
Throughout his life Boal consistently attempted to demonstrate that theatrical action
has the potential to make a social and political impact. His work catalysed the thea-
tre’s struggle to maintain a political focus in what has been called a postmodern age,
after the fervent agitation of the 1960s. Boal was initially a director at the Arena
Theatre in São Paulo, Brazil, where he produced international classic plays, but he
soon became concerned to find a theatre language that was accessible to the illiterate
and poor masses in the Latin American countries where he worked. He argued that
Aristotle’s system, based on the three unities of time, space and action as well as
catharsis, was ‘coercive’. He believed that catharsis, like carnival, is a device that
maintains the status quo and keeps the oppressed passive by encouraging a controlled
dispersal of ‘steam’ or tension. Inspired by the educationalist Paolo de Freire and his
book Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), Boal drew on Bertold Brecht’s theories
and practices, especially when his work moved out of theatre buildings and away
from traditional performance structures. Under the umbrella of the theatre of the
oppressed, he developed several techniques and modes of performance that can
operate in theatrical and non-theatrical milieus as applied and socially-engaged
performance.
For political reasons he was exiled from Brazil and then Argentina in 1971. Boal
then moved to Europe and settled in Paris, where he invented the idea of the ‘cop-in-
the-head’. This term was meant to denote the oppression of self-censorship and
social control which was more familiar in the West and was very different from the
more overt forms of demagogy found in Latin America at that time. After his return
to Brazil in 1986, Boal became a Member of the City Council for Rio de Janeiro in
1992, where he began encouraging groups to suggest the implementation of new
laws through his ‘Legislative Theatre’ practice. This involved the use of forum tech-
niques with active ‘spectactor’ participation to pinpoint, discuss, and refine potential
legislation to support local communities.
Boal published books in several languages documenting both his techniques and
his theories. Partly as a consequence of this wide dissemination of his ideas, his prac-
tices have been adopted by many groups, ranging from homeless people in London
to communities of First Nations people in Canada who have explored issues of sexual
abuse. His paratheatrical work bordered on therapy, though the emphasis was on
communal rather than individual healing. For him the theatre had to question and
engage with real, often external, issues and situations and attempt to help resolve
them, thereby endeavouring to empower people. While his utopianism was inspira-
tional for many, his detractors have questioned the relevance of his approach in a

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European (rather than Latin American) context, where political and social polarities
and oppressions are less clearly defined. Detractors aside, his work has been funda-
mental in breaking down notions of where and with whom theatre can happen, in
investigating the boundaries between art and everyday life, and in maintaining a
politicized theatre practice. Today many groups and individuals still work both
explicitly and implicitly in the spirit of his aims.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The best access to Boal’s work is through his own texts, which illustrate the devel-
opment of his theories with practical examples. The Schutzman and Cohen-Cruz
collection illuminates the wider application of his ideas. Babbage presents a good
introduction to Boal and his practices as well as ways to apply his techniques.

Babbage, Frances (2004) Augusto Boal, London: Routledge.

Boal, Augusto (1979) Theatre of the Oppressed, trans. Charles A. and Maria-Odilia Leal
McBride, London: Pluto Press.
—— (1995) The Rainbow of Desire, trans. Adrian Jackson, London: Routledge.
—— (1998) Legislative Theatre, trans. Adrian Jackson, London: Routledge.
—— (2001) Hamlet and the Baker’s Son: My Life in Theatre and Politics, trans. Adrian
Jackson and Candia Blaker, London: Routledge.
—— (2002) Games for Actors and Non-Actors, trans. Adrian Jackson, 2nd edition, London:
Routledge.
—— (2006) The Aesthetics of the Oppressed, trans. Adrian Jackson, London: Routledge.
Schutzman, Mady and Jan Cohen-Cruz (eds) (1994) Playing Boal: Theatre, Therapy and
Activism, London: Routledge.

BREAD AND PUPPET THEATRE COMPANY (AMERICAN VISUAL AND

ENVIRONMENTAL THEATRE GROUP, 1963–)

Bread and Puppet came to the fore of American experimental theatre in the late
1960s and 1970s with protest and demonstration performances such as A Monument
for Ishi (1975) that utilized giant puppets, parades and symbolic masks, amongst
other popular theatre devices and forms (see Figure 1). Many early works were
protests against the Vietnam War – for example, Fire (1966) – but they also addressed
other social issues including the growth of materialism and increasing technological
mechanization. Founded by German Peter Schumann in New York in 1963, the
group’s name refers to the company’s practice of inviting audiences after perfor-
mances to share bread baked by the company. Schumann’s premise was that theatre
should be as essential to life as bread. Such symbolism and the use of simple alle-
gorical narratives have given his work what many have perceived as a ritual and
spiritual dimension.
The collective is still active today, based on a farm in Vermont, USA, and leads
workshops and creates performances, such as the annual local piece The Domestic
Resurrection Circus and Pageant, which ran from 1970 to 1998. Their

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 BREAD AND PUPPET THEATRE C O MP A N Y

Figure 1 Bread and Puppet Theatre march in protest on the anniversary of the
invasion of Iraq, 2004

performances happen on a vast scale often on outdoor sites, utilizing simple but bold
expressionistic designs and community participation, either in the making and
manipulation of the puppets and objects, through wearing masks, or through the
communal eating of bread. Bread and Puppet’s performances have a strong ideo-
logical basis (Schumann is a pacifist) and often address regional or topical issues
such as environmental waste or nuclear power, as well as the impact of global
problems on local groups. These alter in order to address ongoing or new social
concerns as they arise.
Bread and Puppet’s visual and environmental theatre practice epitomizes a
politically and socially-engaged mode of carnivalesque street presentation and
demonstration as well as aesthetic outdoor performance that has attracted many
imitators.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brecht’s two-volume title provides a wealth of information on the company. Shank

places their work in the broader context of American theatre experimentation, while
Simon and Estrin have collated a vivid collection of essays and photographs, a vital
introduction to the work.

Bread and Puppet. Online. Available http://breadandpuppet.org (accessed 21 July 2013).

Brecht, Stefan (1988) The Bread and Puppet Theatre, 2 vols, London: Methuen.

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 PEOPLE AND COM PA N I E S

Shank, Theodore (2002) Beyond the Boundaries: American Alternative Theatre, revised and
updated edition, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Simon, Ronald T. and Marc Estrin (2004) Rehearsing with Gods: Photographs and Essays on
the Bread and Puppet Theatre, Vermont: Chelsea Green Books.

BRECHT, BERTOLD (GERMAN THEATRE DIRECTOR/WRITER/THEORIST,

1898–1956)
Brecht was a major reformer of several aspects of twentieth-century theatre. He
created an acting process, theories of dramaturgy and performance, a performance
style, and wrote hundreds of plays and poems, many informed by his strong belief in
Marxism. His works were meant to instruct as well as move, a defining principle of
his creative output, and they promoted a Marxist vision. Over time, this conviction
relaxed a little as he shifted from a didactic stance to a more open socially-engaged
investigation of possibilities. Early plays such as The Mother (1932) were starkly
polemical in their presentation of political crises and potential solutions. This
approach was epitomized in his Lehrstücke, or learning plays, such as The Measures
Taken (1930), several of which were targeted at theatre workers to instruct them in
the aesthetics and techniques of Brecht’s theatre as well as ways of thinking. His
later and better-known plays such as The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1954) and Mother
Courage and Her Children (1949; see Figure 6) presented dilemmas for the
audience to consider, putting the onus on the spectator to question and evaluate
potential means to make redress for the characters’ plights. Brecht demanded a
critical response from the spectator, an active intellectual engagement which he
found lacking in the closed cycle of naturalism. In naturalism, the audience is
expected to empathize with the characters on stage but is not necessarily expected to
think how their situation might be altered. The process therefore ends as the play
closes. Brecht wanted to break down the ‘fourth wall’ through various devices:
revealing decisions his characters made and the context in which they did so; making
narrative techniques overt; and exposing the processes by which performances are
constructed, even showing the actor to be aware on stage of the artifice of his or her
role. These notions of public participation in change and an emphasis on process
rather than product are as fundamental to Brecht’s aesthetic vision as they are to
Marxism.
Brecht was aware of the increasing danger of his position as a Marxist and public
figure and so fled Germany in 1933. He left Europe in 1941 and went into exile in the
United States. He continued to write there, including a first draft of The Caucasian
Chalk Circle and The Life of Galileo in 1947, the year when he was famously ques-
tioned about his Communist connections by the House Un-American Activities
Committee. He returned to a Communist East Germany in 1948 and a year later, with
his wife, Helene Weigel, founded the still-extant Berliner Ensemble. Under his charge
this became one of the most influential theatre groups in Europe, contributing to the
politicization of writers and theatre artists worldwide. The development of poetic

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plays by the likes of British playwright John Arden, for example, followed the
ensemble’s visit to the United Kingdom and London’s Palace Theatre in 1955.
Of all Brecht’s theatrical strategies, the most widely known is ‘alienation’ or the
Verfremdungseffekt. This is more appropriately translated as ‘distancing’ or ‘distan-
tiation’, alluding primarily to the critical perspective with which an audience should
engage with the production as well as the attitude an actor might have towards his or
her role. It was inspired in part by the non-illusionistic nature of Chinese theatre and
especially Beijing Opera, to which Brecht was introduced when he met the actor Mei
Lan Fang (1894–1961) in 1935 in Moscow. The Verfremdungseffekt was made
possible by many techniques, most notably Gestus. Actors should recognize a play’s
key Gestus, or those actions which have social-political resonance and implications.
Such awareness should help make visible the central dilemma of any one moment
within a production. An example is Helene Weigel’s silent scream in Mother Courage
and Her Children when she hears of her son’s death but must hide her response for
her own safety. Such techniques might seem at first sight overcomplicated and difficult
to embody, but Brecht wanted his plays also to exude a sense of fun (Spass), inspired
in part by his contact with the thriving world of German cabaret in the 1920s and
1930s. Frequent assumptions about Brecht’s work include the misunderstanding that
he did not want his audience to feel any emotion. Rather, Brecht wanted the spec-
tators to rationalize their emotional responses and to evaluate the stage action objec-
tively in order to ascertain the social foundation of the characters’ motivations and
their own reactions to these. To further separate the actors from their textual material
and encourage objectivity, Brecht wrote parts for narrators or storytellers, and used
Sprachgesang, or half-spoken, half-sung text. Many of the songs in his plays were
written by the celebrated composer Kurt Weill. Such popular theatre devices made
his work accessible, thereby replacing the bourgeoisie as the dominant audience in the
theatre in pre-Second World War Weimar Germany with a more representative cross
section of society and especially the working class. Brecht also collaborated with the
designer Caspar Neher to create a scenography with functional rather than decorative
props, which showed realistically how people worked and lived. Neher constructed
simple locations for each scene and emblematic (even Gestus-like) scenographic
items such as Mother Courage’s cart. His style integrated a spartan playing space – a
boxing ring of sorts – with appropriate and telling gestic detail.
Brecht’s reflections on and theories of performance are most clearly expressed in
the essay ‘Short Organum for the Theatre’ (1948) and in short pieces such as The
Street Scene (1938), which describes how different witnesses at an accident narrate
the same event from alternative perspectives that combine to make up the whole
picture. He differentiated between his Epic Theatre and naturalism’s Dramatic
Theatre. Epic Theatre relies on narrative rather than plot, the action unfolding in self-
contained scenes that make up the total story, each of which might be introduced by
a slogan or a sign. Epic Theatre depicts social and political processes, whereas natu-
ralism shows people governed by apparently natural laws and evolutionary deter-
minism, unalterable and beyond the sway of reason. Brecht’s ability to articulate his
playwriting and directing practice succinctly and with passion, his production of

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model books (Modellbücher) which document in photographs and text his stagings
and their mises en scène, and his importance to other influential artists and thinkers
including Walter Benjamin have meant that his ideas have been, and will continue
to be, for a long time to come, at the centre of politically-motivated theatre practices,
like those of the late Augusto Boal.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

There are numerous books on Brecht, including useful edited works like the Thomson
and Sacks Companion, Wright’s recontextualization, and the Routledge sourcebook
edited by Martin and Bial, as well as the controversial Fuegi biography. Willett’s
translations and analyses have become the authoritative texts on Brecht’s life and
works. RPA

Brecht, Bertold (1965) The Messingkauf Dialogues, London: Methuen.

—— (1970–present) Collected Plays, 10 vols, London: Eyre Methuen.
Fuegi, John (1994) Life and Lies of Bertold Brecht, London: HarperCollins.
Martin, Carol and Henry Bial (eds) (1999) Brecht Sourcebook, London: Routledge.
Thomson, Peter and Glendyr Sacks (eds) (1994) The Cambridge Companion to Brecht,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Willett, John (1959) The Theatre of Bertold Brecht, London: Methuen.
—— (ed.) (1964) Brecht on Theatre, London: Methuen.
Wright, Elizabeth (1989) Postmodern Brecht: A Re-Presentation, London: Routledge.

BROOK, PETER (ENGLISH THEATRE DIRECTOR/THEORIST, 1925–)

Peter Brook has combined successful international productions of classical texts
with experimental devised pieces, as well as lectures and writing. He worked initially
as a director in Britain where, in a short space of time and at an early age, he directed
a large body of work, including classical European plays, Shakespeare and opera. He
was dubbed a ‘boy wonder’ after successful productions including King Lear at the
Royal Shakespeare Company with Paul Scofield (1962). During the1960s his work
became more experimental, and in collaboration with director Charles Marowitz he
produced the 1964 ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ season at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s
Aldwych Theatre in London. This was an attempt to put Antonin Artaud’s theories
into practice, an important research project even if some of the results were considered
disastrous. Other notable productions from this period include Peter Weiss’s
Marat-Sade (1964) and the devised piece US (1966), both of which showed influ-
ences from Bertold Brecht. The latter production (ambivalently titled either ‘us’ or
‘US’, as in the United States) questioned the Vietnam War and interrogated the indi-
vidual’s responsibility in the face of such devastation. For this production, Brook
invited Jerzy Grotowski and his lead actor Ryszard Cieślak to work briefly with his
actors. Their close relationship founded on mutual support and interest in research
processes lasted until Grotowski’s death in 1999.

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 BROOK, PETER

In 1968, Brook wrote The Empty Space. This book launched a scathing attack on
‘deadly theatre’, or moribund commercial productions and received ways of directing
Shakespeare, balanced against the commendation of theatre that unites the rough, the
immediate and the invisible (or an otherworldly metaphysical dimension). The Empty
Space was influenced partly by the Polish critic Jan Kott’s book Shakespeare Our
Contemporary (1964), which argued for the possibility of bringing classical works
up to date. This notion was embodied in Brook’s highly influential 1970 production
of A Midsummer Night’s Dream set in a white box – as opposed to the more familiar
black studio-theatre – and designed in part like a circus or playground. This
production was critically acclaimed for its inventiveness and playfulness, though,
ironically, it heralded Brook’s departure from Britain to Paris. There, he first set up
the CIRT (Centre International de Recherche Théâtrale) and then CICT (Centre
International de Créations Théâtrales), as he shifted his focus away from laboratory
work, replacing ‘Recherche’ with ‘Créations’. In Paris, with more support for experi-
mentation than he felt he could muster in Britain, he employed a multicultural group
of performers and musicians to research the universality of performance, not only
through their own sharing of techniques in rehearsal and workshop but also through
their productions. Notable among these were: Orghast at Persepolis (1971), which
utilized sounds ‘written’ (or rather scored) by British poet Ted Hughes, in part based
on the ancient Persian language Avesta; the African project, which was a tour to tiny,
rural communities in sub-Saharan Africa in 1972 with improvised presentations; and
a performance based on a Sufi poem, both titled The Conference of the Birds (1979).
As well as his opera productions, Brook directed innovative, simply staged
productions of classics like The Tempest (1983), and films like Lord of the Flies
(1961). He also directed the Indian epic The Mahabharata (1985), which aroused
controversy for supposedly exploiting Indian culture, mythology and practitioners, a
charge levelled most notably by Rustom Bharucha. Others such as Una Chaudhuri
presented a more balanced view, and critics in the press were mostly highly positive
about the piece. Brook has attracted similar criticisms for what many have considered
his eclectic cultural ‘piracy’ and minimal recognition of cultural difference in his
intercultural projects, which he strongly refutes.
As well as this extensive practice, Brook has elaborated on the art of the performer
through lectures and writing, attempting to define how the ‘invisible can be made
visible’. He has frequently attempted to reveal his processes and debunk myths,
claiming – as in the title of one of his books – that ‘There are no secrets’. His perfor-
mances are recognized for their simplicity of staging and what he calls (disingenu-
ously, for some critics) an ‘absence of style’. He often uses the central scenographic
device of a carpet, laid down in an African village or more often in the middle of his
Paris theatre Les Bouffes du Nord, its simplicity compatible with the few represent-
ative props, a low-key mode of speaking and understated performances. Critics
(notably Kenneth Tynan) have found this simplicity uninspiring, though such
complaints detract only marginally from his status as a theatre innovator of interna-
tional renown. Since the 1990s, Brook has been exploring the intricacies of the
human psyche in The Man Who (1993), based on neurologist Oliver Sacks’ book The

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Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985), and in The Tragedy of Hamlet (2000).
Brook’s beginnings in classical European theatre have always provided his textual
base and he repeatedly returns to the vitality of Shakespeare’s language and the
Elizabethan theatre event as points of departure.
Although he no longer runs the Bouffes du Nord theatre he continues as an inde-
pendent director of productions and writer of theatre books. Brook has pushed at the
borders of twentieth and twenty-first-century theatre, trying to find a performance
aesthetic that transcends cultures, attracting controversy but more frequently acclaim.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brook’s own writings have an accessible style, often drawing on examples from his
own productions. Williams has collated many of these and has also commented on
much of Brook’s oeuvre, especially post-1970. Croyden and Reeves and Hunt give
useful ways into Brook’s praxis.

Brook, Peter (1968) The Empty Space, London: McGibbon and Kee.
—— (1988) The Shifting Point, London: Methuen.
—— (1993) There Are No Secrets: Thoughts on Acting and Theatre, London: Methuen.
—— (1993) The Open Door, New York: Theatre Communications Group.
—— (1998) Threads of Time: Recollections, London: Methuen.
—— (1999) Evoking Shakespeare, London: Nick Hern Books.
—— (2013) The Quality of Mercy, London: Nick Hern Books.
Chaudhuri, Una (1998) ‘Working out (of) Place: Peter Brook’s Mahabharata and the
Problematics of Intercultural Performance’, in Staging Resistance: Essays on Political
Theater, Jeanne Colleran and Jenny S. Spencer (eds), Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, pp. 77–97.
Croyden, Margaret (2004) Conversations with Peter Brook, London: Faber and Faber.
Reeves, Geoffrey and Albert Hunt (1993) Peter Brook, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Williams, David (ed.) (1988) Peter Brook – A Theatrical Casebook, London: Methuen.
—— (ed.) (1991) Peter Brook and The Mahabharata: Critical Perspectives, London:
Routledge.

BUTLER, JUDITH (AMERICAN ACADEMIC/PHILOSOPHER, 1956–)

Butler is a philosopher, feminist and queer theorist whose ideas have been ground-
breaking and hotly debated across a broad range of disciplines, from performance
and literary theory to law, sociology, film and cultural studies. A prolific writer, her
most influential work for performance studies is Gender Trouble (1990). Here she
argues that gender identity is not biologically given but socially constructed through
repeated performed acts. Thus, although most cultures explicitly and implicitly
enforce very strict definitions of what is female and what is male, individuals can
nevertheless be understood to have at least some control over how they enact their
gender identities. By disrupting the sets of repeated acts which are usually taken to

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signify male or female, enactments of gender which are parodic or simply unusual
can subvert dominant understandings of gender, sex and sexuality as well as the
oppressions those normative understandings can produce. Butler’s theorization of
gender as performative was extremely influential – it enabled gender and queer
theorists and activists to pose identity as something that is actively chosen rather than
passively suffered or naturally attributed and to reclaim formerly pejorative charac-
terizations such as ‘queer’.
Many critics felt that Gender Trouble’s theory bore little relation to actual,
material bodies. Butler responded to this criticism in Bodies that Matter (1993),
arguing that, while the body may be material and given (if not unchanging), its
meanings are nevertheless discursively or performatively constructed and under-
stood. Sex as well as gender, therefore, is a performative act. In Excitable Speech
(1997), Butler explores various acts of speaking and what their potential legal and
social effects for identity have been and might be. She continues to publish exten-
sively on theories of the subject, gender identity, social oppression, violence and
political agency, notably – for theatre and performance studies – through a sustained
reading of Sophocles’ Antigone in Antigone’s Claim (2000). Her work is indicative
of a 1990s trend for theorists from a range of disciplines to use ideas of performing
and performativity to help articulate understandings of the subject’s political agency.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Though Butler is a prolific writer, her earlier work on gender performativity has been
most influential in theatre and performance studies which is why this select bibliog-
raphy focuses mostly on works from the 1990s and the first several years of the
twenty-first century.

Butler, Judith ([1990] 1999) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity,
London: Routledge.
—— (1993) Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, London: Routledge.
—— (1997) Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, London: Routledge.
—— (2000) Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death, New York: Columbia
University Press.
—— (2004) The Judith Butler Reader, Oxford: Blackwell.
—— (2004) Undoing Gender, London: Routledge.
Salih, Sara (2002) Judith Butler, London: Routledge.

CAGE, JOHN (AMERICAN MUSICIAN/COMPOSER/THEORIST 1912–92)

John Cage is a founding father of performance art, a figure of enormous imagi-
nation and influence. Working predominantly in the field of experimental music and
performance, Cage studied with composer Arnold Schoenberg before the Second
World War, after which he embarked as a composer on the pieces that made his
name, many of which have gained mythological status. While a tutor at Black

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Mountain College, North Carolina, just after the Second World War, Cage devised the
‘prepared piano’. He placed objects inside a piano that interfered with the sound of
the strings, creating additional percussion when the piano was played. Works like
this were influenced deeply by Marcel Duchamp, whom Cage knew and admired, and
whose hallmark surrealist work of a urinal titled Fountain (1917) had questioned
what art is. Although there was an interventionist approach in Cage’s piano, this later
gave way to the concept of chance in artistic processes of which he was a primary
proponent. Cage argued that intention got in the way of the creative act and that the
artist should merely divert the spectator/auditor’s attention to what already exists in
nature. By this, he did not mean nature in a purist sense but as in encompassing
human and technological developments too, such as the sounds of raindrops, an
audience breathing, a car horn, or tuning in twelve radios, as in Imaginary Landscapes
No. 4 (1951). This non-intentionality evolved from a fascination with Buddhism and
Zen that Cage sustained throughout his long life. Perhaps the best example of this
approach is his musical piece 4' 33" (1952), whose impact was enormous. The
scandal it sparked helped broaden notions both of what constitutes performing and
what music can be.
Cage’s work was entirely non-representational and arhythmical, as well as being
conceptually demanding, leaving the audience to construct meaning and significance
if this was their wont – a truly collaborative act. Although his early explorations saw
him tossing coins in order to randomly construct his notation and orchestration, Cage
also wrote music in a more orthodox sense, though often for an unorthodox mix of
instruments, using synthesizers and other modes of technological mediation or pre-
recorded sounds. His career centred on an enduring fifty-year collaboration with
dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham. Together they created many
performances, espousing the importance of collaboration (his music was always
conceived to be performed with a significant theatrical dimension), while stressing
the need for their respective art forms to remain autonomous. In one case, Cage
wrote music for a dance piece by Cunningham (Points in Space, 1986, subsequently
filmed), of which he knew nothing in advance about the content except its duration.
Music and choreography came together for the first time in the première perfor-
mance, conjoined by the dancers. It was a device they used frequently and that helped
to keep their collaboration alive.
Cage inspired many artists working in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s,
including Laurie Anderson, Robert Wilson, the choreographer of Trio A (1966)
Yvonne Rainer, and other members of the Judson Church Group, who were exploring
the boundary between dance and everyday movement. He listed among his friends and
collaborators the prominent visual artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, as
well as pianist David Tudor, names that show the breadth of Cage’s practice and ideas.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cage articulated many of his complex and controversial ideas in writing, both creative
and theoretical. These have offered great scope for academic analyses like those

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listed below, which are just a small sample of the many available studies. Kaye and
Zurbrugg show the impact of Cage’s ideas on postmodern thinking and practice.

Cage, John (1967) A Year from Monday; New Lectures and Writings, Middletown, CN:
Wesleyan University Press.
—— Online. Available http://johncage.org (accessed 1 July 2013).
—— (1968) Silence: Lectures and Writings, London: Calder and Boyars.
Fetterman, William (1997) John Cage’s Theater Pieces, Amsterdam: Harwood.
Kaye, Nick (1994) Postmodernism and Performance, London: Macmillan.
—— (1996) ‘John Cage’, in Art into Theatre, Nick Kaye (ed.), Amsterdam: Harwood
Academic Publishers, pp. 14–24.
Kostelanetz, Richard (ed.) (1993) Writings About John Cage, Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press.
Zurbrugg, Nicholas (1993) The Parameters of Postmodernism, London: Routledge.

CHRISTO (BULGARIAN/AMERICAN ARTIST, 1935–) AND

JEANNE-CLAUDE (FRENCH/AMERICAN ARTIST AND PRODUCER, 1935–)
Husband-and-wife artistic team Christo and Jeanne-Claude are most famous for their
wrappings: site-specific buildings, objects and environments which they temporarily
enclose, surround or cover for a period of days or weeks in enormous quantities of
fabric. Some of their most famous works include: Valley Curtain, Rifle, Colorado,
1970–1972 (first planned in 1970 and realized in 1972), a 417-metre-wide orange

Figure 2 Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Wrapped Reichstag (1995)

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 PEOPLE AND COM PA N I E S

nylon curtain suspended across a valley; Surrounded Islands, Biscayne Bay, Greater
Miami, Florida, 1980–1983, where they framed eleven islands with 600,000 square
metres of bright-pink fabric; The Umbrellas, Japan – USA, 1984–1991, where they
erected more than 3,000 six-metre-high umbrellas in the countryside of Japan and
California; and Wrapped Reichstag, 1971–1995, where they wrapped Berlin’s famous
government building in 100,000 square metres of high-strength polypropylene
aluminium-coated fabric (see Figure 2). Their work is monumental, in both planning
and execution: Wrapped Reichstag was planned over twenty-four years, and The
Umbrellas cost US$26 million and required the permission of forty-four government
authorities and approximately 450 farmers and landowners.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s wrappings compel us to look anew at our everyday
surroundings and to reconsider relationships between what is natural and what is
made by humans, commercial or packaged. They turn functional buildings into
luminous, ghostly spectres, suggestively haunting urban and rural sites. Their use of
fabric evokes classical art’s fascination with drapery’s lightness, darkness, form and
volume. It also recalls conventions of packaging gifts and of wrapping bodies in
fabrics, whether to conceal or enhance, in simple daily dressing or, more emotively,
in swaddling babies, shrouding corpses or veiling girls, women, brides and widows.
Their work raises issues about art’s commodification. Christo’s preparatory drawings,
collages and books illustrating the installations are portable, durable, saleable as
commodities, and raise millions of dollars for the couple’s CVJ Corporation. The
installations, however, resist commodification. Paid for by the CVJ Corporation, they
offer free access to the public, are temporary, and their materials are recycled, not
sold. Although the work is generally attributed to a single artist (Christo) its actual
requirement of often many hundreds of people’s labour, commitment and
campaigning, not least the work of Jeanne-Claude, testifies to its social functions. Its
reliance on technical expertise and skill, for example, in engineering, carefully tests
the boundaries of art. It can stimulate international collaboration (The Umbrellas),
provoke thought about borders (Valley Curtain) and facilitate a community’s efforts
to redefine itself. In the context of German reunification after 1989, supporters of
Wrapped Reichstag argued that the German government’s agreement to the project
demonstrated the country’s renewed open-mindedness to the international media
audience attracted by Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work.
This work is performance not least because it combines scenography, space and
event. Its monumental scenography uses objects and lighting to produce awe-
inspiring visual effects and to alter environments and landscapes radically. It is an
event as its fabrics are unfurled, as long as it lasts, and as it is dismantled – in all of
the contexts in which passers-by engage with it, whether by helping to construct it,
moving around or through it, viewing it or witnessing it through the media. It
becomes performance by compelling passers-by to perform differently in its presence
than they probably would do in the same space were it ‘unwrapped’.

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 CI XOUS, HÉLÈNE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 1995 book documents Wrapped Reichstag, The Gates
project for New York’s Central Park and Over the River for the western USA; their
2011 book documents forty years’ work. Baal-Teshuva includes analysis and
extensive photographic illustration. Vaizey’s book is mostly a picture catalogue.

Baal-Teshuva, Jacob (1995) Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Köln: Benedikt Taschen.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude (1995) Three Works in Progress, London: Annely Juda Fine Art.
—— (2011) 40 Years; 12 Exhibitions, London: Annely Juda Fine Art.
—— Online. Available www.christojeanneclaude.net/ (accessed 15 October 2013).
Vaizey, Marina (1991) Christo, London: Academy Editions.

CIXOUS, HÉLÈNE (FRENCH ACADEMIC/WRITER OF CRITICISM, PLAYS,

FICTION AND MEMOIR, 1937–)

Cixous is a pioneer of feminist thought, artistic practice and activism. A prolific

writer across a range of genres (which she playfully combines), she is probably best
known in English translation for her theorization and practice of écriture féminine
(feminine writing). Because she believes patriarchal writing functions to contain its
subjects, she does not precisely define this term but attempts, instead, to enact it.
Thus her writing is characterized by poetry, excess, repetition, word play, and an
emphasis on affect or feeling, including sexual feeling.
In her writing for theatre, Cixous experiments with these features and also with
the apparent linearity of time and the truth of narrative. For example, in Portrait of
Dora (1976), her revision of a Freudian psychoanalytic case study, she gives equal
import to memory, fantasy and dream as well as ‘real’ present-time action. In early
theoretical writing such as ‘Aller à la mer’ and ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, she
argued that dominant classical theatre objectifies and victimizes not only its heroines
– such as Electra and Ophelia – but also its female audiences, and she has experi-
mented in freeing her female characters and audiences alike from these positions.
Her more recent work in theatre has shifted from an emphasis on the personal and
the unconscious to an emphasis on public history, focusing more explicitly on issues
of race, colonialism and migration while maintaining a commitment to feminism.
Born a Jew in colonial Algeria, she has explored the links between patriarchal and
colonial oppression especially through the epic history plays she has written since
1980 for the Paris-based collective theatre company, the Théâtre du Soleil, directed
by Ariane Mnouchkine (for example, The Terrible but Unfinished Story of Norodom
Sihanouk, King of Cambodia [1985], The Indiad, or the India of their Dreams [1987],
and Les Naufragés du Fol Espoir [The Survivors of the Mad Hope, 2010] which she
co-wrote). She has also explored the challenges of global economic migration in the
collaboratively devised Théâtre du Soleil production Le Dernier Caravansérail (The
Last Caravan Stop, 2003) which toured internationally.

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Importantly, the distinctions made above between Cixous’ theoretical and fictional
writing are probably not ones she would make herself, because she abjures conven-
tional writing categories, combining, like Peggy Phelan, theory with fiction and auto-
biography in a performative writing practice.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cixous and Calle-Gruber’s book includes a long interview, biographical information

and an extensive bibliography. Sellers’ collection includes several writings on theatre.
Penrod, Shiach and Dobson all discuss Cixous’ writing for theatre.

Cixous, Hélène ([1975] 1980) ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, trans. K. and P. Cohen, in New
French Feminisms, Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (eds), Brighton: Harvester,
pp. 245–64.
—— ([1977] 1984) ‘Aller à la mer’, trans. Barbara Kerslake, Modern Drama 27.4: 546–48.
—— (2003) The Plays of Hélène Cixous, London: Routledge.
—— and Mireille Calle-Gruber (1997) Hélène Cixous, Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing,
trans. Eric Prenowitz, London: Routledge.
Dobson, Julia (2002) Hélène Cixous and the Theatre: The Scene of Writing, Oxford: Peter
Lang.
Penrod, Lynn Kettler (1996) Hélène Cixous, New York: Twayne Publishers.
Sellers, Susan (ed.) (1994) The Hélène Cixous Reader, London: Routledge.
Shiach, Morag (1991) Hélène Cixous: A Politics of Writing, London: Routledge.

COPEAU, JACQUES (FRENCH THEATRE DIRECTOR/TEACHER, 1879–1949)

Copeau’s approach to making theatre in the early decades of the twentieth century
was exploratory and consistently challenging to established models. It became the
bedrock for later innovations in mime, physical theatre and body-based perfor-
mance. But before becoming a director, Copeau was for many years a theatre critic,
and throughout his career he continually supported new writing, translated plays into
French, and adapted a range of materials, equally at home with Molière or Aeschylus
as well as Noh-inspired plays. His nephew Michel Saint-Denis brought such ideas
and practices to the United Kingdom through what became the Old Vic Theatre
School and as an early director of the Royal Shakespeare Company (1961).
In spite of this avid support and interest in playwrighting and the text, the primary
focus of many of Copeau’s productions and his training processes was acting. He
was critical of the theatre’s conventions and stylistic tricks and advocated simple
staging over decorous scenography. This emphasis on corporeal training inspired
several people who collaborated directly with him, including Charles Dullin, Jean
Dasté, Louis Jouvet and Etienne Decroux. His teaching was also formative for prac-
titioners like Jacques Lecoq and Jean-Louis Barrault, who did not have direct
contact with Copeau himself, but worked with his students or colleagues. Through
such broad transmission, Copeau achieved widespread recognition in France and
beyond.

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Copeau founded the Vieux Colombier theatre in Paris in 1913 as a site to produce
his own plays. He was never happy in Paris, though, and was vehemently opposed to
what he considered the artifice of its theatre, a view shared by Edward Gordon
Craig, whom he met in 1915. Having established a reputation as a director, in 1921
Copeau founded a school for his actors, to give them the additional skills and resources
needed to work in an exploratory way. In 1924, he boldly closed down the Vieux
Colombier and relocated the school to Burgundy in rural France with co-teacher
Suzanne Bing (who did most of the coaching) and other collaborators. Here his
training focused on simplicity, improvisation, play and honesty in performance,
notions which he had also investigated during rehearsals on an earlier retreat in rural
France in 1913. To achieve these qualities he attempted to strip his actors of any
pretensions or assumed conventions, using noble masks (later termed ‘neutral’
masks by Lecoq), and working with a bare stage without decor. The local natural
environment played a large role in this process, with much work conducted outdoors
and in the community.
In Burgundy, Copeau turned to what might be considered popular theatre forms
such as commedia dell’arte, Greek tragedy and medieval theatre as theatrical sources
for his new works. His company Les Copiaus performed in village squares and at
festivals in outdoor spaces, using inspiration gathered from the area, its people and
the rural culture. He looked to rituals to help establish theatre’s place in French
society, fuelled partly by his conversion to Catholicism in 1925. He balanced his
belief in training the body with cultural, moral and social education of his troupe, who
lived communally in what Copeau described as a ‘brotherhood’. For some, his
approach was too prescriptive and his devout faith and discipline led to tensions
within the school. Les Copiaus disbanded in 1929 and reformed as La Compagnie
des Quinze, without Copeau.
Copeau worked continually as a freelance director until 1940, when for a few
months he was made director of France’s most prominent and long-established
national theatre, the Comédie Française. Copeau’s research with popular perfor-
mance, choral and mask work, his emphasis on physicality in performance and
training, and his belief in establishing alternative ways of making theatre have all left
an influential legacy in European theatre, impacting as much on textual as well as
body-based approaches to performance.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Rudlin and Paul have collated primary sources. The other texts adopt biographically-
based analyses and Kurtz’s book focuses on personal acquaintance with Copeau.
Evans gives a short overview whilst Rudlin’s book is much more comprehensive.

Evans, Mark (2006) Jacques Copeau, London: Routledge.

Kurtz, Maurice (1999) Jacques Copeau: Biography of a Theater, Carbondale and Edwardsville:
Southern Illinois University Press.
Rudlin, John (1986) Jacques Copeau, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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—— (2000) ‘Jacques Copeau: The Quest for Sincerity’, in Twentieth Century Actor Training,
Alison Hodge (ed.), London: Routledge, pp. 55–78.
—— and Norman H. Paul (ed. and trans.) (1990) Copeau: Texts on Theatre, London:
Routledge.

CRAIG, EDWARD GORDON (ENGLISH DESIGNER/PRODUCER/ACTOR/

THEORIST, 1872–1966)

Gordon Craig has been instrumental in shaping the trajectory of twentieth and twenty-
first-century performance through his imaginative championing of scenographic
innovation and his rejection of the naturalistic actor, focusing rather on the actor’s
movement and bodies in space. His vivid and sweeping simple stage designs rejected
naturalism’s detail and representational illusionism, creating environments and
moods through various devices, most notably the play of light and shadow, large
painted flats or cloth hangings and bold constructions such as stairways. These
provided spaces in which the actor and large massed choruses could move, illumi-
nated by swathes of demarcating light or spotlights. Craig’s hallmark was symbolism
and he pared his designs to the bone as in his 1912 Hamlet for Konstantin
Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theatre, where large screens suggestively hinted at
the metaphysical dimension of the play.
In one of his many treatises, Craig promulgated the idea that mimetic actors were
prey to their emotions, often vain and lacking in creativity, and that the
‘Übermarionette’, or giant puppet, should replace them. He suggested that this
godlike figure would be able to work with more control and without the intrusion of
the ego, and would remind the audience of the power and mystery of ancient ritual
performances. Craig championed a demagogic director/scenographer figure in order
to oversee this actor-less vision. His ideas and techniques have influenced Tadeusz
Kantor and Bread and Puppet Theatre amongst many others. Following the path
laid before him by his famous theatrical lineage (his mother was the celebrated
actress Ellen Terry and his father the architect and theatre enthusiast Edward William
Godwin), Craig is one of the twentieth century’s first theoretical practitioners and
innovators. As well as setting up his own theatre school in Florence, he published
many of his views in books and in the long-running journal, the Mask, which he
founded and edited, and whose motto was ‘After the practice, the theory’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The amount of writing about Craig is not commensurate with the influence he has had
and the volume of writing he himself produced, of which the most notable texts are
in his 1911 collection. Bablet and Innes offer general overviews on Craig’s life and
work, while Walton focuses more on Craig’s theatrical principles.

Bablet, Denis (1966) The Theatre of Edward Gordon Craig, London: Heinemann Educational
Books.

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Craig, Edward Gordon (1911) On the Art of the Theatre, New York: Theater Arts Books
(reissued in 2009 by Routledge, ed. Franc Chamberlain).
Innes, Christopher (1983) Edward Gordon Craig, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Walton, Michael J. (1983) Craig on Theatre, London: Methuen.

CUNNINGHAM, MERCE (AMERICAN CHOREOGRAPHER/DANCER/

TEACHER, 1919–2009)

Cunningham has made a lasting impact on contemporary dance, creating pieces that
have expanded the boundaries of form in modern choreography and question how
dance is made, especially through his collaboration with composer John Cage. Cage
was Cunningham’s principal collaborator, and together they created many pieces
that tested the limits of each other’s disciplines. Their cooperation was exemplary,
revealing how collaboration works best not as compromise but when two auton-
omous forms and approaches maintain and also enhance their own values and
strengths. This notion of the autonomy of artistic elements has underpinned all
Cunningham’s work, even though he has consistently collaborated with other artists,
too. These include American visual artist Robert Rauschenberg, who designed
several early dance pieces like Summerspace (1958), and Charles Atlas and Elliot
Caplan, both filmmakers. With these two, Cunningham shot several innovative works
for film and television, notably Walkaround Time (1973) with Atlas and Points in
Space (1986) with Caplan, which also had music by Cage.
Most of Cunningham’s output was with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company,
which he founded in 1953, initially with John Cage and David Tudor as musicians.
This was after a six-year spell as a lead dancer in Martha Graham’s company. He then
spent time pursuing his own experiments at Black Mountain and Bennington Colleges.
According to his wishes his company disbanded in 2011, two years after his death.
In his work, Cunningham expressed the importance of dance for dance’s sake and
rarely choreographed for pre-existing music. This shifted emphasis away from the
expressivity and intention of movement and the idea that dance has to be thematic or
generate meaning, to focus on the form and practice itself. Such a strategy pushed
responsibility on to the audience, suggesting that it is up to them to find meaning in
his works. This was furthered as he explored (like, and with, Cage) chance processes
for choreographic purposes, most notably early on in his career in Sixteen Dances for
Soloist and Company of Three (1951).
In common with William Forsythe, Cunningham kept abreast of technological
developments, as a pioneer of integrating electronic music into dance, and by leading
explorations with Motion Capture and LifeForms software, which allows the chore-
ographer to manipulate 3D human forms on computer and thus choreograph in virtual
space. He exploited the differences and discrepancies between animated and live
movement as he transferred his choreography from screen to the studio. Cunningham
also taught extensively, including what has become known as ‘Cunningham tech-
nique’, which (in spite of its name) emphasizes personal expression over technical
precision. He received numerous awards and has an almost legendary status as a

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pioneer in contemporary dance. Cunningham’s works have been danced by

companies all over the world and his technique is still practised and taught widely.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

There is a vast body of works on Cunningham’s decades of practice (many gathered

on his official website), from articles to videos to interviews to books, a very small
sample of which is listed below. These range from Vaughan’s (the Cunningham
company’s archivist) beautifully illustrated insider perspective, to the more objective
analyses of Klosty and Kostelanetz.
Cunningham, Merce with Frances Starr (1968) Changes: Notes on Choreography, New York:
Something Else Press.
—— Online. Available www.mercecunningham.org/newwebsite/ (accessed 1 July 2013).
Klosty, James (ed.) (1975) Merce Cunningham, New York: Dutton.
Kostelanetz, Richard (ed.) (1992) Merce Cunningham/Dancing in Space and Time, New York:
A Capella Books.
Vaughan, David (ed.) (1997) Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years, New York: Aperture Foundation.

FORSYTHE, WILLIAM (AMERICAN CHOREOGRAPHER 1949–)

William Forsythe is a highly-acclaimed choreographer and pedagogue, celebrated
not least for his contemporary deconstruction and reinvention of ballet. Born in the
US yet living and practising primarily in Europe and mostly Germany, he worked
initially with Stuttgart Ballet, with Ballett Frankfurt (1984–2004) and then with his
own group The Forsythe Company (2005–). With these troupes he has created
numerous dance pieces that have established his reputation as one of the world’s
leading choreographers. Most of these have been made with what he calls a ‘choreo-
graphic ensemble’ in a very collaborative process that extends beyond the core team
of dancers – an example is company member and composer Thom Willems who
creates original musical scores for the choreography. Forsythe’s practice has
explored and embraced interdisciplinary and multimedia projects, not least in film
and with architecture, and it frequently makes extensive use of sets, costumes, texts,
sounds, lighting, complex staging arrangements and, increasingly, digital technol-
ogies. A concern with and exploration of rhythm and musicality, and how different
media relate temporally to the dancing body, is at the heart of all his works, with
elements often working in counterpoint.
Forsythe has also been pioneering in developing teaching and educational tools
for dance, including initially CD-ROM-based products and more recently online
materials, such as that related to One Flat Thing (2000). In some ways these look
back to and build on Rudolf von Laban’s early attempts at documentation of dance
and in particular its spatial dynamics, but now using highly sophisticated media.
These are not just technical ‘how to’ guides but go much further in revealing
Forsythe’s aesthetic and creative approach, discernible as much through their media
as their content, through their interactivity and complexity as well as the works and

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processes they reveal. They offer an exemplary model not just of documentation of a
kind (mostly of his creative and technical process), but also of practice as research
as it might be described, in the way that they reveal fundamental aspects of his dance-
making process and performances. This interaction with current technologies as both
tool and aesthetic is a hallmark of Forsythe’s approach. He is an avowedly intel-
lectual choreographer, evident both in the sophisticated movement vocabulary of his
dances and the way he theorises his practice and pushes it in so many different direc-
tions, not least pedagogically. Central to his teaching practice is the notion of self-
study enabled by the many technical tools and methods of analysis he has devised.
The range of Forsythe’s performance work is remarkable. He has created several
installations, including Tight Roaring Circle (1997), a large bouncy castle designed
for London’s Roundhouse building that invited the audience to enter into the vast
space to generate the piece’s movement themselves. Even his onstage choreogra-
phies fragment and play with formal or classical notions of dance: his 1992 ALIE/N
A(C)TION quoted from other forms such as rap and the Alien series of films amongst
its many other eccentricities; Kammer/Kammer (2000) revealed to the audience
some parts of the stage action but through film; and in his 2003 Decreation, all action
was somehow mediated. Stylistically, his choreography demonstrates particular
strength and dynamism, attributable partly to his dancers’ training and daily classes
in ballet, which allows him to push the body to its limits, physically and artistically.
His work is creatively free rather than tightly choreographed in that often the dancers
respond to impulses within parameters given as set tasks. Forsythe and other members
of the creative team also ‘mix’ technical elements live at performances, forcing the
dancers to respond in the moment to the live edit. Most recently his practice has
explored the body’s interior, including the breath and voice, moving the locus of his
spatial investigations from the exterior stage and auditorium to within the body. With
aesthetics that are typically postmodern and postdramatic, Forsythe’s work chal-
lenges spectators as much as performers, asking them to suspend expectations about
what dance and, in particular, ballet might look, feel or sound like.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Driver’s special journal edition is a collection of essays, as is Spier’s, who introduces

and then updates Forysthe’s work with a broad spectrum of contributors. The
Forsythe Company website provides an excellent introduction to all aspects of their
practice. As well as introducing pedagogical and technical aspects of Forsythe’s
dance, brought up to date in the online analysis of One Flat Thing, the Improvisation
technologies CD-ROM contains a comprehensive chronology of Forsythe’s chore-
ographies from 1976–2003.

Analysis of Forsythe’s One Flat Thing (2000). Online. Available http://synchronousobjects.

osu.edu/ (accessed 25 April 2013).
Driver, Senta (ed.) (2000) William Forsythe, Amsterdam: Harwood.

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Forsythe, William (2003) Improvisation Technologies: A Tool for the Analytical Dance Eye
(2nd ed.), Köln: Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie. (CD-ROM and booklet)
Spier, Steven (ed.) (2011) William Forsythe and the Practice of Choreography, London:
Routledge.
William Forsythe Company. Online. Available www.theforsythecompany.com/ (accessed 25
April 2013).

GOFFMAN, ERVING (CANADIAN SOCIOLOGIST/SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGIST,

1922–82)
Although not involved directly in performance as either a practitioner or thinker,
Goffman has made a deep and long-lasting contribution to theoretical debates in
performance studies through his sociological investigations into the ‘presentation of
self in everyday life’. This phrase is also the title of one of his major books, published
in 1959, which analyses social interactions using terminology derived from theatrical
performance, such as ‘character’, ‘props’ and ‘setting’. Although the model of theatre
with which he illustrates his theories seems to derive from naturalism (he refers to
‘settings’ rather than scenography, for example), the broad application of these
theories allows us to go beyond models of behaviour and character enshrined in
mimesis. His ideas have gained currency for their appreciation of the power dynamics
of social interactions, particularly focusing on how people present a ‘front’ or mask
and adopt roles within particular social groupings and situations. In defining this
performative behaviour as a ‘front’, Goffman demonstrates how specific modes of
self-organization and presentation (or traits) might be agreed amongst a group or
within an institution either implicitly or explicitly. This front also impacts of course
on an audience or the person with whom the ‘performer’ is interacting, as it is read
by them. Their behaviour might be seen as being in character or in keeping with
someone’s profession, or it might be construed that it in fact masks an alternative
reality. This response to and the effect of one’s daily ‘theatrical’ self-presentation is
the focus of much of Goffman’s work. While he is careful to note that theatre is not
the same as real life, observing that it is so much more planned, rehearsed and inten-
tional, he asserts that theatre provides a vital conceptual model for revealing that how
we are perceived does not always tally with what we are attempting to show. He thus
articulated in an original way the gap in reception between the performer and the
spectator which occurs in real life as much as in performance.
Goffman has looked at other performative aspects of daily human behaviour in his
celebrated works Stigma (1963), Behaviour in Public Places (1963) and Encounters
(1961), which have expanded on his performative analysis of human interaction.
Stigma considers how those whom society might conceive as marginal figures manage
their positions as outsiders and resist the oppression of that position through seeking
and performing new identity traits that consolidate an otherwise obscure characteri-
zation. Camp behaviour is one example. Goffman has also written about the framing
of performance, in an attempt to ascertain at what point human behaviour becomes
performance. These questions and Goffman’s fieldwork and analyses still provide a

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firm and authoritative base for theoretical investigations into what performance and
performing are.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

These are just three of the key texts by Goffman and are perhaps most relevant to our
field.

Goffman, Erving (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, New York: Doubleday.
—— (1963) Stigma, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.
—— (1974) Frame Analysis, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

GÓMEZ-PEÑA, GUILLERMO (MEXICAN WRITER/PERFORMANCE

ARTIST/CULTURAL ACTIVIST, 1955–)

Born in Mexico and living and working primarily in the USA since 1978, Gómez-Peña
is a prolific writer and performance artist whose work examines and interrogates
the experience of being a migrant and living in culturally-hybrid communities.
Describing himself as ‘a migrant provocateur’, he explores the marginalized and
oftentimes oppressed status of the immigrant and provokes his audiences to confess
and address – verbally, in writing or via the internet – the feelings of fear that produce
cultural and racial stereotypes (for example, in The Temple of Confessions, 1994–
97). He also works to promote alternative understandings of cultural differences that
do not seek to contain those differences, and it is in this spirit that his work celebrates
hybridity, particularly hybrid art forms and identities. He works across media – in
print, installation, radio, film and the internet – but most often makes live perfor-
mances. These frequently take the form of living dioramas, interactive performances/
installations which display him and his collaborators – in a cage in Two Undiscovered
Amerindians Visit the West (1992–94), in Plexiglas boxes in The Temple of
Confessions – wearing hybrid costumes and surrounded by pseudo-ethnic artefacts,
soundscapes and backdrops. The complexity and apparent confusion of the material
in these dioramas (including their live human ‘specimens’) work to question the
efforts of traditional anthropology to classify identity into discrete categories.
Identity – be it national, racial, sexual, religious or otherwise – is not presented as
unified and static, as it might be in a conventional museum display, but rather as
hybrid, dynamic and performative. These living dioramas also challenge the benev-
olence often assumed by anthropological display by showing what museums often
exclude (such as expressions of racism) and by directly returning the potentially
voyeuristic gaze of the spectator. The self-consciously presentational form of
Gómez-Peña’s intercultural displays also problematizes global culture’s commodifi-
cation of identities – especially ethnic identities.
Other hybrid aspects of Gómez-Peña’s performances include: their languages,
which are usually at least bilingual; their ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural sources, which
range from religious iconography to popular films in order to create characters like

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the immigrant superhero El Mad Mex; their authorship, as Gómez-Peña frequently

collaborates with other artists, including Roberto Sifuentes, Coco Fusco and chore-
ographer Sara Shelton Mann; their sites, both within conventional performance and
art venues and in outside spaces, in public plazas or on a beach; and their borderland
relationship to art, ritual and activism. Committed to a politically and socially-
engaged performance, Gómez-Peña problematizes borders, be they territorial,
disciplinary, artistic or between performers and audiences. His work is well-known
within performance studies partly because he has been working for many years
pioneering a postmodern performance activism and teaching that activism in the
‘rebel artist’ workshops he runs with his company La Pocha Nostra. He has
performed, exhibited and led workshops across the Americas and worldwide, and
has published profusely, in books, in journals and online.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

All of Gómez-Peña’s writing and films demonstrate his activist, interventionist

politics. For examples of artists influenced by Gómez-Peña, see Fusco. RPA

Fusco, Coco (ed.) (2000) Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas, London:
Routledge.
Gómez-Peña, Guillermo (1993) A Binational Performance Pilgrimage, Manchester:
Cornerhouse.
—— (1996) The New World Border: Prophecies, Poems and Loqueras for the End of the
Century, San Francisco: City Lights Books.
—— (2000) Dangerous Border Crossers: The Artist Talks Back, London: Routledge.
—— La Pocha Nostra and associates (2004) Ethno-Techno: Los Video Graffitis, vol.1. DVD.
—— (2005) Ethno-Techno: Writings on Performance, Activism and Pedagogy, ed. Elaine
Peña, London: Routledge.
—— and Roberto Sifuentes (2011) Exercises for Rebel Artists: Radical Performance
Pedagogy, Oxon: Routledge.
La Pocha Nostra. Online. Available www.pochanostra.com (accessed 1 July 2013).

GROTOWSKI, JERZY (POLISH THEATRE DIRECTOR/THEORIST, 1933–99)

Jerzy Grotowski is recognized as one of the major theatre directors of the twentieth
century who has continually challenged and extended what theatrical activity
comprises through a rigorous focus on acting and investigations into performance
space and the actor–audience relationship. His most influential period was the
‘production phase’, based in Opole and then Wrocław in Poland during the 1950s
and 1960s. During these years he created internationally-acclaimed productions,
such as: Akropolis (1962), set in a concentration camp and designed by Auschwitz
survivor Józef Szajna; Dr Faustus (1963), based on Christopher Marlowe’s text; The
Constant Prince (1965); and Apocalypsis cum Figuris (1968), drawing on a range of
sources including works by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Simone Weil, and the Bible.
His architecture-trained collaborator Jerzy Gurawski designed several scenographic

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environments for the Theatre Laboratory – from Faustus’ table for his ‘last supper’ at
which the audience sat, to a construction reminiscent of an operating theatre where
the spectators peered down on the Constant Prince being tortured. All attempted to
draw the spectator deeper into the performance event and were in some ways
precursors to immersive theatre. Grotowski’s work has also been cited as a leading
influence on physical theatre, though Grotowski himself disliked the term, fearing
that it focused on virtuosity and effect, external factors, rather than feeling and the
actor’s ‘inner life’.
As well as his imaginative directorial and interpretative approaches and his
rigorous vocal and physical actor training exercises, Grotowski developed several
influential concepts expounded in his often allusive and abstract writings and state-
ments. Key notions include: the ‘poor theatre’ that is stripped of all that is extraneous
like lighting and sound to focus on the actor–audience relationship as an encounter
or meeting; the ‘via negativa’, whereby actors attempt to ‘eradicate their blocks’ and
remove habits rather than accumulate skills; a ‘laboratory’ structure for investigating
the nature of performing; ‘holy actors’, who somehow transcend their material,
‘earthly’ presence in ‘giving’ themselves to the audience; a ‘score’ or precisely
defined set of physical actions, drawing in part from Konstantin Stanislavsky’s
later work; and the ‘total act’, a moment of self-sacrifice by individual actors where
they offer themselves to the audience with total vulnerability and honesty, to incite
the spectator to reciprocate. A ‘total act’ was said by Grotowski and critics to have
been achieved by Ryszard Cieślak, Grotowski’s central actor, in The Constant
Prince.
The difficulty of arousing an equivalent reaction in the spectator, however care-
fully the scenographic arrangement was defined, led Grotowski to develop his work
into ‘active culture’ during his paratheatre period in the 1970s, when all participants
became creative and there were no observers or spectators. This involved long explor-
atory workshops led by former actors and new collaborators in rural areas of Poland
and later other countries, including France, Australia and the United States. Paratheatre
took place beyond formal theatre structures and buildings, and explored natural sites
outside the artifice of the constructed theatre space.
During martial law in 1982, Grotowski left Poland for the US to continue his work
on Theatre of Sources, a search for common or shared principles and techniques in
songs and movement from the world’s ancient rituals and performance-related prac-
tices. Like Peter Brook in Paris a decade before, his work became increasingly
research-based and less public as he focused more closely on the personal processes
of the performer in Objective Drama – an attempt to derive objective material from
subjective experiences – and Art as Vehicle, with which he was engaged in Pontedera
in Italy when he died.
This last Art as Vehicle phase from 1986 onwards explored ancient vibratory
songs and the work of the performer as ‘doer’. It was closed to audiences and was
therefore considered by Grotowski to be quite distinct from ‘art as presentation’,
which is how he dubbed the theatre work he had left behind decades before, though
many have ‘witnessed’ Art as Vehicle opuses, even if they are not intended overtly

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for an audience. Many theatre groups have also now been involved in process-based
exchanges with Grotowski’s ‘doers’ or ‘people of action’, as he described his
performers in this phase. The ‘master’ Grotowski officially handed on his mantle to
his student and final collaborator Thomas Richards before he died. His legacy is also
disseminated through companies who have spun off from his investigations and was
celebrated internationally in 2009 in the UNESCO-designated Year of Grotowski.
Eugenio Barba worked as assistant director to Jerzy Grotowski from 1960 to 1964,
and his Odin Teatret in some ways still continues this Grotowskian tradition. Barba’s
important collection of early texts in Towards a Poor Theatre (1968) helped establish
the significance of Grotowski’s thinking and practices, which were soon considered
fundamental influences on twentieth-century performance, with their specific chal-
lenge to those contemplating the wider possibilities of theatre research, the origins of
drama, the craft of acting, or potential spaces for performance.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A wealth of texts were generated both by Grotowski in various languages and in

response to his work, many of which (in English) are collected in the Schechner and
Wolford sourcebook. The other texts relate to specific periods of Grotowski’s work:
the laboratory period (Grotowski), the beginning up to Theatre of Sources (Kumiega)
and Art as Vehicle (Richards). RPA

Flaszen, Ludwik (2013) Grotowski and Company, trans. and ed. by Paul Allain and Andrzej
Wojtasik, London: Routledge.
Grotowski, Jerzy (1968) Towards a Poor Theatre, Holstebro: Odin Teatrets Forlag.
Grotowski Institute, Poland. Online. Available www.grotowski-institute.art.pl/index.php
(accessed 5 July 2013).
Kumiega, Jennifer (1985) The Theatre of Grotowski, London: Methuen.
Richards, Thomas (1995) At Work with Grotowski on Physical Actions, London: Routledge.
—— (2008) Heart of Practice: Within the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas
Richards, London: Routledge.
Schechner, Richard and Lisa Wolford (eds) (1997) The Grotowski Sourcebook, London:
Routledge.

HIJIKATA, TATSUMI (JAPANESE DANCER/CHOREOGRAPHER, 1928–86)

Hijikata created a very dark style of dance that was inspired as much by European
influences from Antonin Artaud and Jean Genet as by Japanese forms like Bunraku
puppetry. He developed an extensive repertoire of solo as well as collaborative
pieces, most notably with Kazuo Ohno, with whom he is credited as being the
co-founder of butoh. After gaining initial experience in modern dance in Tokyo,
Hijikata’s first independent work was Kinjiki (Forbidden Colours, 1959), inspired by
the nationalist Yukio Mishima’s writing. This is considered (though not unquestion-
ingly) to be one of the pioneering butoh pieces, even though it preceded the actual

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naming of this form by a year or so. Kinjiki involved a chicken’s neck being broken
during the performance as well as scenes of bestiality and homosexuality. Not
surprisingly, it created a great stir and the Japanese Dance Association banned
Hijikata temporarily from membership. Undeterred, Hijikata relentlessly pursued his
exploration of the more emotionally painful and suppressed aspects of the human
psyche, including sadomasochistic sexuality and homoeroticism in works like Butoh
Genet (1967). This was a ‘dance which crawls towards the bowels of the earth’, as he
vividly described it. His direction of Admiring La Argentina, performed by a
71-year-old Ohno in 1977 and inspired by renowned Spanish dancer La Argentina,
has become recognized as butoh’s signature piece. It also clearly demonstrates the
symbiotic potential of these two figures – Hijikata has been described as the ‘architect’
of butoh in relation to Ohno, who is its soul, with Hijikata’s darkness complementing
Ohno’s lightness. This emphasis on form recalls Hijikata’s committed use of extreme
physical techniques to transform his body and surpass the habitual, resulting in
forceful, often perverse, performance rituals. Together they have created a form that
has spread well beyond the shores of Japan and which has endured long past the
protest culture of the 1960s in which it was spawned, not least in its influence on
physical theatre.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Information on Hijikata can be found in these general texts on butoh, such as

Blackwood’s film, but much more specifically in Mikami’s book and Baird’s mono-
graph which is the first comprehensive and widely available study of Hijikata.

Baird, Bruce (2012) Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh: Dancing in a Pool of Gray Grits, New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Blackwood, Michael (1990) Butoh: Body on the Edge of Crisis, New York: Michael Blackwood
Productions. Film.
Fraleigh, Sondra (1999) Dancing into Darkness: Butoh, Zen and Japan, Pittsburgh: University
of Pittsburgh Press.
Mikami, Kayo (1993) The Body as Vessel: Tatsumi Hijikata – An Approach to the Techniques
of Ankoku-Butoh, Tokyo: ANZ-Do Publications.
Viala, Jean and Nourit Masson-Sekine (eds) (1988) Butoh: Shades of Darkness, Tokyo:
Shufunotomo Co. Ltd.

KANTOR, TADEUSZ (POLISH THEATRE DIRECTOR/VISUAL ARTIST,

1915–90)
Kantor was one of the dominant theatre directors in what can be called visual
theatre in the second half of the twentieth century, recognized mostly for work with
his company Cricot 2. Developing the theories and practices of Edward Gordon
Craig with his quest for the Übermarionette, Kantor used his actors to create complex
visual scenes, most notably in The Dead Class (1975) and Wielopole Wielopole

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(1982). Trained primarily as a visual artist, he had a surreal and at times catastrophic
vision, fostered partly by his profoundly affecting experiences of destruction and
brutality in the Second World War. Kantor moved from creating happenings in the
cellars of old buildings in Poland to structured theatre pieces based – in the exemplar
performances named above – on his memories of his schooldays and the very different
life that existed prewar in his small hometown of Wielopole. His work always began
with sketches that would be brought to life by his actors, who would sometimes
merge with movable props or furniture to create what Kantor called ‘bio-objects’.
Like many visual artists, Kantor wrote manifestos at different stages of his
working life, most significantly on ‘The Theatre of Death’ (1975), which developed
Craig’s belief that the actor could not replicate real life and should rather exploit the
deadliness or artifice of representation. His actors, none of whom were professionally
trained, consequently moved like mannequins with repetitive actions and deadpan
delivery, representing figures from Kantor’s depiction of his past. This notion was
extended through Kantor’s own appearance in his performances, dressed always in a
dark suit and acting almost as a conductor, occasionally correcting a pose or speeding
up the action before returning to his chair stage right. After his death, Cricot 2 briefly
toured the piece Today Is My Birthday, which Kantor was still rehearsing when he
died, placing an empty chair stage right to represent the now absent director. Kantor
will be remembered for his interdisciplinary approach, distilled through a very
personal, eccentric theatrical vision. He typifies the director as auteur, taking total
responsibility for staging and scenography, even within the live performance itself.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kobialka has written extensively on Kantor in English and published a collection of

difficult texts by Kantor. Drozdowski provides specific material on The Dead Class.
The two translations from Polish offer overviews of Kantor’s life and work. Witts
provides a helpful introduction. The website has a useful bibliography and selected
information about Kantor’s work.

Cricoteka Centre for the Documentation of the Art of Tadeusz Kantor. Online. Available www.
cricoteka.pl/en/ (accessed 5 July 2013).
Drozdowski, Bohdan (ed.) (1979) Twentieth Century Polish Theatre, London: John Calder.
Kobialka, Michal (1993) A Journey Through Other Spaces: Essays and Manifestos by Tadeusz
Kantor, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Miklaszewski, Krzysztof (2002) Encounters with Kantor, George Hyde (ed.), London:
Routledge Harwood.
Pleśniarowicz, Krzysztof (1994) The Dead Memory Machine: Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre of
Death, Krakow: Cricoteka.
Witts, Noel (2010) Tadeusz Kantor, Oxon: Routledge.

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 LABAN, RUDOLF VO N

LABAN, RUDOLF VON (HUNGARIAN CHOREOGRAPHER/DANCER/

TEACHER/THEORIST, 1879–1958)

Laban was a central figure in twentieth-century dance, recognized now mostly for
his system of movement notation which he first published in German in 1926.
Labanotation, or kinetography, is a process of ‘scoring’ or annotating movements in
space and time that has the capacity to define energy or force as well as the weight
and direction of movement. This ‘script’ also provides detail about the flow and speed
of each movement. Using ideogrammatic symbols, lines, shadings to denote level,
and minimal text, Labanotation enables the detailed reconstruction of dances and has
therefore become the dominant mode of passing on choreography by means other
than live imitation. To qualify these objective elements of the dance, Laban also
articulated eight basic effort actions that verbally describe the qualities of movement.
These include pressing, flicking, slashing and thrusting, and range rhythmically from
‘sustained’ through to ‘sudden’. The visual drawing of these in specific dimensions
and in relation to certain parts of the body, applied with differing sensations of weight,
all build a total picture of the human in motion.
Throughout his life Laban investigated a range of potential applications of such
analyses, considering the body as an integrated holistic entity with mental, physical
and spiritual impulses and desires, which are all made manifest through motion. His
work encompassed theatre, dance, physiotherapy and factory labour, in which he
helped workers streamline and make their repetitive actions ergonomic. To teach his
dance students how to rediscover their natural predisposition for harmony, balance
and flow, he called attention to the rhythms and geometries found in nature and the
organic structures found in crystals, for example, or the ease and careful attention to
themselves that hunting animals demonstrate. Early in his career as a choreographer,
Laban worked closely with students such as Mary Wigman and Kurt Jooss, who
themselves subsequently became influential dancers and choreographers. They were
recognized as part of the Ausdruckstanz or Expressionist movement that influenced,
for example, Pina Bausch and butoh.
Laban’s reputation was such that he was named principal choreographer for the
1936 Olympics in Berlin, though his work was later banned, and after a period of
house arrest he sought exile in England. At Dartington Hall in Devon, Jooss became
his closest collaborator, followed by former pupils Lisa Ullmann and Jean Newlove.
These two championed his pioneering approach globally through the Art of
Movement Studio, which Laban founded in Manchester in 1943. Newlove applied
Laban’s systematic categorization of movement and efforts with actors, notably in
Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop in London. The effort actions were used to help
give physical life to a psychological characterization. Laban’s method of recording
dance provides an international language of dance notation that through transcription
has sustained the life of some performances for many decades and has ensured his
place in dance history.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

These range from primary sources and collections like McCaw’s outlining Laban’s
key theories and experiences to Newlove’s practical guides. Newlove and Hodgson
are informed by their experience working with, or studying under, Laban himself.

Bradley, Karen K. (2009) Rudolf Laban, Routledge Performance Practitioners, Oxon:

Routledge.
Hodgson, John (2001) Mastering Movement: The Life and Work of Rudolf Laban, London:
Methuen.
—— and Valerie Preston-Dunlop (1990) Rudolf Laban: An Introduction to His Life and Work,
Plymouth: Northcote House.
Laban, Rudolf (1960) A Life for Dance, trans. Lisa Ullman, New York: Theatre Arts Books.
—— (1974) Effort: Economy of Human Movement, London: MacDonald and Evans.
—— (1975) The Mastery of Movement, London: MacDonald and Evans.
—— (1975) Modern Educational Dance, London: MacDonald and Evans.
—— (2011) Choreutics, Hampshire: Dance Books Ltd.
McCaw, Dick (ed.) (2011) The Laban Sourcebook, Oxon: Routledge.
Newlove, Jean (1993) Laban for Actors and Dancers, London: Nick Hern Books.
—— and John Dalby (2004) Laban for All, London: Nick Hern Books.

LECOQ, JACQUES (FRENCH TEACHER, 1921–99)

Known principally as a teacher rather than a performer or director, even though his
very early career included directing and teaching, Lecoq has influenced many artists
specializing in comic and physically exaggerated styles of performance often within
physical theatre. His reputation has spread throughout the world mostly through
collaborators like Dario Fo and his students rather than through his theories, for he
was a reluctant author. His students include Ariane Mnouchkine from France (a
collaborator of Hélène Cixous), Julie Taymor from the USA, and in Great Britain
Steven Berkoff and founder members of Théâtre de Complicité, who met at Lecoq’s
Paris school, the Ecole Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq. He founded this
school in 1956 in a former boxing hall and it became the hub for his training
programmes. It is still operative today under the command of his Scottish wife, Fay
Lecoq.
Lecoq’s and the school’s educational programme focuses on encouraging
performers to work with simplicity and to use their bodies as the primary source of
expression. In broad terms, it begins with finding a state of neutrality through the
neutral mask, progressing to the exploration of rhythm and movement in space,
before the practical study of popular theatre genres such as Greek tragedy, melo-
drama, mime, clowning, commedia dell’arte and buffoonery, often using choral
work and masks. All creativity centres on the actor’s ability to play. Lecoq also led
a separate wing of the school, the Laboratoire d’Etude du Mouvement, which focuses
on scenography, space and the visual dynamics of performance. Although he
published his views on performing and performance, his impact has been felt most

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keenly through the continuing work of his many students, who have become directors
and creators of performance in their own right.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Works on Lecoq in all languages are limited: the two main translations by Bradby
into English were published posthumously. Lecoq’s death perhaps spurred other
retrospective analyses, which have endeavoured to emphasize the significance of his
teachings. RPA

Bradby, David and Maria M. Delgado (2002) ‘Jacques Lecoq and his “Ecole Internationale de
Théâtre” in Paris’, in The Paris Jigsaw – Internationalism and the City’s Stages, Manchester
and New York: Manchester University Press, pp. 83–112.
Chamberlain, Franc and Ralph Yarrow (eds) (2001) Jacques Lecoq and the British Theatre,
Amsterdam: Harwood.
Ecole Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq. Online. Available www.ecole-jacqueslecoq.
com/ (accessed 11 July 2013).
Lecoq, Jacques with Jean-Gabriel Carasso and Jean-Claude Lallias (2000) The Moving Body,
Teaching Creative Theatre, trans. David Bradby, foreword by Simon McBurney, London:
Methuen.
—— (2006) Theatre of Movement and Gesture, trans. David Bradby, London: Routledge.
Murray, Simon (2003) Jacques Lecoq, London: Routledge.

LEPAGE, ROBERT (CANADIAN DIRECTOR/DEVISER, 1957–)

Lepage’s directorial practice emphasizes that theatre is a multidisciplinary artistic
activity, created by artists who work not only with words but also with space, objects,
lighting and sound, movement, media and time. As a result of this emphasis, his
theatre aims to be democratic in its processes of conception and development, and is
scenographically ambitious in execution.
Lepage trained at the Conservatoire d’Art Dramatique (Quebec City) from 1975 to
1978, and then briefly in Paris with Swiss director Alain Knapp, who stressed the
director’s role as a multifaceted maker, director, writer and performer. Returning to
Quebec, Lepage performed and directed with a number of companies, including the
Ligue Nationale d’Improvisation, where he developed his improvisation skills, and
Théâtre Repère. Here, he learned a version of the RSVP Cycles, a method of collabo-
rative creation devised by choreographer–architect team Anna and Lawrence Halprin
in San Francisco in the late 1960s. ‘RSVP’ stands for ‘Resource, Score, Valuaction
and Performance’. In devising theatre, the Resource is a stimulus for the perfor-
mance – an object, place, piece of music or memory. The Score is the material that
arises from research, discussion and improvisations – settings, characters, images
and events. Valuaction is the process of evaluating, selecting and organizing the
collected material, and Performance is the testing out in practice of the resulting
performance draft. As the acronym ‘RSVP’ suggests, the method aims to facilitate
continuous feedback amongst participating makers and audiences. The designation

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‘Cycles’ indicates that the creative process is ongoing, the performance always open
to revision.
Lepage’s methods show a commitment to the RSVP’s principles of creativity,
collaboration and process, as well as a development of their terms. For him, a
resource provokes not only literal associations but also metaphors and ways of struc-
turing scenic space and dramatic time. In The Dragons’ Trilogy (1985), the simple
resource of a shoebox inspired a chain of associations – a shoe shop, shoes and the
characters to wear them – and a row of shoeboxes inverted on the stage floor produced
an aerial view of the street where those characters lived. The title of The Seven
Streams of the River Ota (1994) provided a setting – Hiroshima, where those streams
meet – but also a seven-scene structure.
Lepage’s use of a collaborative method of composition means that his perfor-
mances show the influence of many makers: they are frequently multilingual, usually
episodic and often generate meaning by accumulating associations rather than telling
a linear story. Lepage’s dedication to reworking his performances cyclically means
they sometimes evolve over years of public presentation, often taking on extremely
different forms, contents and meanings. The Seven Streams of the River Ota, for
example, ran for two hours in 1994, eight hours in 1996, and was partially developed
into his third feature film, Nô, by 1998. By evolving performance, Lepage creates
work that is dynamic and adaptable to changing circumstances of production, and he
allows his collaborators to continue working creatively, throughout a show’s devising
and during its performance.
Lepage’s commitment to an organic process of making theatre might suggest the
amount of technical, multimedia innovation his performance can accommodate is
limited. On the contrary, he is technically ambitious, exploring the technical potential
of theatre as well as the thematic significance of technology for contemporary audi-
ences. In 1994, he founded the production company, Ex Machina, its name indi-
cating his commitment to using technology to create theatrical trickery and innovation.
In 1997, in Quebec City, he opened the Caserne Dalhousie, a converted fire station
incorporating two well-equipped studio theatre spaces and a range of technical work-
shops and offices. He now makes all his performances in this laboratory, as well as
renting out facilities to other artists. He also exports his technological experiments:
for his 2012 production of Richard Wagner’s The Ring Cycle, New York’s
Metropolitan Opera had to reinforce its stage to accommodate his complex
scenography.
Lepage’s is a visual theatre that plays with images and explores themes visually
as well as through text. Justly renowned for its apparently magical ability to perform
visual tricks, it transforms everyday objects through the subtle alteration of
perspective, lighting or a performer’s movements: a grand piano becomes a gondola,
then a trapdoor (Tectonic Plates, 1988); a dinner table becomes a car in a collision
(Geometry of Miracles, 1997); and the door to a washing machine becomes an
aquarium and then the window on a rocket ship, through which the audience looks
both out and in (The Far Side of the Moon, 2000). From 2008–13, he transformed a
wall of grain silos in Quebec City’s harbour into a gigantic screen on which to project

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images celebrating Quebec’s history in The Image Mill. Thematically, Lepage’s

work consistently explores the effects of intercultural exchange, the fluidity of
identities (national, ethnic and sexual), the cultural significance of historic events
(Hiroshima’s bombing in The Seven Streams of the River Ota, the space race in The
Far Side of the Moon, Quebec history in The Image Mill), and the function of art as
well as the lives of artists – the eponymous artist of Vinci (1986), Jean Cocteau and
Miles Davis in Needles and Opium (1991), Frank Lloyd Wright in The Geometry of
Miracles and Hans Christian Andersen in The Andersen Project (2005).
A dedicated multidisciplinary artist, Lepage has directed theatre, opera, circus,
including the Cirque du Soleil’s KÀ in Las Vegas (2005) and Totem (2010), and
feature films, including The Confessional (1995), Polygraph (1996) and Possible
Worlds (2000). One of the leading directors of his generation, he has directed auspi-
cious productions around the world, including: Strindberg’s A Dream Play for
Sweden’s National Theatre (1995); Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream for
Britain’s National Theatre (1992); Michael Nyman’s opera version of The Tempest,
Noises, Sounds and Sweet Airs, at the Globe in Tokyo (1994); and Wagner’s The
Ring Cycle for the New York Met. Some critics suggest that Lepage’s peripatetic,
organic and postmodern style of directing engenders a lack of cultural specificity
and a thematic superficiality in his productions. He is certainly aiming to limit his
own travel by working from his base at the Caserne Dalhousie, but he remains
committed to a collaborative style which, whatever its detractions, continues to
produce a theatre rich in opportunities for its makers and visual pleasures for its
audiences.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Charest’s book is based on interviews with Lepage. Bunzli provides a detailed

critical introduction to Lepage’s work, the essays collected in Donohoe and Koustas
develop this critical context, and Harvie analyses his work in relation to postmod-
ernism. Dundjerović offers a range of approaches to analysing Lepage’s work.

Bunzli, James (1999) ‘The Geography of Creation: Décalage as Impulse, Process, and
Outcome in the Theatre of Robert Lepage’, TDR: The Drama Review 43.1 (T161): 79–103.
Charest, Rémy ([1995] 1997) Robert Lepage: Connecting Flights, trans. Wanda Romer Taylor,
London: Methuen.
Donohoe, Joseph I. and Jane M. Koustas (eds) (2000) Theater sans Frontières: Essays on the
Dramatic Universe of Robert Lepage, East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.
Dundjerović, Aleksandar Saša (2003) The Cinema of Robert Lepage: The Poetics of Memory,
London/New York: Wallflower/Columbia University Press.
—— (2007) The Theatricality of Robert Lepage, Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s
University Press.
—— (2009) Robert Lepage, Oxon: Routledge.
Ex Machina/La Caserne. Online. Available. http://lacaserne.net/index2.php/ (accessed 13
October, 2013).

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Harvie, Jennifer (2002) ‘Robert Lepage’, in Postmodernism: The Key Figures, Hans Bertens
and Joseph Natoli (eds), Oxford: Blackwell.
Lepage, Robert and Marie Brassard (1997) Polygraph, London: Methuen.
—— and Ex Machina (1996) The Seven Streams of the River Ota, London: Methuen.

MADRES DE LA PLAZA DE MAYO, LAS (THE MOTHERS OF THE PLAZA

DE MAYO, ARGENTINEAN PROTESTORS ACTIVE, 1977–)

Since 1977, these women have protested publicly against the ‘disappearance’ of their
adult children during Argentina’s brutal military dictatorship, commonly known as
the ‘Dirty War’ (1976–83). Through their protests, the Madres have brought inter-
national attention to the human rights violations committed in Argentina during this
time, won retribution against some of those who committed the crimes, and pioneered
a form of community organization and action that has since been imitated by feminist
and women’s groups around the world.

Figure 3 Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, Argentina,

on 3 December, 1986

The Madres’ movement began in April 1977, when fourteen women met publicly
to demand information. They had encountered each other previously in government
offices and courts while searching in vain for their children. Now they gathered in the
Plaza de Mayo – the central square in Buenos Aires, facing the presidential palace
and in the heart of the capital’s financial and political district. Gradually the women
began to identify as a group, calling themselves the ‘Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo’

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and wearing white headscarves in order to recognize one another and to be recog-
nized (see Figure 3). Within three months, 150 mostly elderly women had joined the
Madres. They met weekly to walk slowly, arm in arm, around the Plaza, carrying
placards with information about the ‘disappeared’, wearing their children’s photo-
graphs on cards around their necks, and sometimes stopping at a microphone to
address questions concerning their children to the presidential palace. Like the
Chinese who gathered in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and the Egyptians who gathered
in Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring, the Madres occupied and altered a site of
state authority in order to challenge the State’s claim to that power.
By successfully garnering national and international attention for the 30,000
‘disappeared’, the Madres’ protest threatened the Argentine authorities. In response,
the authorities made twelve of the Madres themselves ‘disappear’ and intermittently
banned the women from the Plaza. Despite these circumstances, and despite the fact
the dictatorship eventually ended, the Madres continued to protest, seeking infor-
mation, compensation and retribution and challenging the military’s dominance of
the public sphere and its ‘forgetting’ of the Madres’ children by presenting an alter-
native narrative of both the Argentine nation and of gender. In their protests, the
Madres remember, record and make visible the names and faces of the ‘disappeared’
and challenge oppressive patriarchal definitions of motherhood that would have
them stay at home and keep silent. In the first decade of the twenty-first century they
recognized the radically changed government in Argentina and its efforts to protect
civil rights but they continue to advocate broadly for human rights.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Taylor has written most extensively about this group from a performance studies
perspective, especially in her publications of 1997 and 1998. For further resources,
see the Madres’ Spanish-language website.

Asociación Madres de Plaza de Mayo. Online. Available www.madres.org/navegar/nav.php

(accessed 13 October 2013).
Taylor, Diana (1997) Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s
‘Dirty War’, Durham and London: Duke University Press.
—— (1998) ‘Making a Spectacle: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo’, in Radical Street
Performance: An International Anthology, Jan Cohen-Cruz (ed.), London: Routledge,
pp. 74–85.
—— (2003) The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas,
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

MARKET THEATRE (FOUNDED JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA, 1976)

The Market Theatre was founded in the apartheid era by Barney Simon and Mannie
Manim and has come to be recognized by many as South Africa’s unofficial ‘national’
theatre as well as a crucible for political critique and engagement. In the wake of the

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Soweto riots in June 1976, the Market aimed first to produce and host European and
African theatre that would raise the consciousness of white South Africans about the
inequities of apartheid – inequities the State tried to mask through social segregation
and media control. Second, the Market aimed to produce theatre that would even-
tually offer black South African artists opportunities for performing in politically
meaningful contexts, rather than the commercially-driven, white-produced, ‘tradi-
tional’ (exoticizing) musicals they were otherwise often contained within and
exploited by (compare with interculturalism). Third, it aimed to attract and address
both white and black audiences, a revolutionary objective in an era when segre-
gation was still legally enforced.
Throughout its first decade and a half, the company focused on producing new
South African performances that provided social and political critique, especially of
apartheid and its related effects of racial and class discrimination. The predominant
production aesthetic was ‘poor’, evoking the aesthetics, conditions and traditions of
black township performance, and seeking – in the traditions of both Jerzy
Grotowski’s ‘poor theatre’ and Peter Brook’s ‘rough theatre’ – to foreground the
energies of its performers. Performances were sometimes scripted; indeed, the Market
has premièred many of the plays of pre-eminent South African playwright Athol
Fugard, as well as plays by Zakes Mda and Mbongeni Ngema, among others. But the
Market is better known for the workshop style of its most famous productions,
including Born in the RSA (1985) and Woza Albert! (1986). The practice of collec-
tively devising productions was developed by Simon following his work with Joan
Littlewood at the Theatre Royal in East London in the 1950s and it has, in turn, influ-
enced not only Market productions but contemporary theatre production in South
Africa more broadly.
Thanks to its liberal practices, the Market was one of the only South African
theatre companies of the apartheid era to bypass other nations’ anti-apartheid
boycotts and to tour successfully on the international circuit, garnering an interna-
tional acclaim which may in turn have protected it from domestic prosecution and
allowed it to continue its liberal practices. Nevertheless, and despite its ostensibly
liberal politics, the Market has been criticized both during and after apartheid for
reinforcing South Africa’s deeply entrenched internal imperial relations. Some argue
that the Market’s commercial priorities reinforce economic apartheid: it accepts
private sponsorship and is keen to maintain an audience that is wealthy (and, given
the demographics of wealth in South Africa, mostly white). Others argue the theatre
is fundamentally Eurocentric: it emphasizes literary textual production, its audience
is predominantly educated and white, it often imports European plays and directors,
and it relies on bringing black audiences to it, rather than going to them. In the
context of South Africa’s difficult transition out of apartheid, the Market Theatre
illustrates some of the potentials and pitfalls of a history spent balanced precariously
on the boundaries of what was and is legal, socially challenging but not overly antag-
onistic, and economically viable.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fuchs and Schwartz provide historical information. Solberg includes an interview

with Market co-founder, Mannie Manim.

Fuchs, Anne (2002) Playing the Market: The Market Theatre, Johannesburg, revised and
updated edition, Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Market Theatre. Online. Available www.markettheatre.co.za (accessed 13 October 2013).
Schwartz, Pat (1988) The Best of Company: The Story of Johannesburg’s Market Theatre,
Craighall, South Africa: Donker.
Solberg, Rolf (1999) Alternative Theatre in South Africa: Talks with Prime Movers since the
1970s, Scottsville, South Africa: University of Natal Press.

MEYERHOLD, VSEVOLOD (RUSSIAN THEATRE DIRECTOR/ACTOR/

TEACHER, 1874–1940)

Meyerhold is remembered predominantly for his radically stylized theatre produc-

tions and his invention of biomechanics for performer training, both of which have
helped to displace the dominance of naturalism in Western theatre. His style focused
on the performer’s physicality or plasticity rather than psychological realism or the
play text. Meyerhold began by directing and acting very successfully in some of the
earliest productions of Anton Chekhov in Russia, including those directed by
Konstantin Stanislavsky. Stanislavsky was his teacher, director and mentor, and
helped Meyerhold by founding and letting him run the Moscow Art Theatre Studio.
Later though – especially after the 1917 Revolution – Meyerhold became convinced
that naturalism was an elitist form, so he more doggedly pursued other ways to draw
the masses into the theatre. This, he believed, could be done using performance tech-
niques from commedia dell’arte, circus and gymnastics, turning the actor into a
minstrel or jongleur figure. His biomechanical exercises helped him put into practice
this clear vision of a non-naturalistic, popular theatre. His belief that the director
and actor should construct the mise en scène together and that this collaboration was
central to the production process itself and should override the director as interpreter
of the playwright’s text, was at odds with Stanislavsky’s own vision. His rejection of
naturalism, which he had begun as early as 1903 in experiments with symbolism,
finally led to a split from Stanislavsky as patron.
Recent interest in Meyerhold’s work, promulgated in part by Eugenio Barba, has
focused extensively on his biomechanics. Meyerhold devised these exercises partly in
response to Frederick Winslow Taylor’s time and motion studies and his investi-
gation into ergonomic efficiency at work. Similar to Rudolf von Laban’s later
research into efficiency of movement in factories, Taylor attempted to raise workers’
output by streamlining their physical labour. Biomechanics also attempted to
encourage the performer’s awareness of ‘excitation’, based on his belief that the
theatre event comprises a series of physical, visceral interactions that take place
between the performer and the spectator – the physical action of the former exciting

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an embodied response in the latter. The twenty or so exercises Meyerhold developed,

such as ‘Shooting the arrow’ or ‘The jump on the shoulder’, were broken down into
their constituent elements as a cycle of actions and responses, testing the performer’s
reflexes by building muscular strength and dexterity, and refining spatial awareness, in
particular in relation to other performers. All the exercises begin with the dactyl, a
short energizing and focusing movement. Biomechanics helped Meyerhold instill, in
the spirit of the Revolution, his vision of the theatre as a spectacular event with
popular appeal, using precise rhythms and vibrant musicality. He nurtured a great
interest in music and performance and directed many operas.
Meyerhold’s most celebrated and challenging productions were his versions of
Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Mystery-Bouffe (1918) and The Government Inspector
(1926) by Nikolai Gogol. The latter piece implicitly praised the Revolution in its
critique of the bourgeoisie under Tsar Nicholas II. His Magnanimous Cuckold (1922),
the first production to use biomechanics, typified his work with Constructivist sets,
reflecting the aspirations of a movement that championed the use of ‘real space and
real materials’. This ethos carried through into several productions, whose scenog-
raphy included ramps, scaffolding, wheels and ladders that enhanced and dynamized
the performers’ movement and provided frames for mass choral groupings.
Meyerhold also developed a style that he labelled ‘grotesque’, a combination of the
exalted and the base, the comic and the tragic, in an incongruous and exaggerated
mix of performance modes, characters and events.
Meyerhold’s relations with the Russian authorities were often fraught, and in
1940, a year after his wife had been officially executed and after years of public
attacks of his work, he was imprisoned and then shot dead. Ironically, his work was
labelled anti-Communist, even though he had strongly supported the Revolution.
Meyerhold was officially rehabilitated in 1956 after Stalin was denounced. He is
now considered one of the twentieth century’s most important directors and has
belatedly achieved rightful recognition in the West as well as Russia, following
growing interest in stylized and physical theatre, as well as physical methods of
performer training. He is celebrated not just for his personal fight for innovation but
as much for his realization of a system for preparing the actor for stylized work.
Meyerhold demonstrates the artfulness and stamina needed to invent a new theatre
performance style, to challenge accepted conventions, and to question the works and
thinking of predecessors and mentors.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Braun, Leach and Pitches are all well-recognized British scholars who have written
key texts on Meyerhold’s life, theories and practice. The Gladkov and Rudnitsky
books are important texts amongst an increasing number of translations (from
Russian) of books on Meyerhold. The Arts Archives videos focus on biomechanics
as does the Law and Gordon book. RPA

Arts Archives. Online. Available www.arts-archives.org (accessed 1 July 2013).

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Braun, Edward ([1979] 1995) Meyerhold: A Revolution in Theatre, revised edition, London:
Methuen.
Gladkov, Aleksandr (1997) Meyerhold Speaks/Meyerhold Rehearses, Amsterdam: Harwood.
Law, Alma and Mel Gordon (2012) Meyerhold, Eisenstein and Biomechanics: Actor Training
in Revolutionary Russia, Jefferson: Macfarland & Co.
Leach, Robert (1989) Vsevolod Meyerhold, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Meyerhold Centre, Moscow. Online. Available www.meyerhold.ru/en/biography/ (accessed
4 July 2013).
Pitches, Jonathan (2003) Vsevolod Meyerhold, London: Routledge.
Rudnitsky, Konstantin (1981) Meyerhold the Director, Ann Arbor: Ardis.

ORLAN (FRENCH MULTIMEDIA AND PERFORMANCE ARTIST, 1947–)

Orlan is best known for her series of operation-performances, The Reincarnation of
Saint Orlan (1990–93), but she has been making performance art for much longer
– arguably since 1962, when she first ‘reincarnated’ herself by changing her name to
the sexually ambiguous Orlan. Her work is consistently feminist, questioning tradi-
tional definitions of femininity and challenging the institutions – from art historiog-
raphy, to the Catholic Church, the plastic surgery industry and the fashion industry
– that produce and enforce those definitions.
From her earliest work in the 1960s, Orlan, like Annie Sprinkle, has challenged
cultural taboos that enforce female propriety and domesticity. In an inversion of the
patriarchal mythology surrounding the fantasy of the virgin bride and the ‘proof’ of
her virginity signified by blood-stained honeymoon sheets, Orlan invited male artists
and gallery workers to provide her with sperm, with which she stained the sheets
from her trousseau (the domestic linens collected by her mother for when Orlan
married). In Chiaroscuro Sewing (1968), she did sloppy embroidery around the
stains, confounding the expectation that she should be competent at this traditionally
‘feminine’ craft.
Since 1971, when she adopted the persona of St Orlan, her work has increasingly
made reference to religious iconography and its fetishization of female figures, espe-
cially the Madonna (compare with Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s Temple of
Confessions, 1994–97). In One-Off Striptease with Trousseau Sheets (1975) she
stripped but adopted poses from religious paintings and sculpture, thus combining
high and low cultural references, challenging their social esteem as respectively
worthy and contemptible, and testing binary definitions of the female as exclusively
either virgin or whore. In other body art pieces and/or living sculptures, Orlan
appeared draped in sheets, black vinyl or white leatherette, testing the sanctity of the
religious icon, irreverently portraying the saint as fetish object, and demonstrating
that fine art’s proclivity to make various individual parts of a woman’s body iconic
– the hand, the face, the breast – has literally chopped women up (compare with Ron
Athey).
Orlan’s work explores the female subject of art and religious history not only as
object of the gaze but also as economic commodity. Her photo-sculpture The Kiss of

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the Artist (1976) combined the torso of a naked woman (Orlan) with a slot at the
throat inviting the audience to insert five francs and a container at the crotch to catch
the money. When money dropped into the container, Orlan would leap out to kiss the
person who had paid. In a gesture that Reincarnation would enhance, The Kiss
commented on the art market’s economy of commodifying the female nude, partially
subverting that economy by making Orlan both active rather than passive and the
beneficiary of the financial transaction.
From 1976 to 1984, Orlan’s work concentrated on challenging the male domi-
nance of space as well as the dominance of certain masculine art practices. In a series
of site-specific Measurings, she used her own body to take the measure of various
environments, offering a female – or gynometric – assessment of male-designed
churches, museums and streets, including the rue Victor Hugo. She continues to make
Measurings, for example at Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum in 2012. She also
responded to Yves Klein’s Anthropométries (1958–60), paintings in which the fully
dressed male artist daubed naked women’s bodies in paint and verbally and physi-
cally directed their movements on a canvas. After her Measurings, Orlan would wash
her trousseau sheet costume and preserve the dirty washing water as a relic – a
practice of preserving and celebrating the abject residue which she would later
develop in her Reincarnation.
Orlan continues to make performance art and images that challenge received
notions of gender identity and gendered mythologies, frequently recycling – or rein-
carnating – her own previous work. Her Self-Hybridizations (1999), for example, use
digital technologies to produce hybrid intercultural images that combine her face
with faces from African and pre-Columbian Central American art. In her Shot at a
Movie series (2001), she makes posters for movies in which she is putatively starring
but which do not actually exist. Like her fellow performance artist Stelarc, she alters
her own body and uses multimedia technology to explore and create new mediated
and performative definitions of identity. The focus of Orlan’s work, though, remains
firmly on exploring gender and (in particular) femininity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

For critical analysis of Orlan’s work, see Augsburg, Auslander, Donger et al, Ince,
Kauffman and Orlan: Carnal Art; for images, see Buci-Glucksmann and the Orlan
entries. Orlan’s website includes detailed information on artwork, biography, bibli-
ography and exhibitions.

Augsburg, Tanya (1998) ‘Orlan’s Performative Transformations of Subjectivity’, in The Ends

of Performance, Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane (eds), New York: New York University Press,
pp. 285–314.
Auslander, Philip (1997) From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism and
Postmodernism, London: Routledge.
Buci-Glucksmann, Christine (2000) Orlan: Triomphe du baroque, Marseille: Images En
Manoeuvres Editions. Includes French and English texts.

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Donger, Simon, with Simon Shepherd and Orlan (2010) ORLAN: A Hybrid Body of Artworks,
Oxon: Routledge.
Ince, Kate (2000) Orlan: Millennial Female, Oxford and New York: Berg.
Kauffman, Linda S. (2002) ‘Cutups in Beauty School – and Postscripts, January 2000 and
December 2001’, in Interfaces: Women/Autobiography/Image/Performance, Sidonie
Smith and Julia Watson (eds), Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 103–31.
Orlan (1996) This Is My Body . . . This Is My Software, London: Black Dog.
—— (2004) Orlan: Carnal Art, trans. Deke Dusinberre, Paris: Editions Flammarion.
Orlan. Online. Available www.orlan.eu/ (accessed 13 October 2013).
ORLAN, Carnal Art (2001), produced and directed by Stephan Oriach, Myriapodus Films.

PHELAN, PEGGY (AMERICAN ACADEMIC/WRITER/PERFORMER)

In her theoretical and practical explorations of performance, both enacted through
writing, Phelan asserts that performance’s liveness – its fleeting, ephemeral nature – is
psychically, politically and ethically significant. Combining politicized psychoana-
lytic, feminist and queer theories, she argues that because performance is ephemeral,
it stages loss. Because loss is something everyone has to deal with emotionally and
psychologically throughout their lives, examining performance as a staging of loss,
absence or trauma can be suggestive, instructive, therapeutic and politically enabling.
In Unmarked (1993), she proposes that performance is liminal – between being
live and present and immediately over and absent. Because of this liminality, perfor-
mance is a particularly valuable medium to practise and analyse for those who are
themselves made to feel liminal or marginal by dominant culture, whether because of
their race, sexuality, gender, politics, ability or class. She challenges the contention
that visibility equals power, a logic that informed many marginalized groups’ rights
advocacy activities in the visibility politics of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. She argues
instead that being ‘unmarked’, a blind spot in the purview of dominant culture, can
allow one to evade surveillance and control. It is therefore worthwhile, she suggests,
to explore being unmarked – or, as in the case of performance, ephemeral – as a
radical aesthetic strategy for empowering liminal subjectivities.
Phelan is an extremely influential practitioner of performance studies. Her work is
typical of the field in that it is multidisciplinary, addressing the performative politics
of media as diverse as theatre, performance art, public events and trials, psychoana-
lytic case histories, acts of grief and mourning, dance, literature, and many visual
arts, including film, video, photography and painting. Importantly, her work is also
distinctive within performance studies, both in content and form. Where Richard
Schechner, for example, emphasizes anthropology and ritual, she focuses on
feminism and psychoanalysis. Perhaps more importantly, because she is interested in
the performative politics of writing, she has developed performance studies’ forms
by advocating ‘performative writing’. This is a dynamic, hybrid fusion of critical and
creative thinking that combines commentary, analysis, story, anecdote, reflection
and fantasy and aims to emulate the ephemeral nature of performance (compare with
Hélène Cixous’ practice of écriture féminine). For Phelan, performative writing is

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importantly distinct from more conventional performance criticism, which risks

fixing and potentially rendering conservative what might have been elusive and
radical in the live event. In Mourning Sex (1997), a kind of elegy to loss and the
injured body, she argues that performative writing aims to enact the affective force
of the performance event, including its sense of loss, and to make performance crit-
icism itself subjective, partial and active in the present, not trying to copy and capture
the past.
Phelan’s radical and pioneering practice of performance studies has provoked
criticism of her own work and crystallized criticism of the field more broadly. The
multidisciplinary nature of performance studies that is apparently evidenced by her
work, for example, has been accused of neglecting and denigrating theatre and drama
as sites of study. Further, performance studies has also been accused of being ahis-
torical (for example, by David Savran), adopting a renegade attitude to history
alongside an emphasis on liveness and the present. In Liveness (1999), Philip
Auslander specifically takes issue with Phelan’s arguments about live performance,
arguing against the politically oppositional claims she makes for liveness.
As well as garnering detractors, however, Phelan’s work has accumulated many
admirers and emulators, its influence arising not only through her writing but also her
editing and teaching. With Lynda Hart, she co-edited Acting Out (1993), a collection
of essays on feminism and performance; and with Jill Lane, she co-edited The Ends
of Performance (1998), which reflects cogently on the discipline through a selection
of essays first delivered at the Performance Studies international conference which
Phelan organized in New York in 1995 and which led to the establishment of PSi
(Performance Studies international), which holds annual conferences. From 1985,
she taught in (and later headed) the Department of Performance Studies, co-founded
by Schechner, at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. Since 2003, she has
been a professor at Stanford University in California. This West coast location facili-
tated her production of the history, Live Art in LA: Performance in Southern
California, 1970–1983 (2012).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Auslander, Philip (1999) Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, London and New
York: Routledge.
Hart, Lynda and Peggy Phelan (eds) (1993) Acting Out: Feminist Performances, Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press.
Phelan, Peggy (1993) Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, London: Routledge.
—— (1997) Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories, London: Routledge.
—— (2012) Live Art in LA: Performance in Southern California, 1970–1983, New York:
Routledge.
—— and Jill Lane (eds) (1998) The Ends of Performance, New York: New York University
Press.
Reckitt, Helena (ed.), survey by Peggy Phelan (2001) Art and Feminism, London: Phaidon.
Savran, David (2001) ‘Choices Made and Unmade’, Theater 31.2: 89–95.

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 RANCI ÈRE, J ACQUE S

RANCIÈRE, JACQUES (FRENCH PHILOSOPHER, 1940–)

Born in Algeria, French philosopher Jacques Rancière theorizes understandings of
radical equality and democracy which recognize everyone’s intelligence and seek
everyone’s emancipation, particularly from hierarchies of class. He publishes prolifi-
cally across a range of topics from pedagogy to history, but with a particular emphasis
on the visual politics of aesthetics and spectatorship in film, theatre and contem-
porary art. He credits everyone as bearers of authority, for example, spectators are
understood as active rather than passive. And he explores the ways that many people
are potentially excluded from exercising that authority because their views are
de-legitimated, suppressed or ignored in what he calls ‘distributions of the sensible’
(or patterns of attention and inattention) that are divisive, elitist and prejudiced. He
seeks ways of understanding how people might be emancipated from this kind of
exclusion and oppression and properly perceived as equal. Especially influential in
theatre and performance studies have been his arguments about the distribution of
the sensible (in The Politics of Aesthetics) and the ‘emancipated spectator’ (in several
texts published since 2004).
To understand the emancipated spectator it is useful to know more about some of
Rancière’s earlier ideas, particularly in pedagogy. In The Ignorant Schoolmaster:
Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, he argues that everyone has equal intel-
ligence. Therefore, the role of the ‘schoolmaster’ is not masterfully to instruct but to
recognize and channel everyone’s equal intelligence. (Similar thinking in the work
of educational theorist Paulo Freire influenced applied theatre practitioner Augusto
Boal.) Where other post-Marxist critics may speak for the masses and see them as
bearers of a deluded false consciousness, Rancière credits everyone as not only able
to speak for him or herself but also not deluded. In his understanding, by speaking for
themselves, people force a ‘redistribution of the sensible’, command attention and
claim public space, visibility, legitimacy and power.
Rancière’s pedagogic theories about intelligence and learning map directly onto
his theories about spectatorship. Many theorists and makers of theatre and perfor-
mance – from Bertold Brecht, to Antonin Artaud, Boal and creators of happenings
– have considered audiences passive and in need of political awakening. Rancière
refutes the simple oppositional terms on which such perspectives are based. As the
schoolmaster is not the only one with intelligence, the literally moving performer is
not the only one who is active; active too are acts of listening, looking and being a
spectator. A ‘distribution of the sensible’ (or way of understanding the world) which
denigrates as passive acts of looking, listening and being a spectator is responsible
for dominating and subjecting those activities. Changing understanding and enabling
emancipation and democracy requires a shift in understanding that recognizes
looking and hearing as active because they involve observation, selection, comparison
and interpretation – intelligence and learning, in other words.
Though Rancière credits theatre spectators as creators of meaning, he does not
cast them as a utopian community, as theatre makers and analysts are sometimes
tempted to do, crediting theatre’s liveness for producing something ostensibly better

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for its audiences than do other media such as television and film. What theatre spec-
tators have in common, Rancière argues, is intelligence; but they may not share the
same understanding of or engagement with the performance. What is politically
valuable about this analysis is the ways it preserves understanding of individual
differences in intelligence and interpretation, resists homogenizing audiences and
maintains a healthy suspicion about the romanticism of claiming audiences are
necessarily homogeneous communities.
Rancière is occasionally criticized for being obscure and sometimes given to
‘motifs’ more than clear arguments and proposals for real-world political acts which
would extend democracy. Such criticisms aside, his theory is important for all arts
because it regards art practices as nothing more than the means of achieving equality
and democracy through a re-distribution of the sensible.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Rancière is a prolific writer. Listed below is a selection of his texts with particular
relevance in this context. Though not discussed above, readers might be interested in
his essay on a popular theatre in France, ‘The People’s Theatre: A Long, Drawn-out
Affair’.

Rancière, Jacques (1991 [1987]) The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual
Emancipation, trans. Kristin Ross, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
—— ([2000] 2004) The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel
Rockhill, London: Continuum.
—— ([2005] 2006) Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Corcoran, London and New York:
Verso.
—— ([2003] 2007) ‘The Emancipated Spectator’, ArtForum International 45:7 (March):
270–81.
—— (2007) The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott, London and New York: Verso.
—— (2010) The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott, London and New York: Verso.
—— (2010) Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Steven Corcoran, London:
Continuum.
—— ([2011] 2013) Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, trans. Zakir Paul,
London and New York: Verso.
—— (2012) ‘The People’s Theatre: A Long, Drawn-out Affair’, in Jacques Rancière, The
Intellectual and His People; Staging the People, Volume 2, trans. David Fernbach, London:
Verso, pp. 1–40.

SCHECHNER, RICHARD (AMERICAN ACADEMIC/EDITOR/WRITER/

DIRECTOR, 1934–)

Since the 1960s, Schechner has pioneered an interdisciplinary approach to defining

what performance is and does, broadening those definitions and allowing new critical
connections to be made across and between them. The approach Schechner advo-
cates – and to a large degree founded – has come to be known as ‘performance

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studies’. It combines knowledge and practices from anthropology, sociology,

psychology, art history, folklore, and cultural studies as well as theatre and dance
studies to examine a broad range of practices and events, including: religious and
social ritual, amateur and professional sport, games, popular entertainment, perfor-
mance in everyday life, secular public events like carnivals, festivals, parades and
political demonstrations, as well as conventional theatre performance. One outcome
of performance studies’ critical innovations is an increased focus on the social, spir-
itual and political effects of performance, alongside the aesthetic or formal qualities
that the study of drama had generally previously emphasized. Another is the interna-
tional, intercultural and generic expansion of Euro-American theatre scholarship to
pay greater attention to Asian performance forms such as Indian Kathakali and
Japanese Noh theatre as well as to non-text-based events like Native, Jewish and
Indian festivals and rituals (such as the Māori haka and the Yaqui Lent and Easter
ceremonies).
Schechner has practised and promoted performance studies as a director, editor,
writer and teacher. As the founding director of The Performance Group (New York,
1967–80), Schechner was a primary exponent in the experimental American theatre of
the 1960s and 1970s, working especially to enhance theatre’s social and spiritual
effects as ritual for participating makers and audiences. Using the Performing Garage
as a flexible environmental theatre, Schechner and The Performance Group sought
to increase the interactivity of the performance event by mobilizing both audiences
and performers and encouraging them to interact directly, as in such productions as
Dionysus in 69 (1968–69), Commune (1971) and The Balcony (1980), all of which
Schechner directed. When The Performance Group folded due to difficult internal
dynamics, the Wooster Group absorbed several of its artists, remained in the
Performing Garage, and carried on many of its innovations. Schechner too continues
his theatrical experimentation as a freelance director (of, for example, a Chinese-
language Oresteia in Taiwan, 1995) and as founding artistic director of East Coast
Artists (1991–) which has produced a highly physical version of Goethe’s Faust in
Faust/Gastronome (1993), an intercultural Hamlet (1999) that eclectically borrowed
visual and musical styles from a host of different cultures and periods and a response
to Ophelia’s story and the erotic novel by Anne Desclos (pen name, Pauline Réage)
The Story of O in Imagining O (2012), produced and staged at the University of Kent,
UK.
From 1962 to 1969, and again since 1986, Schechner has edited the influential
journal TDR: The Drama Review (formerly Tulane Drama Review), first when he
taught at Tulane University in New Orleans, and subsequently since his move to the
Department of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University,
in 1967. Having accrued the subtitle The Journal of Performance Studies in 1986,
TDR has pioneered research into emerging artists, practices and critical paradigms,
including Jerzy Grotowski, Fluxus and approaches to understanding performance as
ritual, aspects of which were elaborated with his friend Victor Turner. As a book
editor, Schechner continues to work to expand the discipline, for example as Editor
of Routledge’s Worlds of Performance series. In his numerous publications,

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Schechner consistently explores the social function of theatre and ritual performance.
He published Performance Studies, his textbook on the subject, in 2002 which is
now in its third edition and is enhanced by online content. His often polemical views
on the field and his championing of Performance Studies have attracted criticism, not
least for what they ignore as much as what they welcome.
Responses to Schechner’s practical work have also not always been positive.
Some, like Rustom Bharucha, have seen his (and others’) incursions into Eastern
forms of theatre and ritual as romanticizing and imperialist in ways typical of much
intercultural exploration. (In many of his writings, Schechner himself acknowledges
this potential problem.) Several of his experiments with The Performance Group
have been criticized for the ways they failed to achieve a more democratic perfor-
mance event. Critics argue that his experiments in using nudity in performance and
breaking audience–performer boundaries, for example, were compromised because
they did not take adequate precautions to protect performers from exploitative groping
by audiences. While there may remain areas where Schechner’s practice focuses on
one ideological aspect of production at the expense of another, he has nevertheless
produced and overseen a radical transformation in the study of theatre and perfor-
mance and has in many ways forced the field to become more politically accountable.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The range of Schechner’s publications shows just how prolific he is. Harding and
Rosenthal’s collection is a good place to begin with analysing his achievements and
potential weaknesses.

Harding, James M. and Cindy Rosenthal (2011) The Rise of Performance Studies: Rethinking
Richard Schechner’s Broad Spectrum, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Schechner, Richard ([1973] 1994) Environmental Theater, New York: Applause.
—— ([1977] 1988) Performance Theory, London: Routledge.
—— (1983) Performative Circumstances: From the Avant Garde to Ramlila, Calcutta:
Seagull.
—— (1993) The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance, London: Routledge.
—— ([2002] 2013) Performance Studies: An Introduction (3rd edn edited by Sara Brady),
Oxon: Routledge.
—— and Willa Appel (eds) (1990) By Means of Performance: Intercultural Studies of Theatre
and Ritual, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
—— and Lisa Wolford (eds) (1997) The Grotowski Sourcebook, London: Routledge.

SISTREN THEATRE COLLECTIVE (WOMEN’S THEATRE COLLECTIVE,

FOUNDED KINGSTON, JAMAICA, 1977)

Taking as its name the female counterpart of the word ‘brethren’, Sistren is a theatre
collective founded by working-class women with initial artistic director Honor Ford-
Smith. Since its beginnings, it has aimed to advance audience awareness about
issues affecting Caribbean women especially through the combined effects of racial,

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sexual and class oppression (see feminism). Initially, Sistren worked almost wholly
through the medium of theatre, but by 1982 it had expanded to run a programme of
drama-based workshops with both urban and rural community groups, was producing
silk-screened textiles, had popularized Jamaican research on women, and was
publishing a quarterly magazine. Across its activities, it aimed to empower its partici-
pants and audiences by analysing and commenting on gender roles in Jamaican
society, organizing itself as an autonomous collective, and taking performance,
education and other opportunities to a wide variety of audiences in Jamaica, the
Caribbean region and beyond. Sistren’s activist practices also included bringing
together women of different races and classes and participating in campaigns criti-
cizing Jamaica’s debt and violence against women.
Sistren’s performance work was both particular to Jamaica in its use of specific
Jamaican stories, oral histories, languages, rituals and aspects of carnival, for
example – and typically postcolonial, in its reclamation of indigenous stories,
languages and performance practices. Sistren’s performances were collectively
devised using games and improvisation to combine participants’ own stories with
other research materials, especially interviews. Its shows included features typical of
a community-based popular theatre of political advocacy, combining song, stories
and monologues, and dealing consistently with social issues. They were also,
however, very particular to their specific contexts, using Jamaican Creole, stories
from Jamaican popular culture and history, traditional and current popular songs, and
addressing Caribbean women’s history and experiences, both domestic and public.
Sistren has produced over a dozen plays. One recurring thematic concern has been
with women’s experiences as labourers. Downpression Get a Blow, Sistren’s first
show, devised for performance at Jamaica’s 1977 Workers’ Week celebrations, dealt
with the unionization of women in the garment industry; Domesticks (1981–83)
focused on women’s abuse as domestic servants; and the documentary film Sweet
Sugar Rage (1985) looked at women in the Jamaican sugar industry. The company
explored Caribbean women’s history in Nana Yah (1980), about a seventeenth-
century Maroon warrior woman who fought the British, and in QPH (1981), a
memorial to more than a hundred women who died in a fire in the Kingston Alms
House in 1980. Women’s relationships were the focus of several shows, including
Bellywoman Bangarang (1978), about women’s sexuality and mothering, Muffet
Inna All a We (1985), a reggae musical partly about global capitalism in which three
women try to enter a dancehall DJ competition, and Buss Out (1989), which investi-
gated questions of colour and shade and women’s interclass relations.
Sistren have demonstrated theatre’s community-building potential in tours
throughout the Caribbean (including to rural Jamaica) and to the USA, Canada and
Europe. The company’s socially-engaged work, like that of Augusto Boal, demon-
strates the potential of theatre and performance to build skills and confidence and to
empower communities that may otherwise be marginalized by economics, gender
and geography. The trajectory of the company’s history – from relatively modest
beginnings, through quick and extensive expansion, to reduction in the 1990s –
points to the ways many collectives (like Bread and Puppet Theatre) established in

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the 1960s and 1970s in a climate of democratic ‘grassroots’ empowerment, political

protest and political possibility flourished in the 1980s, but thereafter retrenched as
political conditions changed. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, Sistren has
been funded principally by the Jamaican government and has turned its focus to
addressing inner-city violence through drama workshops and counselling.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The collective’s work is described in Sistren’s 1983 article and in introductions to

the published plays. Lionheart Gal is a Sistren project that documented Jamaican
women’s lives. Ford-Smith analyses in detail the interlinked political, financial and
historical conditions for the collective’s decline. Green examines the positive and
negative effects of globalization on the company’s efficacy, and Smith assesses
shifts in the collective’s work since it became effectively subcontracted by the
Jamaican government around 2001.

Ford-Smith, Honor (1997) ‘Ring Ding in a Tight Corner: Sistren, Collective Democracy, and
the Organization of Cultural Production’, in Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies,
Democratic Futures, M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (eds), London:
Routledge, pp. 213–58, 390–92.
Green, Sharon L. (2006) ‘On a Knife Edge: Sistren Theatre Collective, Grassroots Theatre,
and Globalization’, Small Axe 10.3 (no. 21): 111–24.
Sistren Theatre Collective (1983) ‘Women’s Theatre in Jamaica’, Grassroots Development 7.2.
Reprinted in Charles David Kleymeyer (ed.) (1994) Cultural Expression and Grassroots
Development: Cases from Latin America and the Caribbean, Boulder and London: Lynne
Rienner, pp.71–82.
—— (2001) Introduction and Bellywoman Bangarang, in Contemporary Drama of the
Caribbean, Erika J. Waters and David Edgecombe (eds), Kingshill, St Croix: The Caribbean
Writer, pp. 77–131.
—— (2001) Introduction and QPH, in Postcolonial Plays: An Anthology, Helen Gilbert (ed.),
London: Routledge, pp. 153–78.
—— with Honor Ford-Smith (1986) Lionheart Gal: Life Stories of Jamaican Women, London:
The Women’s Press.
Smith, Karina (2013) ‘From Politics to Therapy: Sistren Theatre Collective’s Theatre and
Outreach Work in Jamaica’, New Theatre Quarterly 29.1: 87–97.

SOYINKA, WOLE (NIGERIAN WRITER/ACADEMIC/POET/ESSAYIST/

NOVELIST/EDITOR/SOCIAL COMMENTATOR, 1934–)

A prolific writer and winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1986, Soyinka is best
known for his playwriting. His oeuvre of over twenty plays includes The Swamp
Dwellers (1958), Madmen and Specialists (1970), and Death and the King’s
Horseman (1976). Throughout his writings, he has observed and offered critiques of
his changing Nigerian culture and its history of colonial and postcolonial oppression.
His commitment to speaking out against social injustice in this context is

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indisputable; indeed, it was ‘rewarded’ by detention by the Federal Military

Government from 1967 to 1969 during the Nigerian Civil War and has since, at
times, required him to live in exile for his own safety.
However, some critics from both Africa and the West have debated whether
Soyinka chooses the most appropriate methods for speaking out. Some postcolonial
African writers have argued against using colonial languages (for example, English
and French), colonial myths and colonial literary structures and symbols, in favour
of using, respecting and celebrating indigenous African ones. Soyinka considers this
approach atavistic, calling its proponents ‘Neo-Tarzanists’, and advocates an inter-
cultural strategy of combining colonial and indigenous languages, myths, symbols
and structures. His own work is particularly well-known for its exploration and
comparison of classical Greek dramatic form and Yoruba myth. While some Western
critics have complained that this approach is discordant, Soyinka has pursued it to
create a drama which he sees as not only internationally accessible, but – through the
English language – accessible within his own multilingual and multicultural country
as well. Thus, he pioneers a new dramaturgy that acknowledges the hybridity of
postcolonial cultural expression and experience like his own. Born and educated in
both Christian and Yoruba traditions in Nigeria, Soyinka completed a BA at the
University of Leeds and worked at the Royal Court Theatre, London, from 1957 to
1959.
Soyinka’s writing strategies – and responses to them – demonstrate some of the
issues at stake in postcolonial cultural practice. He continues to speak out about
political corruption in Nigeria and was particularly fierce in his condemnation of the
1995 execution of fellow Nigerian playwright Ken Saro-Wiwa. He himself received
a death sentence from Nigeria’s then-military dictator General Sani Abacha in 1997
and therefore lived in exile. With the restoration of civilian rule in Nigeria in 1998,
Soyinka was able to return in 1999. He has also had a significant influence as a
teacher and has been employed by universities worldwide, including in Nigeria, the
UK and the USA.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Jeyifo includes a full list of Soyinka’s books to 1999, a chronology of his life, and
numerous interviews. Art, Dialogue and Outrage collects some of Soyinka’s critical
writing.

Jeyifo, Biodun (ed.) (2001) Conversations with Wole Soyinka, Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi.
Soyinka, Wole (1984) Six Plays, London: Methuen.
—— (1988) Art, Dialogue and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture, London: Methuen.
—— (1999) Plays 2, London: Methuen.

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SPLIT BRITCHES (LESBIAN AND FEMINIST THEATRE COMPANY, FOUNDED

NEW YORK, 1980)
Since its inaugural performance of Split Britches in New York in 1980, the epon-
ymous company has performed throughout the USA and Europe, particularly the UK,
and has become the most influential (mostly) lesbian performance group of its time.
The company’s central members are Lois Weaver, Peggy Shaw and Deb Margolin,
although they often work in collaboration with other groups, solo and sometimes in
pairs (especially Weaver and Shaw).
Split Britches have pioneered organizational and aesthetic models for lesbian and
feminist theatre and performance art as well as other forms of socially-engaged
performance, and provided some of the most important performance material for the
growing feminist critical discourse on theatre throughout the 1980s, into the 1990s
and beyond. They founded a theatre festival called Women’s One World (WOW) in
1980 and opened the WOW Café in New York in 1982. These provided a festival and
then a space for women’s performance, as well as a home for New York’s lesbian
and feminist communities and, in the analysis of critic Jill Dolan, a site for specifi-
cally feminist spectatorship. Aesthetically, they developed a postmodern style to
articulate postmodernity’s split subjectivity and to interrogate the patriarchal and
heterosexist assumptions of much dominant theatre and culture. As performers, they
play both themselves and characters, often blurring the distinction between the two
and drawing attention to the performativity of identity. Their shows are typically
satirical and episodic and combine lip-synching (familiar from gay and drag cabaret),
self-conscious butch–femme role-playing, and sequences of popular song and
movement. The shows present generically unconventional, camp approaches to
canonical texts, including a vaudeville Beauty and the Beast (1982), Little Women,
subtitled The Tragedy (1988) and a comic Streetcar Named Desire in Belle Reprieve
(with Bloolips, 1991). Their plays explore issues of economics (Upwardly Mobile
Home, 1984), personal relationships (Anniversary Waltz, 1989), sex roles (Lust and
Comfort, with Gay Sweatshop, 1995), class and gender violence (Lesbians Who Kill,
1992), urban change (Miss America, 2008; Lost Lounge, 2009), and aging (RUFF,
2012).
Split Britches’ shows are irreverent in their humorous and playful subversion of
both canonical texts and elitist theatre-making practices and they resolutely retain a
rough theatre style – sometimes by force of economic circumstance, certainly, but
also to interrogate the economics of theatre and patriarchal capitalism and, through a
Brechtian aesthetic, to defamiliarize the myths of gender and culture they present.
The company’s efforts to develop forms for effective public engagement have led to
their creation of formats which are increasingly interactive. In Weaver’s perfor-
mance as Tammy Whynot, a ‘failed’ country-and-western-singer-turned-lesbian-
performance-artist, Tammy’s professed ignorance about her chosen career (and
much else) allows her to request (and receive) audiences’ expertise in the shows
What Tammy Needs to Know (2004–). This interactive, non-hierarchical format is
extended in Long Table events which have been developed and disseminated

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worldwide by Weaver since the turn of the millennium and which welcome discussion
from all participants in order to address important social issues, both local and global.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Case collects the company’s plays, Dolan examines their work in detail, and Jenkins
provides an introduction, including a brief interview with Split Britches’ members.
The company’s website offers good access to their history of performance and to
further resources including archival materials. The Public Address Systems website
provides details on this line of Weaver’s work in particular.

Case, Sue-Ellen (ed.) (1996) Split Britches: Lesbian Practice/Feminist Performance, London:
Routledge.
Dolan, Jill (1988) The Feminist Spectator as Critic, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Jenkins, Linda Walsh (1987) ‘Split Britches’, in Women in American Theatre, revised and
expanded edition, Helen Krich Chinoy and Linda Walsh Jenkins, New York: Theatre
Communications Group.
Public Address Systems. Online. Available http://publicaddresssystems.org/ (accessed 14
October 2013.
Split Britches. Online. Available http://splitbritches.wordpress.com/ (accessed 14 October
2013).

SPRINKLE, ANNIE (AMERICAN PERFORMANCE ARTIST/SEXUAL ACTIVIST/

WRITER/PHOTOGRAPHER/ECOLOGICAL ACTIVIST, 1954–)

A former prostitute and hardcore porn film star and director, since the early1980s
Sprinkle has been making films, videos, and live performances that are, to use her
term, ‘post-porn’, that is, critically and playfully self-reflexive about pornography.
Her socially-engaged live performances are autobiographical multimedia hybrid
performance art/body art ‘herstories’, detailing her transition from prostitute to
porn actress to sexual and ecological activist. They include Post-Porn Modernist and
Post-Post Porn Modernist (1990–95), Hardcore from the Heart (1996–97) and
Annie Sprinkle’s Herstory of Porn, from Reel to Real (1997). These performances
critically acknowledge that women are vulnerable to exploitation within the sex
industry, for example, by abusive clients or film directors. But they also actively
celebrate porn’s potential for exploring and expressing sexuality (especially safer
sex practices in an age of HIV/AIDS), and female sexuality in particular, which
Sprinkle believes is violently oppressed within the sex-negative culture of the West.
Sprinkle’s work has been a challenge and an inspiration to feminism. For some
feminists, her work has the negative effect of both objectifying the female body and
essentializing female identity by locating it in its biological contexts rather than the
social ones, which feminism might then act to change. For others, however, her work
has several positive effects. Sprinkle’s body may be an object in her shows, but she
is also a subject: she is self-authoring and self-pleasuring; she addresses her

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audiences directly; she returns their gaze; and she actively invites them to explore
her body beyond the limits that porn normally adopts in order to preserve the female
body as a strictly sexual object. In ‘A Public Cervix Announcement’, a scene in
Post-Porn Modernist (and viewable in part on Sprinkle’s website), Sprinkle inserted a
speculum into her vagina and invited audience members to come forward and view
her cervix (compare with Ron Athey’s staging of his anus in several of his works).
Where much Anglo-American academic feminism of the late 1980s and 1990s
concentrated on language and discourse (see, for example, Judith Butler and Peggy
Phelan), Sprinkle’s work reasserts the body as an important site of (and for) feminist
campaigning without arguing that a single body necessarily houses a unified identity.
For many critics, this irreverence towards feminist pieties is typical of the postmod-
ernism of Sprinkle’s shows. Other recognizably postmodern features include the
shows’ pastiche of non-linear scenes, the ambiguity of their ironic and celebratory
attitudes towards pornography, and their acknowledgement of Sprinkle’s own split
subjectivity as commodity and seller, as object and subject, and as unresolved into a
unified sexuality (with past sexual partners including men, women and transsexuals,
Sprinkle refers to herself as metamorphosexual; in 2007, she married her long-term
partner and artistic collaborator Elizabeth Stephens).
Debates about the effects of her work aside, Sprinkle’s motivations are clear. She
aims to help women to explore and express their sexuality, whether through conven-
tional or alternative sexual practices, including ‘ecstasy breathing’ and erotic medi-
tation, and she campaigns to spread safer sex practices, especially within the sex
industry. She completed a PhD at the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human
Sexuality in San Francisco with a dissertation entitled ‘Providing Educational
Opportunities for Adult Industry Workers’, and she continues to offer sex workshops,
to write and publish, and to perform internationally. Increasingly, she and Stephens
have combined sex-positive activism with ecological activism in what they call
ecosexual activism, drawing links between care for and about women, sexuality and
the earth.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sprinkle’s website and books offer detailed information on, and images of, her work.
Schneider provides broader context and analysis.

Annie Sprinkle. Online. Available http://anniesprinkle.org/ (accessed 14 October 2013).

Schneider, Rebecca (1997) The Explicit Body in Performance, London: Routledge.
Sprinkle, Annie (1998) Annie Sprinkle, Post-Porn Modernist: My Twenty-Five Years as a
Multimedia Whore, revised and updated edition, San Francisco: Cleis Press.
—— (2001) Hardcore from the Heart: The Pleasures, Profits and Politics of Sex in
Performance: Annie Sprinkle: Solo, ed. Gabrielle Cody, London: Continuum.

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 STANI SLAVSKY, KONSTA N T I N

STANISLAVSKY, KONSTANTIN (RUSSIAN THEATRE DIRECTOR/ACTOR/

TEACHER, 1863–1938)

With his insights into the processes of acting and directing, Stanislavsky forged a
definitive position in the development of twentieth-century theatre, laying the
groundwork for many innovators. With Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, he
founded the Moscow Art Theatre in 1897, through which he developed and docu-
mented a system of acting as a way of creating believable roles on stage. This process
depends on the concept of the actor seeming to transform into another being before
the spectator, who observes from ‘behind’ (or literally in front of) the fourth wall.
Like naturalism, these notions of verisimilitude and believability were innovative at
the time. They were a reaction to the star system and the Romantic drama that existed
before Stanislavsky, which highlighted individual actors and their melodramatic
techniques while simultaneously marginalizing the text and other cast members.
The acting process of recreating a fictional character outlined by Stanislavsky
begins with the self. The actor has to search in his or her subconscious, through a
technique called emotion memory for a personal experience equivalent to that which
the character must depict on stage. The actor uses the ‘magic if’ to suspend disbelief
and to ask what he or she would do in such a situation. Beyond the self, Stanislavsky’s
meticulous attention to text gives the actor a method of dissecting and compartmen-
talizing text into units and objectives. Actors must find their character’s own aim,
desire or objective for each unit, to ascertain what he or she wants at any given
moment. This segmentation must then be reconstituted and overridden by the char-
acter’s total desire or superobjective, that is, the principal aim or desire in his or her
fictional life, ultimately providing the performer with a consistent through-line.
Alongside these very specific skills, the actor has to understand the character’s
tempo-rhythms (the rhythm of actions and thoughts) and search for an organic
fluidity in all his or her reconstructed behaviour. This sense of truthfulness to
everyday life has to pervade the actors’ interactions, their speaking of text (including
the unspoken subtext which the actor has to assiduously ascertain and imagine), and
their physical actions. Stanislavsky envisaged the actor as a naturally creative, imagi-
native being, rather than a director’s sop or physical acrobat, though he also stressed
that actors must train the body as much as the mind through gymnastics, fencing and
other physical elements of training.
Stanislavsky researched, questioned and documented his own processes through
the fictional actor/student Tortsov, who appears in his writings as a willing, though
questioning, subject. Stanislavsky’s discoveries are partly significant, if at times
confusing, for his later admission and redress of previous failings and limitations,
exacerbated no doubt by the longevity of his working life and the radical changes in
Russian society and culture during this time. Stanislavsky’s ideas evolved to place
more emphasis on the actor’s physical actions rather than on his or her emotional
life, a system known as the Method of Physical Actions, or MOPA for short, though
he never completed research into this to his satisfaction. What was important for him
in this emphasis was that actions can be fixed, whereas emotions are temperamental

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and unreliable. Stanislavsky also recognized the introversion on stage that his
psychological processes were creating in his actors. The work of Jerzy Grotowski
(who cited Stanislavsky as his ‘master’), as well as a recent general growing interest
in physical approaches to performing led by exponents like Eugenio Barba, have
all confirmed the significance of this shift in Stanislavsky’s later years.
As a director, Stanislavsky was the central proponent in the new movement of
naturalism in the theatre. In spite of their disagreements, he championed Anton
Chekhov’s writing, acting in and directing several of the première productions of his
major plays like The Seagull (1897) and The Cherry Orchard (1904). Chekhov
cursed Stanislavsky’s tendency to fill the stage with overdetailed scenography, both
visual and aural, rather than relying on the stripped-back symbolism he desired. But
Stanislavsky’s meticulous explanation of the performance processes required for
naturalistic acting and the success and ambition of his productions still command
immense respect, however much questioning there has been of naturalism itself. His
techniques are taught in acting schools throughout the world and used widely in
rehearsals, though only in a few places are they followed through with such detail
and over such time scales of a year or more, as Stanislavsky proposed and practised.
His writings and exercises continue to be utilized extensively, if somewhat randomly,
with scant regard for their value as a total system. His work provided a systematic
base for students such as Evgeny Vakhtangov and Vsevolod Meyerhold to depart
from, and for Lee Strasberg to develop (though many would say misconstrue) into
the Method via students of Stanislavsky like Richard Boleslavsky, who went to work
in the United States of America.
Stanislavsky weathered the great changes in Russian society in the first two
decades of the twentieth century and was in the State’s and Stalin’s favour until his
death, however much Meyerhold and others decried his work as elitist and out of
touch. At the other end of the twentieth century, Perestroika in the Soviet Union
meant a further revision and embellishment of Stanislavsky’s theories. This has
encouraged new translations of his writings to replace Elizabeth Hapgood’s 1930s
and 1950s versions, which have been shown to be partial and highly selective.
Benedetti’s translations testify to the ongoing significance and continued re-evalu-
ation of Stanislavsky’s achievements and will reinvigorate ongoing research into
Stanislavsky’s work and related acting and directing practices.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

There is a vast amount of published material on Stanislavsky by recognized author-

ities like Benedetti and Whyman. Merlin has usefully updated thinking by drawing on
her own work as an actor in Britain and Russia. The Gorchakov and Toporkov trans-
lations provide illuminating insights into Stanislavsky’s methods of work. RPA

Benedetti, Jean (1982) Stanislavski: An Introduction, London: Methuen.

Carnicke, Sharon M. (1998) Stanislavsky in Focus, Amsterdam: Harwood.

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Gorchakov, Nikolai M. (1954) Stanislavski Directs, trans. Miriam Goldina, New York: Grosset
and Dunlap.
Merlin, Bella (2001) Beyond Stanislavski: The Psycho-Physical Approach to Actor Training,
London: Nick Hern Books.
—— (2003) Konstantin Stanislavsky, London: Routledge.
Stanislavski, Konstantin (1924) My Life in Art, trans. J. J. Robbins, London: Geoffrey Bles.
—— (2008) An Actor’s Work, trans. and ed. Jean Benedetti, London: Routledge; this includes
An Actor Prepares, [1937] and Building a Character, [1950].
—— (2009) An Actor’s Work on a Role, trans. and ed. Jean Benedetti, London: Routledge; this
includes Creating a Role [1957].
Toporkov, Vasily (1979) Stanislavski in Rehearsal: The Final Years, trans. Christine Edwards,
New York: Theatre Arts Books.
Whyman, Rose (2008) The Stanislavsky System of Acting: Legacy and Influence in Modern
Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

STELARC (AUSTRALIAN PERFORMANCE ARTIST, 1946–)

Stelarc (or Stelios Arcadiou, as he was formerly known) has extensively explored
notions of what it is to be human, frequently through solo performance works and in
both artistic and academic roles, the most recent of which is as Professor of Performance
Art at Brunel University outside London. This has led him to state that the body is
redundant, obsolete, and needs to be replaced or at least enhanced by technological
developments. In practice, he has demonstrated this shift towards artificial intelli-
gence, cyborgs, robots and advanced prosthetics through performance projects that
include the attachment of a robotic arm to his body to make a third hand, and the
connection of his body to the internet. For some of his early internet-based perfor-
mances (for example, Muscle Stimulator System, 1994), Stelarc used Stimbod
software that made electrical impulses activate him. His involuntary movements –
the disjointed jumpy dance of his wired-up limbs – were caused by electrical charges
stimulating selected muscles, programmed directly either by spectators present at
his events or by those thousands of kilometres away, moving him electronically via
the internet. His image was then relayed on to the internet through a ‘live’ website,
creating a dynamic cycle of Stelarc’s reactions and spectators’ stimuli. Stelarc has
also worked with external machinery and robots, ‘dancing’ with an industrial robot
of the kind found in car factories (various projects between 1991 and 1994). His and
the robot’s movements were programmed to modify each other’s patterns in a
random interactive sequence.
In his various writings, many of his statements may seem hyperbolic but they
perhaps anticipate the not-too-distant reality of extensive medical and technological
enhancement of the human body, reflected also in the performance work of Orlan.
Increasingly accessible plastic surgery and surgical enhancements make his work
with prosthetic robotic limbs and a third ear seem less and less experimental. The
irony is that even though he now uses sophisticated medical, computer-based and
engineering technologies, Stelarc’s performance art practice began with very
simple mechanisms, though with comparable risk – he famously suspended himself

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on meathooks above a New York street as part of his body suspension work (1976–
88). As well as showing body art performances and pictures from these events on
the internet, including his ‘stomach sculptures’ or images filmed by an internal probe,
he presents live work in numerous galleries and non-theatre spaces and has exten-
sively explored both the interior and exterior dimensions of the body. Through these
events he continues to test and question the parameters of acceptable exploitation of
the human form in a typically postmodern way. However serious the issues and the
potential consequences of his practice, it is inflected with a playful sensibility. He
appeals to the spectators’ voyeurism, opening himself up to their direct intervention
and whim as well as to life-threatening danger, be it from meathooks or power surges.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Writings about Stelarc range across collections like those listed below, which deal
generally with technology and human interactions. Smith’s more comprehensive
collection of essays solely on Stelarc also contains numerous photographs and an
interview with the artist. The Marsh text concerns the earlier period of Stelarc’s
work. Stelarc’s website is an excellent primary source including extensive film
material.

Geary, James (2002) The Body Electric: An Anatomy of the New Bionic Senses, London:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Hungate, Claire, Ian Farr and Sholto Ramsay (eds) (1996) Totally Wired: Science, Technology
and the Human Form, London: Institute of Contemporary Arts.
Marsh, Anne (1993) Body and Self: Performance Art in Australia 1969–92, Melbourne:
Oxford University Press.
Murphie, Andrew (1998) ‘Negotiating Presence: Performance and the New Technologies’, in
Culture, Technology and Creativity in the Late Twentieth Century, Philip Hayward (ed.),
London: John Libbery, pp. 209–26.
Smith, Marquard (ed.) (2007) Stelarc: The Monograph, Cambridge, Mass: MIT.
Stelarc. Online. Available http://stelarc.org/?catID=20247 (accessed 4 July 2013).
Stelarc (2005) Stelarc: The Body is Obsolete, Melbourne: Contemporary Arts Media. DVD
and CD-ROM.

SUZUKI, TADASHI (JAPANESE THEATRE DIRECTOR/THEORIST, 1939–)

Suzuki has a composite identity as director, trainer, designer of theatre spaces,
intercultural theorist and practitioner, and writer. He has directed a large number of
performances, many of which have attracted acclaim around the world, especially
The Trojan Women (1977), with Kayoko Shiraishi in the lead role, and The Bacchae
(1978). His creation and theorization of his training system – the Suzuki method – is
perhaps his most notable contribution to twentieth and twenty-first century perfor-
mance. It has transformed comprehension of the performer’s vocation and what
performing is, and is now taught in several universities and drama schools in North
America, as well as through regular training sessions in London and Australia. As

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well as working regularly with SCOT, the Suzuki Company of Toga, Suzuki has also
directed productions with just Australian and American actors, as well as with
Japanese and American actors combined in a production of Dionysus (1992),
performed in both English and Japanese. Through such projects and as an Asian
director he has made a significant and original contribution to intercultural debates,
initially through his book The Way of Acting (1986), a translation of one of the twelve
books he has published in Japanese. As part of his cross-cultural vision, he collabo-
rated with American director Anne Bogart, with whom he co-founded SITI, the
Saratoga International Theatre Institute (1992). Though now separate from Suzuki,
Bogart’s group is today one of the USA’s leading experimental companies, who still
use his training method.
Suzuki has developed a range of performance work, from intimate classical pieces
to outdoor celebratory spectacles with fireworks. One dominant form has been
collages of European texts, creating surprising conjunctions and juxtapositions. This
integration of multiple Eastern and Western sources applies to the music and scenog-
raphy he employs, as well as the spaces he has developed. For an outdoor theatre in
the village of Toga he mixed ancient Greek theatre architecture with elements from
a Noh stage, for example. In his performances, extracts of texts by Samuel Beckett
and Anton Chekhov sit alongside contemporary Japanese pop songs. His is an eclectic
postmodern directorial style that is rooted in his strict training method, centred on
the ‘grammar of the feet’.
Derived in part from the traditional Japanese forms of Noh and Kabuki, this
‘grammar’ uses ways of walking and movements centred on the lower half of the
body to challenge and ground the performer. It tests the performer’s stamina and
concentration as well as physical flexibility, muscular strength and spatial sensitivity,
generating what Suzuki calls ‘animal energy’ in the performer. Suzuki believes
actors need to rediscover the body’s potential, which has been neglected in the name
of progress and civilization. The theatre should return to non-electricity-dependent
resources, as in premodern forms such as Noh or the Elizabethan stage. Suzuki has
followed this idea through in locating his practice outside of the metropolis of Tokyo.
From 1976 he was based in the tiny village of Toga in the remote Japanese alps,
where he founded Japan’s first international theatre festival in 1982. The Toga Arts
Park contains a mixture of theatre spaces, including a Noh-like farmhouse theatre
and an outdoor amphitheatre overlooking a lake. Crucially, it has also provided a
‘home’ for SCOT. In the 1990s, his empire expanded, when (with architectural
collaborator Arata Isozaki) he oversaw the building and management of a theatre in a
newly built arts centre in the city of Mito, and then developed a multi-million-pound
arts park in hills outside the city of Shizuoka, an hour from Tokyo. Since the late
1990s Suzuki has been touring the world under the auspices of the Theatre Olympics
Festival, which he co-founded, and of which the fifth festival took place in South
Korea in 2010. He has energized and experimented with contemporary Japanese
theatre as much as he has challenged the dominance of naturalist and psychologi-
cally-based acting processes in the West.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Only one of Suzuki’s many books has been published in English. Both Allain and
Carruthers and Takahashi introduce all aspects of Suzuki’s work, with Allain’s
second edition text also comprising a DVD demonstrating the Suzuki method.
SCOT’s website is quite limited but has some basic information in English.

Allain, Paul (2009) The Theatre Practice of Tadashi Suzuki, London: Methuen.
Carruthers, Ian and Yasunari Takahashi (2004) The Theatre of Suzuki Tadashi, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Shizuoka Performing Arts Center. Online. Available www.spac.or.jp (accessed 4 July 2013).
Suzuki Company of Toga. Online. Available www.scot-suzukicompany.com/en/ (accessed 4
July 2013).
Suzuki, Tadashi (1986) The Way of Acting, New York: Theatre Communications Group.

TURNER, VICTOR (BRITISH ANTHROPOLOGIST/THEORIST/TEACHER,

1920–83)
Turner embraced connections between anthropology and performance, most notably
through his collaboration and friendship with Richard Schechner. After his initial
fieldwork with the Ndembu tribe of Central Africa, he researched the nature of
symbols, play, pilgrimages and the dramatic properties inherent in social rituals in
various contexts, both tribal and industrial. Building on the pioneering ideas of
anthropologist Arnold van Gennep, who attempted to classify the liminal structure of
rituals, Turner further defined a distinction between the liminal and liminoid. He saw
the former term as an essential element of play or rituals, denoting how participants
enter into a ‘betwixt-and-between’ field of behaviour outside social rules of space
and time, where symbols might suggest links to the sacred. The liminal is familiar to
tribal societies where rituals do not tend to have a subversive agenda, but rather
endorse the status quo. The liminoid refers to more complex modes of play found in
modern societies, in which people might choose to participate or not, and which
often have transgressive potential. One example Turner gives is radical performance,
a connection that brought him into contact with theatre-makers like Schechner.
Turner’s thinking has offered anthropological models to reflect on performance
but has also reversed this process using dramatic forms and practices both to analyse
social behaviour and to perform ethnographic research. For example, he analysed the
features that dramaturgical structures in classical drama have in common with ritu-
alized social practices, or ‘social dramas’ as he called them, and he ‘staged’ rituals
with his students in order to elucidate their understanding of how and why rites of
passage mark important moments in life. He and his wife and collaborator Edith
called this practice ‘performing ethnography’.
Turner continually broadened the scope of anthropological studies and theories,
partly through contact with experimental performance in America, a country in
which he spent most of his working life. Before his death he wrote ‘Body, Brain and

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Culture’ (1983), in response to growing interest in brain-mapping and attempts to

explain consciousness. This explored the idea that there might in fact be a biologi-
cally determined desire or need for the kind of play that is found in rituals, which
exists outside cultural constructs of games and socialization. Controversially, this
questioned much anthropological theory, including the premises of most of his life’s
research. It is a line of enquiry disputed by theorists like Judith Butler who have
emphasized the importance of cultural constructions of identity and behaviour over
and above biologically determined givens. Turner’s new avenue of research was
tentative and unfinished, but its fundamental principles were explored in subsequent
writings by Schechner and in the practice of Jerzy Grotowski, who investigated the
possible existence of universal behaviour that is not culturally determined. Through
his research, Turner built a bridge between studies of everyday life and
performance.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

This lists the books by Turner that are most relevant to theatre and performance.
Schechner’s texts articulate some of the connections between their ideas.

Schechner, Richard (1985) Between Theater and Anthropology, Philadelphia: University of

Pennsylvania Press.
—— (1993) The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance, London: Routledge.
Turner, Victor (1969) The Ritual Process, Chicago: Aldine.
—— (1974) Drama, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society, Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press.
—— (1982) From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, New York: Performing
Arts Journal Press.
—— (1986) The Anthropology of Performance, New York: PAJ Publications.

WILSON, ROBERT (AMERICAN DIRECTOR/SCENOGRAPHER/PERFORMER/

WRITER/VISUAL ARTIST, 1941–)

For his revolutionary work in creating a theatre of images – which explores and
promotes the visual potentials of space, light, objects, figures, costumes and
movement – Robert Wilson is one of the most important directors of the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries. Throughout a prolific and celebrated international career,
he has challenged conventional theatre practice, especially its emphasis on natural-
istic representational idioms, de-emphasizing the text in the theatre event and
concentrating instead on the formal, postdramatic properties of image, time, space,
movement and sound.
Wilson’s concern with form typically means that his shows appear stylistically
surreal, moving without apparent psychological motivation from image to image.
Trained in painting and architecture, he often begins work on his productions by
drawing his shows in black-and-white storyboards that feature starkly minimalist,

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abstract landscapes. The storyboards are translated into usually very large proscenium
arch stagings, with action – or near-static images or shapes of light – filling the
vertical plane. In A Letter for Queen Victoria (1974), the visual composition of the
stage was inspired by an envelope, with the horizontal and vertical planes providing
a rectangular shape and diagonal lines of light, and with costume and performer
movement sometimes cohering to suggest the envelope’s flap. Wilson’s sets are
pictorial, architectural and often abstract, resisting naturalism’s ‘real life’ and
offering instead what may appear to be dream, fantasy or meditation.
Wilson experiments also with the formal properties of time, exploring what
aesthetic, emotional and psychological effects can be produced by drawing action
out, or by juxtaposing slow and quick movements. Action is often performed repeti-
tively, in a non-linear structure, in a style Wilson has described as ‘politely mannered’,
or over great lengths of time. The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin (1973) was 12
hours in duration, and KA MOUNTain and GUARDenia Terrace (Iran, 1972) took
seven days to perform. He experiments, too, with sound. Frequent repetition of words
in his productions focuses attention on their formal properties – length and sound –
rather than their meanings. For Wilson, the crucial feature of an opera is not sound
but action.
Wilson’s theatre is innovative, in terms not only of what it is but also of how it is
made. His renown as an auteur director suggests that, because his shows are firmly
imprinted with his signature style, his mode of direction must be autocratic. Certainly,
his ways of working can be repetitive, mechanical, demanding, unfamiliar and
uncomfortable for many performers, asking them, for example, to adopt positions in
the stage picture rather than to build a character or find a motivation. But, given that
Wilson’s sets of rules can be seen as simply different from other more conventional
sets of rules, it is perhaps not surprising that many performers have found Wilson’s
style of directing productively challenging.
Arguments for seeing Wilson’s auteurism as autocratic should also be set
alongside the fact that he is a keen collaborator. Early in his career he co-created
scripts for silent operas with Raymond Andrews, a deaf-mute boy (Deafman Glance,
1971), and scripts that explored fractured language with Christopher Knowles, a
teenage boy who had been diagnosed with brain damage (A Letter for Queen
Victoria). (Wilson himself overcame a teenage speech impediment through work
with a dancer, Mrs Byrd Hoffman, after whom he named his first theatre company,
The Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, in 1968.) Subsequent writer-collaborators include
Susan Sontag (Alice in Bed, 1993), William S. Burroughs (The Black Rider: The
Casting of the Magic Bullets, 1991), the German playwright Heiner Müller, who
co-authored the German section of Wilson’s multinational epic the CIVIL warS: a
tree is best measured when it is down (1983–84) and Marina Abramović with
whom he made The Life and Death of Marina Abramović (2011). Music collabo-
rators include Laurie Anderson (Alcestis, 1986), opera singer Jessye Norman (Great
Day in the Morning, 1982), and Philip Glass, with whom Wilson and another frequent
collaborator, choreographer Lucinda Childs, produced Einstein on the Beach (1976;
see Figure 4).

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 W I LSON, ROBERT

Although Wilson’s work has maintained a striking aesthetic consistency

throughout his career, it has also made a number of sizeable shifts. After devising
silent operas and plays that deconstructed language, he began to produce more
literary plays that were still elliptical and lyrical (the CIVIL warS), and then more
classical plays and operas. In this later period, he has directed and designed many
plays by modernists, such as Henrik Ibsen (When We Dead Awaken, 1991), Gertrude
Stein (Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, 1992), August Strindberg (A Dream Play,
1998) and Samuel Beckett (Happy Days, 2008; Krapp’s Last Tape, 2009). He has
also designed and directed numerous operas, including Wagner’s Parsifal (Hamburg,
1991) and Lohengrin (Zürich, 1991; New York, 1998) and Puccini’s Madame
Butterfly (Paris, 1993–97). As well as directing and designing, Wilson sometimes
performs as in Hamlet: A Monologue (1995). He also makes a variety of other forms
of visual art, including sculpture, painting, drawing and installation (for example,
H.G., London, 1995).
Wilson’s work has frequently been criticized for being elitist, both aesthetically
and financially. His innovations and expansions in physical and temporal scale have
indeed had implications for the financial scope of his work, usually making it very
expensive to produce. For much of his career, this condition has resulted in his work
being produced more frequently in European countries with relatively high levels of
state subsidy to the theatre (especially Germany) than in Wilson’s native USA, not to
mention any non-Western contexts. In his defence, Wilson sometimes uses amateur
performers in his productions, so that in this respect at least participation can be seen
as not elitist (unless one considers him to be exploiting these amateurs). Wilson’s
theatre may certainly not be without fault, but in a theatre industry dominated by
realism his formalism is startling, provocative and welcome. His theatre demon-
strates the potentially awe-inspiring effects that can be produced by experimenting in
epic scales of time and space and by prioritizing the making of images over the
speaking of text.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brecht, Donker, Holmberg and Shyer all provide sustained description and analysis
of Wilson’s work. Safir offers a richly illustrated collection of interviews with his
many collaborators.

Brecht, Stefan (1978) The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp
Verlag.
Donker, Janny (1985) The President of Paradise: A Traveller’s Account of Robert Wilson’s the
CIVIL warS, Amsterdam: International Theatre Bookshop.
Holmberg, Arthur (1997) The Theatre of Robert Wilson, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Robert Wilson. Online. Available www.robertwilson.com/ (accessed 14 October 2013).
Safir, Margery Arent (ed.) (2011) Robert Wilson from Within, Paris: The Arts Arena and
Flammarion, SA.

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Shyer, Laurence (1989) Robert Wilson and His Collaborators, New York: Theatre
Communications Group.
Simmer, Bill (1976) ‘Theatre and Therapy: Robert Wilson’, TDR: The Drama Review 20.1
(T69): 99–110. Partially reprinted in Rebecca Schneider and Gabrielle Cody (eds) (2002)
Re:Direction: A Theoretical and Practical Guide, London: Routledge, pp. 147–56.
Wilson, Robert ([1977] 1996) A Letter for Queen Victoria in The Theatre of Images, Bonnie
Marranca (ed.), Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Originally published by
Drama Book Specialists.

WOOSTER GROUP (PERFORMANCE GROUP, FOUNDED NEW YORK, 1975)

The Wooster Group has pioneered politically-engaged postmodern and postdra-
matic performance to a degree and with longevity unmatched in American experi-
mental performance from the last quarter of the twentieth century onwards. Made up
of a small core ensemble of artists, some of the Group’s original members, including
director Elizabeth LeCompte and performer Spalding Gray, were working with
Richard Schechner’s The Performance Group when they splintered to form their
own company in 1975. This new group developed many of Schechner’s practices –
including strategies for collectively devising and eclectically composing their work
– while dropping others, particularly his emphasis on ritual and his promotion of the
director as a kind of guru. Based in the Performing Garage in SoHo, New York City,
the company’s main members have included LeCompte, Willem Dafoe, Kate Valk,
Jim Clayburgh, Peyton Smith, Scott Shepherd, Ari Fliakos and Ron Vawter and
Spalding Gray (who died in 1994 and 2004, respectively). The company has won
many awards (including, for LeCompte, a National Endowment for the Arts
Distinguished Artist’s Fellowship for Lifetime Achievement) and has toured widely
in the USA, Europe, Asia, South America and Canada, influencing many other
theatre-makers.
The Wooster Group’s work is aesthetically pioneering and politically radical and
pivots around combining old and new texts and practices to interrogate the cultural
power of both. In content, the Group’s productions typically collage elements from
classic modern plays (usually from the American repertoire) with elements of
personal and Group autobiography and diverse samplings from popular culture,
including material which is culturally taboo. Route 1 & 9 (The Last Act) (1981)
combined Thornton Wilder’s Our Town with pornography and a Pigmeat Markham
comic routine from the 1960s performed by the company in blackface. LSD (. . . Just
the High Points . . .) (1984) combined Arthur Miller’s The Crucible with accounts of
Timothy Leary’s experiments with LSD. Juxtapositions like these produce new reso-
nances in both sources of material, often working to deconstruct the assumed elitism
of the ‘classic’ texts and to expose some of the prejudices – about race, gender, and
age for example – on which they rely. In form, the company is exploring and experi-
menting with a host of theatre languages available to it alongside dramatic text,
including dance, scenography and the multimedia potentials of video and lighting
and sound design. Sets are often organized around tiered metal grids, with on-stage

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video playback and microphones, and with tables facing audiences for the performers’
presentation of material. These sets and the presentational style they facilitate have
acquired a signature status and spawned numerous imitative ‘table plays’ – for
example, Forced Entertainment’s Speak Bitterness (1994) and The Travels (2002).
Stylistically, the productions are again eclectic, intercutting documentary-style pres-
entation with naturalistic scenes (which are often, however, estranged through
video or microphone mediation) and sequences of flamboyant theatricality often
involving dance (for example, the shoe dance at the end of LSD) or other forms of
athletic movement such as playing badminton in To You, the Birdie! (Phèdre) (2001),
based on Jean Racine’s Phèdre (and pictured on this book’s cover).
The political engagement of the Wooster Group’s work operates on multiple
fronts. The work deconstructs received high cultural artefacts, especially classic
plays, and queries popular assumptions about what theatre should do and be. While
acknowledging the power and seduction of naturalism’s illusionistic performance,
the Group’s work also challenges its cultural dominance and perceived truth through
a number of alienation techniques – for example, showing the actor putting drops in
his eyes to simulate tears, and replaying a monologue, first as emotionally-charged
realism and a second time accelerated and ridiculous (both in LSD). Finally, it
provokes debate about the responsibilities of both producing and consuming culture
by explicitly including controversial material, the most spectacular example being
the blackface in Route 1 & 9, for which the company temporarily lost a major portion
of its public funding.
A pioneer in postmodern American performance, the Wooster Group celebrates
performance’s pleasures (the actor’s presence, classic texts’ literary achievement,
the thrill of high energy dance), interrogates its prejudices, explores the new forms it
might take, is fiercely (if not straightforwardly) socially-engaged and remains
committed to democratic methods of devising. The Group continues to make chal-
lenging productions, including Brace Up! (1991), which combined Chekhov’s Three
Sisters with Japanese theatre forms and on-stage video capture and playback; House/
Lights (1998), based on Gertrude Stein’s Dr Faustus Lights the Lights (1939) and the
1964 softcore bondage film Olga’s House of Shame; and HAMLET (2006) which
combined Shakespeare’s text with Richard Burton’s 1964 Broadway production of
the play. In its exploration of new media, it has also made radio works and several
videos, including White Homeland Commando (1992). The company increasingly
collaborates with other companies such as the UK-based Royal Shakespeare
Company and the New York City Players. Famous and extremely influential, the
Wooster Group also remains one of the most energetically innovative theatre
companies.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Savran provides detailed descriptions and analysis of many productions up to the late
1980s, while Shank describes and analyses work through the 1990s. Callens collects
new essays on both the Group and other companies and directors it has influenced,

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including The Builders Association and Richard Maxwell’s New York City Players.
Auslander’s books analyse the Group’s work, especially LSD. Giesekam considers
the Group’s work in the context of postmodernism. Quick’s book provides great
insight into the Group’s processes. The Group’s website has extensive video
resources and other information and material.

Auslander, Philip (1992) Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in
Contemporary American Performance, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
—— (1997) From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism and Postmodernism, London:
Routledge.
Callens, Johan (ed.) (2004) The Wooster Group and Its Traditions, Brussels: Peter Lang.
Giesekam, Greg (2002) ‘The Wooster Group’, Postmodernism: The Key Figures, Hans Bertens
and Joseph Natoli (eds), Oxford: Blackwell.
Quick, Andrew (2007) The Wooster Group Work Book, Oxon: Routledge.
Savran, David (1988) Breaking the Rules: The Wooster Group, New York: Theatre
Communications Group.
Shank, Theodore (2002) Beyond the Boundaries: American Alternative Theatre, revised and
updated edition, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
The Wooster Group. Online. Available http://thewoostergroup.org/blog/ (accessed 14 October
2013).

ZEAMI, MOTOKIYO (JAPANESE NOH ACTOR/THEORIST/PLAYWRIGHT,

1363–1443)
Zeami is one of the founders of Noh theatre. He wrote approximately 100 of the
extant 240 Noh plays. His insights, and those of his father (Kanami Kiyotsugu), into
the practices and concepts of this ancient form provide one of the fullest and earliest
analyses of performing and performance, and are equivalent perhaps to Bharata-
muni’s Natyasastra (from India) and to a lesser extent Aristotle’s Poetics. Zeami’s
treatises categorized principles like Grace (yugen) and the Flower (hana – the spir-
itual quality and presence a performer can acquire with maturity, insight and
practice), as well as more pragmatic notions like ‘reading the audience’. His work
offers not only invaluable historical information but vital instruction to the contem-
porary performer, even though he does not fit within the temporal parameters of this
book.
Zeami’s writings have also influenced several European artists, including Edward
Gordon Craig, Eugenio Barba, Peter Brook and Jerzy Grotowski, some directly
and others more obliquely. Several Japanese experimental theatre practitioners, like
Tadashi Suzuki, returned to his work keenly in the 1960s, reacting against shingeki,
the Japanese version of Western realism, and in order to return to the source of
Japanese theatre. European and Asian performance practitioners have been attracted
to several aspects of his work: the long apprenticeship of decades rather than years
which he proposes; his combination of pragmatism (for example, how to structure
events in the day-long Noh festivals) and spirituality; his technical advice to the
performer on sustaining energy and focus on stage; and the structured

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methodological approach of a performer moving through different ‘levels’, which

peak in ‘The art of the flower of peerless charm’. Zeami also defined performing as
a ‘way’ of being, a principle shared by theatre directors and martial artists alike, and
evident in groups that range from The Living Theatre and Bread and Puppet
Theatre in the US to Poland’s Gardzienice Theatre Association.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

For a long time Rimer and Masakazu’s book has been recognized as the standard
translation of Zeami’s treatises in English, though Wilson updates this. Quinn and
Hare’s texts give invaluable insights into the total range of Zeami’s practices and
theories.

Quinn, Shelley Fenno (2005) Developing Zeami: the Noh actor’s attunement in practice,
Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press.
Zeami, Motokiyo (1984) On the Art of the No Drama – The Major Treatises of Zeami, trans.
J. Thomas Rimer and Yamazaki Masakazu, New Jersey: University of Princeton Press.
—— (2006) The Spirit of Noh, trans. William Scott Wilson, Boston: Shambhala Publications
Inc.
—— (2008) Zeami: Performance Notes, trans. Tom Hare, New York: Columbia University
Press.

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 Part II
EVENTS
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 4' 33"

4' 33" (BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE, NORTH CAROLINA; ‘COMPOSED’

BY JOHN CAGE; 1952)

Conceived by John Cage, 4' 33" (four minutes and thirty-three seconds) constructed
the absence of music. This timed period of silence invited the audience to listen not
to the piano playing of concert pianist David Tudor but instead to incidental sounds
– their own breathing, coughs or the rustling of programmes. Tudor began 4' 33" by
lifting the lid of a grand piano. He ended by replacing the lid. Between these two
clearly defined actions he moved his arms three times, breaking the whole compo-
sition into three movements, in both the literal sense of the word and in terms of a
musical score. The elements of chance, non-intentionality and naturally occurring
sounds which made up 4' 33" were features that also appeared in many of Cage’s
later works. The piece’s significance lay in its insistence that auditors or spectators
must find their own meanings in the performance rather than respond to the expressive
ideas of the artists. Through this seemingly simple decision, Cage defined the process
of creativity as an essentially democratic one. He was undermining his status as a
composer who intentionally constructs sounds to affect the spectator. But he was
also playfully negating Tudor’s role as a virtuoso musician, as the piece prevented
both artists from demonstrating their talents.
Not surprisingly, 4' 33" ’s first audience was deeply provoked and the piece
generated avid debate. It was an early example of, and inspiration for, the kind of
provocative practices that became widespread in the 1960s, initially known as
happenings and then performance art. These all questioned the audience’s role as
passive observers and tried to make them somehow the object of the performance. 4'
33" still stands up as a conceptually challenging event, continuing to fuel debates
about the nature of art. In summer 2002, it was the centre of a copyright dispute when
composer Mike Batt was accused by Cage’s estate of plagiarism when he included a
piece called ‘A Minute’s Silence’ on his album Classical Graffiti. Batt settled out of
court. In January 2004, the piece was played for the first time in Britain by a full
orchestra in a season of Cage’s works titled ‘John Cage Uncaged’, and transmitted on
the radio. These examples and the interest that surrounded both events and Cage’s
centennial in 2012 indicate how much the piece still lies firmly within the public
consciousness and how it still functions as a paradigm of the extreme nature of some
creative explorations. Recent interest in theatre and sound is extending and enriching
such debates.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Understandably, none of these texts gives much detail about the performance, but
rather they follow questions and issues it provoked, picked up in Kendrick and
Roesner’s book which indicates the growth of interest in acoustic aspects of theatre
and performance. Kaye places the work in a broader context of the history of post-
modern performance.

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Cage, John (1967) A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings, Middletown, CN:
Wesleyan University Press.
—— (1968) Silence: Lectures and Writings, London: Calder and Boyars.
Kahn, Douglas (1999) ‘The Impossible Inaudible’, in Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound
in the Arts, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, pp. 155–99.
Kaye, Nick (1994) Postmodernism and Performance, London: Macmillan.
Kendrick, Lynne and David Roesner (eds) (2011) Theatre Noise: The Sound of Performance,
Newcastle: Cambridge University Scholars.
Kostelanetz, Richard (ed.) (1993) Writings About John Cage, Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press.

ARAB SPRING (NORTH AFRICAN AND MIDDLE EASTERN PEOPLE’S

REVOLUTIONS, LATE 2010–)

The Arab Spring is a series of large-scale, citizen-led national revolutions across

North Africa and the Middle East that rose to prominence in December 2010 in
Tunisia and quickly spread to Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria amongst other places
throughout 2011 and beyond. In different nations, particular local conditions spurred
protest, demonstration, mass sit-ins and rioting. For example, in Tunisia, national
protests erupted when 26-year-old street trader and sole breadwinner for a family of
eight Mohammed Bouazizi set himself alight after a policewoman confiscated his
unlicensed cart and scales and assaulted him. However, the many revolutions shared
numerous common causes and were ignited by a momentum that unfurled across the
region, aided in large part by widespread use of the internet and appropriation of
such corporate social media platforms as Facebook and Twitter as well as YouTube
and Flickr. Protest was both violent and non-violent and, in general, denounced
entrenched repressive governments. It also condemned such corollary problems as
human rights violations, political corruption, plutocratic decadence, rising prices,
high levels of poverty and high rates of unemployment, especially amongst large
populations of comparatively well-educated young people. Its effectiveness across
the region has been variable. Many regimes have fallen but many are still in flux, not
least, at the time of writing, that in Syria.
The Arab Spring is particularly socially significant because it indicates epochal
– and ongoing – change in a region marked by serious social deprivation, social
repression and conflict. Though similar to other mass political protests, the Arab
Spring is distinctive partly for the great number of nations it encompassed so quickly
and for its perception as the first major revolution of the social media age, where
protesters used not only their own internet-based websites but appropriated corporate
social networking sites. Performance studies might particularly help us understand
the Arab Spring in several ways. In many nations, performative acts such as singing
revolutionary songs were punished by state authorities in moves that only provoked
more public protest; representational acts of performance often proved more powerful
than material acts of State violence. Like other populist protests – such as in China’s
Tiananmen Square in 1989, the protests of las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in

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Argentina since 1977, Czechoslovakia’s 1968 Prague Spring and the Occupy
movement of 2011 on – Arab Spring protesters in their thousands occupied highly
symbolic public spaces such as Tahrir Square in central Cairo. This occupation
allowed them not only to share opinions, strategize, mobilize and challenge the State
authority often vested in those spaces, but also to make globally visible through
media their sheer numbers and their force of shared feeling, sometimes represented
through wearing particular colours, or waving specific flags. In ways that would
previously have been unimaginable, social media allowed them to organize masses
of people, evade state sponsorship and maintain control over the global dissemi-
nation of information about their conditions, demands and experiences of state
repression. The importance of social media in organizing these live, public protests
indicates that, as in debates about mediatization and liveness, cyberspace and ‘real’
space are mutually contingent and not as distinctive as they might at first appear. It
also raises questions about the relative and long-term effectiveness of these appar-
ently leaderless revolutions where communication is so dispersed, making it difficult
to arrest revolutionary leaders but also potentially challenging to focus revolutionary
aims. And it provokes consideration of the internet’s broader political efficacy and
control. Although the internet is used globally not only for the dissemination of
information and opinions, more often it is used for marketing, consumerism and
entertainment. Though it can be used for revolutionary ends, it is also widely scruti-
nized by governments, often in ways that make state censorship invisible rather than
transparent. And its corporate control by American companies begs questions about
how independent its use can ever be, either ideologically or commercially.
The Arab Spring is unfinished at the time of writing; its effects in its own region
and beyond have been and continue to be monumental.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gerbaudo offers detailed information on and analysis of Arab Spring events in Egypt
(as well as protests in Spain and New York), focusing on their articulation through
new media. Noueihed and Warren’s book describes and analyses relevant events
before and during the Arab Spring across the Arab world. Azmy and Carlson’s
co-edited special issue of Theatre Research International looks at the importance of
both theatre and performance (including enactments in Tahrir Square) to the Arab
Spring. The special issue of the journal Globalizations on ‘Arab Revolutions’
includes articles relating revolution to humour and to social media.

Azmy, Hazem and Marvin Carlson (eds) (2013) Theatre Research International, Special Issue
on ‘Theatre and the Arab Spring’, 38:2 (July).
Gerbaudo, Paolo (2012) Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism,
London: Pluto Press.
Globalizations (2011) Special Forum on the Arab Revolutions, 8:5 (October).
Noueihed, Lin and Alex Warren (2012) The Battle for the Arab Spring: Revolution, Counter-
revolution and the Making of a New Era, New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

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BALINESE DANCE-THEATRE (THE DUTCH PAVILION, PARIS COLONIAL

EXPOSITION; DIRECTED BY COKORDA RAKA SUKAWATI; 1931)

This dance-theatre presentation has come to epitomize the infiltration of Asian

performance into Western theatre, shaping its practices and theories alike and taking
it inexorably on a path towards interculturalism. This performance was not,
however, by any means the first appearance of Asian performing arts in the West.
For example, W. B. Yeats had already seen Japanese theatre in Europe and had been
working with a Japanese dancer, Mr Ito, when he wrote his Noh-inspired Four Plays
for Dancers, published in 1920. But the fact that Antonin Artaud saw this particular
performance which inspired his essay ‘On the Balinese Theatre’ in The Theatre and
Its Double (1938) has thrust this specific event irrevocably into the limelight.
Presented in a mock-temple setting, the presentation included short modernized
extracts from a myriad of Balinese forms – Balinese dance-theatre includes the
popular Barong dance, the sacred Wali dance and the warrior dance Baris, all of
which have centuries-long genealogies. The irony in Artaud’s analysis and the subse-
quent significance this has accrued is that he misunderstood what he was watching
and its context, investing in the performance the spirituality and history he desired
for his own theatre. He misinterpreted the performers’ codified hand gestures as
abstract ‘hieroglyphics’, and he emphatically imbued the rather artificial event with a
mysticism that the performers did not themselves intend to convey. Rather than
being an authentic enactment of a Balinese sacred dance, the performance was prag-
matically devised to entertain paying visitors to the exposition. Nevertheless, the
Balinese dance-theatre’s gamelan music and striking physicality helped Artaud
envisage a total theatre, much as Bertold Brecht’s meeting with Chinese performer
Mei Lan Fang four years later supported the development of his theory of alienation.
We can also use Artaud’s essay to gauge Western theatre artists’ growing preoccu-
pation and frustration with the limitations of naturalist mimesis.
Balinese ritual performance in its own domestic context has also become known
through anthropologist Margaret Mead’s film footage, which shows performers in
trance piercing themselves with the long thin ceremonial knives known as kris. The
ethnographic film Trance and Dance in Bali (1952) is based on fieldwork conducted
in Bali from 1936 to 1938 by Mead and her husband Gregory Bateson, with cinema-
tographer Jane Belo. The access such documentaries and their earlier album Balinese
Character: A Photographic Analysis (1942) give to sacred ritual practices has led to
deeper analyses of trance states in several investigations of acting. Within a wide
spectrum of approaches to acting, the total absorption of those in trance stands at the
other end from the detachment espoused by Brecht. Such analyses also emphasize
the differences between what the spectator and the performer perceive even on a
biological level, with the trance-dancer insensitive to the pain that spectators might
assume he feels.
Artaud’s limited perception during a time of still intense imperialism differs
greatly from the later detailed anthropological surveys produced by Belo and Mead,
and shows how understanding moved on. Hindsight has helped us understand the

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necessity of mutual insight into the ‘other’s’ position and context in cross-cultural
projects. The exoticizing contained within his essay – perhaps inevitable, given the
falsifying nature of the exposition – reminds us of the impositions and assumptions
potentially implicit in intercultural projects. Current examinations of Asian perfor-
mance practices by outsiders must now have a more sophisticated sense of alter-
native perspectives, thanks in part to the knowledge Artaud and anthropological
studies and documentation such as Mead’s have bestowed.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The two essays cited here look at the specific misunderstandings in Artaud’s writing
and the implications of this, while Schechner looks at the relationship between
theatre and anthropology in general, including discussions of trance and Balinese
performance.

Artaud, Antonin (1970) The Theatre and Its Double, London: Calder and Boyars.
Belo, Jane (1960) Trance in Bali, New York: Columbia University Press.
Savarese, Nicola (2001) ‘Antonin Artaud Sees Balinese Theatre at the Paris Colonial
Exposition’, The Drama Review 45.3 (T171): 55–77.
Schechner, Richard (1985) Between Theater and Anthropology, Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
Winet, Evan (1998) ‘Great Reckonings in a Simulated City: Artaud’s Misunderstanding of
Balinese Theatre’, in Crosscurrents in the Drama – East and West, Stanley Vincent
Longman (ed.), Alabama: University of Alabama Press and Southeastern Theatre
Conference, pp. 98–107.

CABARET VOLTAIRE (ZURICH, SWITZERLAND; PERFORMED BY VARIOUS

ARTISTS; 5 FEBRUARY 1916)

The first night of the Cabaret Voltaire saw the birth of a challenging movement
called Dada that has influenced much performance experimentation since, especially
theatre of the absurd, performance art and happenings. These events performed
in the neutral country of Switzerland during the First World War had destructive and
irrational drives that chimed with the nihilism of the surrounding mass slaughter.
Dada’s appeal also lay in the fact that it cut across artistic boundaries with partici-
pants drawn from literature, music, theatre and the plastic arts. Consequently, its
impact has also traversed disciplines. Antonin Artaud and Tadeusz Kantor are just
two amongst many theatre artists who were clearly inspired by the surrealist
movement into which it evolved.
The word ‘dada’ itself, selected when plucked randomly from a dictionary, means
a horse or a hobbyhorse in French and ‘yes, yes’ in Russian, and it indicates the
movement’s attempt to deny all significance, to resist categorization and, ultimately,
to destroy art. The nature of the first Cabaret Voltaire performance at No. 1
Spiegelgasse in Zurich was eclectic, including shouted poems, folk songs, the display

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of paintings, the recitation of manifestos, drumming and short sketches. Nightly

themed performances ensued (initially these were country-specific based on mate-
rials from Russia, France and Switzerland), with both solo and collaborative work,
most of it provocative. Performers played with words and reduced them to sounds
in order to displace their functionality. With the exception of the highly-skilled
cabaret performer Emmy Hennings, performances were rough and ready, denying
virtuosity, professionalism or dramaturgical organization. The simultaneous
reading of poems and nonsense texts accompanied by cacophonic noise, masks and
absurd costumes led to riotous audience responses. Such interaction became
commonplace and was even encouraged. As this animation and the audience’s hunger
for scandal grew, so did the performers experiment more wildly, striving to keep
breaking their own rules.
The Cabaret Voltaire closed after five months. It had had some popular success,
but its influence went well beyond these events alone. The Dada movement that the
Cabaret spawned has provided a constant reminder of the ability, and perhaps indeed
the necessity, of art to disturb the public and their expectations, and continually to
move beyond the parameters which it establishes.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

There is a wealth of material on Dadaism, but these texts place it in relation to the
evolution of performance and its beginnings at the Cabaret Voltaire.

Esslin, Martin (1961) Theatre of the Absurd, New York: Doubleday.

Goldberg, RoseLee (1988) Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, revised and
expanded edition, London: Thames and Hudson.
Melzer, Annabelle Henkin ([1976] 1994) Dada and Surrealist Performance, Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press.

CHERRY ORCHARD, THE (MOSCOW, RUSSIA, MOSCOW ART THEATRE

[MAT]; DIRECTED BY KONSTANTIN STANISLAVSKY, WRITTEN BY ANTON
CHEKHOV; 17 JANUARY 1904)
At the beginning of the twentieth century this production cemented the place of
naturalism as a dominant and successful form, even though it had its detractors.
These included Vsevolod Meyerhold and Chekhov himself, who saw The Cherry
Orchard as comic and symbolic rather than the tragic slice of life for which
Konstantin Stanislavsky strove. With designer Viktor Simov, Stanislavsky loaded
his production of the play with sound effects such as frogs and corncrakes and
numerous scenographic elements, like a mound of hay, whereas in the text Chekhov
had stipulated the vast emptiness of the steppe. Chekhov’s desire for minimalist
symbolism clashed head-on with Stanislavsky’s own love of stage technology and
conspicuous detail. In spite of such conflicts during the process, the audience
responded positively to this verisimilitude at The Cherry Orchard’s première, timed

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to coincide with an ailing Chekhov’s birthday. The play acted as an epitaph to the
vanishing life of the gentry in the early years of the new century and signalled the
changes sweeping through Russia before the imminent revolutions. This change was
embodied in the character Lopakhin, who surprises even himself by buying the
orchard in order then to chop it down and exploit the land commercially. The end of
Act 4 resonates to the sound of axes and the orchard’s destruction. The play became
the longest-running Chekhov piece in the Moscow Art Theatre’s (MAT) repertoire
and has subsequently become one of Chekhov’s most produced works, the focus of
its social critique shifting for each epoch and culture that produces it. Chekhov died
shortly after the MAT production, closing the debates that had raged between himself
and Stanislavsky as to the timbre of his plays. However, these differences continued
in the tensions between Stanislavsky and Meyerhold regarding their divergent
approaches to directing.
Though numerous other plays and productions could supplant The Cherry
Orchard as a paradigm of early twentieth-century naturalist theatre, it has become
emblematic of such work. The play has proved versatile enough to allow diverse
approaches like Peter Brook’s stripped-back production at his Thêátre Les Bouffes
du Nord, Paris in 1981, Tadashi Suzuki’s 1986 intercultural version that mixed
Japanese pop songs with traditional forms, or Giorgio Strehler’s rather more poetic
rendition in 1974. The naturalist detail of its première was often emulated, though,
and as a result its over-complex detail has reinforced both skewed notions of what
naturalism is and how Chekhov might stereotypically be interpreted (with white dust
sheets, dull lassitude and bubbling samovars). This production of The Cherry
Orchard reminds us how canonized theatre so easily starts to reproduce not so much
everyday life but in fact itself alone.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The play and its production have spawned numerous analyses, such as the ones by
Edward Braun (in the Allain/Gottlieb collection) and Rayfield. Senelick and
Benedetti place this production in the context of Stanislavsky’s numerous other
works.

Benedetti, Jean (1982) Stanislavski: An Introduction, London: Methuen.

Gottlieb, Vera and Paul Allain (eds) (2000) The Cambridge Companion to Chekhov,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rayfield, Donald (1994) The Cherry Orchard: Catastrophe and Comedy, New York: Twayne
Publishers.
Senelick, Laurence (1997) The Chekhov Theatre – A Century of the Plays in Performance,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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CONSTANT PRINCE, THE (WROCŁAW, POLAND: THE LABORATORY

THEATRE, DIRECTED BY JERZY GROTOWSKI; 1965)

The Constant Prince was a central performance in Jerzy Grotowski’s oeuvre as well
as in world theatre of the twentieth century. Most remarkable was the actor Ryszard
Cieślak’s portrayal of the eponymous Prince, which epitomized Grotowski’s
approach to acting. Critics considered that Cieślak had achieved a ‘total act’ and,
while they struggled to describe what this meant in practice, they agreed unani-
mously that he had somehow transcended both the role and his material presence,
becoming what Grotowski defined as a ‘holy actor’. Cieślak recalled Antonin
Artaud’s vision of the martyred actor, ‘burning alive at the stake but still signalling
to the audience through the flames’, communicating even in his death throes.
The production’s playtext, which is delivered at great speed in an incantatory
way, had a complex cross-cultural evolution. The nineteenth-century Polish Romantic
playwright Juliusz Słowacki had written a version of Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s
play El Principe Constante (1629) from the Golden Age of Spanish drama, which
Grotowski further drastically cut. As well as this pared-down text, in keeping with the
principles of ‘poor theatre’, Grotowski used few props and simple costuming and had
scenographer and architect Jerzy Gurawski construct a striking scenic arrangement
for this piece. Gurawski had invented models of staging for several of the Laboratory
Theatre’s previous productions, each time altering the perspective and position of the
spectator. In The Constant Prince, the actors performed in a pit surrounded by
wooden walls, reminiscent of a bullring or operating theatre. Seated on benches, the
spectators had to lean forward over the barriers to look down on the action. They
were thus meant to become suppliant witnesses of, and voyeuristic participants in,
the Prince’s torture and subsequent martyrdom at the hands of his captors.
On one level, Cieślak’s role symbolized a Poland which has been ‘crucified’ (or
invaded and occupied) several times in its history. The piece used Christian imagery
such as the pietà, which depicts a dead Jesus lying across his mother Mary’s lap. But
the role was also a deeply personal exploration. Months of private work with
Grotowski plumbing Cieślak’s memories of his first feelings of love as a teenager led
to the precise physical and vocal sequence of actions or ‘score’ that was meant to
contain and control the performer’s emotions. Cieślak’s ‘self-penetration’, as
Grotowski described it, helped generate the piece’s acclaim on an international tour.
Critics testified that The Constant Prince went beyond specific Polish referencing
through its central archetype of the martyr and through Cieślak’s ‘gift’ of vulnera-
bility before the audience.
The Constant Prince is recorded minimally in a poor-quality film shot from a
fixed position with a single camera with minimal lighting, for which the sound was
recorded two years after the performance in another country. The near-perfect match
between sound and action shows the absolute precision of the actors’ scores, even
with this two-year gap. It is hard to discern a lot in the film, but in spite of this it
affirms Grotowski’s vision of performance as an encounter between spectator and
actor that attempts to change all participants on a deep, personal level as they remove

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the masks and habits inculcated in daily interaction. The basic premises of
Grotowski’s performances in this period – the small audiences of fewer than a
hundred people, the efficacy of communicating through Jungian archetypes, as well
as the actors’ profound and almost destabilizing work on themselves – have been
repeatedly questioned. Few can deny, however, the enormous impact the piece had
aesthetically, or its many imitators, as well as the debates about theatre’s function,
the need for craft and discipline, and the ethics of the director–actor relationship that
it subsequently spawned.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The following texts contain short accounts of this performance from various perspec-
tives: the director’s, the critics’ and the scholars’. All these books relate this piece to
Grotowski’s other works, though with focuses on different periods. The film is only
available privately and contains subtitles in several languages.

Grotowski, Jerzy (1968) Towards a Poor Theatre, Holstebro: Odin Teatrets Forlag.
Kumiega, Jennifer (1985) The Theatre of Grotowski, London: Methuen.
Schechner, Richard and Lisa Wolford (eds) (1997) The Grotowski Sourcebook, London:
Routledge.

COYOTE: I LIKE AMERICA AND AMERICA LIKES ME (RENÉ BLOCK

GALLERY, NEW YORK; ‘ACTION’ PERFORMED BY JOSEPH BEUYS AND A
COYOTE; 1974)

Joseph Beuys’ temporary cohabitation with a coyote broke down boundaries between
everyday life and art in a compelling way, furthering his belief that everyone (even
a coyote, perhaps) can be an artist or present art. Beuys had not been alone in inte-
grating animals into performance but here the interaction was sustained and was
unavowedly central to the piece. For a week, before an intrigued public in the René
Block Gallery in New York, the German artist shared a small cage with the animal,
with not much more than a pile of straw, a large sheet of felt and numerous copies of
the Wall Street Journal, which the coyote enjoyed tearing up and urinated on. Beuys
followed its every move and attempted to communicate with the animal constantly.
Like many of his pieces, Coyote: I Like America and America Likes Me explored
the indeterminate crossover between ritual, daily behaviour and performance. Beuys
called these events ‘Actions’, though they shared many properties with happenings,
and were even briefly connected to the very socially aware fluxus movement (1962–
65). His works gained their gravity from their socially-engaged critique as well as
allusions to religious symbolism. He described his role as being akin to a shaman
figure. Politically, he operated in left-wing and ecological groups, an engagement
that fed directly into his art and that, in one event (Kukai/Akopeenein/Brown cross/
Fat corners/Model fat corners, 1964), led him to being attacked on stage by right-
wing demonstrators. The performance with the coyote, for example, questioned the

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status of the United States’ Native population. With the protagonist of the coyote and
a simple repeated sequence of structured moments of interaction, Beuys invoked the
close contact to nature with which Native Americans live. Traditionally, for them,
the coyote is a powerful totemic animal, whereas for contemporary Americans its
status has been downgraded to little more than a pest. The piece’s challenge to
America lay in Beuys’ allusion to this discrepancy.
Beuys’ inspiration for his events, sculptures and installations derived in part from
his personal experience during the Second World War, when his aeroplane was shot
down over Crimea and he was kept alive by Tartars, who wrapped him in felt and
rubbed animal fat on to him to keep him warm (a claim that some have queried).
From a visual arts background (for twelve years, Beuys was Professor of Sculpture
in Düsseldorf – before being dismissed in 1972 for his controversial views), the
striking sculptural and physical presence of his works was usually animated by his
own interactions, be it with the wild coyote, a dead hare with whom he was privately
discussing his own artworks (How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, 1965) or a
cardboard box in which he spent a whole day (Twenty Four Hours, 1965). His ‘social
sculptures’ and Actions influenced and excited many, perhaps most surprisingly the
Glaswegian ex-gangster prisoner/author Jimmy Boyle, with whom Beuys began a
series of dialogues as a result of the coyote event. In November 2002, Flemish actor
Benjamin Verdonck staged an anti-war piece during the build-up to the Iraq war,
spending three days in a cage with a pig named ‘Coyote: I Like America and America
Likes Me’. Although Beuys died in 1986, works like Verdonck’s perpetuate his
unconventional and politically-engaged practice and attest to his enduring impact.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

These books are a mixture of essays, interviews, statements and visual information,
providing helpful ways into Beuys’ often difficult to grasp visual and performed
artworks.

Bower, Alain (1996) The Essential Joseph Beuys, Lothar Schirmer (ed.), London: Thames and
Hudson.
Tisdall, Caroline (1976) Joseph Beuys: Coyote, Munich: Shirmer Mosel.
—— (1979) Joseph Beuys, London: Thames and Hudson.

DEAD CLASS, THE (CRACOW, POLAND; CRICOT 2, DIRECTED BY

TADEUSZ KANTOR; 1975)
Polish director Tadeusz Kantor’s production of The Dead Class was a masterpiece
of visual theatre. Exploring notions articulated in his manifesto on ‘The Theatre of
Death’, Kantor played with the staging of personal childhood memories, images of
lifelessness and the replication of real life inherent in performing. The piece draws
on a range of sources but was loosely based on a framework developed by the Polish
Jewish writer, artist and teacher Bruno Schulz in his short story ‘The Old Age

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Pensioner’ (1934). On the verge of dying, an old man returns to his former school
and gradually regresses to become a schoolboy again before he is swept away into
the sky by the wind and disappears. The performance also contained fragments from
Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz’s novel Ferdydurke (1937), an imaginative
homage to idle youth. The novel’s narrative sometimes focuses on (and thereby
‘enlarges’) parts of the body, a sort of textual zoom-in. Kantor’s actors replicated this
device gesturally, through face-pulling, for example. Excerpts of text were also lifted
from Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz’s Tumor Brainiowicz (1920), an absurdist piece
by the eccentric Polish writer, artist, photographer and philosopher, whose difficult
and surreal plays Kantor frequently and successfully staged. Finally, The Dead
Class also drew on Kantor’s own experience, or rather the memories of his childhood
days. Kantor aptly described himself as a ‘text-mincer’, as this wide-ranging
collection of sources and stimuli demonstrates.
The Dead Class’s haunting macabre images were reminiscent of the sketches of
hollow-eyed dome-headed figures that accompany Schulz’s stories. The scenog-
raphy consisted of an archetypal pre-Second World War schoolroom with desks,
where the uniformed children (played by adult performers) were straddled by manne-
quins strapped to their backs. At times these figures even replaced them, propped up
at their desks – they were omnipresent as shadows that cannot be forgotten or erased.
The unusual collection of characters included the Old Man with a Bike, who was
represented semi-literally by a wheel tied to an old man’s body – one of Kantor’s
‘bio-objects’ as he described them. All action was overseen and orchestrated by the
on-stage black-suited figure of Kantor himself, whose looming presence and critical
eye focused moments through gestures of encouragement or admonishment. His
participatory presence clearly framed the mise en scène as a representation of his
own experience, and made the audience aware of his ongoing role as director and
creator of that experience – a practice common to all Cricot 2 productions.
The impact of the piece was sustained by several years of international touring as
well as its presentation in other media. Textual transcripts of the performance exist,
as well as grotesque, humorous photographs and the vivid sketches with which
Kantor’s creative process always began. Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda made a
film as a response to the piece, shot in a Cracow cellar as well as outdoors where the
characters become liberated from the schoolroom and their mannequin selves, in a
departure from Kantor’s original performance. Théâtre de Complicité’s Street of
Crocodiles (1992, UK), directed by Simon McBurney and based on another story by
Schulz, was visually and thematically inspired by The Dead Class and Kantor’s work,
a testament to the long-lasting impact Kantor has had.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Apart from videos of the performance and Wajda’s film, none of which are commer-
cially available, the best access to this piece is through the Drozdowski book. This
includes a transcript of the performance text as well as reflections on the piece and its
characters by Kantor. More indirect analyses and visual information are available in

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the other texts below. The website has a useful bibliography and selected information
about Kantor’s work.

Cricoteka Centre for the Documentation of the Art of Tadeusz Kantor. Online. Available www.
cricoteka.pl/en/ (accessed 5 July 2013).
Drozdowski, Bohdan (ed.) (1979) Twentieth Century Polish Theatre, London: John Calder.
Kobialka, Michal (1993) A Journey Through Other Spaces: Essays and Manifestos by Tadeusz
Kantor, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Miklaszewski, Krzysztof (2002) Encounters with Kantor, George Hyde (ed.), London:
Routledge.

DEAD DREAMS OF MONOCHROME MEN (PERFORMANCE BY DV8; 1988)

This award-winning performance by British physical dance-theatre company DV8,
made just two years after the company was founded, is a key reference point not just
in terms of its form and influence on the then-emerging field of physical theatre, but
as much for its troubled relationship to British law and moral and ethical issues. Its
influence has been furthered by the film made of the performance, the documen-
tation of which expanded debates around its subject matter and related concerns.
The piece was based on the real story of Dennis Nilsen, a serial murderer who picked
up homosexual men in nightclubs, took them home, murdered and cannibalized
them. The main textual source was Brian Masters’ 1985 book on this subject, Killing
for Company.
Dead Dreams, as it is known for short, had a stark atmosphere underpinned by
dynamic, athletic choreography, and gained an impact that has earned it a position as
one of the foundational performances of physical theatre. Whilst the dance work
itself received many positive, if not shocked, reviews, the aftermath of the work had
much greater significance in that it was referenced in parliamentary discussions
about the repeal of Clause 28. This 1986 Local Government law, instituted in the
same year that DV8 was founded, forbade the ‘promotion of homosexuality’ or its
presentation in a positive light (in schools and educational facilities in particular).
DV8 were at the forefront of protests against this homophobic act, which was only
repealed in England in 2003. The performance not only responded to the law,
showing the potential risks of suppressing homosexuality and driving it underground
through the extreme example of Nilsen, but was also referred to as indicative of
homosexual vice after a London Weekend Television screening of the film made
right-wing newspaper headlines.
The documentation of the performance comprises a fifty-minute black and white
film that operates as a standalone creative response to the performance rather than as
a more faithful recording of the stage work. In it, the position of the audience is not
fixed and the viewer cannot gain any sense of where they might have been located in
the performance proper: a nightclub scene takes place in a 360° club environment
which also acts as a prison. The metaphor of the club as prison is especially evident
in a scene backed by loud disco music when the performers use each other as ladders

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to try to scramble up the walls to escape. Further innovative aspects of the perfor-
mance and subsequent film include direct address by one dancer to the audience and
DV8’s hallmark exaggerated gestural language where perhaps subconscious tics are
repeated and extended to a grotesque level to capture and subvert everyday behaviour
and mannerisms. This personal input from dancers as actors/storytellers, speaking in
part autobiographically, has much in common with Pina Bausch’s approach in her
dance-theatre. The performance also explored the ambiguity of who is the victim and
who is the perpetrator, an especially important issue when, as the piece suggested,
society bears responsibility for cultivating homophobia and when the violence of
homophobia becomes internalized. Implicitly, Dead Dreams also referenced the then
numerous deaths of gay men caused by AIDS, the aggressive homophobia nurtured
by panic about this, and the violence of effective inaction on a state level both in
response to that homophobia and in the search for a cure for HIV/AIDS.
Dead Dreams’ choreography was in what was then called a Eurocrash style,
which emerged across Europe in the 1980s, epitomized by the work of choreogra-
phers and companies like Wim Vandekeybus and V-TOL. Eurocrash denoted a high
energy, physically risky mode of dance in which the performers seemed to disregard
even their own well-being. The DV8 dancers’ apparent abuse of their own and each
others’ bodies as they hurled themselves at and rolled over each other, and used each
others’ shoulders and backs relentlessly to climb the nightclub wall, became a repre-
sentation of the violence done by Nilsen to innocent young men. The vulnerability of
some of the performers was exacerbated by the fact that one was dressed just in
underpants, socks and boots. The four male cast members included company founder
and artistic director Lloyd Newson as well as the late Nigel Charnock, who had a
long-term connection to DV8, and was widely acclaimed for his confessional dance
scene in their Strange Fish (1992).
Dead Dreams in both its live and filmed versions helped launch DV8 as a company
to watch, a reputation they still hold today, and had an enormous impact on many
dance and theatre artists and groups such as Frantic Assembly and Volcano. The
subject matter and physicality, as uncompromising as much body art, compounded
by the virtuosic skills of the dancers, has shown the power of performance to interject
into and comment on everyday events as much as being just an aesthetic
presentation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dead Dreams has been discussed in many contexts too numerous to list here, espe-
cially in relation to identity and sexual politics. DV8’s website contains basic infor-
mation about the performance and film as well as a review and interviews.

DV8 (1990) Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men, Millennium Productions/DV8 Physical

Theatre. Film.
Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men. Online. Available www.dv8.co.uk/projects/deaddreams
(accessed 5 February 2013).

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 EVENTS

DIONYSUS IN 69 (NEW YORK; THE PERFORMANCE GROUP; 1968–69)

Based on Euripides’ The Bacchae, Dionysus in 69 was devised by The Performance
Group and its director, Richard Schechner, and performed in a purpose-built envi-
ronmental set at the Performing Garage in SoHo, New York, for over a year from
1968 to 1969. It demonstrates some of the innovative performance methods
Schechner and The Performance Group helped to pioneer in the late 1960s and early
1970s, as well as some of those methods’ advantages and problems.
Schechner and his collaborators wanted to make theatre that produced more
meaningful communication and a stronger sense of democratic community for its
makers and audiences than they felt was produced by conventional text-based
Western theatre. They wanted a theatre that performed a ritual function, making all
participants feel they were building a community. Schechner and The Performance
Group therefore adopted innovative approaches to text, performance practices and
scenography. Written texts provided a starting point for performance rather than an
authoritative blueprint. Dionysus in 69 used The Bacchae’s characters, story and
some text, though not where The Performance Group’s performers felt they could
portray material more effectively by other means, especially by speaking as them-
selves, and through highly physicalized, non-realist movement sequences.
Dionysus’ birth ritual, for example, began with the actor playing Dionysus telling the
audience a little about his own birth, and was performed with five male performers
lying on the floor, five women standing, straddling them, and Dionysus being passed
– or ‘birthed’ – through the resulting canal. The performers did the scene in minimal
costumes for the first several months of the show, but in a bid to make it more
sexually expressive and ritualistic they later performed it naked. The Performance
Group created its shows in ways that aimed to be democratic, devising Dionysus in
69 over many months of workshops and rehearsals and continuing to alter the show
throughout its run. Scenography for The Performance Group’s productions trans-
formed the entire space of the Performing Garage, literally enveloping audiences in
the show and facilitating a degree of audience–performer interaction that the
company felt was qualitatively better than what conventional, proscenium-arch theatre
allowed – today this would be described as immersive theatre. Performer movement
in Dionysus in 69’s multi-level set was designed to be circular, thereby producing a
sense of inclusion and intimacy. The audience was invited to sit and move where it
liked in designated audience areas. But they were also asked to join in the perfor-
mance, for example in a dancing scene, a caressing scene (sometimes also performed
naked), and the concluding parade from the theatre out on to Wooster Street. For
many, Dionysus in 69 produced a sense of democratic community-building and chal-
lenged taboos of self- and group expression, especially sexual expression. Such
issues are still relevant today, as illustrated by the Rude Mechs’ decision to reenact
the performance in Texas in 2009 as part of their Contemporary Classics Series.
Despite its apparently altruistic aims and egalitarian effects, however, Dionysus in
69, Schechner and The Performance Group were sometimes criticized for being
precisely the opposite – undemocratic and exploitative. As long as Schechner

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directed the show, the company was inevitably organized at least partially hierarchi-
cally. For example, when a student group in the audience executed a premeditated
kidnapping of the performer playing Pentheus part way through one performance,
Schechner made an executive decision about whether or not – and how – to continue
the show. His decision was subsequently hotly debated amongst the company.
Further, while the show idealized community, there was disagreement within the
company. One of the chief points of debate concerned opportunities for audience
contact, especially during scenes performed naked. While the nudity may have
served director Schechner’s thematic aims, it nevertheless left the performers – espe-
cially the women – vulnerable to actual groping on stage. Like the Living Theatre’s
Paradise Now (1968), Dionysus in 69’s bold exploration of methods for democra-
tizing performance encountered and exposed some of the possibilities and hazards of
that ambition.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

De Palma et al’s film is a split-screen documentary of The Performance Group’s

production, showing both performers and audiences. The Performance Group’s book
documents the show’s development through text and images. Schechner articulates
his arguments about environmental theatre and describes this show. Shank provides
summary description and analysis. Shephard performed in the show and offers a
personal account.

Dionysus (1970) film directed by Brian de Palma, Robert Fiore and Bruce Joel Rubin, USA:
Performance Group Stage Productions and Sigma III Group.
Performance Group, The (1970) Dionysus in 69, Richard Schechner (ed.), New York: Farrar,
Strauss and Giroux.
Schechner, Richard ([1973] 1994) Environmental Theater, New York: Applause Books.
Shank, Theodore (2002) Beyond the Boundaries: American Alternative Theatre, revised and
updated edition, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Shephard, William Hunter (1991) The Dionysus Group, New York: P. Lang.

EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH (AVIGNON FESTIVAL, FRANCE; DIRECTED BY

ROBERT WILSON, MUSIC BY PHILIP GLASS, VOCAL TEXTS BY ASSORTED
CONTRIBUTORS, CHOREOGRAPHY BY ANDREW DE GROAT AND LUCINDA
CHILDS; 1976)
Robert Wilson and Philip Glass’s opera Einstein on the Beach (see Figure 4) marks
a shift in the development of Wilson’s work and indicates the scale of his achievement
as an innovator of visual theatre for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Like A
Letter for Queen Victoria (1974), it shows Wilson moving away from his visually
complicated ‘silent operas’ towards a scenography that is more architecturally
controlled and into an exploration of the theatrical power of language and speech

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 EVENTS

Figure 4 Einstein on the Beach (1976) directed by Robert Wilson, music by Philip
Glass; performed by the Philip Glass Ensemble, Avignon Festival, 1976

– even when they are nonsensical. In a broader context, since its première in 1976,
Einstein has shown how theatre can be non-linear, multidisciplinary and postdramatic
– not prioritizing narrative sense and text, as most naturalist theatre and opera does,
but fracturing narrative and exploring the aural qualities of speech as well as the equally
important features of image, space, light, non-vocal sound, and movement.
Einstein on the Beach combines a mathematically precise structure with allusive,
dreamlike content – Wilson’s familiar trademarks. It is composed of nine episodes
over four acts spanning five hours. Three images – a train, a courtroom and a space
machine hovering over a field – appear first in pairs and, finally, all together in a trio.
Wilson’s signature knee-plays (literally, joints between scenes) provide a prologue
and interludes. Architectural precision is central to the design, too, as horizontal,
vertical and diagonal lines of objects, movement and light dominate the visual field,
and most performers wear the Einstein ‘uniform’ of shirt, braces, trousers and tennis
shoes. This precision is reiterated in Glass’s sound score, which features insistent
patterned thematic repetition.
The allusiveness of the performance is in its images and texts. The three recurring
images are relatively banal and can form logical narrative links to Einstein’s lifetime,
which stretched from the age of the steam locomotive to the brink of the age of space
travel. But the enactment of these images is illogical and dreamlike. In the courtroom,
for example, an elderly black male judge delivers a monologue about romance in
Paris or women’s liberation, and dancer Lucinda Childs sways on a bed reciting a

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disjointed monologue written by Wilson’s teenage collaborator, the writer

Christopher Knowles. Meanwhile, the chorus sings patterns of numbers – a ‘text’
introduced in rehearsals by Glass as a placeholder for the libretto he had not yet
written, but adopted for performance by Wilson, who loved both its order and its
arbitrariness.
As in much of Wilson’s work from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, speech and
song do not tell a linear story; rather, they enhance mood, compel audiences to think
or daydream associatively, and refer obliquely to the opera’s subject – Einstein and
his mathematics. Other aspects of staging, too, compel audience engagement with
the apparently irrational as well as the apparently rational, affective as well as deno-
tative meaning and with scenic and aural elements of theatre. Like most of Wilson’s
theatre, Einstein presents images that slowly transform before us, it is collaborative,
and it combines elements of high and popular culture, juxtaposing Einstein’s mathe-
matics and his tennis shoes. It also indicates the European appeal of Wilson’s work
and the support he has found there: it received funding from the French government
and was initially produced at the Avignon Festival. Its various remountings in 1984,
1988, 1992 and 2012, and the design changes these incorporated, show the evolution
of his aesthetic towards an ever more architectural, elegant and refined theatre of
images style as demonstrated in, for example, his Dream Play (1998).
Perhaps most significant is the opera’s distinctive formality, in both its compo-
sition and its relationship to the audience. Wilson’s theatre almost never addresses
the audience directly, unlike much American theatre of the same period, for example,
that of Richard Schechner’s Performance Group. Wilson was, and continues to be,
interested in altering audiences’ ways of seeing and hearing, rather than trying to
revise ways of literally and socially interacting with the audience. His advice to audi-
ences going to see Einstein was, ‘Go like you would to a museum, like you would
look at a painting…You just enjoy the scenery, the architectural arrangements in
time and space, the music, the feelings they all evoke. Listen to the pictures’ (quoted
in Shyer: see Bibliography).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Obenhaus’ documentary film of the 1984 revival includes excerpts from the production
and interviews with Wilson and Glass. All sources listed describe and analyse the
opera or offer insights into its production.

Brecht, Stefan (1978) The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp
Verlag.
Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Image of Opera (1985) film directed by Mark Obenhaus,
USA, produced by the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Holmberg, Arthur (1997) The Theatre of Robert Wilson, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Safir, Margery Arent (ed.) (2011) Robert Wilson from Within, Paris: The Arts Arena and
Flammarion, SA.

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Shank, Theodore (2002) Beyond the Boundaries: American Alternative Theatre, revised and
updated edition, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Shevtsova, Maria (2007) Robert Wilson, Oxon: Routledge.
Shyer, Laurence (1989) Robert Wilson and His Collaborators, New York: Theatre
Communications Group.

GOVERNMENT INSPECTOR, THE (SOHN THEATRE, MOSCOW; WRITTEN

BY NIKOLAI GOGOL, DIRECTED BY VSEVOLOD MEYERHOLD;
9 DECEMBER 1926)
Vsevolod Meyerhold’s production of Gogol’s 1836 play demonstrated his view of the
director as interpreter and orchestrator of both the mise en scène and the text with a
confidence that caused shockwaves in Russian theatre. By placing the onus of inter-
pretation on himself as auteur rather than on the writer, Meyerhold was tampering
with a sacred cow – that is, classical Russian material from the mid-nineteenth
century. Critics balked at his heavily altered adaptation of the play, which he divided
into fifteen episodes and interpolated with lines from other works by Gogol, such as
his Petersburg Stories. They also questioned his tragicomic pantomime style, a major
departure from the reverential realism with which such works had been treated
previously, by the likes of Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-
Danchenko. In spite of criticism that verged on abuse and which helped generate
animosities that later culminated in Meyerhold’s officially sanctioned assassination,
the production heralded a new path of experimentation with the classics in Russian
theatre. Even with these detractors, the piece stayed in the company’s repertoire until
1938.
Although in rehearsal Meyerhold initially asked his actors for clearly defined
characters with biographies consistent with naturalist approaches, he soon pushed
them towards caricature and the grotesque, asking them to find repeated habitual
gestures, defined postures, idiosyncratic movements and a specific rhythm for their
characters. By such means they caricatured petty officialdom and Tsar Nicholas’
bourgeois society and affectations. Elaborate stage business departed from the text
and choreographed sequences sublimated the individual in carefully composed
tableaux vivants. Meyerhold focused on the ensemble rather than the individual with
several interpolated and additional choral scenes, like that of young officer-suitors
strumming imaginary guitars. By now his cast were highly trained in biomechanics
and were working with assured synchronicity and discipline. The actors’ movement
was enhanced by exaggerated costumes and kinetic scenography, with sets that
moved on trucks and that kept the action of this four-hour version flowing. Orchestral
music, some of it original and some by nineteenth-century Russian composers,
heightened their gestural, rhythmical acting in a style that Meyerhold intended to be
consonant with Gogol’s satirical vision.
Meyerhold’s uncompromising combination and exploitation of all elements of the
theatre was ahead of its time. The production has since come to be considered an influ-
ential precursor of physical and visual theatre, an early example of successful

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theatrical stylization. While this might also be claimed for Meyerhold’s earlier produc-
tions, like The Magnanimous Cuckold (1922), written by Belgian author Fernand
Crommelynck, The Government Inspector is significant because of the text’s esteemed
place in Russian culture and Meyerhold’s willingness to go beyond accepted interpre-
tations and practices with such hallowed material, however great the risk.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Both Braun and Leach listed below are respected experts on Meyerhold. The Worrall
article gives details about this particular production.

Braun, Edward ([1979] 1995) Meyerhold: A Revolution in Theatre, revised edition, London:
Eyre Methuen.
Leach, Robert (1989) Vsevolod Meyerhold, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Worrall, Nick (1972) ‘Meyerhold Directs Gogol’s Government Inspector’, Theatre Quarterly
2.7: 75–95.

HAKA (TRADITIONAL MĀORI DANCE)

Figure 5 The haka performed by the New Zealand national rugby team, the All
Blacks (2012)

Haka is the generic name for the dance of the Māori, Natives of Aotearoa/New
Zealand, but it is probably best known internationally through the particular haka
performed before matches by the New Zealand national rugby team, the All Blacks
(see Figure 5). This haka is known as the ‘Ka mata, Ka mata’ (the opening words of

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 EVENTS

the chant, translatable as ‘I die! I die!’) or the ‘Te Rauparaha’ (after the Māori chief
who is credited with having composed it in around 1820). Its chant speaks of the
threat of imminent death and then the triumph of survival. Its dance portrays strength,
control and determination and involves the whole body and face in a range of quick,
alert, disciplined and powerful movements, including stomping, jumping, slapping
the legs, quivering the arms, chanting, and grimacing with the eyes wide open and
the tongue stretched out of the mouth. It was first performed internationally in 1888
by the New Zealand Native Team, a rugby team made up predominantly of Māoris.
Even today, it is an All Black player of Māori descent who initiates its performance
before a match. Like many rituals, the haka warms up and focuses its performers,
strengthening their sense of community and presence and potentially alienating
those who watch and cannot perform it – notably, the opposing team.
The All Blacks’ ‘Ka mata, Ka mata’ haka performs Aotearoan/New Zealand
national identity, more actively and distinctively than the conventional act that
precedes many sports events – passively standing for a national anthem. However, it
raises important issues about intercultural crossover and appropriation. The Māori
were historically colonized by European settlers, or pakeha. Read negatively, the
haka’s adoption as a performance of New Zealand national identity can be seen as an
appropriation of the historically and culturally-specific traditions of a colonized
people to signify a bit of ethnic colour for their colonizers. Read more positively, this
adoption credits the Māori with founding the culture of Aotearoa/New Zealand,
demonstrates the strength of that culture and articulates the pre- and postcolonial
hybridity of contemporary Aotearoan/New Zealand identity. More broadly, the haka
demonstrates how identity is produced through all kinds of performative acts,
including – and even especially – those that take place in mass popular culture.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

All sources provide history and description of the haka (or direct links to this infor-
mation). Haka! is a page on a site dedicated to New Zealand rugby and is the most
detailed.

Haka! Online. Available www.haka.co.nz/haka.php (accessed 14 October 2013).

Karetu, Timoti (1993) Haka! The Dance of a Noble People, Auckland: Reed.
New Zealand Rugby Union. Online. Available www.allblacks.com (accessed 14 October
2013).

HOLOCAUST MEMORIALS AND MUSEUMS (WORLDWIDE; POST–1945)

The horror of the Holocaust has produced a crisis in practices of representation and
performative acts of memorialization. Memory had previously been widely
conceived as objectively knowable, recoverable, and so possible to memorialize in
static and solemn monuments, be they statues, poems or museums. Postmodern and
poststructuralist thinking, especially from the 1970s onwards, questioned this model

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of memory, suggesting it risked displacing the horrific event with an aesthetic repre-
sentation, replacing social acts of remembrance with inert placebos, and thereby
actually sanctioning forgetting – instead of stimulating remembrance. These
problems of memorialization were particularly urgent as people struggled to decide
what to do with sites like the death camps at Auschwitz. Preserve them as memorials
to the dead and reminders to the living? Or obliterate them as atrocities? Facing such
critical decisions, postmodern thinking reconceived memory as subjective, multiple
and possibly unknowable – although it acknowledged that remembering is both an
emotional urge for individuals and an ethical responsibility for societies. Postmodern
culture has not stopped producing memorials but has attempted to make them possess
other responsibilities and presumptions that acknowledge the radical mutability of
memory; stimulate in audiences active engagement and remembering; provoke audi-
ences to take responsibility for preventing past horrors from being repeated; and
continue to question if, how and when it is even possible to represent traumatic
memories.
An influential example of this kind of postmodern counter-monument is conceptual
artists Jochen and Esther Gerz’s Monument Against Fascism, War, and Violence –
and for Peace and Human Rights, which was erected in Hamburg in 1986. Aiming
neither to pay tribute to fascism nor to immobilize spectators in the face of it, the
Gerz monument was designed to be interactive, changing and ultimately only a
memory itself – or, rather, multiple memories. Its 12-metre pillar was covered in soft
lead with steel-pointed pens attached near its base. Multilingual signs invited
spectators to write on it and to commit to remain vigilant in support of peace and
human rights. In a series of seven ceremonies, the pillar was gradually lowered into
the ground so that the whole of its surface could be written on. It was finally interred
in 1993, its site marked with a stone, thereafter evoking silence and absence. This
example demonstrates counter-monuments’ potential interactivity, performativity
and dynamic production of meaning in concert with their participant audiences.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, designed by
James Ingo Freed and opened in 1993, uses other strategies to act as an appropriately
awe-inspiring memorial, while it resists being inappropriately celebratory or even
definitive. It deliberately combines seemingly contradictory elements – granite and
brick, a tower and a hexagon, grand and prosaic entrances – in order to acknowledge
its role as necessarily monumental and simultaneously democratic. These dual
meanings were deemed vital as a response not only to the Holocaust but also to the
museum’s location in the US state capital (see study by Patraka in the Bibliography).
Probably the most famous museum of this kind is the Jewish Museum in Berlin,
designed by Daniel Libeskind and opened in 1999. Libeskind sought to evoke the
very absence of the Jews in post-Holocaust Berlin by incorporating into his building
a number of voids – empty spaces that span several floors, interrupt the spaces of the
rest of the building, and can be looked into and sometimes entered. As Berlin’s Jews
experienced profound displacement, this building produces a strong sense of disori-
entation through its asymmetries and contrasts. Its structure is a zigzag; its windows
are rarely horizontal or vertical and appear like slashes in the building’s façade; its

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surfaces contrast shiny zinc and dull concrete; and its garden contains a square area
of 49 rough, inclined rectilinear concrete columns atop which willow oaks grow,
their curving branches intertwining. While Libeskind’s building may appear to prior-
itize chaos and absence, it nevertheless incorporates many elements of order and
presence: its heterogeneity validates the heterogeneity of the architecture surrounding
it; and the apparently random lines of its windows actually ‘connect’ the addresses of
great figures in Berlin’s Jewish cultural history. Furthermore, the building is not just
about the past; its grounds are accessible to the public and provide access to a play-
ground. The building explores and manifests the traumas and evacuations of Berlin’s
Jewish past but suggests also Jewish achievement and endurance, inviting its visitors
to witness all of these aspects of Jewish history in Germany.
Many other communities worldwide who have experienced massive loss and
trauma must also face, in different ways, the issues of commemoration addressed by
these Holocaust and Jewish memorials. This is as true of las Madres de la Plaza de
Mayo, who witnessed Argentina’s ‘disappearances’ of the 1970s and 1980s, as it is
of the citizens of New York after the events of 11 September 2001, for whom how to
mark Ground Zero has been a haunting question. Such issues must be addressed in
different media as well. Jeannette Malkin, for example, examines how twentieth-
century drama has worked to produce a kind of counter-memorial theatre.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Young provides extensive information and analysis of memorials. His article,

Schneider’s book, and two articles in Performance Research’s special issue focus on
the Jewish Museum, Berlin. Malkin analyses the work of memory in postmodern
theatre, while Patraka looks closely at both theatre and performance.

Heathfield, Adrian and Andrew Quick (eds) (2000) ‘On Memory’, a special issue of
Performance Research 5.3, London: Routledge.
Malkin, Jeanette R. (1999) Memory-Theater and Postmodern Drama, Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press.
Patraka, Vivian M. (1999) Spectacular Suffering: Theatre, Fascism, and the Holocaust,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Schneider, Bernhard (1999) Daniel Libeskind: Jewish Museum Berlin: Between the Lines,
trans. John Gabriel, Munich: Prestel Verlag.
Young, James E. (ed.) (1994) The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History, Munich:
Prestel-Verlag.
—— (2001) ‘Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin: The Uncanny Arts of Memorial
Architecture’ in Visual Culture and the Holocaust, Barbie Selizer (ed.), London: The
Athlone Press, pp. 179–97.

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 M AHABHARATA, THE

MAHABHARATA, THE (PARIS AND TOURING; CENTRE INTERNATIONAL DE

CRÉATIONS THÉÂTRALES [CICT], DIRECTED BY PETER BROOK;
1985–1988)
The Mahabharata has at least a twofold significance for twentieth- and twenty-first-
century theatre. It epitomizes many of the methods and aims of its highly influential
director, Peter Brook, and it has provoked and sustained some of the most hotly
contested debates around the risks and potentials of intercultural theatre from the
late 1980s onwards.
The source for Brook’s performance text originated in India in the third or fourth
century AD and is known there simply as ‘the Epic’. At more than 100,000 stanzas in
length, it is the world’s longest narrative poem. For many Indians it provides a foun-
dational account of Indian, especially Hindu, cultures. Following extensive research
in India and Europe, Brook’s collaborator, writer Jean-Claude Carrière, adapted this
epic into a nine-hour playtext which Brook’s cast subsequently rehearsed and
developed for nine months. The French-language version, called Mahabharata,
premièred at the Avignon Festival in 1985. It toured Europe before it was adapted
into English and toured to six countries on four continents from 1987 to 1988. It was
finally adapted into a three-hour film and then a six-hour television version that was
broadcast worldwide in 1989.
For Brook, The Mahabharata offered a monumental opportunity to explore
theatre as a vehicle for communication. He argued that, although ‘the Epic’ text may
be Indian, it ‘carries echoes for all mankind’ (Brook, quoted in Williams 1991: 44); it
is Indian and it is universal. This liberal humanist attitude influenced not only his
selection of text, but also his decisions about scenography, music, performance
styles and casting. He did not want design and music to attempt to be authentically
Indian but rather to give ‘a flavour’ of India. Consequently, set design, for example,
was minimal, using performance spaces largely as the company found them, but
adding some accents of warm colour as well as the real elements of fire, water and
earth. A firm believer in the universal power of storytelling, Brook staged The
Mahabharata as a series of stories, sometimes narrated by a teller to a young boy and
sometimes represented by performers. The action flowed easily between these modes
of performance and acknowledged the communicative power of both speech and
movement. Brook cast thirty performers and five musicians from eighteen countries,
including France, Greece, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Poland, Senegal, Trinidad
and Vietnam. He cast this range partly because he believed the performers could each
bring differences – of culture, language and performance skills – but centrally
because he believed those differences would nevertheless be universally understood
by his audiences. The Mahabharata is probably Brook’s most ambitious show to
date, but it is nevertheless typical of his work. It aimed for direct communication,
eschewed elaborate design and performance styles, was rehearsed by a multicultural
company over many months, celebrated the power of myth and demonstrated his
conviction that cultural difference is not a barrier to communication.

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This last point here is the one that has caused major disputes. Brook advocates an
understanding of communication as potentially universal. His most virulent critics,
led by Rustom Bharucha, argue that, rather than communicating the meanings
of ‘the Epic’, Brook desecrated them, largely by trivializing them. By decontextual-
izing ‘the Epic’ and leaving out the core section of the Bhagavad Gita, Brook
removed ‘the Epic’ from the specific contexts in which its mythology, vocabulary,
social and religious references could be understood. By condensing it into a linear
narrative, he disregarded the cultural significance of its many stories, its forms and its
modes of expression. Brook’s aim to evoke merely ‘a flavour’ of India might have
been an attempt at modesty, but for Bharucha and others it was irresponsible,
rendering a complex culture superficial. Some have extended these arguments to a
critique of Brook’s casting as well, arguing that he homogenizes his performers’
different skills, styles and cultural identities to produce a fluid but bland multicultural
sameness. Brook has defended himself against these accusations by reiterating both
his commitment to universal communication and his belief that universalism is more
important than cultural difference. Other critics, keen to defend Brook’s Mahabharata
as a powerful performance that does not appropriate Indian culture irresponsibly, but
eager also to credit the significance of cultural difference, have posed a third
argument. Recognizing the numerous diversities brought to The Mahabharata, they
argue that it is multi-voiced or polyphonic rather than homogenized, that it allows
interaction rather than assimilation, and that it produces new, hybrid, syncretic
cultures rather than desecrating old ones. Debates around The Mahabharata may
have lessened, but they continue to influence intercultural performance-making and
critical discussion.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brook articulates his aims in the foreword to the play. Williams collects an excellent
range of critical and documentary material. Chaudhuri summarizes critical debate
succinctly.

Bharucha, Rustom (1993) Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture,
London: Routledge.
Carrière, Jean-Claude (1987) The Mahabharata, translation and foreword by Peter Brook,
London: Methuen.
Chaudhuri, Una (1998) ‘Working out (of) Place: Peter Brook’s Mahabharata and the
Problematics of Intercultural Performance’, in Staging Resistance: Essays on Political
Theatre, Jeanne Colleran and Jenny S. Spencer (eds), Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, pp. 77–97.
Mahabharata, The (1989) Film. Directed by Peter Brook, screenplay by Jean-Claude Carrière,
COL.
Williams, David (ed.) (1991) Peter Brook and The Mahabharata, London: Routledge.

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 M OTHER COURAGE AND HER C H I L D R E N

MOTHER COURAGE AND HER CHILDREN (DEUTSCHES THEATER,

BERLIN, GERMANY; DIRECTED BY BERTOLD BRECHT AND ERICH ENGEL;
1949)
Although not the première, this 1949 performance of one of Bertold Brecht’s central
full-length plays is recognized as a model of what he championed for the theatre. The
play was written in 1938 just before and in anticipation of the Second World War,
and premièred in 1941 at the Zurich Schauspielhaus, directed by Leopold Lindtberg.
Brecht, though, had no direct involvement in this production, as he was then in exile
from Germany in Finland. The image from the 1949 production (see Figure 6), which
Brecht co-directed, of his wife Helene Weigel as Mother Courage dragging her
wooden cart across the stage has become an iconic image in twentieth-century
theatre, and a role that has become inseparable from the actress. The performance
was also significant in that it led to the foundation of the Berliner Ensemble, a hugely
influential theatre company that was based initially in Socialist-administered East
Berlin, but which still operates today in a reunited country. Core members of the
1949 production’s cast went on to develop pivotal roles in this ensemble. In addition,
the piece cemented Brecht’s position as a director of repute as well as a writer.
The play centres on the characters of the title, showing how the economics of war
and the quest for survival in precarious times can corrupt, displacing the mother’s
natural instinctive protection of her children. The reference to the mother’s ‘courage’
is partly ironic, but also indicates her stoicism and ability to keep her head above
water economically in the face of the adversity war brings. Accompanied by her
mute daughter Kattrin on the fringes of battle, Mother Courage scavenges what she
can as the spoils of war, but even this is meagre. The performance plays out the
economic and theatrical concerns of Brecht in his later period of work, embodied in
techniques such as Gestus and through the disruptive placing of the dialectical songs.
Scenes such as that in which the mute Kattrin is shot – unable to shout, she is conspic-
uously drumming on a barn roof in order to alert the townspeople of Halle to the
advance of soldiers – are a good example of Brecht’s plays’ emotional power, belying
the mistaken conviction that his works lack feeling.
Although the Berlin production was a huge success both in a partitioned Germany
and internationally on tour and stayed in repertoire for more than ten years, the play
has never proved an easy piece to produce, with its embedded Brechtian techniques,
complex central role and large cast. Many Western actresses – including Diana Rigg,
Anne Bancroft, Judi Dench and Glenda Jackson – have struggled with the role of
Courage. Brecht and Engel’s production is preserved in its ‘original’ form in a 1960
film as well as in a model book (one of the series of Modellbücher). This text assidu-
ously documents the production through photos and a written commentary that gives
details of the mise en scène, including blocking and scenography. This document
initially led to some failed imitations, which were against the spirit of the model
books – these were meant to give guidance only and not encourage replication. Other
directors have experimented more boldly, including Richard Schechner in a 1975
version that ran successfully off-Broadway. The play has been produced consistently

123
Figure 6 Helene Weigel as Mother Courage in Bertold Brecht’s Mother Courage
and Her Children (1949)
 OLYM PI CS

and has been studied across the world, providing a recurrent critique of the personal
and social devastation wreaked by war and proving an enduring testimony to Brecht’s
ideology and artistic vision.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Willett is the most recognized English-language Brecht scholar. Numerous other

writers, including Eddershaw, have analysed the play and its many productions.

Brecht, Bertold (1970–present) Collected Plays, 10 vols, vol. 5, part 2 Mother Courage and
Her Children, ed. and trans. John Willett and Ralph Mannheim, London: Eyre Methuen.
Eddershaw, Margaret (1996) Performing Brecht, London: Routledge.
Willett, John (ed.) (1964) Brecht on Theatre, London: Methuen.
—— (1964) The Theatre of Bertold Brecht, London: Methuen.

OLYMPICS (WORLDWIDE; USUALLY EVERY FOUR YEARS 1896–)

Though primarily a competitive sporting event, the Olympics have become recog-
nized as extravagant displays of cultural identity for nations’ self-promotion. They do
not always make economic sense. Countries usually run the events at a significant
loss, though the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics was an exception and made a huge
profit. However, an implicit sense of enduring tradition and a legendary history – the
Olympiads were sporting displays held in ancient Greece – lend the event authority
and weight, even though in their modern form the first Olympics were held in Athens
as recently as 1896. Now the Olympics take place every four years, with summer and
winter events staggered, providing both the host and the guest countries with the
opportunity to create spectacles that frame their sportspeople as heroes. The winning
of individual medals has been subsumed by obsession with the total tally, evident in
the nationalistic rivalry between the United Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) and
America during the Cold War, and now between Russia, the US and China. The
Olympics are a clear example of the potential seriousness of human play, when indi-
vidual commitment becomes symbolic of national prowess.
The sporting performances are circumscribed and embellished by theatrical
devices, especially in the televised opening ceremony, which increasingly comprises
the following to an extravagant level: fireworks, pyrotechnics and the eternal Olympic
torch; flag-waving; music and especially national anthems; choreographed dance
displays and parades using national teams; and elaborate masks and costuming.
These events are directed by high-profile artistic teams, which in 1992 in Spain
included experimental Catalan theatre group La Fura dels Baus and in London in
2012 theatre and film director Danny Boyle. Critics frequently lament the lack of
focus on the sports themselves that the mediatization and interest in spectacle has
brought, with its inevitable prurience about off-track relationships and rivalries,
drugs scandals (as in Athens in 2004), and the creation and promotion of celebrity
sporting personalities.

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Figure 7 A poster for the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Olympia Part I: Fest der
Völker (Festival of the Nations)
 PARADI S E NOW

The most renowned example of a host country attempting to manipulate the

Olympics to its own ends was in 1936 in Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany (see Figure
7). The performance of German national achievement and Aryan racial supremacy
was, however, upstaged by the brilliance of black American athlete Jesse Owens,
who quashed the Nazis’ aspirations. Owens won four gold medals and broke several
records to become ‘the fastest man on earth’ at that time. The event can also be
hijacked for other ends, its importance guaranteeing mass publicity – in the 1972
Munich Olympics, eleven Israelis were killed in a terrorist attack. The organized
exploitation of the global stage for national promotion inevitably generates counter-
demonstrations and counter-actions, though not usually as bloody as the Munich
attack.
The Olympics’ theatrical nature has instigated a corresponding artistic event, the
Theatre Olympics. This international festival, run by a committee of major world
directors and theatre artists including Tadashi Suzuki, Robert Wilson and Wole
Soyinka, has so far taken place in Greece, Japan, Turkey, Moscow and South Korea.
Exploiting the global repute of the Olympics, the theatre has at last attempted to
reverse the mirror and create artistic events in sport’s likeness. The Olympics them-
selves are also formally run in parallel with a Cultural Olympiad which stages
extensive cultural activities featuring theatre and performance.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MacAloon’s text is one of the few pieces that places the Olympics directly in relation
to theatre and performance. A wealth of information can be accessed through the
official Olympics website.

Harvie, Jen and Keren Zaiontz (eds) (2013) Contemporary Theatre Review, special issue on
‘The Cultural Politics of London 2012’, 23.4.
MacAloon, John J. (1984) ‘Olympic Games and the Theory of Spectacle’, in Rite, Drama,
Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals toward a Theory of Cultural Performance, Philadelphia:
Institute for the Study of Human Issues, pp. 241–80.
Olympics, The. Online. Available www.olympics.org (accessed 26 June 2013).

PARADISE NOW (AVIGNON FESTIVAL, FRANCE; THE LIVING THEATRE,

DIRECTED BY JULIAN BECK AND JUDITH MALINA; 1968)

Like The Performance Group’s Dionysus in 69 (1968–69), Paradise Now epito-

mizes the radical, political and collective creations of 1960s experimental theatre
groups. Adopting ritualistic patterns, the piece was structured in eight sections or
rungs of a ladder. Each section had an ‘Action’ sequence which depended on the
voluntary participation of spectators. Only through this close interaction with the
audience could all the participants – that is, actors and audience – progress towards
spiritual and political enlightenment and the piece’s final positive vision of an equal,
open society (or Paradise). This process had to begin ‘now’, as the title indicated and

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as the symbolic action on the streets at the end of the performance demonstrated. In
this way, theatre could intervene directly in everyday life, in order to change life’s
rules and conventions, and could become truly ‘living’.
Throughout their many productions, the Living Theatre have tested and pushed at
the boundaries of legal and theatrical possibilities. As a highly politicized artistic
group attempting to practise what they preached, the Living Theatre collective have
promoted non-violent revolution in both their lifestyle and their performances.
Paradise Now was created through much discussion and individual improvisational
input. Further synthesizing life and art, the company attempted to use theatre as a tool
to change the audience’s awareness of social, political and cultural restrictions. One
notorious Action section – Rung Four, ‘The Exorcism of Violence and the Sexual
Revolution’ – invited the audience to take off most of their clothes (which the actors
had already done) and sit with their genitals in contact with a partner. Public sexual
acts were of course illegal, even if this did not prevent everyone from refraining.
Trust exercises (such as leaping into the group members’ linked arms) had become a
hallmark of the Living Theatre’s training, and in Paradise Now they even solicited
audience members to commit physically to their ideals and ‘make the big leap’,
through such enabling devices. The carefully structured piece was a collage of state-
ments, shouted slogans, exercises and tableaux that vocally and physically stretched
the body and tested the audience’s responsibilities and the parameters of their
participation.
When they first showed Paradise Now, the Living Theatre collective had become
tax exiles from the United States in 1964 and so were based in Europe. Here they had
achieved almost mythical status and gathered a large following that travelled with
them, at times numbering in the hundreds. In the wake of Paris’ mass protests and
demonstrations in May 1968, the première of Paradise Now at the Avignon Festival
added fuel to the fire. In the final stages of the performance the company rallied their
audience to meet on the streets and so begin the process of revolution. Fearful of
unrest, the Festival authorities asked the group to present another work instead, but
the group refused, railing against this censorship. On their return to the United States
to tour Paradise Now after its French première, the group faced similar difficulties,
including arrest. Frustrated by the restrictions inherent in the theatre spaces and
administrative structures of Europe and America, the group split into cells, with one
led by the anarchist couple Julian Beck and Judith Malina (the group’s leaders, if
they can be so described) moving to Brazil in 1970. Shifting the focus of their work
outside theatre buildings and institutional structures, they could then be open to audi-
ences not dominated by the middle class, as had been the case in their performances
in the United States and Europe. On the streets of Latin America, the Living Theatre
pursued their search for paradise on Earth with the poor and oppressed people who
perhaps had the greatest need for it. They continue this mission today, touring to
festivals and leading community-based projects from their New York base, most
recently with the Occupy movement, though without Beck (who died in 1985). The
group has gone further than most to embody Antonin Artaud’s vision of a total,
transformative theatre.

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 REI NCARNATI ON OF S AI NT OR L A N , T H E

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Shank places Malina and Beck’s own accounts in their book in a broader context of
American experimental performance, while Tytell provides an easy introduction to
their work and lives.

Malina, Judith and Julian Beck (1971) Paradise Now: Collective Creation of The Living
Theatre, New York: Vintage Books.
Shank, Theodore (2002) Beyond the Boundaries: American Alternative Theatre, revised and
updated edition, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Tytell, John (1997) The Living Theatre: Art, Outrage and Exile, London: Methuen.

REINCARNATION OF SAINT ORLAN, THE (SERIES OF OPERATION-

PERFORMANCES; ORLAN; 1990–93)

In a series of nine surgical operations, French feminist performance artist Orlan

altered her face to incorporate features from famous works of art, including the
forehead of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and the chin of Botticelli’s Venus. Orlan was not
trying to make herself into a static image of ideal beauty. Rather, through pastiche,
parody and camp performance, she questioned who produces ideals of female beauty
– pointing the finger at male artists, male fashion designers and a male-dominated
medical establishment. Further, she staged identity as something that is not inert and
biologically given, but is continuously socially produced – or performative – and
therefore contestable.
Orlan’s Reincarnation challenged the medical objectification of women’s bodies
by taking control of the operating theatres where her Reincarnation took place, in a
gesture similar to Roberto Sifuentes and Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s occupation of
bourgeois art galleries in their Temple of Confessions (1994–97). Orlan decorated
the theatres, hired designers (including Paco Rabanne and Issey Miyake) to costume
the participants (surgeons included), and remained conscious throughout the oper-
ation-performances. During the events, she directed action, read excerpts from texts
on psychoanalysis, philosophy, feminism and performance (by, for example,
Antonin Artaud), and responded to faxed queries from audiences watching via
electronic link-up in art galleries around the world. By introducing intertextual refer-
ences, Orlan invited her audience to understand her work as a commentary on ideas
of beauty, self-fashioning, the Theatre of Cruelty, and boundaries – of the body, of
propriety and of performance practice. By interacting with her audience, she chal-
lenged the conventional separation of audience and performer and – like fellow body
artists Marina Abramović, Ron Athey and Stelarc – compelled her audiences to
take responsibility for what they witnessed. By using multimedia to perform and
transmit her work, Orlan challenged the assumption that the meaning of the biological
body is transparently available.
Orlan documented her recovery from the operations with daily photographs and
other relics, including videos of the surgical procedures, blood finger paintings and

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mounted samples of extracted bodily tissue. These relics challenged her audience to
consider what distinguishes the sacred relic from the profane. They made flesh the
problems of documenting liveness and the ephemeral performance event, while
revealing the post-operative physical and emotional trauma that cosmetic surgical
practice conventionally hides. Irreverently, Orlan inserted her self-Reincarnation
into a long history of religious and spiritual art, collapsing the historical distance
between archaic relics and her postmodern present, and challenging the grand narra-
tives of Catholicism and art history.
Reincarnation’s first four operations took place in 1990, the fifth in 1991, and the
sixth to the ninth in 1993. Orlan subsequently discussed the possibility of completing
Reincarnation with an operation to extend the bridge of her nose to her forehead, but
eventually decided to stop the surgery because it became both too risky and too
expensive. She then considered concluding her Reincarnation by asking an adver-
tising agency to rename her – or, more accurately, to rebrand her, creating a new
identity and passport. This conclusion would reiterate Orlan’s ongoing critique of –
and engagement with – the consumerism of the art market. It would also reinforce
Reincarnation’s proposition that the body and identity are socially produced.
In what she calls her ‘carnal art’, Orlan is intentionally non-conformist, ques-
tioning what the body, the face and identity are, and who defines and controls them,
throughout art history as well as in our contemporary, technologically-advanced
culture.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ince’s book is well illustrated, as well as analytically thorough and insightful. For
more sources of information, see the Orlan entry in Part I.

Ince, Kate (2000) Orlan: Millennial Female, Oxford and New York: Berg.
Orlan. Online. Available www.orlan.eu (accessed 14 October 2013).

ROUTE 1 & 9 (THE LAST ACT) (NEW YORK; THE WOOSTER GROUP;
1981)
Route 1 & 9 is typical of the Wooster Group’s work in that it experimented with
form and combined radically different source materials in order to explore and chal-
lenge cultural assumptions about art, performance practices and American society.
As the first part of a trilogy, it both returned to and raised ongoing company practices
and concerns. Almost all of the Group’s work has successfully provoked debate, but
this can be seen as their most controversial piece, its blackface performance and
sexually explicit video attracting accusations of racism and sexism and leading to a
withdrawal of a significant portion of their state funding.
The main sources for Route 1 & 9 are Thornton Wilder’s classic American play,
Our Town (first produced in 1938), and vaudeville routines performed in the 1960s in
blackface by African-American entertainer Dewey ‘Sweet Papa Pigmeat’ Markham.

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 ROUTE 1 & 9 ( THE LAS T A C T )

Our Town is a close study of a handful of characters in the small town of Grover’s
Corners in early twentieth-century New Hampshire. Grover’s Corners is fictional, but
the ‘Our’ of the title invites audiences to see the town as typically American and the
play as containing universal truths about life and death. Route 1 & 9 disrupted Our
Town’s universalizing fantasy of a white, middle-class, puritan American idyll by
introducing the racial and cultural difference Wilder’s play omitted. It first proposed
an alternative version of the United States by shifting the suggested location from
Our Town’s imaginary, idealized, pastoral New Hampshire town to an actual urban
environment of heavy industry, traffic and commerce: Route 1 and 9, a 50km-long
stretch of highway flanked by gas stations, malls, restaurants and industrial plants in
New Jersey. It further challenged Our Town’s whitewashed, realist version of
American culture by embedding Wilder’s play in sections of performance that were
non-realist and came from non-white acting traditions. These included sequences
where white actors in blackface emulated Pigmeat Markham’s scatological comic
routines from the 1960s and made phone calls from the theatre, trying (often unsuc-
cessfully) to get uptown Harlem restaurants to deliver downtown to the Performing
Garage in SoHo, in other words to cross a social divide marked by class and ethnicity.
Other non-realist sections of performance included a parodic opening video ‘lesson’
on how to understand Our Town, a mid-show high-energy dance, and a concluding
set of videos showing a road trip from Manhattan to Route 1 and 9 and a couple
trying out a variety of sexual positions in what appears to be a pornographic film in
the making. Using video playback and extreme close-up reminiscent of soap opera,
Route 1 & 9 presented sections of Our Town but always using alienation techniques
that are typical of the Wooster Group’s efforts to deconstruct realism’s claim to
portray ‘the truth’.
The Wooster Group’s director, Elizabeth LeCompte, has argued that in Route 1
& 9 she aimed to confront not the audience but difficult source material, which the
audience must then witness. However, many audiences – including critics and state-
funding representatives – found the show’s use of blackface and extreme racial stere-
otyping not critical but offensive, so much so that the New York State Council on the
Arts (NYSCA) rescinded the Group’s funding by forty per cent the following year.
The Group held public forums to discuss the show’s alleged racism and appealed the
NYSCA’s decision, but the appeal was not upheld. Perhaps what was most successful
about Route 1 & 9 was its provocation to debate issues around who has the right to
represent whom, what new forms political theatre might take, and how to devise a
deconstructive, provocative, but intellectually, kinetically and emotionally engaging
form of multimedia, postmodern, postdramatic performance. These debates
continue, often in direct relation to the Wooster Group’s work.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Savran excellently documents and analyses much of the Group’s work to the mid-
1980s. Auslander’s books include useful analyses of this piece and another in the
trilogy, LSD (...Just the High Points…) (1984).

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 EVENTS

Auslander, Philip (1992) Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in
Contemporary American Performance, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
—— (1997) From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism and Postmodernism, London:
Routledge.
Savran, David (1986) Breaking the Rules: The Wooster Group, New York: Theatre
Communications Group.
—— (1991) ‘Revolution…History…Theater: The Politics of the Wooster Group’s Second
Trilogy’, in The Performance of Power: Theatrical Discourse and Politics, Sue-Ellen Case
and Janelle Reinelt (eds), Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, pp. 41–55.

SHOOT (1971)
In 1971, American performance artist Chris Burden was deliberately shot in the
upper left arm in a small white-walled gallery in Los Angeles, in part as a response
to the then-current Vietnam War. The incident took place at Burden’s request, the
event a planned performance, though there was no intention for him to be injured
quite so badly. The .22 rifle was shot by a friend of Burden’s in front of a small group
of invited spectators, but the plan was that the marksman’s bullet would just glance
his arm. Unfortunately Burden flinched, with painful consequences (see Figure 8).
However momentary the event, the piece has had a resonance that has endured far
longer than the seconds within which the main action took place, revealing how
performance can have an impact that reaches well beyond its actual temporal frame.
Performance affords the opportunity to distil time and focus such moments in a

Figure 8 Chris Burden, Shoot, F Space, Santa Ana, CA, November 19, 1971: ‘At
7:45 p.m. I was shot in the left arm by a friend. The bullet was a copper jacket .22
long rifle. My friend was standing about fifteen feet from me.’

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 S HOOT

concentrated form from which it can reverberate outwards. Shoot also demonstrates
the lengths to which some artists will go in their creative and embodied explorations,
echoed in the practice of Ron Athey, Orlan and Stelarc to name but three. Burden
continued this approach with further self-sacrificial performances in which he was
crucified on a car, electrocuted and cut. All four artists have worked with risk and
danger, pushing at the limits of what society might deem acceptable or ethical
behaviour, at the boundaries of affect and feeling, but ultimately attesting to how
our fate lies in our own hands. Such an emphasis on individual autonomy is intrinsic
to most body art.
Shoot also has important things to say about documentation of performance and
art. The ambiguous title refers both to the gunshot and the fact that the work was shot
on Super 8 film. A short black and white extract some eight seconds long accom-
panied by Burden’s explanatory voiceover and two photos are widely available. The
event and its record make us realize how contingent art is and how it nearly always
deviates from well-made plans, failure perhaps built in from the beginning. Yet, this
failure can be of as much interest to us scholars and spectators as a piece’s success,
highlighting in this example the vulnerability of the human form and the artist in
particular, who through his or her actions purposefully stands out from the crowd.
Perhaps the strangest afterlife of Shoot, and which operates as another form of its
documentation, albeit an oblique one, is Laurie Anderson’s 1977 song It’s Not the
Bullet that Kills You – It’s the Hole, dedicated to Burden. Performances such as
Shoot resonate not just in wider social circles and sometimes globally but also within
artistic circles. As is typical of postmodernism, ideas are recycled, referenced and
represented, and so Shoot endures.
The ramifications of the piece in relation to its context are multiple, some more
evident than others. Shoot makes explicit reference to the Vietnam War which had
fuelled large-scale ongoing protests and demonstrations around the world both
before and during 1971. Burden’s individual protest was contiguous with these but
also looked back to the notorious self-immolation by a Buddhist monk in Vietnam in
1963, during the early stages of the war. Although here the action is framed by the
white gallery walls and happens before an invited rather than incidental audience,
several parallels can be found; though of course Burden is still very much alive and
active as a visual and performance artist. Shoot asks difficult questions about art and
life and their interconnectedness, and individual responsibility within these two
spheres. More locally, the piece also questions a core principle of American life
where the right to carry arms is enshrined in the Constitution. Frequent rampages by
gun-wielding individuals across America demonstrate that Burden’s implicit critique
of the availability of weapons is still trenchant, decades on. Just as Shoot has ambiv-
alent meaning, so too does the idea of an arm: one metal and potentially destructive,
the other soft, vulnerable and full of life. In Shoot, Burden brought the two terms and
materials into direct confrontation, with an unanticipated but long-lasting effect.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

The YouTube film of Shoot cited here shows the event and its build up. Peggy
Phelan’s collection focuses especially on violence and performance art in Los
Angeles, with Shoot as a significant discussion point.

Phelan, Peggy (ed.) (2012) Live Art in LA: Performance in Southern California, 1970–1983,
London: Routledge.
Shoot. Online. Available www.youtube.com/watch?v=JE5u3ThYyl4 (accessed 7 May 2013).

SPORTS
Sports events run parallel to theatrical performance, providing inspiration, theo-
retical analogies, and serving as spectacles in themselves. The Olympics are the
grandest example of theatricalized sport, the event framed by spectacular opening
and closing ceremonies, parades and the dramatic stagings of the awarding of medals
accompanied by national anthems. The very idea of performance is embedded in
sports and especially in the word ‘play’. But, while most performance playing is ulti-
mately for entertainment, sports have more serious outcomes and are highly compet-
itive. There is subsequently a lot more at stake in sport than there is in performance,
and events like the Olympics put national pride and confidence on the line. Sports
also have much greater public inclusion than the theatre, and the public’s emotional
investment in sports is extensive. Sports stars are as celebrated today as Hollywood
actors, their off-pitch activities attracting as much interest as their games. Spain’s
bullfighting brings this relationship between sports, ceremony, ritual and everyday
life into even sharper focus, more so than other potentially fatal sports such as boxing
and motor-car racing. Bullfighting involves elegant costuming and a flamboyant red
cloth, as well as the sophisticated ‘dances’ of the toreadors. These decorative perfor-
mance elements do not, however, hide the fact that this ritual-like event frequently
ends in bloodshed or death, of both the bull and occasionally the bullfighter.
The more gentle race against time is one of sport’s primary aims, embodied in
landmark moments such as the achievement of the four-minute mile or the smashing
of the ten-second 100 metre sprint. With their emphasis on physical achievement, the
need for training is central to sports. Sports-like training principles and practices
have crossed over into the performing arts, recognizable in Vsevolod Meyerhold’s
functional biomechanics, in some highly athletic approaches to dance like Eurocrash,
and in actor training methods such as that of Tadashi Suzuki, based partly on martial
arts, which many people practise as sports. In martial arts, the two fields of sport and
art are even more integrated, for they demand a way of life, or at least a psycho-
physical approach. As the rewards for sporting success have grown, so too has
greater significance been attributed by sports psychologists and coaches to sportspeo-
ple’s lifestyles and their mental conditioning – with sportspeople’s domestic lives
often considered to be impacting negatively on their play.

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In spite of advances in technique, psychological analyses and training, much in

sport still depends on what might be called ‘improvisation’ – performances and sports
both have unpredictable outcomes. This element of chance is what gives it its
excitement and generates sport’s massive popularity. And, as in the theatre, spec-
tators can affect the outcome of events (consider the difference it makes to a football
team’s performance whether it is playing away or at home). Unlike most theatre,
however, sports carry no message as such, even if they use complicated systems and
codes or rules which the spectator must know how to read. This is what separates them
so clearly from theatrical performance, even if many of their processes are shared.
The popularity and the aesthetics of sport have inspired many theatre practi-
tioners, especially Bertold Brecht. He advocated that the boxing ring is a useful
model for the theatre and that spectators should approach the theatre as though a
boxing match – critically detached, with pleasure and smoking. Italian comic
performer Dario Fo has presented several satirical performances (like Mistero Buffo)
in vast sports stadia in Italy in order to reach a large and predominantly working-class
audience. Theatresports is the name of a widely practised type of competitive improvi-
sation, with performers responding spontaneously to prompts given by audience
members. Appropriating the aesthetics rather than the political and inclusive
dimension of sport, the Wooster Group played badminton to signify battles in their
piece To You, the Birdie! (Phèdre) (2002), based on Jean Racine’s Phaedra. British
choreographer and dancer Shobhana Jeyasingh’s Raid (1995) investigated the
boundaries between dance and sport, and specifically an Indian street game called
Kabbadi. But cross-fertilizations are not just practical. Richard Schechner is one
theorist who has investigated similarities between sport and performance on a theo-
retical level, revealing the difficulties in classifying such activities. There are many
examples of the convergence of sport and performance in both practice and theory.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brecht’s views are posited in his 1926 chapter, an article originally written for news-
paper publication. Social psychologist Russell has a detailed section on social influ-
ences on sports performance that includes analysis of crowds. Schechner’s
‘Event–Time–Space Chart’ in By Means of Performance lists sports as a specific
category and provides a useful introduction to comparative analyses.

Brecht, Bertold ([1926] 1964) ‘Emphasis on Sport’, TDR: The Drama Review 16.1 (T53):
3–15. Reprinted in John Willett (ed. and trans.) Brecht on Theatre, London: Methuen,
pp. 6–9.
Russell, Gordon W. (1993) The Social Psychology of Sport, New York: Springer-Verlag.
Schechner, Richard ([2002] 2013) Performance Studies: An Introduction (3rd edn edited by
Sara Brady), Oxon: Routledge.
—— and Willa Appel (eds) (1990) By Means of Performance: Intercultural Studies of Theatre
and Ritual, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Willett, John (ed.) (1964) Brecht on Theatre, London: Methuen.

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 EVENTS

TEMPLE OF CONFESSIONS, THE (TOURED USA; GUILLERMO

GÓMEZ-PEÑA AND ROBERTO SIFUENTES; 1994–97)
This performance-installation by Gómez-Peña and Sifuentes is representative of
their innovative work as performance artists and activists, and indicates how their
intercultural agendas have tested the artistic and social potentials of interactive
performance.
The Temple of Confessions opened in Arizona in 1994 and toured the USA until
1997, visiting a range of venues, from art galleries, to a convent, to city festivals. It
was composed of three areas: the Chapel of Desires, the Chapel of Fears, and a sort
of mortuary chamber in the middle. In ‘living dioramas’ in the two Chapels, Sifuentes
and Gómez-Peña posed in Plexiglas boxes as ‘living saints’ with hybrid identities
composed mostly of what they saw as ‘Anglo’ fantasies of Mexicans. Sifuentes was
covered in tattoos and fake bullet holes, evoking fantasies of youths of colour as
simultaneously sexually attractive and threatening. Gómez-Peña wore a clichéd ‘Tex
Mex’ outfit festooned with souvenirs and talismans, evoking fantasies of Mexican
culture as being in touch with some sort of pagan wisdom. (Effigies replaced
Sifuentes and Gómez-Peña in the installation after they had appeared live for three
days.) A body bag marked ‘INS’ (Immigration and Nationality Service) implicated
American bureaucracy as potentially violent in its relationship to other cultures. The
installation’s ironic undercutting of an authentic spirituality was further enhanced by
velvet paintings of other hybrid saints, small tables covered with votive candles and
icons, and two live dancers dressed as nuns who used their veils to clean the Plexiglas
boxes and visitors’ shoes. Audiences were invited to confess their intercultural fears
and desires, whether orally (at two prayer benches with microphones placed before
Sifuentes and Gómez-Peña), in written statements to be placed in an urn at the instal-
lation, or over the phone to a toll-free number. Recorded confessions were subse-
quently played back in the installation’s soundscape, further encouraging audiences
to confess and to engage with their feelings about the installation and broader issues
of migration and ethnicity.
Sifuentes and Gómez-Peña challenged dominant cultural assumptions and the
public’s interest in confessional behaviour, by both displacing and reanimating them
in disturbing ways. Where artists like Orlan have occupied galleries to criticize how
they display and objectify women, Sifuentes and Gómez-Peña did the same here to
interrogate how forms of dominant culture objectify other cultures. By making the
performance a semi-ritualized opportunity for audience confession, Sifuentes and
Gómez-Peña extended the limits of audience–performer interaction and social
engagement developed in many different ways by other theatre and performance
makers (for example, Split Britches, Ron Athey, Richard Schechner, Eugenio
Barba, Peter Brook and Jerzy Grotowski). Specifically, they wanted to compel
audiences to explore their complicity as cultural tourists in producing the clichéd
images Sifuentes and Gómez-Peña inhabited. At the end of its tour, Sifuentes and
Gómez-Peña created an online version of Temple, using the internet to extend
Temple’s interactive reach still further into time and cyberspace.

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 T I ANANM EN SQUARE DEM ON S T R A T I O N S

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Temple of Confessions publication includes an audio CD; its website is available
at www.pochanostra.com (accessed 3 February 2014).

Gómez-Peña, Guillermo (2000) Dangerous Border Crossers: The Artist Talks Back, London:
Routledge.
—— and Robert Sifuentes (1997) The Temple of Confessions: Mexican Beasts and Living
Saints, New York: powerHouse.
Temple of Confessions, The (1996). Video. Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library.
Online. Available http://hidvl.nyu.edu/video/000518344.html (accessed 14 October 2013).

TIANANMEN SQUARE DEMONSTRATIONS (BEIJING, CHINA, APRIL–JUNE

1989)
In what is reportedly the largest public square in the world, a mass popular demon-
stration and sit-in turned into a massacre. The significance in recalling this event is
not only its symbolism on a political and social level, representing how mass move-
ments like the Arab Spring can emerge to threaten the authorities, but also how
performative such occasions become. They utilize theatrical elements such as
costumes, props and non-daily modes of behaviour – in Beijing, for example, there
was music, dancing, chanted slogans and the parading of a home-made statue of a
‘Goddess of Democracy and Freedom’. When participants actively seek out and
exploit the mass media in order to spread the message about what is happening, the
ensuing sense of being observed, both locally and even globally, and therefore of
performing, deeply informs these protests. Inevitably, then, there is a fine line which
is often crossed between such events and more artistic happenings that might be
primarily motivated by aesthetic concerns. Reversing this equation, happenings
might also accrue or utilize political connotations and implications, a premise which
many groups, including Bread and Puppet Theatre, have explored.
Events such as those in Tiananmen Square frequently manipulate and subvert the
dominant modes of representation and the symbols that public spaces possess. This
square is first and foremost a site for May Day military parades, where thousands of
soldiers march past Communist Party officials with rows of tanks and other weapons,
and where the State’s authority is celebrated. All is ordered and tightly structured in
space and time to foster the appearance of control, overlooked by giant placards of
Mao Tse-tung, whose mausoleum is in the square. It is a performance of state power
directed at the nation, its ‘enemies’ and the global media. Such images were exploited
continuously in the Cold War by the opposing sides. The 1989 uprising, which had
many other forms but was most manifest in this square in Beijing, was a performance
of another kind, with few rules and another cast, led by carnivalesque subversive
play. The third ‘act’ of this large-scale ‘production’, when hundreds were killed as
the authorities cleared out the protesters in order to re-establish the square’s place

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within the regime’s construction of authority, was a tragic denouement. It is this

slaughter which makes the two-month sequence of events so unforgettable.
There are countless examples of such performative mobilizations of people
throughout the world and throughout history. The Tiananmen Square protests took
place only months before the fall of the Berlin Wall in November of the same year,
for example. Tiananmen demonstrators also used some of the same tactics of spatial
occupation as the protests of Argentina’s las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo.
Tiananmen Square stands out because of its scale, its closing violence, and the
surprise it generated by happening in what was largely perceived abroad as a nation
of passive conformists. Such moments have helped shape the field of performance
studies and broadened the scope of what its analytical terrain might be. Performance
theorists and especially Richard Schechner have argued how loose the boundaries
are between consciously staged events and those which become theatricalized inci-
dentally through being observed or mediatized. They also reveal how frequently
devices used in performance are adopted in everyday life to heighten demands, draw
focus, or simply as inevitable elements of public celebrations and community gath-
erings, when the fluid rules of play displace the rigid structures of government.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The theatrical dimension of these protests has been analysed in these short pieces –
one end of the wide spectrum that is political theatre.

Esherick, Joseph W. and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom (1990) ‘Acting Out Democracy: Political
Theatre in Modern China’, Journal of Asian Studies 49.4: 835–56.
Kershaw, Baz (1999) ‘Fighting in the Streets: Performance, Protest and Politics’, in The
Radical in Performance: Between Brecht and Baudrillard, London: Routledge, pp. 89–125
Schechner, Richard (1993) ‘The Street Is the Stage’, in The Future of Ritual, London:
Routledge, pp. 45–93.

TRIO A (JUDSON CHURCH, NEW YORK; CHOREOGRAPHED BY YVONNE

RAINER; 1966)
Although only just over four minutes long, Trio A – or The Mind is a Muscle, Part 1
as it was originally called – opened up the parameters of dance and performance in
general, and helped to define what has been labelled postmodern dance. In practical
terms, the piece attempted to flatten crescendos and phrasing, working against the
natural rhythms of breathing and climactic cycles which usually exist in dance as
build-up, culmination and then release. Trio A explored a pared-down minimalist
aesthetic, without music, costume, reference to an audience or intentional inter-
action with other dancers, even though the work was made for three people (hence its
later name). Its vocabulary was daily or ‘actual’, as Rainer saw it, rather than extraor-
dinary, with deceptively simple turns of the torso or a controlled sinking to the floor,
and a mode of engagement in the movements that was low-key and apparently

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 TRI O A

effortless. Trio A tried to de-emphasize dance technique, in part by replacing phrasing

with continuous flow. Ironically, great skill was needed to suppress the performer’s
tendency to utilize climaxes and instead create a consistent, even rhythm and appli-
cation of energy. This mastery and effort was made as invisible as possible, focusing
attention instead on the movements as tasks rather than on the dancers, their abilities
and their interpretations.
Trio A was part of the Judson Dance Theatre group’s experiments in a community
centre in Manhattan, New York, at a time of artistic ferment, being temporally close
to such pieces as Richard Schechner’s Performance Group’s Dionysus in 69
(1968–69) and the Living Theatre’s Paradise Now (1968). The Judson group’s
explorations shifted emphasis away from virtuosity towards an absence of technique
and everyday movement under an umbrella notion of the dancer utilizing a ‘demo-
cratic body’, as dance critic and theorist Sally Banes described it, referring to these
attempts to break out of dance’s apparent elitism and incorporate different kinds of
dance and dancers. One group member was Steve Paxton, who later created the disci-
pline of Contact Improvisation and who choreographed pieces based on walking.
Although many works have played a similarly influential role in dance experimen-
tation at that time, Trio A’s impact has been endorsed by Rainer’s own lucid analysis
of the performance in a 1968 article, as well as through the existence of a short silent
black-and-white film recording. This shows the piece firstly in its entirety and then
focuses on detailed movements of parts of the body to highlight the craft of abne-
gation and suppression. Banes has described Trio A as a paradigm of postmodern
dance which questions all previous rules, even though it draws on a modernist
interest in minimalism, evident in Rainer’s reference to minimalist sculptures in her
analysis. The piece exemplifies the difficulty of categorizing creative works within
historical and theoretical boundaries and the complexity of defining what postmod-
ernism is.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Banes contextualizes this piece within the larger body of the Judson group’s work,
whereas Kaye relates it to postmodern performance of all kinds from this important
period of artistic activity. A short film of the piece is available on youtube:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=aggv4jybdaY (accessed 18 March 2014).

Banes, Sally (1981) Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theatre 1962–1964, Ann Arbor: UMI
Research Press.
Kaye, Nick (1994) Postmodernism and Performance, London: Macmillan.
Rainer, Yvonne (1974) ‘A Quasi Survey of Some “Minimalist” Tendencies in the Quantitatively
Minimal Dance Activity Midst the Plethora, or an Analysis of Trio A’, in Work, 1961–73,
New York: New York University Press.

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 EVENTS

UBU ROI (THÉÂTRE DE L’OEUVRE, PARIS; WRITTEN BY ALFRED JARRY,

DIRECTED BY AURÉLIEN LUGNÉ-POE; 1896)
Alfred Jarry (1873–1907) was not only an inspiration for the surrealist movement
but can also be considered the progenitor of much experimental performance in the
twentieth century, including theatre of the absurd. Ubu Roi, the first of a trilogy of
Ubu plays that Jarry began writing at the age of 15, achieved a central role in
twentieth-century theatre in spite of Jarry’s short, self-destructive life (he died aged
34). Its première was a landmark that heralded the beginning of modern
performance, which offered an uncompromising alternative to naturalist or
illusionist theatre.
The première of Ubu Roi immediately erupted into uproarious tumult amongst the
2,500 audience members, when the absurd pot-bellied, masked figure of Ubu opened
the play with his first word, ‘merdre’, a corruption of the French word for ‘shit’. The
audience were provoked by the scatological puns, the eccentric visual scenography
(in Scene 3, King Ubu brandishes a toilet brush) and the childish content. The
previous night’s public dress rehearsal for 1,000 people had been equally tumultuous.
The scandal among a wildly animated public was fuelled by the press response, much
to Jarry’s evident enjoyment: he was mocking the illusionistic devices of naturalism
with its attempted verisimilitude and psychologically motivated characters, but he
was also launching a broader attack on the values of bourgeois society enshrined in
naturalism. The playful, puppet-like characters with cardboard horse-heads stemmed
in part from Jarry’s youthful games, the central character based on a school physics
teacher. But Ubu Roi was also sophisticated – for example, in its parody of
Shakespeare, when the stupid king is urged by his wife Ma Ubu to kill King
Wenceslas, just as Macbeth is spurred on to assassinate Duncan. Such derision and
absurdity were picked up by the Dadaists and the surrealists and later in the theatre
of the absurd, whose dark and often grotesque comedy borrowed much from Jarry’s
exaggerated characterization and zany dialogue.
As Jarry continued to write new Ubu material, notably Ubu Cuckolded and Ubu
Enchained, as they are known in English, the play was performed in Paris again in
1898, this time with marionettes as it had originally been envisioned. Anticipating
Vsevolod Meyerhold, the roots of Jarry’s imaginative vision were clearly in visual
theatre and popular theatre forms and figures, such as those from commedia dell’
arte and clowning, both of which are licensed to lampoon society. Jarry took this
buffoonery and mockery one step further when he began to dress like and adopt the
manner of Père Ubu, as his art and everyday life merged. Events surrounding the
performance became as much part of the spectacle as the staging of the play. The
Ubu plays themselves are rarely performed – not surprisingly, given the provocative
nature of the material and the difficulty it gives translators and directors. Yet, the
first performances and the play itself still possess an almost mythological status.

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 W AI TI NG FOR GODO T

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Braun and Esslin deal briefly with this performance as part of their overviews of the
evolution of directing and the absurd. Shattuck focuses on Jarry as both person and
artist in relation to his fellow Frenchmen and the political, social and artistic
background.

Braun, Edward (1982) The Director and the Stage: From Naturalism to Grotowski, London:
Methuen.
Esslin, Martin (1961) Theatre of the Absurd, New York: Doubleday.
Jarry, Alfred (1968) The Ubu Plays, London: Methuen and Co.
Shattuck, Roger (1959) The Banquet Years: The Arts in France 1885–1918: Alfred Jarry,
Henri Rousseau, Erik Satie, Guillaume Apollinaire, London: Faber and Faber.

WAITING FOR GODOT (THÉÂTRE DE BABYLONE, PARIS; DIRECTED BY

ROGER BLIN, WRITTEN BY SAMUEL BECKETT; 5 JANUARY 1953)
Like Bertold Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children (1949), Waiting for
Godot has become a globally recognized signature piece of twentieth-century theatre,
its significance embodied in the distilled image of a stunted tree and two tramps on a
bare stage. The play, by Irish author Samuel Beckett, was written at the end of 1948
and in January 1949, and was informed by the loss and violence of the Second World
War, which goes some way towards accounting for its bleak mood. It is a simple
story that involves a child, a tree and four adult characters, waiting for the enigmatic
figure of Godot. Yet this simplicity belies a deep complexity in the material, which
has seen the play continually evolve and cross cultural borders through its many
translations. Its atmosphere of desperate anticipation and existential questioning is
wide open to interpretation, for thematically it never posits what the meaning of life
might actually be – it simply depicts the rather pathetic search for meaning.
The play’s cross-cultural transferability also stems from the fact that it is set in a
non-space of an almost empty stage and is not rooted in a specific epoch. This meta-
phorical and suggestive nature has helped give the text its longevity and value. It is
also stylistically open in terms of its genre. The Japanese première in 1960 incited
several Japanese writers to experiment with minimalism and absurdity, exploring the
difficult balance between tragedy and comedy that Beckett’s play treads so deli-
cately. It has achieved acclaim in a multitude of contexts – from its successful
reception in the San Quentin prison in California in 1957, to Susan Sontag’s
production in a besieged Sarajevo in 1993. The plot-confounding play has a distinct
human dimension that allows it to operate on what might be considered a universal
level. Godot is not only shorthand for a Christian God, as many critics have suggested,
but can equally be Clinton stalling on making a decision to save a bombed city, or
(for a convict) Godot is long-awaited parole.
The play’s style, with its rhythmical, poetic nature and anti-plot was startlingly
original when written, and even now proves difficult to perform. It has its roots in

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 EVENTS

popular theatre and especially clowning and music hall vaudeville tradition, but its
philosophical disposition runs much deeper than these forms might suggest. Beckett’s
own production as director in 1975, staged at the Schiller Theatre in Berlin, was long-
awaited to see how the writer would present the elusive material. The production was
much faster and lighter than anticipated, and influenced numerous productions after-
wards. The necessity for directors to adhere strictly to the stage directions, demanded
formerly by Beckett and now by his estate, has meant that few have been able to make
radical experiments with the material. But the difficulty also lies in the play’s strict
rhythm and pattern, which does not lend itself to edits, cuts or radical interpretations.
In spite of this seeming restriction, productions vary extensively in their mood, pace
and in the balance between comedy and darkness, such is the text’s richness.
Waiting for Godot is considered a landmark piece of experimental twentieth-
century theatre writing. The play clearly continued the investigations of the Dadaists
and Antonin Artaud some thirty years before, but it also looked ahead and was the
foundation of the artistic movement that Martin Esslin defined as the theatre of the
absurd. Wherever and whenever it is played, it still attracts good ticket sales and
fervent critical and academic interest.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

These are just a few of the numerous analyses of Beckett’s work in general and of
this play in particular. Esslin demonstrates the play’s important position in the
evolution of the absurd, while Bradby gives detailed accounts of the play and various
key productions. States’ short essay examines the play and its structure more
theoretically.

Bradby, David (2001) Waiting for Godot, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Esslin, Martin (1961) Theatre of the Absurd, New York: Doubleday.
States, Bert O. (1978) The Shape of Paradox: An Essay on Waiting for Godot, Berkeley:
University of California Press.

YAQUI LENT AND EASTER CEREMONIES (NATIVE AMERICAN

RELIGIOUS CEREMONIES)

The Yaqui are a Native tribe resident in the southwest of the USA and northern
Mexico. They adopted Christianity during an intense period of contact with Jesuit
missionaries from the early 1600s to the mid-eighteenth century. However, they also
adapted it to their own local experience (of geography, for example) as well as to
their own cultural practices – their myths, social structures, architecture, pre-Christian
ceremonies, and so on. Thus, they created new ways of performing important
Christian events, the most famous of which are their Lent and Easter ceremonies.
These are traditionally Christian in many ways: they portray Jesus’s time in the
wilderness, his betrayal by Judas, his burial and resurrection; they follow a Christian
calendar; and they incorporate sermons. But they are also traditionally Yaqui: they

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take place within the Church but also in other significant sites around the community,
many outdoors; they incorporate Yaqui characters (deer dancers and other tricksters,
including the masked Chapayekas, who simultaneously represent Pharisees); and
they are led by an orchestrating maestro rather than a cleric.
Anthropologists and performance scholars – Richard Schechner chief among
them – have studied and employed Yaqui Lenten rituals to develop many arguments
and analyses. For these critics, the Yaqui ceremonies demonstrate ritual’s social value,
here as a performance of the Passion, an Artaudian exploration of cruelty, and a
re-enactment of the survival of the Yaqui, who have historically been attacked by the
Spanish and the Mexicans and oppressed by the USA. The rituals demonstrate cross-
cultural differences – for example, by being led by a maestro instead of a cleric – and
similarities – the tricksters resembling the mummers common in European religious
celebrations. They indicate how intercultural contact produces new hybrid or
syncretic practices, as demonstrated also, for example, in the postcolonial play-
writing of Wole Soyinka. The ceremonies facilitate critical exploration of the
performative significances of site, space, time, performer–audience relationships
and characterization. They also demonstrate some of the challenges of documenting
performance, not only because of its liveness, but also because its sacredness to
participating communities must be respected. In this and other ways, these rituals
remind scholars to be self-reflexive about their practice. Deak argues that Euro-
American scholars’ interest in the Yaqui rituals is a symptom of their nostalgia for
pre-secular culture. Others point out that the rituals’ dynamic of Euro-American
observing Native American reminds us that power is distributed unevenly in intercul-
tural anthropological observation and must itself always be carefully scrutinized.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
The rituals are described and analysed in detail from a performance studies perspective
by Deak and Schechner, and from anthropological perspectives by Spicer and
Crumrine and Spicer. Valencia et al provide some Yaqui perspectives on both Yaqui
religious practices and their anthropological study.

Deak, Frantisek (1989) ‘Yaqui Easter: A Reflection on Cross-Cultural Experience’, Performing

Arts Journal, ‘The Intercultural Issue’, 11.3/12.1 (PAJ 33/34): 69–78.
Schechner, Richard (1985) Between Theater and Anthropology, Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania.
—— (1993) The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance, London: Routledge.
Spicer, Edward H. (1980) The Yaquis: A Cultural History, Tucson: University of Arizona
Press.
Spicer, Rosamond B. and N. Ross Crumrine (eds) (1997) Performing the Renewal of
Community: Indigenous Easter Rituals in North Mexico and Southwest United States,
Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
Valencia, Anselmo, Heather Valencia and Rosamund B. Spicer (1990) ‘A Yaqui Point of View:
on Yaqui Ceremonies and Anthropologists, in By Means of Performance: Intercultural
Studies of Theatre and Ritual, Richard Schechner and Willa Appel (eds), Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 96–108.

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 Part III
CONCEPTS AND PRACTICES
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 ACTI NG

ACTING
Acting is the art of performing in theatre, especially using the actor’s voice and
body. While this may sound obvious, it makes the point that acting is both intentional
and theatrical, whereas other forms of performance, such as participating in ritual or
protest, may be neither. The intentional nature of acting means the actor will be self-
reflexive about his or her craft, its practice, and its aesthetic and social functions.
Because it is theatrical, acting happens in a social context and can have significant
social effects; further, it often aims to be mimetic – to copy a recognizable reality.
These three features of acting as intentional, social and mimetic are not only
descriptive. They are also at the core of arguments about whether acting is an innate
and spontaneous or learned and mechanical skill, the social and ideological effects it
can have, and how it performatively produces or reproduces the world.
The first question gets to the heart of debates about what the function of acting is
and how that is achieved. Actors are generally expected to convey emotion and to
empathize with the characters they play, especially in naturalism. Thus, many
analysts in the West have wanted to see the emotional link between actor and char-
acter as natural. Writing in the late eighteenth century, Denis Diderot went against
this prevailing opinion to argue that it was in fact necessary for actors to maintain an
objective distance in order to control their own emotions, the better properly to
portray those of their characters. Diderot called this dependence of emotion on tech-
nique the ‘actor’s paradox’. From the late nineteenth century on, the recognition that
what we perceive as good acting usually depends on intellectual and physical
training and discipline has gained wide acceptance. This is evident in the impor-
tance commonly attributed from the mid-twentieth century on to such concepts as
focus, control, research, psychophysical preparation, textual interpretation, and the
identification and realization of objectives, whether the performance is devised,
improvised or conventionally rehearsed. Nevertheless, the continuing value placed
on the actor’s quality of presence and liveness reveals a residual ideological
investment in understanding acting as spontaneous, inspired and somehow natural.
As actor training techniques have shifted across time, so have other aspects of
acting, all indicating changing social understandings, not only of acting. The
Elizabethan prohibition disallowing women’s appearance on stage reflected gendered
ideologies of the time. Western acting has practised intercultural borrowing at least
since the early twentieth century, when Antonin Artaud and Bertold Brecht, for
example, were both influenced by Asian performance. This borrowing persists in
Western practitioners’ increasing adoption of Asian forms such as yoga, Kathakali
and t’ai chi ch’uan, raising questions about balances of power in intercultural econ-
omies of exchange. From the late nineteenth century on, naturalism’s emphasis on
character and psychology has been continuously reinforced by training methods
derived from Konstantin Stanislavsky’s system and has reflected understandings of
identity as whole, autonomous and self-actualizing. Postmodern acting has interro-
gated this idea of a unified subject and individual agency in a variety of ways. The
Wooster Group’s Route 1 & 9 (1981) explicitly demonstrated the acting

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conventions it used to construct character and emotion. Robert Wilson’s theatre of

images frequently prioritizes the actor’s role as a scenographic element over his or
her role as a total, emotive character, as does much physical theatre. Sheffield’s
Forced Entertainment often compose performance as a set of tasks to be executed
rather than an arc of emotions to be played through. Partly because it resists psycho-
logical characterization in these ways, postmodern acting is often understood more
broadly as performance/performing. Further, as all of these examples indicate, from
the late nineteenth century on, acting has been directly developed and deployed by
directors to realize their aims.
Acting’s social status has had a chequered history. While tragic actors were highly
regarded in ancient Greece, acting has often been seen as disreputable. This can partly
be attributed to anti-theatrical prejudices – the actor is distrusted precisely because of
his or her very skill in mimetic representation, disguise and dissembling. Throughout
the twentieth century into the twenty-first, the actor’s status has been variable. It has
risen with the cult of the celebrity and repeatedly sunk as the actor’s paradox persists
in fuelling acting’s associations with both artlessness and artifice, sometimes
configured as self-indulgence and self-importance. What also endures, however, is a
continuing fascination with acting for both performers and audiences alike, indi-
cating acting’s specific potential to engage intellectually and phenomenologically
with questions of, amongst other things, subjectivity and representation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Roach analyses Western theories of acting from the seventeenth century into the
twentieth. Harrop provides an accessible introduction to many aspects of twentieth-
century acting. Hodge collects useful introductions to the training methods of
important Western director-practitioners. Zarrilli collects influential and thought-
provoking essays, including Kirby’s early attempt to distinguish between acting and
not-acting/performing and with Daboo and Loukes explores cross-cultural models of
acting process. Auslander traces some of the changes in acting that have transformed
it into performance.

Auslander, Philip (1997) From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism and

Postmodernism, London: Routledge.
Harrop, John (1992) Acting, London: Routledge.
Hodge, Alison (ed.) (2010) Twentieth Century Actor Training, 2nd edition, London: Routledge.
Kirby, Michael (1972) ‘On Acting and Not-acting’, TDR: The Drama Review 16.1: 3–15.
Reprinted in Phillip Zarrilli (ed.) (2002) Acting (Re)Considered: A Theoretical and
Practical Guide, 2nd edition, London: Routledge, pp. 40–52.
Roach, Joseph (1985) The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting, Newark:
University of Delaware Press.
Zarrilli, Phillip B. (ed.) (2002) Acting (Re)Considered: A Theoretical and Practical Guide, 2nd
edition, London: Routledge.
—— Jerri Daboo and Rebecca Loukes (2013) Acting: Psychophysical Phenomenon and
Process, Basingstoke, Palgrave.

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AFFECT, FEELING AND EMOTION

In the early twenty-first century an ‘affective turn’ in critical thinking in the arts and
humanities has increased attention on affect, emotion and feeling. (‘Affective’ has to
do with feelings; this is different from ‘effective’ which has to do with the efficiency
of something, or how well it works.) This entry outlines definitional distinctions
between these related terms, explores critical and political consequences of the
‘affective turn’ and considers its particular relevance to theatre and performance
studies. It argues that paying fuller attention to affect increases appreciation of the
roles of feeling and of bodies in making meaning and that this appreciation impor-
tantly recalibrates historical hierarchies of meaning which have denigrated bodies,
feelings and, for that matter, theatre and performance. It also argues that, as practices
which feature and foreground feelings and bodies, theatre and performance can help
us better understand the cultural work of feelings.
Affects are sensory, bodily responses to stimuli which are manifested in such
things as goosebumps, blushing and a racing heart. They happen in our bodies but are
usually beyond our conscious control. In the context of theatre and performance, a
concern with affect raises the importance of the body in meaning-making for both the
performer and the audience. For some theatre scholars, it has provoked collaboration
with scientists in exploring the ways that cognition happens. It has also turned
attention to and validated audience responses which are apparently irrational or
initially unexplainable, giving authority to such claims as ‘I liked it’ or ‘It moved
me’, to feelings of presence and to the individual audience member and his or her
intimate, immediate ‘gut feelings’. Feelings are our recognition of affects. And
emotions are how we understand and interpret affects through social agreement and
personal memory, for example, as fear, pity or desire.
The affective turn has shifted credit for meaning-making from features and prac-
tices which focus on semiotic systems, representation, sense-making and interpre-
tation onto bodily experience, feelings and emotions. It restructures hierarchies
which tend to privilege apparently rational understandings and apparently ‘cerebral’
cultural practices (that is, ‘high art’). It has been very important to – and has been led
by – feminist and queer studies as well as critical race theory because the historical
denigration of the expression of feeling has been linked both frequently and inti-
mately to historical prejudices against women, queers and people of colour.
For the same reasons and more, the affective turn is important to theatre and
performance. This is especially the case for those forms which are more commonly
associated with feeling and bodies, including much popular theatre and perfor-
mance such as nineteenth-century melodrama, the megamusical, dance and sports.
But it is also true for practices which are apparently elite – or, for some, esoteric –
such as body art and performance art/live art. The affective turn is also important
because, as Erin Hurley, Nicholas Ridout, Martin Welton and others have persua-
sively argued, theatre is a sort of ‘feeling-machine’, an apparatus designed to stim-
ulate feelings through such triggers as lighting, sound, movement, mise en scène,
pacing, structure, characterization, human proximity and more. Theatre’s many

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feelings include cathartic pity and fear in the theatre of the fifth century BCE according
to Aristotle; empathy across much of theatre history; visceral feeling for Antonin
Artaud; politically provocative feelings of outrage and indignation in the theatre of
Bertold Brecht; and a range from fear through euphoria to boredom in butoh.
Feeling is also crucial to making theatre, for example through emotion memory exer-
cises in the work of Konstantin Stanislavsky and in relation to longstanding debates
about the so-called ‘actor’s paradox’ which asks whether performers must actually
feel emotions during performance in order properly to portray them.
Paying critical attention to affect and emotion in performance can furthermore
help expand how we understand audiences’ experiences as not just about interpre-
tation, but also about feelings. It can help us see how theatre and performance can
motivate political action in any socially-engaged form, which Jill Dolan might call
a utopian performative, and which includes such things as public protests – like
those of las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, Tiananmen Square and the Arab Spring
– and sites such as Holocaust Memorials and Museums. It can enhance our under-
standing of performance work which provokes us to reflect on affect and emotion, be
that the apparently affectless theatre of New York-based writer/director Richard
Maxwell, or the viscerally challenging work of artists such as Marina Abramović
and Ron Athey. It can help us make sense of a range of practices of ‘affective
labour’; that is, labour which is emotional and also intellectual (rather than princi-
pally physical), such as parenting, working in a service industry or acting. And it can
help us to understand not only our own feelings but also those of others.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hurley’s Theatre & Feeling provides a wonderful overview of key issues which are
explored in more theoretical context in her co-edited collection with Sara Warner.
Some relevant works in theatre studies include books by Dolan, Escolme, Ridout,
Thompson (who applies the ‘affective turn’ to applied theatre), and Welton and Di
Benedetto, both of whom focus on the senses. Key works which engage with the
performativity of emotions include texts by Ahmed, Clough and Sedgwick.

Ahmed, Sara (2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotions, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press.
Clough, Patricia Ticineto (ed.) (2007) The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, Durham:
Duke University Press.
Di Benedetto, Stephen (2010) The Provocation of the Senses in Contemporary Theatre, New
York: Routledge.
Dolan, Jill (2005) Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre, Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press.
Escolme, Bridget (2013) Emotional Excess on the Shakespearean Stage: Passion’s Slaves,
London: Arden Shakespeare.
Hurley, Erin (2010) Theatre & Feeling, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
—— and Sara Warner (eds) (2012) Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Special Section
on ‘Affect/Performance/Politics’, 26:2, 99–219.

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Ridout, Nicholas (2007) Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (2003) Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Thompson, James (2009) Performance Affects: Applied Theatre and the End of Effect,
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Welton, Martin (2012) Feeling Theatre, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

ANIMALS
Anecdotally, the presence of animals on stage, like that of children, is best avoided
because their behaviour is unpredictable and difficult to control. Yet, animals have
often been used in performance by many groups and artists, exploiting these very
qualities of surprise and unpredictability. This ranges from England’s Rose English
and France’s Théâtre Equestre Zingaro, who both perform regularly with horses,
through Italy’s Socíetas Rafaello Sanzio, who work with children and animals, to
Pina Bausch’s Wuppertal Dance Theatre. Bausch has frequently used the much
more predictable, though still challenging, devices of performers dressed as animals
and even a stuffed deer (in 1980), which provided an enigmatic stillness in the
surrounding vortex of movement.
Historically, the circus was at the forefront of performance with live animals until
increasing concerns about exploitation in the 1980s led to the development of human-
only circus events, dominated now by the hugely successful Canadian company
Cirque du Soleil. In various actions and happenings, performance artists have
provoked strong feelings with their exploitation of dead and live animals. Most noto-
rious amongst these is Hermann Nitsch, who from 1962 onwards ritualistically
played with dead chickens and blood as visual media with which to paint the body
and adorn the space, perhaps inevitably causing a scandal. Joseph Beuys used a dead
hare and a live coyote in Coyote: I Like America and America Likes Me (1974) as
performance partners. He deployed these animals not so much for their potential as
spectacle (though this is inevitable), but more to provoke questions about our identity,
about the function of art as communication (by asking how animals communicate),
and about human responsibility for nature and for other beings. The juxtaposition of
human performers alongside animals enables the spectator to scrutinize both stage
presences closely – and comparatively – within the objectifying frame that perfor-
mance provides. A performance’s liveness is also accentuated by the risk of animals’
unpredictability.
Other correspondences between humans and animals exist in concepts of actor
training and performance, like Tadashi Suzuki’s idea of performers utilizing
‘animal energy’. Several directors and teachers, like Eugenio Barba and Jerzy
Grotowski, have also attempted to emphasize the ‘extra-daily’ or non-social aspects
of performance, implicitly advocating a return to nature and ritual that goes back to
the goat song (tragos) at the source of tragedy. These artists espouse biologically-
driven, impulsive, even irrational (or at least non-cognitive) behaviour, that is

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somehow animalistic. This is different from, though not completely unrelated to, the
imitative animal exercises that have become familiar in many acting processes,
notable in Jacques Copeau and Jacques Lecoq’s training. Such processes of trans-
formation and imitation may have little relation to the overt display acts of
‘performing’ dolphins or bears. But the presence of animals in performance, the
challenges they pose theoretically, and the models of behaviour they offer, all add
unusual complexity and richness to investigations of what performing might be.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Read collates theoretical reflections as well as more descriptive pieces by and on

various practitioners who work with animals. Orozco’s book provides a short
overview of the corresponding worlds of animals and performance, whilst Ridout
focuses specifically on various anomalies prompted by mixing animals and theatre.
Chaudhuri examines zoos and circuses in order to understand better the crossovers
between human and animal performance, thereby building on Bouissac’s early and
unusual study.

Bouissac, Paul (1976) Circus and Culture: A Semiotic Approach, Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Chaudhuri, Una (2003) ‘Zoo Stories: “Boundary Work” in Theater History’, in Theorizing
Practice: Redefining Theater History, W. B. Worthen with Peter Holland (eds), Hampshire:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Orozco, Lourdes (2013) Theatre & Animals, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
Read, Alan (ed.) (2000) ‘On Animals’, a special issue of Performance Research 5.2, London:
Routledge.
Ridout, Nicholas (2006) Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

APPLIED THEATRE AND SOCIALLY-ENGAGED PERFORMANCE

In applied theatre, trained practitioners work actively and collaboratively with
participants who are not usually theatre experts and who are often from socially-
marginalized groups, so that those participants become both spectators and makers,
or ‘spect-actors’ in the words of applied theatre pioneer Augusto Boal. With and for
those participants, applied theatre ‘applies’ itself, explicitly aiming to bring about
social change, such as education, social empowerment, revisions to legislation,
conflict resolution, activism or therapeutic impact. It is usually embedded in its
participant community’s contexts, such as schools, prisons, hospitals, community
centres and other public places. Its techniques include theatre games, making
tableaux, role-playing and other forms of improvisation and are designed to engage
spect-actor participants, explore issues of concern to them and stage potential solu-
tions. Some theatre companies which use applied practices, such as Sistren and the
Bread and Puppet Theatre, do produce shows, but they tend to maintain a somewhat

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amateur or rough style, downplaying performance expertise and actively empha-

sizing process over product. Some of applied theatre’s best-known forms include
theatre in education (TiE), prison theatre and several forms pioneered by Boal such
as Legislative Theatre and Invisible Theatre.
In contrast to applied theatre, socially-engaged performance aims less to bring
about social change directly than to make social interventions which provoke
discussion which may in turn lead to change. It also tends to pay more attention to
the finished quality of its aesthetic product than does process-focused applied theatre.
Deriving its name from the capacious category of ‘socially-engaged art’, it is a looser
term than ‘applied theatre’ and can capture a wider range of practice. Some artists
who might be considered practitioners include Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Orlan and
Marina Abramović, whose works address such issues as misogyny and ethnic
discrimination through complex artistic practices. Socially-engaged performance has
become important in theatre and performance studies as practical, disciplinary and
intellectual lines between performance, live art and art have blurred, and as debates
have grown about the political efficacy of art which aims instrumentally to create
social change.
A core question in these debates asks what the roles of art and performance should
be in contexts where social change is desired. If they aim to be instrumentalist,
bringing about change, does this risk turning them into social work rather than art
practice? Are practitioners more like teachers and facilitators than artists, and what
is jeopardized if they pay less attention to artistry? James Thompson has argued
persuasively that applied theatre should focus less on its quantitative social effects
and more on its qualitative affects, the feelings that art can produce through, for
example, beauty, and the benefits of those feelings. Art critics and historians Claire
Bishop and Grant Kester have staged a fierce debate in this area, mostly in the pages
of the journal ArtForum International. Bishop argues against a critical approach
which focuses on art’s social effects and ethics to the exclusion of its aesthetics. Such
an approach, she maintains, prevents aesthetic analyses which might read such work
as, for example, potentially socially unsuccessful, simply boring, artistically bland or
even ethically uncomfortable. (For Bishop as for Jacques Rancière, this discomfort
can be aesthetically and socially productive for the ways it troubles normative
assumptions and re-distributes the sensible in Rancière’s terms). Kester counters that
Bishop’s proposed approach is elitist in its advocacy of critique which is aesthetic,
deconstructive and certainly sceptical rather than, for example, joyous in its partici-
pation, as so much applied theatre can be.
These are not the only debates about performance work which aims to stimulate
social change. Critics warn that applied theatre can pose risks to its participating
communities when its engagement is too brief, superficial, patronizingly didactic or
even exploitative; for example, when a practitioner imposes unsolicited ‘help’ on a
community without proper consultation. On the other hand, some warn that socially-
engaged projects risk being too esoteric, exclusive, elitist, insufficiently integrated
with the communities and issues they address, not to mention too product-driven and
complicit with a capitalist art market as distinct from what might be seen as applied

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theatre’s gift economy, as in Eugenio Barba’s practice of barter. Furthermore,

several observers argue that the distinctions posed here between applied and socially-
engaged practices are, for many practitioners such as Split Britches and Annie
Sprinkle, redundant, not to mention counter-productive, since such divisions can
police and separate practices that deliberately hybridize the political, the social and
the aesthetic in important ways.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

There is a vast literature on applied theatre and its various forms (for example, Boal,
McAvinchey, Nicholson, Thompson and Kester; Prentki and Preston’s edited
collection is full of useful selections). Those who focus on socially-engaged perfor-
mance and art include Jackson and Bishop. Shaughnessy makes the case to recognize
these kinds of practices as often significantly mutually integrated.

Bishop, Claire (2006) ‘The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents’, ArtForum
International 44:6 (February): 178–183.
—— (2012) Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, London:
Verso.
Boal, Augusto (1979) Theatre of the Oppressed, London: Pluto Press.
Jackson, Shannon (2011) Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics, Oxon: Routledge.
Kester, Grant (2004) Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art,
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
—— (2006) ‘Another Turn’, ArtForum International 44:9 (May): 22.
McAvinchey, Caoimhe (2011) Theatre & Prison, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Nicholson, Helen (2005) Applied Drama: The Gift of Theatre, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Prentki, Tim, and Sheila Preston (eds) (2009) The Applied Theatre Reader, Oxon: Routledge.
Shaughnessy, Nicola (2012) Applying Performance: Live Art, Socially Engaged Theatre and
Affective Practice, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Thompson, James (2009) Performance Affects: Applied Theatre and the End of Effect,
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

ASIAN PERFORMANCE
There is an overt problem in trying to write a single entry on the performance forms
of a continent, for it will inevitably limit, simplify, exclude and possibly mislead.
Yet, from the Western perspective this book adopts, Asian performance has long
appeared as a challenging and enticing corollary to Western practices. Interest in
interculturalism cemented this, but only at the very end of a century of fascination,
misunderstanding and appropriation, to name some of the worst aspects of this cross-
cultural interaction. Asian performance has also offered inspiration, education and a
constant reminder of the ritual sources of, and possibilities for, Western theatre,
dance and other art forms that, amongst many others, director Ariane Mnouchkine
has explored with her Théâtre du Soleil. For these reasons it is important to attempt to

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summarize the complex impact that traditional Asian performance (the focus here is
not on contemporary practices) has had on the West, while being sensitive to ethical
issues.
Much interest in Asian performance has been driven by fascination with the
exotic, as articulated broadly by the late Edward Said in his influential writings on
Orientalism. The codified performance forms of Kathakali and Noh, for example,
might distance outsiders because of their specific gestural languages or mudras
(Kathakali’s symbolic hand gestures), but they obviate this with their emphasis on
physical and energetic techniques, which can be felt and seen (if not understood)
cross-culturally. The skill these forms require depends on long-term training from an
early age that has an equivalence in the West in sports, ballet and music rather than
in the theatre itself, and which is markedly different from relatively short-term
theatre training programmes in the West.
Equally compelling for Western theatre practitioners and historians alike are the
still evident roots of these forms in ritual practices and an overt connection to spiritu-
ality, as in Balinese dance-theatre. Contemporary or experimental Asian forms like
butoh have not totally cut themselves off from these traditions, even if they have
called into question any dogmatism with which they might be associated or practised.
This metaphysical dimension is what Antonin Artaud wanted to capture, just as
Peter Brook and Jerzy Grotowski were also animated by the idea of a holy theatre
or actor. But the very idea of performance in Asian cultures is fundamentally different
from that in the West, especially in relation to its role in society. Asian forms often
have a central role in their communities, which many feel is lacking in the West, even
if practitioners of popular theatre and community arts workers have tried hard to
develop this political purpose.
Asian performance forms have also helped establish the notion of the performer as
someone who might sing, dance or recite text – a challenge to the Western Aristotelian
model of acting based on mimesis. Correspondingly, performer training in Asia has
other priorities from Western approaches. Achievement in later life is emphasized
rather than youth and talent, just as originality is secondary to perpetuating tradi-
tions. Such notions have been picked up by many in the West, including Eugenio
Barba, Grotowski and American director Anne Bogart, and especially those working
in physical theatre. The importance of mastery of techniques and rules of training,
for example in Motokiyo Zeami’s treatises, have inspired practitioners like Phillip
Zarrilli to follow and then translate methods of transmission and instruction found in
Asian practices into Western contexts.
The differences between Asian and Western performance can too easily be over-
stated, but it is important to counterbalance these by recognizing that there are also
many shared principles and practices. Barba’s theatre anthropology is a well-docu-
mented example of an approach which looks for such common ground. Similarly, it
is vital to remember that there is a two-way traffic of ideas and practices, as in Japan’s
shingeki, the term for a hybrid of Japanese theatre based on a Western, mostly natu-
ralist model. Dynamic explorations of contemporary forms like multimedia work
fused with traditional practices have been the result of recent pan-Asian projects

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based in Singapore (Theatre Works’ ‘Flying Circus’ is one example), and ongoing
collaborations between Singaporean artists and Australian groups like Melbourne’s
Playbox Theatre, who produced Tadashi Suzuki’s Australian version of Macbeth in
1992. Asian performance must not be further set in stone or falsely exoticized as
locked in its past – traditions evolve and can be home to innovation, though perhaps
at a rate that is slower than is usual in the West. The respect for both tradition and
experimentation in much of Asia adds weight to arguments that Western theatre is
too often driven by commercial rather than aesthetic or even spiritual considerations,
and increasingly lacks social or political purpose.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The literature even on singular Asian performance forms is vast, as Brandon’s

important panoptic guide illustrates. These are a few examples that begin to explore
the inter-relationship between Western and Asian performance practices and some of
the theoretical concerns that surround them. The two edited collections cover a range
of materials, forms and approaches. RPA

Brandon, James R. (ed.) (1993) The Cambridge Guide to Asian Theatre, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Brown, John Russell (1998) New Sites for Shakespeare, London: Routledge.
Fischer-Lichte, Erika, Josephine Riley and Michael Gissenwehrer (eds) (1990) The Dramatic
Touch of Difference: Theatre, Own and Foreign, Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag.
Pavis, Patrice (ed.) (1996) The Intercultural Performance Reader, London: Routledge.
Said, Edward (1995) Orientalism, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Reprinted from the 1978 original
with a new afterword.

AUDIENCE AND SPECTATOR

Literally speaking, an audience is a group of people who listen and a spectator is one
who watches. By most definitions, the audience and/or the spectator fundamentally
constitute theatre and performance by witnessing it and at least partially producing its
meanings. Beyond these basic points of definition, however, the precise nature of the
audience and/or spectator is troubled by questions about who the audience actually is
and what it does.
As an abstract collective noun, the term ‘audience’ tends to homogenize the sense
of who is in it, both across different times and places and within audiences at
particular events. The idea of the audience as a collective is appropriate in some
instances (for example, in Aristotle’s understanding of the function of tragedy as an
event which spiritually cleanses the community) as well as in certain models of
theatre – such as black theatre or women’s theatre – which aim intentionally to
address and validate particular communities that may otherwise be marginalized. But
often this sense of the audience’s coherence and consistency is not only inaccurate
but also deceptive. This is because it produces an impression of shared identity,

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mutual ideologies and community – or Victor Turner’s communitas – that might not
actually exist. Historically, for example, the class, gender and ethnic constituency of
theatre audiences has varied according to shifting ideas about who is permitted to
attend and whether or not theatre-going is ‘proper’ or fashionable. That said, while
an audience may appear to be mixed, the performance’s address to the audience can
constitute it as homogeneous. Many feminists, for example, have pointed out that
much Western theatre often assumes an ‘ideal’ spectator who is white, middle class
and male. They argue that to maintain another perspective in the face of this
assumption is to sustain one’s exclusion from the show’s projected meaning and from
the dominant class.
This homogenization of the audience also problematically presumes that audi-
ences consistently do the same thing. But there clearly exist many different under-
standings about what audiences do, and especially about whether audience
participation is fundamentally active or passive. In some models, often associated
with commercial forms such as Broadway and West End megamusicals, audiences
bankroll the show, look and hear, sit back and expect to be entertained. In other
models, they become voyeurs, or are spiritually uplifted, or emotionally moved.
Sometimes they watch and listen, applaud or jeer, witness and take responsibility, or
are compelled to act. In different configurations of theatre and performance space,
audience involvement can range from the passivity encouraged by the darkened,
segregated auditoria of traditional proscenium-arch theatres, to the mobility neces-
sitated by environmental and site-specific performance, immersive theatre and
one-to-one performance and installation art.
For Aristotle, the audience identified with the tragic hero and experienced
catharsis, or the purgation of difficult feelings. This analysis of the audience’s expe-
rience persisted for a long time – and still persists. But it drew criticism for modelling
a fundamentally passive spectator: the spectator might recognize hardship in a play’s
narrative but would not act on it in real life because the will to act had been quelled
by the experience of catharsis in the theatre. Arguing against what he saw as natural-
ism’s inherently politically passive spectator, Bertold Brecht advocated an active
spectator who would be compelled by epic theatre to go out after the show and take
direct political action. Augusto Boal has proposed a ‘spectactor’, who literally
participates in both Forum Theatre – by deliberately entering the performance as a
vocal, thinking participant – and invisible theatre, which surreptitiously draws
‘innocent’ bystanders into public altercations. Many playwrights, movements and
practitioners, including Samuel Beckett, Peter Handke, Dada, futurism and the
Wooster Group, have tried to challenge the inherent passivity of assumed rules
about being an audience by deliberately provoking and even offending their audi-
ences. Theorist Jacques Rancière has argued that though conventional theatre audi-
ences may be physically passive they are creatively and intellectually active. Jerzy
Grotowski moved from a strong belief in the importance of the audience in consti-
tuting the show’s meaning to favour instead a paratheatre, where the powers of
catharsis were fundamentally designed to transform the performers rather than the
audience. While an audience is nearly always an essential part of theatre and

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performance, therefore, what an audience is understood to mean and do shifts

according to changing ideas, not only of what theatre and performance are and how
they make meaning, but also of what community and identity are.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bennett and Freshwater offer detailed surveys of theoretical understandings of the

audience, concentrating on twentieth-century theatre practice and active audiences.
Blau’s book is a well-informed rumination on the audience, grounded in psychoana-
lytic theory and asking important questions about what the social and political
function of a community or public is, and whether one is possible. Dolan’s book is a
foundational feminist critique. Rancière’s delineation of the ‘emancipated spectator’
has increasing influence.

Bennett, Susan (1997) Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception, 2nd edition,
London: Routledge.
Blau, Herbert (1990) The Audience, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Dolan, Jill (1988) The Feminist Spectator as Critic, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Freshwater, Helen (2009) Theatre & Audience, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Rancière, Jacques (2009) The Emancipated Spectator, London: Verso.

BODY ART
Body art is radical performance art that explicitly uses the artist’s own body to
comment visually, sensually and often viscerally on identity and to enact the body’s
social meanings and expressive possibilities. It began after the Second World War
with artists actually using their own and others’ bodies in their art; in the 1950s, a
fully dressed Yves Klein infamously deployed naked women’s painted bodies as
‘paintbrushes’, directing their movement on canvases to leave paint marks. Body
art came to prominence in the 1970s as part of a growing recognition that the body’s
specificity and social significations mean it can never be neutral, either as an artistic
medium – the actor’s body – or as the author of meaning – the artist’s body.
Body art was led by feminist artists who put themselves in their work, collapsing
the distance between artist and artwork, subject and object, and process and product,
and insisting that their embodied gendered experiences affected their work, its
reception and its meanings. Body art has consistently challenged the ways that bodies
signify – or are made to signify – within dominant cultures. Feminist body art has
explored how the female body is controlled by, for example, dominant conceptions
of beauty and sexuality, such as the kind of sexual objectification of women demon-
strated by Klein. Orlan’s series of plastic surgery operations, The Reincarnation of
Saint Orlan (1990–93), simultaneously acknowledges icons of beauty in Western art
history by adopting elements from famous portraits, and undermines them by
combining them in hybrid new configurations. Carolee Schneemann, Yayoi Kusama,
Karen Finley, Annie Sprinkle and numerous other artists have performed naked or

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semi-naked to challenge audiences to confront the ways pornography, fine art and
other forms of representation persistently portray women as commodified sexual
objects, rather than as active subjects.
As well as exploring the social significations of bodies differentiated by gender,
sexuality, race, ethnicity, illness and so on, body art has explored the body’s material
capabilities and limits. This work has focused on and tested the body’s material
borders – such as its skin – as well as the limits of mental endurance. Numerous
artists, including Chris Burden (in Shoot), Marina Abramović, Ulay, Ron Athey,
Fakir Musafar and Franko B, have shot, cut and/or pierced their bodies in perfor-
mance, with a variety of effects – provoking audiences to consider the ethics of their
passive spectatorship, and exploring responses to pain, transgressed taboos, the puta-
tively ‘obscene’, masochism, the presence of the performer and the mortality of the
body. Stelarc’s early ‘body suspensions’ with meathooks viscerally illustrated the
material body’s vulnerability, leading to his subsequent work exploring the rela-
tionship of the body to its technological environment in body work incorporating
multimedia, robotic machines and the internet.
Much body art has explored the complexities of subjectivity as conceived within
postmodern theory, recognizing it as fragmented – partially constituted by culture
and partly by the body’s given material conditions. It has interrogated the limits of
personal volition as well as conceptions of identity as coterminous with the body.
Work by artists including Abramović, Cindy Sherman, Hannah Wilke and Gilbert
and George self-consciously enacts the repetitions through which identity is produced
and changed, demonstrating identity’s performativity – a critical concept developed
by Judith Butler.
Body art is practised in artistic contexts such as theatres and galleries, but it also
occurs much more widely – and with many of the same meanings – through everyday
life activities of costuming/body adornment such as tattooing, piercing and scarring.
Other forms of body modification might be seen to include eating disorders such as
anorexia and bulimia. Like the gallery’s body art, these everyday forms articulate
bodies’ social relationships of oppression and resistance. They also engage with
ritual practices and rites of passage, mark the body in time, explore psychoanalytic
understandings of feelings, pain and pleasure, and provoke varied interpretations as
celebratory, exhibitionist, self-abusive or liberating.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

All three books here provide strong critical overviews. Warr also provides extensive
illustration and supporting critical reading.

Jones, Amelia (1998) Body Art: Performing the Subject, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
O’Dell, Kathy (1998) Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art and the 1970s,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Warr, Tracey (ed.), survey by Amelia Jones (2000) The Artist’s Body, London: Phaidon.

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BUTOH
Butoh was part of a powerful new movement of underground or alternative perfor-
mance forms in Japan that emerged in the late 1950s and (more forcefully) the 1960s,
a decade of radical protest amongst students in Japan, as elsewhere in the world.
Butoh performers were highly critical of 1950s Japanese culture and politics. Against
the troubled background of the economic and material destruction of Japan during
the Second World War – exemplified by the atom bombings of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki and the subsequent American Occupation –debates shifted between the
conservative right-wing forces espousing the preservation of traditions and cultural
autonomy, and the reformists championing Western influences and change, with
which butoh aligned itself. Expressionism, for example, was a significant influence
on butoh. Initially, butoh was led by individual artists such as dancer/choreographers
Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno. Ohno was Hijikata’s collaborator, then pupil.
His dance style emphasized personal expressivity, in part derived from his work with
a student of German expressionist dancer Mary Wigman. Only in 1972 was the
standing of butoh in Japan reinforced by the founding of the first butoh group,
Dairakudakan (which translates as ‘Dance Apricot Machine’), led by Maro Akaji.
And it was only in the 1980s that butoh achieved widespread popularity in Europe
and the rest of the world through touring groups like Paris-based Sankai Juku
(founded in 1975 and pictured in Figure 9).
Butoh – or ‘the dance of darkness’ as it is known – turns the spectator’s attention
to the simplicity of the stripped-bare, almost animal body and the innermost recesses
of the Japanese psyche. To the West it reiterated the image of Japan as a nation

Figure 9 Sankai Juku perform HIBIKI – Resonance from Far Away (1998)

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suffering in the wake of the Second World War. Painted white figures with shaved
heads, moving in painfully slow, acutely controlled and contorted sequences on
bleak sets, recall the ghosts of the traditional Noh theatre as well as the victims of
radiation. Even if it still demanded strict allegiance in terms of company dynamics
and a certain uniformity of expression, butoh demonstrated an innovative progression
from strict Asian performance forms like Japanese Noh and Kabuki. Whereas these
had set patterns or kata, many of which are centuries old, movement in butoh is
devised largely though improvisation, even if the performance ultimately appears
as precise, detailed choreography. Its intense physicality is meant to derive from the
flow of deep atavistic inner impulses of an animal nature that reveal the performer’s
very soul. The ‘dance of death’, which butoh is also called, should somehow tran-
scend the body’s material presence. Training for, and practising, this form is
frequently rigorous and intensely demanding of personal sacrifice, crossing over into
everyday life. This principle was taken to its extreme in 1985, when one member of
Sankai Juku fell to his death during a performance in Seattle, when the rope he was
suspended from, high above the streets, snapped. Butoh continues to challenge ortho-
doxies on an artistic, personal, emotional as well as political level, both in its ques-
tioning of conformity and in its emphasis on individual instinctive creativity. It is
also, in many ways, still largely an enigma. Butoh sits awkwardly, though challeng-
ingly, in a liminal space between dance, therapy, protest and acting.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
There is little written in English on butoh other than these four texts. The commer-
cially-available Blackwood video offers an indispensable companion to these texts,
especially since the form is so difficult to describe verbally. RPA

Baird, Bruce (2012) Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh: Dancing in a Pool of Gray Grits, Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Blackwood, Michael (1990) Butoh: Body on the Edge of Crisis, New York: Michael Blackwood
Productions. Film.
Fraleigh, Sondra (1999) Dancing into Darkness: Butoh, Zen and Japan, Pittsburgh: University
of Pittsburgh Press.
Klein, Susan Blakeley (1988) Ankoku Buto: The Premodern and Postmodern Influences on the
Dance of Utter Darkness, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University.
Viala, Jean and Nourit Masson-Sekine (eds) (1988) Butoh: Shades of Darkness, Tokyo:
Shufunotomo Co. Ltd.

CAMP
Camp exemplifies Judith Butler’s conception of identity as performative –
constructed through repetition, therefore provisional, and indicative of the potential of
cultural identities not to be predetermined by biology but to be articulated and
changed through cultural practice. However, the precise meanings of the term ‘camp’
and the practices it represents have been strongly disputed in cultural criticism

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– especially queer criticism. In her famous 1964 essay, ‘Notes on “Camp”’, cultural
critic and theatre director Susan Sontag defined camp as a sensibility and a style
characterized by artificiality, excess and a lack of political commitment. By suggesting
that camp values the apparently vulgar and the popular over fine art, high culture and
received notions of beauty, she usefully indicated the ways camp implicitly promotes
cultural democratization by playfully challenging dominant cultural hierarchies. By
identifying it as simultaneously attractive and repulsive, she acknowledged this anti-
hegemonic cultural value, but also camp’s potential problems. While she did not
specify what these were other critics have done so, suggesting that camp is: poten-
tially misogynist, sometimes celebrating restrictive clichés of femininity; not egali-
tarian but elitist, as a sensibility shared only by those with the requisite ‘queer eye’;
seduced by consumer culture; and desexualizing, engaged with eroticism and desire,
but not linking them to any particular sexual practices. Some of these problems with
camp are epitomized in the television programme Queer Eye for the Straight Guy
(2003), which played on ideas of gay men as stylish but somewhat superficial elitist
consumers.
Sontag’s analysis has been criticized on a number of counts, especially for down-
playing the link between camp and homosexual and/or queer sexual identities, and for
identifying camp as apolitical. For many queer theorists, camp is socially-engaged
queer activism: parodying dominant heteronormative culture in both everyday life
contexts and at such events as parades and carnivals; challenging binary under-
standings of male and female genders, especially through cross-dressed or drag
performance like that of Split Britches; and consuming excessively, not in a capitu-
lation to capitalist culture, but to claim queer purchase within a dominant culture that
otherwise violently marginalizes the queer.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The three collections here contain numerous good articles. Cleto’s is most substantial
and includes Sontag’s essay, as well as a full bibliography dating back to the nine-
teenth century.

Bergman, David (ed.) (1993) Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality, Amherst: University
of Massachusetts Press.
Cleto, Fabio (ed.) (1999) Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader,
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Meyer, Moe (ed.) (1994) The Politics and Poetics of Camp, London: Routledge.
Sontag, Susan ([1964] 1987) ‘Notes on “Camp”’, in Against Interpretation, London: André
Deutsch, pp. 275–92. Reprinted in Fabio Cleto (ed.) (1999) Camp: Queer Aesthetics and
the Performing Subject: A Reader, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 53–65.

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CARNIVAL
Carnival is popular street festival that usually combines music, masking or costume,
dance, food, eroticism, and performances such as parades, street theatre and
puppetry. Its practices raise key debates about cultural power and cultural identities.
Theorist Mikhail Bakhtin influentially argued that carnival is socially liberating
because it licenses the crossing of boundaries, especially between classes. As others
have noted, carnival’s transgressive potential can also challenge the conventional
separation of audiences and performers, as well as boundaries of gender, race,
ethnicity and sexuality in events such as Gay Pride festivals. Carnival can also chal-
lenge dominant social rules regarding time and space – as in women’s ‘Take Back
the Night’ marches advocating women’s right to walk safely in the city at night, or in
events where anti-globalization campaigners or Occupy protesters occupy the streets
and prevent the usual flow of traffic and commerce. And it can challenge hegemonic
assumptions of value, most importantly by celebrating marginalized communities, as
in the community plays and events of Welfare State International (UK) and the
Bread and Puppet Theatre (USA). However, in a debate subsequently extended by
Stallybrass and White, Bakhtin acknowledged that carnival also has socially
repressive potential because its licence to exist is granted only temporarily, in a
circumscribed space and by the State. Thus, carnival produces an illusion of demo-
cratically dispersed cultural power while actually reinforcing hegemony: by allowing
the oppressed classes to ‘let off steam’ temporarily, carnival evacuates their opposi-
tional energies.
These debates about carnival’s inherently ambivalent political potential can be
demonstrated through the form that is now most pervasive in the West: carnival that
originated in the Caribbean and has spread throughout the black diaspora to Europe,
North America and beyond. Historically, this form combined imported European
carnival practices that originated in Christian pre-Lent festivities with black and
indigenous Caribbean forms of music and dance. The resulting hybrid combination
can be considered both liberating for, and oppressive of, black communities. It is
oppressive if the new hybrid form of carnival is seen as predominantly imposing
European cultural practices on black cultures, and liberating if the carnival seems
more significantly to challenge imposed culture through the black communities’
claiming of space, presence, music, dance, food and so on (compare with Yaqui
Lent and Easter ceremonies).
In contemporary contexts as far dispersed as Rio de Janeiro, London’s Notting
Hill and Toronto, carnivals often function to articulate minority communities’
national, ethnic and/or ‘racial’ cultural identities, temporarily but powerfully
contesting racism and oppression. Carnival nevertheless remains vulnerable to
appropriation. While hegemonic governments may promote themselves as benignly
multicultural by supporting carnival, they may simultaneously exploit it by presenting
it as intercultural exotica and using it to attract tourists and to stimulate regional
regeneration. Carnival is also vulnerable to capitalist exploitation. In the 1990s, the
Notting Hill Carnival’s sponsorship by a soft-drink company meant it temporarily

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changed its name to the ‘Lilt Notting Hill Carnival’. This association of product and
event was obviously meant to attach street credibility to the soft drink, but it is
possible instead to see its actual effect as detracting from the Carnival’s oppositional
status, linking the event with commercial rather than cultural priorities.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bakhtin’s book lays down ideas subsequently developed by Bristol, Schechner,

Stallybrass and White, and most recently Crichlow in her edited collection. Carver
discusses issues raised by Lilt’s sponsorship of the Notting Hill Carnival. Riggio’s
collection examines a range of examples of contemporary carnivals worldwide, but
with a particular focus on the Caribbean.

Bakhtin, Mikhail (1984) Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky, Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Bristol, Michael D. (1985) Carnival and Theatre: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of
Authority in Renaissance England, London: Methuen.
Carver, Gavin (2000) ‘The Effervescent Carnival: Performance, Context and Mediation at
Notting Hill’, NTQ: New Theatre Quarterly 16.1 (NTQ 61): 34–49.
Crichlow, Michaeline A. (2012) Carnival Art, Culture and Politics: Performing Life, Oxon:
Routledge.
Riggio, Milla Cozart (ed.) (2004) Carnival: Culture in Action, the Trinidad Experience,
London: Routledge.
Schechner, Richard (1993) The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance,
London: Routledge.
Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White (1986) The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, London:
Methuen.

CIRCUS
An emphasis on large-scale spectacle and virtuosic achievement has always been
integral to circus, an influential and continually evolving popular theatre form.
Although demonstrations of skill and exotica may have much older roots, the idea of
mass public circuses stems concretely from early Roman times. The term then
denoted both the open-air stadia built for entertainment – like chariot racing at the
Circus Maximus, for example – as well as the name of such events themselves. The
circular shape of circus tents echoes these ancient counterparts and presents a non-
hierarchical auditorium for the spectators, encouraging a participatory inclusivity,
where vocal responses, eating and drinking are encouraged, and the audience see
each other across the dirt stage. Tents are portable and easy to tour and are thus
germane to its popularity. The collective nature of circus spectatorship was alluded
to by Karl Marx in his phrase ‘bread and circuses’ (from the Latin panem et circenses),
though he was suggesting that the masses could be fobbed off with such spectacles.
Following Marx’s statement, debates focus (as with carnival) on whether circus is
socially liberating or oppressive for performers and spectators alike.

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Circus went through extensive transformation following the public rejection of

animal participation in the 1980s. Now the popular Moscow and Chinese State
Circuses, for example, with their multiple franchises operating simultaneously in
different countries, rely instead on human skill and invention. Such companies draw
their personnel worldwide from national circus schools with their intensive training
programmes. The specialist skills that circuses depend on take years to acquire and
performers need constant practice. Canadian group Cirque du Soleil (founded in
1984) have taken virtuosity to an unprecedented level and an astonishing scale, and
now runs a multimillion-dollar international business, as their multilingual website
shows. As well as touring, the company is based at major leisure destinations like
Orlando, Florida and Las Vegas, and merchandises its work extensively. In the face
of such competition and promotion, small travelling troupes – of the kind immor-
talized in Federico Fellini’s films like The Clowns (1970) – are having to adapt
quickly.
The commodification of circus has removed it from its former marginal and
excluded position into mainstream consciousness. The broad appeal that touring
allows is at odds spatially with the liminal places at the edges of towns and cities that
circuses have historically inhabited. This marginal position is a reminder that circus
has the potential to provoke and challenge public perceptions of norms as well as just
entertain. There have been exciting innovations in what has been termed ‘new vaude-
ville’ (in the United States) or ‘new circus’, following the lead of experimental
groups like Australia’s Circus Oz, France’s Archaos (now-disbanded) and American
clown Bill Irwin. Archaos were renowned for working on the edge of safety, juggling
with chainsaws in performances based on a heavy metal aesthetic. As well as taking
circus skills into schools and communities, new circus practitioners in the United
Kingdom have investigated how their form can create hybrids with other media,
thereby opening up what was once centred on relatively closed, transient troupes.
Even the traditional role of the clown has disappeared from some circus performances.
Notions drawn from performance art, dance and the theatre are energizing circus,
which (relieved from its heritage of animal exploitation) is undergoing a
renaissance.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Few academics or critics, with the notable exception of Bouissac, have engaged with
theoretical issues about circus, and there is little other than scattered articles, five of
which are collated in Schechter’s edition. Bolton gives a lively report on the changing
face of circus in a range of countries and Jenkins looks at American performance that
has been inspired by circus practices and other popular forms. Cirque du Soleil’s
website shows the commercial possibilities of contemporary circus with its online
store and numerous film extracts, rather different from Birch’s simple video.

Birch, Miriam (1988) Inside the Soviet Circus, National Geographic Society. Film.
Bolton, Reg (1987) New Circus, London: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

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Bouissac, Paul (1976) Circus and Culture: A Semiotic Approach, Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Cirque du Soleil. Online. Available www.cirquedusoleil.com/en/welcome.aspx (accessed 8
July 2013).
Jenkins, Ron (1988) Acrobats of the Soul: Comedy and Virtuosity in Contemporary American
Theatre, New York: Theatre Communications Group.
Schechter, Joel (2003) Popular Theatre: A Sourcebook, London and New York: Routledge.

CULTURAL MATERIALISM
Cultural materialism is a politically-committed critical approach to studying all
forms of culture from apparently ‘high’ practices such as Shakespearean theatre,
opera and literature to apparently popular forms such as performance, fashion, music,
television, journalism as well as the cultures of marginalized groups such as skate-
boarders. Focusing on the material conditions of culture’s production, cultural mate-
rialism draws attention to the fact that those conditions affect the culture’s meaning
politically, socially and aesthetically. By examining culture in a material and social
network, it recognizes all cultural products and events as not the stable and trans-
cendent issue of an individual genius author’s mind, but as socially and materially
negotiated by ‘authors’ and audiences, amongst other agents. By examining culture’s
materiality, it seeks to understand culture’s consequences and how it reproduces –
but can also intervene in – hegemonic ideologies.
Most theatre production involves such material features as labour, funding,
equipment, costumes, bodies, toilet facilities, advertising, texts and spaces for
rehearsal, waiting, purchasing tickets, spectatorship and socializing. All of those
material conditions have consequences for a production’s meanings. In the case of
things like lighting and an actor’s performance this is evident and well attended to by
semiotic theatre analysis, but it is also important to pay attention to material condi-
tions which are less obviously significant. The comfort or discomfort of seating, for
example, may enhance or distract audience attention and reinforce or undermine the
would-be focus of the play. We might reasonably ask whether Bertold Brecht’s epic
theatre is properly achievable if staged in lavish conditions which might dampen an
audience’s receptiveness to his political provocations. Also affecting theatre’s
meanings and mediating our understanding of it are material circumstances appar-
ently ‘beyond’ the theatre itself, including education systems, advertising, urban
geographies, and aspects of theatre industries such as production companies, funding
networks, performer training systems and performance archives. For example, an
economy in decline may inhibit people from going to the theatre, or provoke them to
go, seeking release from the drudgeries of austerity budgets. It will certainly desta-
bilize the theatre’s economies and is likely to elicit risk-averse, less costly programming
– with, for example, smaller casts, less elaborate scenography and possibly ‘pop-up’
shows in inexpensive venues. An education system which instructs people to read
Shakespeare psychologically will produce audiences who do so, though such an
approach is anachronistic. Historical knowledge of much Elizabethan-age theatre as

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practised with royal patronage and no female actors can significantly inform how we
understand not only its plays but also its attitudes to gender and class. Thinking about
such a range of material conditions of theatre production helps us recognize both the
instability of the text (how an understanding of Brecht, for example, depends on
context), and how cultural meaning might be intervened in to produce different
meanings and effects which are potentially socially constructive.
Cultural materialism came to prominence in the 1980s. It evolved from Marxist
analyses of culture, specifically the work of Welsh scholar Raymond Williams
(1921–88) whose book Drama in Performance, first published in 1954, pioneered
the dramaturgical analysis of plays, as distinct from the literary analysis then
common. Beyond simply examining culture’s materiality, cultural materialism
explores and challenges the ways that culture and its institutions (for example,
education systems, a perceived ‘national’ theatre or a perceived cultural icon such as
‘Shakespeare’) are often used to reinforce existing hegemonic ideologies pertaining
to, for example, privileges of class, gender, sexuality and ethnicity. Some work in
this area deliberately focuses on popular cultural forms, following Williams’ obser-
vation that ‘culture is ordinary’ and all culture has significance. Another influential
strand led by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield examines works that are tradi-
tionally prized as high culture, especially the work of Shakespeare, showing how
cultural hierarchies are produced and are not intrinsic.
Cultural materialism has had a strong influence on theatre studies, as indicated in
the bibliography below. In relation to performance, its ideas have contributed to
legitimizing important and sometimes countercultural areas of practice and study
such as live art/performance art and body art. But there is more cultural materi-
alist work to do in this area, as initiated by critics such as Dominic Johnson, to
examine in more detail the often very constrained conditions of these forms’
production and the implications of those constraints.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sinfield (2006) makes the case for the continuing relevance of cultural materialism.
Knowles combines cultural materialism with the ‘close-reading’ strategies of semi-
otics. Carlson provides an extended example of the relevance of theatre’s material
contexts to its meanings across centuries. Holderness offers analysis of the
Shakespeare industry.

Carlson, Marvin ([1989] 1993) Places of Performance: Semiotics of Theatre Architecture,

revised ed.; Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Dollimore, Jonathan and Alan Sinfield (eds) ([1985] 1994) Political Shakespeare: New Essays
in Cultural Materialism, second edition; Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Holderness, Graham (2001) Cultural Shakespeare: Essays in the Shakespeare Myth, Hatfield:
University of Hertfordshire.
Johnson, Dominic (ed.) (2013) Critical Live Art: Contemporary Histories of Performance in
the UK, Oxon: Routledge.

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Knowles, Ric (2004) Reading the Material Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sinfield, Alan (2006) Shakespeare, Authority, Sexuality: Unfinished Business in Cultural
Materialism, Oxon: Routledge.
Williams, Raymond ([1954] 1991) Drama in Performance, intro. by Graham Holderness,
revised edition, Buckingham: Open University Press.

DADA AND SURREALISM

Dada is an ‘anti-art’ form that came into being in 1916, partly as a deliberately
illogical response to the perceived irrationality of the First World War. It was
pioneered by a trans-European group of artists who fled their war-ravaged countries to
gather – partially by chance – in the neutral domain of Switzerland. Here, in a Zurich
nightclub in February 1916, the German poet and theatre-maker Hugo Ball opened
the infamous Cabaret Voltaire. The Cabaret exhibited paintings and other graphic
artworks, but its main function was to present performance. Initially, the perfor-
mances resembled conventional cabaret, staging poetry readings alongside musical
turns. However, they quickly became much more experimental, combining dances
and skits that were often performed in masks to avoid naturalistic characterization;
cubist costumes; recitations of manifestos; music exploring silence, rhythm, noise
and sounds produced by the body; and, most famously, unconventional poetry
readings. These emphasized sound rather than literal meaning by simultaneously
combining drumming and bell-ringing with multiple voices speaking different
languages, singing, whistling and simply making noises. In contrast to the dominant
performance of their time, the Dadaists’ performances rejected rationality and its
oppressive hierarchies in favour of apparent nonsense and freedom, fantasy, the
abstract, process, chance and spontaneity.
Like futurism, Dada aimed deliberately to challenge its audience, even to scan-
dalize them, provoking them to respond actively. It also shared futurism’s forms of
cabaret, phonic poetry and manifestos. However, where futurism celebrated war,
Dada’s artists were fleeing war; where futurism extolled the machine, Dada was
interested in the primitive and the infantile, including the nonsense of pre-linguistic
speech; and where futurism had a sense of mission, Dada was characterized by
anarchic play. The name ‘dada’ itself ambiguously invokes a horse in French, ‘yes,
yes’ in Russian, and in many languages a sense of childish precocity and deliberate
obstruction. Dada, of course, cultivated this ambiguity.
The Cabaret Voltaire shut after only five months, but Dada’s practice spread to
Paris, Berlin and elsewhere in Germany, Holland, New York and Barcelona. The
publication of Dada magazines, books and posters, and the foundation of dedicated
gallery spaces, led to a split among its primary exponents, who argued for and against
Dada’s institutionalization. However, despite Dada’s relative brevity as a movement,
its influence has been enormous. Its deliberate irrationality was taken up in the surre-
alism which flourished in the graphic art of, for example, Salvador Dalí, and in films
such as Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1928).

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Surrealism was less developed in theatre but its absurdity is visible in the earlier
plays of Alfred Jarry, like Ubu Roi (1896), and later writers of the theatre of the
absurd. Like expressionism, surrealist work featured illogical, often dreamlike and
sometimes menacing narratives and images, it externalized otherwise repressed
feelings, and it experimented with dreams, as both form and content. Dada’s
expressive principles also worked their way into the dance of choreographers Rudolf
von Laban and Mary Wigman, who attended the Cabaret Voltaire. Its collage
composition extended later into the epic style developed by Erwin Piscator and
Bertold Brecht, and its exploration of theatre’s many arts led to Antonin Artaud’s
advocacy of a total theatre. Its anti-naturalistic avant-gardism worked its way into a
range of performance and body art practices as well as happenings. And its exper-
iments with chance were later extended in music by composers including John Cage
in 4' 33" and in dance by choreographers including Pina Bausch. While it resisted
being a coherent movement, Dada nevertheless articulated a clear sense of social
resistance, demonstrating some of the ways art could operate as anti-art, challenging
contemporary artistic and social conventions.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Through extensive, accessible documentation and narrative, Goldberg locates Dada

within a series of avant-garde movements that led to the development of perfor-
mance art. Matthews’ and Melzer’s histories focus on, respectively, playwriting (by
authors including Tristan Tzara, Louis Aragon and Artaud) and performance
(including theatre and dance). Richter was one of the original Dadaists.

Goldberg, RoseLee (2001) Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, revised and
expanded edition, London: Thames and Hudson.
Matthews, John Herbert (1974) Theatre in Dada and Surrealism, Syracuse: Syracuse
University Press.
Melzer, Annabelle Henkin ([1976] 1994) Dada and Surrealist Performance, Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Richter, Hans ([1965] 1997) Dada: Art and Anti-Art, London: Thames and Hudson.

DANCE
Dance is central to any study of performance and needs to be considered even in this
Companion, which focuses mostly on theatre practice, a form with which it shares
many elements. Indeed, in non-Western cultures, dance’s many manifestations are
often inseparable from the theatre. Asian performance forms often integrate text,
character and stylized movement, their performers operating as dancer/actors with
little distinction discernible between the two. Dance in the West, however, is
primarily concerned with movement in space rather than with text or acting. Western
dance is usually choreographed, or at least follows a structure based on rhythmic
patterns, sounds or music. As a phenomenon, dance – like play or ritual – is vast in

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its potential frameworks and in encompassing a ubiquitous part of human and even
animal behaviour, with multiple motivations and functions. But, whereas play can
often be solitary, dance mostly has a social dimension. As such it bonds, celebrates,
integrates and identifies people through a particular affiliation (as in Mods’ or
Rockers’ styles of dancing). This social role recalls dance’s origins in ritual practices,
where communal dance accompanied by music would be a primary component of
rites that brought a community together for calendrical or celebratory purposes. From
such public participation evolved the individualized dances of shamans, for example,
the beginnings of dance as performance presented for the aesthetic admiration and
appreciation of spectators.
While still predominantly using choreographed human movement, many Western
dance experimenters have also explored text, character and site-specificity, concepts
more familiar to the theatre. Anna Teresa de Keersmaeker’s Rosas Danst Rosas
(1983) was performed and later filmed (1997) in a disused factory. Many practi-
tioners have consciously explored the boundaries between genres, like German
choreographer Pina Bausch with her decades of dance theatre and William
Forsythe, who uses a range of technologies in and beyond performance. British
group DV8 describe themselves as a physical theatre company, yet they build on
the 1980s Eurocrash dance movement, which pushed the body to its limits, as
evidenced in their 1988 Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men. They have challenged
narrow-minded views of the ideal dance performer by employing older dancers,
questioning the fact that performers are assumed to be ‘finished’ after they reach their
early thirties. The success of British dance company CanDoCo, which consciously
integrates disabled with able-bodied dancers, has also nudged this important issue
forward. Such groups have succeeded in making dance and movement explicitly
political, in content as much as in its processes and context.
Dance has frequently contended with the question of how to speak with the body
or present concrete concepts or themes through abstract movement. Like DV8, post-
modern dancers such as New York’s Judson Group tried to combine formal experi-
mentation with politics. A piece like Trio A (1966) purposefully devalued virtuosity
and technique and replaced it with everyday movement, rejecting the politics of
body use and the aesthetics inherent in classical forms. The fact that dance scholar
Sally Banes has subsumed such work under the title Democracy’s Body reveals how
wider social agendas can be implicit in an aesthetic approach. Indeed, it can be argued
that all movement, however abstract, contains, reflects or endorses an ideology.
Battle lines have frequently been drawn against traditional forms like ballet, which is
based on fantastical narratives, is removed from any political implications and in
which movement is aestheticized and remote from the spectator, using an archaic
codified language. The dominance of classical dance has also led many contemporary
or modern dancers like Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham to create their own
techniques, focusing their experimentations on form. For Cunningham, for example,
movement is about position and space rather than the development of narratives
through danced action.

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For the scholar, dance shares the difficulty of all live performance forms in that it
is inherently transitory. Dance studies range widely: from phenomenological
approaches, which emphasize the experience of movement; through the techniques
and precise vocabulary of physical processes such as those articulated by Rudolf von
Laban; through questions of interpretation; to the placing of works in a historical,
political and social context. Problems inherent in dance analysis are partly remedied
by the fact that there have been some very good attempts to document dance on film
from avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren’s 1940s and 1950s works onwards. The
visual nature of dance and the ability of cameras to zoom in on details have led to
many rich and informative film documents. Filmed dance has also fed back into
performance in the works of companies like British group VTol Dance, The Forsythe
Company and Belgium’s Charleroi Danses, who have experimented extensively
with new technologies. Live performers have danced with virtual partners streamed
through the internet or on film, and there has been much exploitation of motion
capture technology, which, amongst other properties, allows dancers themselves to
trigger lighting and sound cues. As is evident, the possibilities for dance analysis
are as many as the forms and processes dance inhabits, the theories pushed to their
limits by the moving body.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The range of styles and modes of dance is reflected in a huge dance bibliography, of
which this is a very small selection. Some works on specific dancers can be found in
entries on choreographers in Part I (‘People’). Thomas, a sociologist, gives a cross-
disciplinary view. Foster’s various writings on dance have been eagerly picked up by
theatre and performance scholars, and Carter offers a comprehensive reader on the
study of dance. The DVD accompanying the Mitoma book is an excellent resource
that includes almost two hours of dance footage. The Rosas website contains infor-
mation on buying various films.

Banes, Sally (1981) Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theatre 1962–1964, Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press.
Carter, Alexandra (ed.) (1998) The Routledge Dance Studies Reader, London: Routledge.
DV8 (1990) Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men, Millennium Productions/DV8 Physical
Theatre. Film.
Foster, Susan Leigh (1996) Corporealities, London: Routledge.
Maya Deren (1945–55) London: Dance Films. Collected films.
Mitoma, Judy (ed.) (2002) Envisioning Dance on Film and Video, London: Routledge.
Rosas. Online. Available www.rosas.be/nl/rosas (accessed 8 July 2013).
Thomas, Helen (1995) Dance – Modernity and Culture: Explorations in the Sociology of
Dance, London: Routledge.

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DEVISING
Devising is a method of making performance that is often non-text-based and
includes the collaborative participation of the whole creative company in all stages
and aspects of performance-making, from scenographic design, to textual or dram-
aturgical development, lighting and sound design, and actual performance.
Companies that devise begin with one or more stimulus, such as an idea, question,
theme, story, object, image, light, smell, movement, place or a piece of text or
music. They then use a variety of methods first to develop performance material and
then to rehearse and edit it into a performance event. Methods of generating material
vary but may include improvisation exercises, writing, drawing, filming, play and
games, research and discussion. Having developed material, the company selects,
structures and edits it, practises it – sometimes seeking training to develop necessary
skills – and often shows work in progress to solicit audience feedback.
Devising methods can be seen in many earlier forms of performance such as
commedia dell’arte, which directly influenced teacher Jacques Lecoq. However, these
methods achieved newfound currency (if not yet the name ‘devising’), from the
1960s on, in the work of avant-garde companies that aimed explicitly to challenge
conventional theatre-making methods. Such companies included the Living Theatre,
Richard Schechner’s Performance Group and the Wooster Group in the USA;
Theatre Passe Muraille in Canada; Pina Bausch’s Wuppertal Dance Theatre in
Germany; and, in Britain, the People Show, Joint Stock, Monstrous Regiment,
Complicite and, later, Forced Entertainment and DV8 Physical Theatre. They chal-
lenged conventional theatre’s usual prioritization of text, director and performance
product by using collaborative and/or collective methods to explore the possibilities
and challenges of a less hierarchical theatre practice and an emphasis on all partici-
pants’ artistic processes. Thus, before the term ‘devising’ gained currency in the UK
in the 1990s, the work of such companies was often known as ‘collaborative’ in the
UK and as ‘collective creation’ in Canada. These makers frequently rejected dominant
generic patterns and formal categories, often producing non-linear postmodern and
postdramatic performance and cross-disciplinary performance as epitomized in the
theatre of images. Because devised theatre is often temporally and site-specific,
these companies also provoked audiences’ ethical engagement with controversial
current social issues. For example, Caryl Churchill’s collaboratively developed Cloud
Nine (1979) explored gender and colonial relations, the Wooster Group’s Route 1 &
9 (The Last Act) (1981) addressed race relations, the work of playwright Howard
Brenton interrogated the ethics of witnessing violence, and director Mike Leigh
explored class aspirations and animosities.
Devised theatre frequently addresses a particular audience, such as children or
people from a specific region. Because it requires enormous personal commitment
from its makers, it often works to enhance the risk taken and emotional investment
made in the performance, by both performers and audiences, and it is often autobio-
graphical, as in the work of Robert Lepage and Pina Bausch. However, because it
sometimes lacks ‘big name’ directors or playwrights and does not have the draw of a

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familiar (let alone classic) title, it can also be financially risky, sometimes having
difficulty securing both development funding and box-office sales. Its anti-hierar-
chical origins were perhaps developed most extensively in the invisible and Forum
Theatre work of Augusto Boal, for whom it was a universal method of rehearsal for
revolution. It is worth noting, though, that as well as suggesting models of anti-
hierarchical, more democratic theatre practice, devised theatre sometimes points out
– whether inadvertently or knowingly – the challenges of a truly democratic theatre,
questioning the necessity of a director or another figure who takes final decisions.
While many companies worldwide still use devising practices, some of the utopian
collectivism characteristic of devising from the 1960s to the 1980s has now
dissipated.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Etchells’ inspirational book is a creative memoir and history of his company, Forced
Entertainment. Oddey provides the first overview of devising practices, with many
specific examples from British companies’ work. Books by Govan et al, Heddon and
Milling, Mermikides and Smart and edited by Harvie and Lavender demonstrate
recent interest in this area of study and practice, and are just a selection of many
books that cover similar terrain.

Bicât, Tina and Chris Baldwin (2002) Devised and Collaborative Theatre: A Practical Guide,
Ramsbury, England: Crowood Press.
Boal, Augusto (2002) Games for Actors and Non-Actors, trans. Adrian Jackson, 2nd edition,
London: Routledge.
Etchells, Tim (1999) Certain Fragments: Contemporary Performance and Forced
Entertainment, London: Routledge.
Govan, Emma, Helen Nicholson and Katie Normington (2007) Making a Performance,
Devising Histories and Contemporary Practices, Abingdon: Routledge.
Harvie, Jen and Andy Lavender (eds) (2010) Making Contemporary Theatre: International
Rehearsal Processes, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Heddon, Deirdre and Jane Milling (2006) Devising Performance, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Mermikides, Alex and Jackie Smart (2010) Devising in Process, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Oddey, Alison (1994) Devising Theatre: A Practical and Theoretical Handbook, London:
Routledge.

DIRECTING
Today it seems surprising that Western theatre existed for so long without a director
– or at least a director in the form with which we are now familiar. It was as late as
the second half of the nineteenth century when Duke Georg II of Saxe-Meiningen (in
what is Germany today) took responsibility in the Meiningen company for both coor-
dinating a mise en scène and interpreting the text. This concept of a director was

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quickly picked up by artists linked to naturalist theatre, especially André Antoine

and Konstantin Stanislavsky, with whom the title became firmly established. Their
primary concern was to create the coherent aesthetic central to naturalist theatre,
focusing, for example, on psychologically believable characters and group cohesion,
rather than creating vehicles for the star actors who had previously dominated the
theatre. Before naturalism, the director’s role had often been taken on by an acting
company member, an actor-manager or producer figure, or the playwright. However
similar their work might have been in practice to that of the director we know today,
the role was not recognized as a discrete one with its own expertise or responsibil-
ities, and did not share the dominant position in theatre hierarchy that directing has
today. Directors like Vsevolod Meyerhold and Bertold Brecht then emerged. They
wanted control of a production in order to embody their own vision and style, which
then led to the creation of a range of approaches to acting.
What, though, are the director’s responsibilities as we now understand them, and
what does directing actually involve? The answer of course depends on the work
being directed, but the broad responsibilities do not vary extensively between
different materials. Whether the director’s task is the interpretation of playtexts, the
construction of a performance through a devising process or the creation of a visual
theatre environment according to the model of director-auteurs Robert Wilson,
Robert Lepage and Tadeusz Kantor, directing usually evolves from extensive
planning into a rehearsal process. This may or may not involve training per se but
will inevitably focus on acting techniques. It might also include a dramaturg
working closely alongside the director. Rehearsals culminate with the addition of
costumes, lighting and sound in the eventual construction of a mise en scène or
scenography. This grows from collaboration with the technical team before and
throughout the rehearsals, following on into runs or touring.
Some directors work repeatedly with particular individuals in a collaboration that
is central to their vision. Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod, who established the
British company Cheek by Jowl, are a notable director–designer team. But at the
heart of all directing processes is the director–performer relationship. This may vary
from ensembles where a director works with a group over many years, as Eugenio
Barba has done with Odin Teatret, to a situation where casting managed by an agent
brings in people new to the director but appropriate to the material or methodology
of his or her chosen production. The director’s main task is to make these performers
comfortable with their characters, roles or tasks so they can perform them to the best
of their abilities, whatever the stylistic conventions. In rehearsal, the director works
almost as a proxy audience, reflecting the actor’s work back to him or her and
providing what is often described as an ‘outside eye’. Work that is made without
such an outside eye, in theatre collectives for example, has often been criticized for
being indulgent or shapeless, perhaps indicating through this absence crucial aspects
of the director’s job. Directors need to find a dramaturgical or structural shape to
their work, a well-formulated and articulated rhythmical pattern, cultivate focused
performers and a sense of shared purpose among the company, and build a staging or
spatial environment that is consistent with their material and the acting style. A

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further vital part of the director’s work is to instill confidence in, and integrate, the
entire cast and production team, to manage the inevitable nervousness that is
generated by the expectations and actuality of public performance. These feelings of
trust, balanced against carefully selected challenges and risks, are enabled by the
constant evaluation and feedback that a director gives. The role is organizational as
much as it is artistic, but too much organization of the performances can stifle the
performers’ creativity. Subsequently, most directors do not have a strict methodology
that they apply to all texts or concepts. The nature of the job is rather more pragmatic
and serendipitous, the primary virtue of a good director perhaps being his or her
ability to adapt to the particular conditions and given resources of each production.
There is no denying the central place that directors have held, shaping (through
their theories as well as their practices) the innovations that have revolutionized
twentieth- and twenty-first-century theatre and performance, as a glance at our list of
‘People’ in Part I confirms. But the public perception of theatre directors’ work is
that it is often invisible. It might be sidelined by star actors or celebrated writers, but
also most of their work is over by the time a production reaches the public. If directors
have done their job well, the spectator will perhaps focus more on the content or the
performers than on the staging, though directing cannot of course be extricated from
these. Some directors cross over between the stage and television and film, building
a reputation through the wider reception that these formats bring. Sam Mendes,
formerly of the Donmar Warehouse, London, did just this with his first film American
Beauty (1999). But for many directors public or critical acceptance can be a double-
edged sword, especially if they want to challenge established orthodoxies or be
‘cultural critics’, with radical interpretations of classics or new works, as the Wooster
Group have done. Whether freelance or company-based, directing requires resource-
fulness, imagination and perseverance.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

There are numerous books on directing, many by directors articulating their own
theories or approach. Several of these can be found in the individual bibliographies
in the ‘People’ section. Below is a sample of books about directing that covers a
range of approaches: from Delgado and Heritage’s interviews; Mitter and Shevtsova’s
and Shevtsova’s and Innes’ collections and analysis; to Schneider and Cody’s
collection of materials previously published in The Drama Review; Harvie and
Lavender’s insightful edition about a range of rehearsals; and Braun’s thoughtful
though rather outdated historical survey.

Braun, Edward (1982) The Director and the Stage: From Naturalism to Grotowski, London:
Methuen.
Delgado, Maria M. and Paul Heritage (eds) (1996) In Contact with the Gods? Directors Talk
Theatre, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Harvie, Jen and Andy Lavender (eds) (2010) Making Contemporary Theatre: International
Rehearsal Processes, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Innes, Christopher and Maria Shevtsova (2009) Directors/Directing: Conversations on

Theatre, Cambridge: CUP.
—— (2013) The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Directing, Cambridge: CUP.
Mitter, Shomit and Maria Shevtsova (eds) (2005) Fifty Key Theatre Directors, London:
Routledge.
Schneider, Rebecca and Gabrielle Cody (eds) (2002) Re:Direction: A Theoretical and
Practical Guide, London: Routledge.

DOCUMENTATION
Documentation in our field refers to the recording of or attempt to capture a live
event, such as a theatre piece, performance or rehearsal and the subsequent output.
There are many ways of doing this: technology has now moved well beyond simple
written, static or two dimensional visual representational models like drawings,
photographs or even cave paintings, perhaps the earliest example of a sort of artistic
documentation of life events. The advance of digitalization means that performances
or performance practice can be filmed and recorded relatively cheaply and easily and
disseminated almost immediately, often online. Indeed, so good and readily available
are such technologies that processes used in documentation of works on film have
led to the frequent simultaneous live global presentation of staged events: as with the
National Theatre’s NT Live scheme in England, which transmits performance films
to cinemas for viewing, or the New York Metropolitan Opera’s Live in HD broad-
casts. Both of these formats are presented internationally, indicating the potential for
these performances not just to be documented but also shared through other media.
In such cases, the tools of documentation turn the live event into another form of
‘live’ performance, revealing just some of the complexities that pervade this area.
The documentation of live performance has sparked many debates, often centred
on issues about what remains of the performance after it has materially vanished.
Scholars have described how we are torn between the desire to retrieve an artwork,
in part in order to analyse it or at least remember it, and enjoyment of the very
liveness and ephemerality that is performance’s hallmark. Peggy Phelan’s research
has been central to these discussions, as she has argued for performance’s onto-
logical status as something that cannot be reproduced, is ephemeral, and thus innately
live. Philip Auslander has countered this view, proposing that all performance is
somehow already mediated, even when live, and that the distinction between live and
mediatized is therefore inaccurate. Fundamentally, documentation raises the question
of what futures we create for the past, by producing durable documents to travel into
the future. In addition, there are inevitably mixed views on what the best means of
documenting live events are. It might be that a simple black and white photograph
captures an atmosphere and moment better than continuous film, which might suffer
because it is somehow too close to the original. Documentation can therefore serve
simply as a trigger to allow a spectator or audience to recall what they have already
seen or as a means just to suggest something of a work, to evoke its presence in a
partial way. In considering such issues and with an awareness of their etymological

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connection, documentation thus draws on a long history of questioning how docu-

mentary films do or do not present an accurate record of reality, and how they in turn
reconstruct that reality. Academic arguments aside, documentation of one’s own
performance practice (or even one’s life in social media forms such as Facebook) has
now become so ubiquitous that some scholars have questioned paradoxically whether
something only exists when or if it is actually documented, a provocative conundrum.
Distinctions between the live and the recorded, the actual and the documented are
becoming increasingly blurred as the development of computer-generated images
(CGI) in films attests. The consolidation in the United Kingdom of practice as
research as a distinct mode of research, where there might also be a requirement for
it to be documented for others to appraise or access it or for the sake of longevity
(such as with practice-based doctorates), has generated extensive discussions around
these issues. These have also been stimulated by the absence of good (at least by
today’s exacting standards) documentation of past pieces, which in part has led
several performance artists like Marina Abramović and some theatre groups to
restage works made years before (Abramović) for example, in London’s Whitechapel
Gallery (2002/3). In 1999, Birmingham’s Stan’s Cafe recreated Impact Theatre’s
The Carrier Frequency from the 1980s, and in 2009 Texas’s Rude Mechanicals
represented Richard Schechner and The Performance Group’s Dionysus in 69.
This ‘turn towards the archive’ has been practised across many fields and not just
performance. With a similar fascination for archives, theatre and performance groups
have also incorporated and referenced other kinds of documentation in their live
performances. Polish theatre group Theatre of the Eighth Day, for example, made a
piece called Teczki (Files) in 2007, which was based on secret police files about
them, that they read and discussed in performance. And historical reenactment soci-
eties regularly use performance as a way of animating understanding of the past, as
a kind of living archive. As technologies become smaller, cheaper and even more
ubiquitous, the uses of documentation look set to continually expand, becoming
more widespread almost certainly, but potentially also more complex.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Auslander and Phelan’s books contain the key arguments about the ontology of
performance and its ephemerality, though their arguments have been developed by
many others in multiple directions since, including Schneider. Inevitably discussions
about and examples of documentation are widespread, but Reason’s book remains a
foundational synthesis. The Routledge Performance Archive is just one recent
example of predominantly film-based performance documentation.

Auslander, Philip (1999) Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, London and New
York: Routledge.
Phelan, Peggy (1993) ‘The Ontology of Performance’, in Unmarked: The Politics of
Performance, London: Routledge, pp. 146–66.

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Reason, Matthew (2006) Documentation, Disappearance and the Representation of Live

Performance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Routledge Performance Archive. Online. Available www.routledgeperformancearchive.com
(accessed 3 May 2013).
Schneider, Rebecca (2011) Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical
Reenactment, London: Routledge.

DRAMATURGY
Dramaturgy is a concept that grew initially out of continental European theatre, espe-
cially in Germany where the term ‘dramaturg’ denotes a formal role that has long
been firmly established in many of its repertory theatres. Broadly, ‘dramaturgy’
denotes the organization of a performance in a range of possible ways, and ‘dram-
aturg’ the person who implements this. This structuring might be musical, physical,
visual, lead to a ‘score’, be thematic or conceptual. There is no limit to the number of
ways a performance can be organized but it is generally understood that a perfor-
mance needs to have its own internal logic, even if it is, to the spectator or audience
at least, chaotic or unstructured. Both the term and the role evolved in Germany from
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s work with the Hamburg National Theatre as early as at
the end of the eighteenth century, much of which process he recorded in his journals.
Since then, and especially since the 1990s, dramaturgy has become increasingly
popular within theatre and performance studies and practice. An important factor in
this rise is the growth of performances that are devised from a non-textual or physical
starting point, what is loosely called physical theatre. In such contexts, dramatur-
gical principles and oversight can give a piece a logic or cohesion that otherwise
would have been provided by a writer’s text. The institutionalization in the United
Kingdom of practice as research has also brought some dramaturgs into univer-
sities and colleges, not surprisingly given the often historical or scholarly nature of a
dramaturg’s work.
As well as supervising and advising on a performance’s clarity and purpose, its
meaning perhaps, dramaturgs often work closely with a director or creative team
before a performance to help gather research materials and textual information to
take into rehearsals, for example, or to generate a performance’s leading concept.
They usually also have to prepare the playscript before rehearsals start, perhaps
working across translations. Once rehearsals are underway the dramaturg might then
be given the crucial role of ‘outside eye’, standing back to look at how the mise en
scène operates as a whole. Equally, their remit can sometimes encompass educa-
tional work around a project, using the information gathered during the creative
process to give others insight into it, which can also feed into their task of writing the
theatre programme.
The notion of what a dramaturg is and does varies across cultures and institutions.
In larger British theatre companies and theatres, such as London’s Royal Court for
example, the literary manager is involved in the selection of texts, translation work,
and the production of new scripts through a range of writing development processes.

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This more literary focus involves a narrower understanding of what a contemporary

dramaturg can be, but historically and culturally offers the most ubiquitous and
familiar description of what dramaturgy might encompass. As performance-making
practices continue to evolve beyond the traditionally constructed triangle of writer–
director–actor, and as theatre increasingly involves the actor as creator as much as
interpreter, and dramaturgy becomes more frequently integrated into the director’s
work, especially within devising companies, it seems likely that the role of the dram-
aturg and recognition of the importance of dramaturgy will continue to thrive. And
following such growth and evolution, what it comprises will continue to diversify.
The dramaturg still remains a slightly enigmatic figure, championed as much as they
are treated with suspicion, even amongst those who practise the art of dramaturgy
every time they stage or make a performance.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cardello’s edited collection includes some excellent contributors and has an inform-
ative geographical spread that examines Europe and the USA. Its cultural and
historical perspective predates the recent growth of interest in the role, represented
by Luckhurst’s and Turner and Behrndt’s books. The user guide and the network
have a more practical professional focus but provide helpful starting points. Eugenio
Barba’s book focuses on the actor’s dramaturgy and is rooted in his experiences
with Odin Teatret.

Barba, Eugenio (2010) On Directing and Dramaturgy: Burning the House, London: Routledge.
Cardello, Bert (ed.) (1995) What is Dramaturgy?, New York: Peter Lang.
Dramaturgs’ network. Online. Available http://www.dramaturgy.co.uk (accessed 10 January
2014).
Dramaturgy: A User’s Guide (2000) London, Central School of Speech and Drama.
Luckhurst, Mary (2006) Dramaturgy: a Revolution in Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Turner, Cathy and Synne Behrndt (2007) Dramaturgy and Performance, Basingstoke:
Palgrave.

ENVIRONMENTAL THEATRE AND SITE-SPECIFIC PERFORMANCE

These two forms aim explicitly to alter the conventional spatial practices of perfor-
mance to enhance both the relationship between performers and audience and the
performance’s engagement with its space and site of production. The term ‘environ-
mental theatre’ was popularized in the early 1970s through the writings of Richard
Schechner, works made by his company The Performance Group, and the practices
of other innovative makers such as Jerzy Grotowski. Schechner intended to include
a broad range of theatre practices in this term, including theatre made in found spaces.
In practice, however, The Performance Group concentrated on making work in their
studio, which they altered radically for each performance. These physical alterations

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focused on producing for each show a specially constructed scenography that would
provoke performers and audiences to interact, through both looking and contact.
Productions such as Dionysus in 69 (1968–69) avoided end-on perspectives, put
audiences closer to and often in the action, encouraged them to move around, and
sometimes provided multiple, simultaneous focal points, which would now be
described as immersive theatre.
Site-specific performance shares many of these features. However, it achieved
currency as a name in the 1980s and 1990s to identify performance that was produced
in non-theatre sites, aimed to engage directly with the meaning and history of those
sites, and went out to audiences who might not normally come to the theatre. This
shift in production practices reflected an increasing imperative felt by many makers to
address local audiences in the face of advancing globalization. Coincidentally, the
shift in name also responded to the increasing association of ‘environmental’ with
ecological issues. The Welsh company Brith Gof produced devised shows in rural
outdoor sites (Tri Bywyd, ‘Three Lives’, 1995) and a disused urban factory (Gododdin,
1988–90), provoking audiences to think about the significance of these sites in
Wales’ recent post-industrial economy and culture. Orlan’s choice of an operating
theatre as her site for The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan (1990–93) invited audi-
ences to reflect on various aspects of such a site’s usual use, including its gender
divisions. Tinderbox Theatre Company’s convictions (2000) staged seven short plays
in Belfast’s disused Crumlin Road Courthouse, site of many ‘Troubles’ trials, to
reflect on issues of justice and Northern Irish identity in the context of a faltering
peace process.
Although the terms ‘environmental theatre’ and ‘site-specific performance’ only
came into common use in the twentieth century, the spatial practices they name have
a much longer Western history, from Greek amphitheatres set in spectacular natural
environments, to medieval religious processions through towns, to Dada perfor-
mance like the Cabaret Voltaire in cafés, to festivals, carnivals and protests – in all
of which people occupy familiar everyday sites in unfamiliar ways. These practices
also share similarities with performance art, installation art, happenings and
Augusto Boal’s invisible theatre, which put creative and often critical work in
unusual sites in order to ask questions about those sites and the ways people behave in
them (compare with Erving Goffman).
Environmental theatre and site-specific performance almost always aim to make
political interventions in relation to their audiences and sites, but the effectiveness of
these aims is sometimes questionable. Some performances exploit the novelty of site-
specific performance to attract large audiences without necessarily developing a critique
of the site – an example might be the Cirque du Soleil, which commonly exploits rather
than interrogates the cultural cachet of the urban sites in which it pitches its tent (such
as lower Manhattan’s Battery Park). Physical proximity between performers and
audience does not necessarily produce critical or democratic interaction. What such
work does consistently is raise questions about the effectiveness of different perfor-
mance sites, asking whether performance is more effective in a ‘neutral’ space that can
be adapted or in a specifically selected space to which it explicitly refers.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aronson and Schechner write on environmental theatre; Kaye, Pearson (former

co-director of Brith Gof) and Shanks discuss site-specific performance.

Aronson, Arnold (1981) The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography, Ann Arbor:
UMI Research Press.
Kaye, Nick (2000) Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place, and Documentation, London:
Routledge.
Pearson, Mike and Michael Shanks (2001) Theatre/Archaeology, London: Routledge.
Schechner, Richard ([1973] 1994) Environmental Theatre, New York: Applause Books.

EVERYDAY LIFE
‘Everyday life’ is both a descriptive and a theoretical term. It describes what people
do every day, especially such repetitive activities as working, consuming food, and
interacting. From that basic description, at least three related critical applications of
the term arose in the twentieth century. Cultural theorists and historians used it to
emphasize how all culture is grounded in everyday activity, to argue for the impor-
tance of popular culture (as distinguished from elite culture) and to refocus critical
study on what had previously been considered unworthy of analysis, such as the lives
of workers, women and immigrants. This shift in thought influenced theatre studies
by propelling the development of performance studies through the analysis of such
popular forms as ritual and festivals. Activists known as the Situationist International
and French sociologists Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau developed this first
understanding of everyday life by identifying it as the medium both of people’s
oppression but also of their emancipation. Everyday life was oppressive because it
was organized by state and capitalist control. It consigned people to the alienating
drudgery of repetitive work and, even in the apparent safety of their own homes, it
‘terrorized’ them through such means as advertising into the equally alienating
drudgery of unthinking consumption. It was nevertheless emancipating because it
was through activities such as carnivals, face-to-face communication and other small
acts of resistance that individuals could tactically challenge the alienations of capi-
talist life and claim subjectivity and agency. Lefebvre wrote, ‘Everyday life should be
a work of art’, indicating that performative interventions could change and enhance
people’s lives.
A related performative analysis of everyday life had already been developed by
the Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman, who focused on how people’s daily
behaviour could be understood through dramaturgical analysis. Goffman observed
that in regular social interactions such as communicating with colleagues, people are
not simply being, they are performing – both consciously and unconsciously.
Identity is not what we are (a given), it is something we make and do through the
deployment of dress (costume), objects (props) and behaviour (acting). Where many
critics had previously distinguished rigidly between ‘real’ life and theatre, Goffman

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argued that real life was theatre. He did not denigrate real life as false but simply
recognized that real life shares features with theatre, and that performance analysis
can therefore be used to help understand human behaviour. Goffman’s argument has
certainly been corroborated in performance studies. Michael Kirby’s influential
analysis of acting put all behaviour from acting to ‘being’ on a continuum, and
claimed that certain activities were seen as acting, not because of what they were but
because of how they were framed for an audience.
The twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ critical preoccupation with everyday life
has other important links to theatre and performance. It inspired many performance
artists, especially those who did durational work that explicitly challenged the sepa-
ration of life and performance. In Coyote: I Like America and America Likes Me
(1974), Joseph Beuys lived with a coyote in a New York gallery for a week, literally
staging his lived daily experience as a European in the constant presence of American
culture, embodied by the coyote. And Chris Burden’s Shoot showed the potential
risks of when art crosses over into life. Analyses of everyday life similarly influenced
much environmental theatre and site-specific performance. Frequently set in
everyday contexts such as people’s homes, factories and familiar landscapes, this
work emphasizes performance’s ethical responsibility to function directly in people’s
everyday lives, rather than removed from that context in theatres. The rise of reality
television at the turn of the millennium, where people’s daily lives are explicitly
presented as entertainment, once again tests distinctions between real life and perfor-
mance and presents new challenges for critical understandings of everyday life.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Goffman’s book is foundational to analyses of life as performative. Lefebvre and de

Certeau argue for the revolutionary potential of everyday life. Read proposes that the
imbrication of theatre and everyday life gives theatre the responsibility – and oppor-
tunity – to be an influentially ethical practice. Highmore collects an excellent range
of critical and creative texts.

de Certeau, Michel (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Goffman, Erving (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, New York: Doubleday.
Highmore, Ben (ed.) (2002) The Everyday Life Reader, London: Routledge.
Kirby, Michael (2002) ‘On Acting and Non-Acting’, in Acting (Re)Considered: A Theoretical
and Practical Guide, Phillip B. Zarrilli (ed.), London: Routledge, pp. 40–52.
Lefebvre, Henri ([1968] 1984) Everyday Life in the Modern World, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch,
New Brunswick, NJ: Transactions Publishers.
Read, Alan (1993) Performance and Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance, London:
Routledge.

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EXPRESSIONISM
The term ‘expressionism’ was first used most widely near the turn of the twentieth
century to describe a radical style of visual art that aimed to express emotion non-
naturalistically, in violent protest against the perceived bourgeois repression of natu-
ralism. It is exemplified in Edvard Munch’s well-known lithograph The Scream
(1893), where the central figure’s scream sends powerful shockwaves through the
entire surrounding environment. Practised across a range of art forms, expression-
ism’s roots stretch back to the nineteenth century and the advent of psychoanalysis,
with its interests in people’s emotional life and in dreams. Theatrical expressionism
begins with the work of playwrights such as Frank Wedekind and August Strindberg,
but it was especially prevalent in Germany from about 1907 to the early 1920s,
largely in response to the First World War and its aftermath. Expressionist plays by
such writers as Oscar Kokoschka, Ernst Toller and Georg Kaiser are polemical but
highly poetic. They often focus on a single male protagonist who declaims long self-
exploratory monologues interspersed with brief dialogue with often nameless
supporting characters acting as representative social beings. Often, the plays are
violent, are concerned with human conflict (especially generational and class conflict),
challenge taboos (particularly sexual taboos), and adopt the associative and highly
visual qualities of dreams. Expressionist acting developed a complementary declam-
atory, intensely physically committed style featuring actors with haunted, emaciated
physiognomies; action that was spare and often allegorical; and the intention to move
its audience to ecstasy through empathy with the protagonist. Other aspects of
expressionist theatre, most notably its scenography and lighting, were also revolu-
tionary, eschewing naturalism in favour of strong lighting and colours, stark contrast
and asymmetry, and the kind of emotionally suggestive abstraction familiar from
The Scream. A good extant visual example of expressionism’s early performance
and scenographic styles is Robert Wiene’s 1919 film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari,
with its intensely energized performances and sinister angular, disproportionate sets
(compare with Vsevolod Meyerhold’s constructivist sets).
The impetus behind expressionism – as with its near-contemporaries Dada and
futurism – was to effect revolutionary change. David F. Kuhns argues, for example,
that expressionist performance could performatively regenerate German society by
fostering the audience’s ecstatic engagement with alternative social possibilities and
visions. Expressionism was distinctive from those other movements, however, in its
initial emphasis on stimulating empathy for human suffering. Even as expressionist
artists gradually grew disaffected with the lack of social change occurring, they
maintained their focus on human emotion and developed a cynicism quite different
from the nihilism of Dada’s absurdity. Despite the relatively brief life of a wholly
expressionist theatre, many aspects of theatrical expressionism have persisted.
Beyond Germany, expressionist playwrights include the American Eugene O’Neill
and the Irishman Sean O’Casey. Bertold Brecht adopted and developed expression-
ism’s iconic imagery and declamatory speech as well as its social impetus. Adolphe
Appia, Edward Gordon Craig and Robert Wilson developed its revolutionary

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scenography. Choreographers Mary Wigman and, later, Pina Bausch and butoh prac-
titioners have all explored emotional material through performance in ways that
expressionism pioneered and legitimated. Theatrical expressionism’s wordiness and
abstraction have made its production somewhat uncommon, but it is still produced by
directors such as Katie Mitchell and Wilson, who want to test theatre’s expressive
possibilities as well as their own craft.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Styan analyses the broad historical and geographical range of expressionist drama.
Richard and (especially) Kuhns provide more sustained analysis of expressionist
theatre and performance. Beil and Dillmann’s extensively illustrated edited collection
has ample source material and analysis from across genres.

Beil, Ralf and Claudia Dillmann (eds) (2010) The Total Artwork in Expressionism: Art, Film,
Literature, Theatre, Dance, and Architecture 1905–1925, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz.
Kuhns, David F. (1968) Seven Expressionist Plays: Kokoschka to Barlach, London: Calder and
Boyars.
—— (1997) German Expressionist Theatre: The Actor and the Stage, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Richard, Lionel (1978) Phaidon Encyclopedia of Expressionism, Oxford: Phaidon.
Styan, J. L. (1981) Modern Drama in Theory and Practice, vol. 3, Expressionism and Epic
Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

FEMINISM
Feminism is a political practice which addresses gender identities, relationships and
representations in order particularly to redress inequalities which disadvantage
women. ‘First wave’ feminism spanned the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries in the West and focused on improving women’s rights, especially their
access to education and suffrage (the right to vote). ‘Second wave’ feminism
burgeoned in the 1960s and 1970s as part of a broader escalation in civil rights protest
and identity politics. This included protests against the Vietnam War and for black
and gay rights in the USA especially, and French student demonstrations against
institutional and state oppression, notably in 1968. Among other things, second wave
feminism advocated greater equality in conditions of labour and pay, better childcare
provision, and women’s right to control their reproduction, for example through
access to contraception and abortion. But it was also increasingly concerned not only
with the explicit legislation that controlled women, but moreover with how women
were controlled in more implicit, everyday material and social practices, such as
through daily language, the personal politics of family relations, and representation,
for example in advertising, film and theatre.
Feminist precepts have been articulated through theatre, dance and performance
throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Several first wave

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feminists wrote and performed plays advocating female suffrage and decrying double
standards in the social behaviour expected of women and men (for example, Elizabeth
Robins’ Votes for Women [1907]). Christabel Pankhurst and others might be seen as
early makers of performance art and body art, staging public protests and hunger
strikes in pursuit of suffrage. Throughout the twentieth century, feminist theatre and
dance have interrogated the ways women’s conventional representation is often
derogatory, exploitative or at least patronizing, reproducing relationships of repre-
sentation and audience spectatorship that disempower women. They have indicated
how women’s representation is often founded on clichés and stereotypes that invite
voyeuristic consumption; how female characters serve as foils in plots centred around
male characters; and how the dominant theatre simply offers fewer roles for women.
Many theatre- and dance-makers have drawn attention to these inequalities. Pina
Bausch’s dance theatre and Split Britches’ theatre, for example, intentionally stage
clichés of femininity and masculinity in order to explore how they are socially
constructed or performatively produced. Other makers overturn these inequalities
by producing theatre run by women (Sistren, Split Britches). Some feminist theatre-
makers deploy postmodern and postdramatic strategies of deconstruction to inter-
rogate conventional practices of representing women, for example by engaging with
both pornography and the conventional family structures of classic American drama,
as in the Wooster Group’s Route 1 & 9 (The Last Act) (1981). Feminists including
Hélène Cixous have challenged what they perceive as male-dominated languages
and structures of representation, using écriture féminine and non-linear structures to
explore non-patriarchal strategies of representation. Feminist theatre-makers have
also adopted devising and improvisation techniques to evade theatre’s conven-
tionally hierarchical structuring. And feminist historiographers have retrieved
women’s ‘lost’ theatre histories. Across these critical and creative practices, feminist
theatre-makers and analysts have worked to strengthen women’s communities and to
change gender inequalities.
Feminist performance has pursued many of the same objectives through parallel
strategies. Protesters such as las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo have congregated to
strengthen female communities and to display their gender (and age) to advocate
social change. Numerous performance and body artists – including Marina
Abramović, Laurie Anderson, Bobby Baker, Orlan and Annie Sprinkle – have
redressed conditions of women’s oppression through the use of direct address and
autobiography.
Feminist critics have explored not only how feminism can inform theatre and
performance, but also how ideas developed through theatre and performance can
inform and progress feminism. Judith Butler and others have pioneered under-
standings of how sexist identities are performatively produced through naturalized,
repeated behaviours. They have suggested, further, that these identities might therefore
be transformed by interrupting that repetition. Peggy Phelan has advocated a feminist
political practice which, unusually, does not advocate visibility and rights. Instead,
she embraces women’s status as ‘unmarked’ or less visible culturally, proposing that

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this marginalized position is actually enabling because it allows women to evade

voyeurism and surveillance.
Theatre, dance and performance have been crucial media for enacting feminist
concerns because they facilitate detailed interrogation of the ways gender inequalities
are produced, most importantly through acts of representation and through embodied
behaviours. In the context of theatre, performance and feminist theory, some critics’
heralding of post-feminism in the early 1990s seems to have been premature, as all
three continue to challenge and work to change gendered representations and
behaviours.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Publishing on feminism and theatre exploded in the late 1980s, and continues. Early
influential texts are the journal Women & Performance (founded in 1983, and
published twice annually by New York University’s Department of Performance
Studies), Case’s 1988 book (reissued in 2008), and books by Dolan and Aston; Aston
and Harris’s book explores what they call popular feminisms, often in mainstream
theatre. Strong collections of articles include those edited by Case, Goodman and du
Gay, Hart and Phelan, and Martin. Chothia’s edited collection of suffrage plays
contains Robins’ Votes for Women. Baker is an influential feminist performance artist
in the UK.

Aston, Elaine (1995) An Introduction to Feminism and Theatre, London: Routledge.

—— and Geraldine Harris (2012) A Good Night Out for the Girls: Popular Feminisms in
Contemporary Theatre and Performance, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Barrett, Michèle and Bobby Baker (2007) Bobby Baker: Redeeming Features of Daily Life,
Oxon: Routledge.
Case, Sue-Ellen ([1988] 2008) Feminism and Theatre, reissued ed., Houndmills: Palgrave
Macmillan.
—— (ed.) (1990) Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press.
Chothia, Jean (ed.) (1998) The New Woman and Other Emancipated Woman Plays, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Dolan, Jill (1988) The Feminist Spectator as Critic, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Goodman, Lizbeth with Jane du Gay (eds) (1998) The Routledge Reader in Gender and
Performance, London: Routledge.
Hart, Lynda and Peggy Phelan (eds) (1993) Acting Out: Feminist Performances, Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press.
Martin, Carol (ed.) (1996) A Sourcebook of Feminist Theatre: On and Beyond the Stage,
London: Routledge.
Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory. Online. Available www.womenand-
performance.org/ (accessed 14 October 2013).

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FESTIVALS
Festivals are spatially and temporally limited events, usually held annually, where
theatre and/or performance is staged and celebrated. Like carnival, they often serve
significant social functions, such as honouring the host community or encouraging
artistic innovation. However, they also pose certain risks, for example, the possibility
that a select few may exploit a festival to serve their own interests rather than those
of the broader community. These ambivalent potentials are demonstrated in the West
as far back as the fifth century BC in Athens’ Festival Dionysia, a major civic compe-
tition that presented both comedy and tragedy. The Festival Dionysia aimed to serve
a ritual function for all of Athens’ citizens through the mimetic enactment of symbolic
sacrifice. Because it was grounded in a system of patronage, however, the Festival
Dionysia nevertheless privileged the city’s leaders.
Festivals take many forms in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: presenting
international, national, local, amateur or professional work; combining dance,
theatre, music, opera, sports, workshops and/or debates; or exploring in detail a
particular form, as at the London International Mime Festival (founded in 1977).
Many theatre festivals are dedicated to the work of a single playwright, most
frequently Shakespeare. Such festivals are partly designed to celebrate the genius of
an individual, but these and other festivals also function to acclaim the ‘genius’ and
achievement of their host city, nation or region – as the Olympics do. Many European
international theatre festivals founded after the destruction and alienation of the
Second World War – including Edinburgh, Avignon and Holland (all 1947), the
Berliner Festwochen (1951) and the Théâtre des Nations (Paris, 1954) – were created
to demonstrate Europe’s cultural accomplishments as well as to facilitate European
regeneration and international communication. Festivals continue to foster diverse
community identities through the proliferation of black, women’s, children’s and
queer theatre festivals.
Festivals have many potential benefits for their sites, art forms and participants.
They can benefit their sites by fostering economic development and urban regener-
ation. They can foster artistic appreciation and development, providing opportunities
for artistic experimentation and introducing audiences to new work through inno-
vative programming and producing. Given their frequently amenable conditions of
big budgets and well-equipped theatre spaces, major international festivals signifi-
cantly support the work of such eminent directors as, for example, Peter Brook,
Robert Wilson, Robert Lepage and Tadashi Suzuki. Through such activities as the
‘Enquiries’ of the London International Festival of Theatre (founded 1981), festivals
can also provoke reflection on the (potential) purposes of theatre, as well as the
nature of community. Both the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (founded 1947) and the
Edinburgh People’s Festival (founded 1951) challenged the perceived elitism and
exclusivity of the Edinburgh International Festival. The 1990 Los Angeles Festival
curated by director Peter Sellars excluded much work from the Euro-American pool
that international festivals usually draw on, and included Asian and Mexican prac-
tices and groups that represented the backgrounds of many of LA’s marginalized

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immigrant communities. It thus asked who and what LA was and what communities
the festival should both represent and serve.
Despite all these positive potentials, there are a number of festival characteristics
that bear critical scrutiny, especially as festivals continue to proliferate alongside
growing international trade and tourism. First, as in any context of intercultural
exchange, festivals risk trivializing and commodifying the cultures they represent.
Second, given the standardization of international theatre festivals’ conditions of
production, they risk internationalizing aesthetic trends, producing homogenized
festival fare (which is recognizably large-scale, auteur-directed/branded so it will
sell), and often visual theatre, so it can trade across linguistic barriers. Finally, they
risk producing an acute elitism, certainly because they are often financially expensive,
but also because they frequently deploy rarefied theatre vocabularies that address
specialist (international) audiences but may be less accessible to local audiences.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Contemporary Theatre Review’s special issue includes useful articles on festivals in

Avignon, Edinburgh, Africa and the Arab world, and on how festival conditions
affect the work of Robert Lepage. The collection edited by Hauptfleisch et al includes
essays on a global range of festivals. Knowles details how international festival
conditions affect theatre’s meanings.

Contemporary Theatre Review (2003) special issue on festivals, 13.4, London: Routledge.
Hauptfleisch, Temple, Shulasmith Levaladgem, Jacqueline Martin, Willmar Sauter and Henri
Schoenmakers (eds) (2007) Festivalising!: Theatrical Events, Politics and Culture,
Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Knowles, Ric (2004) Reading the Material Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

FUTURISM
Futurism is an avant-garde artistic movement and ideology that originated in Italy
before the First World War. Its founding manifesto by poet and playwright F. T.
Marinetti, published in 1909 in Paris’s Le Figaro newspaper, espoused the destruction
of museums and libraries – as enervating sites of reflection on the past – and cele-
brated machines, speed, youth, masculinity and war. Automobiles, aeroplanes and
other machines and technology provided models for a new era driven by an aggressive
masculine energy focusing on the future. Futurist art often took literary and graphic
form, but it keenly adopted and developed many performance techniques in order
directly to shock audiences out of lazy conformity by actively provoking debate,
protest and – ideally, for many of its proponents – riots. Its numerous manifestos
were rhetorically conceived less to be privately read than to be publicly declaimed.
Futurist cabaret-style performance evenings were inspired by traditions of popular
performance and variety theatre, encouraged improvisation to be as provocative as
possible, and combined several unrelated acts such as sequences of noise music,

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poetry readings and brief plays designed to produce a sense of acceleration in their
stripped-down compression. Eventually earning the name ‘synthetics’ for their
dynamic synthesis of numerous disparate elements, these events embraced abstraction
and rejected the dominant theatre’s focus on artifice, linear narrative, psychology and
naturalism. They were similar to Dada’s cabarets, such as the Cabaret Voltaire, but
more destructive and assertive of a world view than Dada’s absurd questioning.
Scenographically, futurist theatre often emphasized the mechanical by using
machine-like costumes, automatons and marionettes, realizing the performance of
Übermarionetten that Edward Gordon Craig had advocated but not fully achieved.
Because it glorified war and was linked to Fascism, futurism was somewhat
discredited with the coming of the First World War, although its experiments
continued in theatre, dance, film and radio through the 1920s until the early 1930s,
primarily in Italy but also, for example, in Russia. From the 1970s on, theatre histo-
rians have recuperated futurism as an important progenitor of numerous twentieth-
century avant-garde and political performance practices, from Dada, to the theatre of
the absurd that developed in Italy (for example, in the plays of Luigi Pirandello) and
elsewhere in Europe (in the work of Samuel Beckett, for instance), to the interven-
tionist practices of happenings, to multimedia performance. Elements of futur-
ism’s aggressive experimentation have certainly been influential, but its advocacy of
violence and war has resulted in the critical, highly selective adoption of its
practices.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Kirbys collect archival material and develop a detailed analysis in order to recu-
perate futurist theatre from critical neglect and demonstrate its contribution to other
non-naturalistic twentieth-century theatre practices. Goldberg draws out this link to
other avant-garde practices.

Goldberg, RoseLee ([2001] 2011) Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, 3rd
edition, London: Thames and Hudson.
Kirby, Michael and Victoria Nes Kirby ([1971] 1986) Futurist Performance, New York:
Performing Arts Journal Publications.
Marinetti, F. T. ([1909] 2002) ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’, reprinted in Michael
Huxley and Noel Witts (eds) The Twentieth-Century Performance Reader, 2nd edition,
London: Routledge.

HAPPENINGS
Happenings are cross-disciplinary non-text-based events that utilize all media and
means at the artists’ disposal, and especially those from outside the maker’s own
field. A central part of artistic experimentation of the 1960s, happenings evolved
from various disciplines. They were inspired by challenges in dance led by the
Judson Church and pieces like Trio A (1966), as well as the earlier pioneering

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explorations of John Cage and Merce Cunningham at Black Mountain College

during the 1950s. Many consider Cage’s work the main inspiration for happenings.
But as in Dadaist events like the Cabaret Voltaire, visual and plastic artists
(connected to the pop art movement) were particularly dominant. The actual term
was coined by American artist Allan Kaprow and came to prominence in the 1960s,
even though the notion had been in circulation in the 1950s, as Kaprow’s own event
18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959) demonstrates. But it was only with the plethora of
live and installation works by Jim Dine, Kaprow, George Brecht and Robert
Whitman, for example, as well as later publications by Kaprow and Michael Kirby in
response to these, that this distinctive genus of performance clearly emerged.
Although happenings took place mainly in the United States, they also had their
proponents in Europe and Japan. Jean-Jacques Lebel produced and wrote about his
fiercely political happenings in France, Tadeusz Kantor conducted events in Poland
with mannequins, found objects and eccentric home-made contraptions, and Japan’s
Gutai Theatre’s performances led to international renown. After the 1970s,
happenings, ‘assemblages’ and events were subsumed under the range of work
labelled performance art.
Happenings relied predominantly on visual or material elements, many of which
were deliberately impermanent or destroyed during the act of performance.
Practitioners consciously avoided using artists’ materials or theatre techniques,
working outside their disciplines and beyond familiar gallery spaces. In Kaprow’s
Notes to Soap (1965), participants were smeared with jam and buried on a beach.
Joseph Beuys, in what he termed ‘Actions’ rather than happenings, lived with a
coyote in Coyote: I Like America and America Likes Me (1974). Such events shared
much with environmental theatre, often taking place in outdoor or non-perfor-
mance spaces like streets, shops or in the countryside. They were frequently partici-
patory, deliberately immersed in, or intervening in, everyday life rather than in spaces
created for the showing of art. Although these one-off unrepeatable events were
loosely scored or structured rather than improvised, they depended on planning
rather than on rehearsal or training. They were what Michael Kirby has referred to
as ‘non-matrixed’ performance, where performers do activities, tasks or actions in
the present time and in an actual place, rather than acting in illusionist or mimetic
terms where they are expected to fabricate an alternative here and now. Happenings
demanded aesthetic re-evaluation of all processes that they utilized, deliberately
blurring the boundaries between art and life.
As the name suggests, happenings were intended to make the audience aware of
the liveness of the event, to encourage them to engage in the moment and experience
what was happening. As such, they contested realist art forms that depend on artifice
and reproduction, and what might be considered the privileged position of funded
work presented with sophisticated technologies and techniques in dedicated spaces
for paying audiences. In sympathy with, and emerging from, the political idealism of
1960s America, Europe and Japan, happenings shared features with (and were some-
times inseparable from) protests and demonstrations, particularly in their European
manifestations. The 1968 demonstrations in Paris and around the world took

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inspiration from happenings’ challenges and transgressions. Happenings were rough-

and-ready events that were free and accessible and thus operated in a different
economy from commercial art. With their seemingly random association of actions
(which were in fact usually carefully planned), happenings posed provocative
political, aesthetic and personal challenges throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

There are several books that focus on the evolution of postmodern performance and
performance art generally, but these texts focus on the specific nature of happenings.
Kaprow’s has many useful black-and-white illustrations of his and others’ events and
a short explanatory text. Glimcher’s book provides a historical survey, also with
numerous illustrations.

Glimcher, Mildred (2012) Happenings: New York 1958–63, New York: Monacelli Press.
Kaprow, Allan (1966) Assemblage, Environments and Happenings, New York: Harry N.
Abrams.
Kirby, Michael (1965) Happenings: An Illustrated Anthology, New York: Dutton.
Sandford, Mariellen (ed.) (1995) Happenings and Other Acts, London and New York:
Routledge.

HISTORIOGRAPHY
Historiography is the study of the writing of history. It recognizes that because
history is past and in some senses unrecoverable, recollecting and writing it will
never be an objective practice, but rather one that is subjective, interpretive and
fundamentally creative. Different writings of the ‘same’ history thus implicitly
reveal the cultural conditions and ideologies of their time. The subjectivity of history
writing becomes evident when we compare histories of the same topic written at
different times. Variations in theatre history writing, for example, show how atti-
tudes towards theatre – as differentiated from drama – have shifted. While early
theatre histories concentrated on the playtext as the primary source of the theatre’s
meaning, more recent theatre histories focus overwhelmingly on the material condi-
tions of production – or mise en scène – as crucial determinants of meaning. Much
theatre history writing has also identified, and so produced, theatre as high cultural
practice, excluding such popular theatre activities as offstage cross-dressing in the
Renaissance, melodrama in the nineteenth century and contemporary megamusical
theatre.
As these examples indicate, the fact that history writing is subjective affects not
only what information it explicitly conveys, but also the ideologies or beliefs it may
implicitly carry. It matters not only what history is told, but also how it is told. So, a
Renaissance theatre history that concentrates on the stage and not on other theatrical
cultural practices will necessarily produce a gender focus on men because women
were not permitted to perform on public stages at that time. Similarly, a history of

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nineteenth-century theatre that omits melodrama will simultaneously omit an

enormous working-class audience. In the 1970s and 1980s, as part of a postmodern
movement that rejected what critic Jean-François Lyotard called ‘grand narratives’
and their apparent certainties, it was increasingly recognized that ‘received’ histories
were often the history of the dominant. It was also recognized, however, that absence
from the histories did not mean absence from history, and efforts were made to
redress the prevailing bias by retrieving lost histories. In the 1980s and 1990s, this
led to the rise of historiographies with explicit subjective focus on, for example,
feminist, lesbian, gay and black theatre. In the 1990s and on, it has also led to the rise
of performative theatre histories. Drawing on the particular challenges and possi-
bilities presented to the historian by theatre and performance’s liveness and inevi-
table immediate loss or absence, these writings are explicitly self-reflexive about
their own subjective formation of history and meaning.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bratton provides an excellent introduction to key issues in historiography and grounds

them in English theatre history. Reinelt and Roach and Postlewait and McConachie
collect articles which usefully indicate historiography’s practice and potential. Roach
and Shepherd and Womack both demonstrate performative, self-reflexive
historiography.

Bratton, Jacky (2003) New Readings in Theatre History, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Postlewait, Thomas and Bruce A. McConachie (eds) (1989) Interpreting the Theatrical Past:
Essays in the Historiography of Performance, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
Reinelt, Janelle G. and Joseph R. Roach (eds) (1992) Critical Theory and Performance, Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Roach, Joseph (1996) Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, New York: Columbia
University Press.
Shepherd, Simon and Peter Womack (1996) English Drama: A Cultural History, Oxford:
Blackwell.

IMMERSIVE THEATRE AND ONE-TO-ONE PERFORMANCE

Immersive theatre invites audiences directly into its scenographic, installation-like
environments, to explore and participate, effectively becoming performers them-
selves; its performance often draws extensively on vocabularies of physical theatre.
One-to-one performance is usually a form of performance art/live art in which a
single person performs with and for one audience member at a time, usually for a
comparatively short duration of five to thirty minutes; the performer’s address
immerses the audience member and usually necessitates his or her participation as a
performer. These practices share an approach which actively, spatially and sceni-
cally integrates audiences as, to varying degrees, co-makers of the performance.

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They resemble environmental and site-specific theatre, but those forms usually
guide large audiences more, both physically and along a linear narrative (though this
is not always the case). In contrast, one-to-one performance tends to produce much
greater intimacy, and immersive theatre’s invitation to roam usually means audi-
ences’ experience of narrative is fragmented as well as secondary to their experience
of spectacular and multi-sensory environments. These forms are also akin to
happenings, but where those are usually performative interventions in everyday
sites, these tend to be theatre events, with many pre-scripted features. They also
share features with Antonin Artaud’s total theatre and the scenographic actor–
audience experiments of Jerzy Grotowski. But in general, immersive theatre is less
politically engaged and more focused on aesthetic experience than total theatre,
Grotowski’s performances or much site-specific theatre. One-to-one performance,
on the other hand, is frequently as political, or even more so, though in ways that may
be less explicit or direct.
These forms have proliferated since the early 2000s in the work of, for example,
Ontroerend Goed (based in Belgium) and Shunt (based in London, UK). The most
frequently cited example of an immersive theatre company is London-based
Punchdrunk, who have also produced their highly successful adaptation of
Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Sleep No More, in New York (from 2011). Punchdrunk
generally takes over large disused buildings such as warehouses, converting several
storeys into a range of immersive environments. In their 2013 London production,
The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable, they converted a former Royal Mail sorting
office into the fictional film studios, Temple Studios, furnished with desert and
woodland landscapes, artists’ trailers, costume shops and more in a visual theatre
environment audiences could explore at will. Comparatively high-profile one-to-one
performers include, in the UK, the late Adrian Howells, who washed, massaged,
anointed and kissed individual participants’ feet in Foot Washing for the Sole (from
2008), and Toronto-based Jess Dobkin, who invited solo audience members to sharpen
their pencils in her vagina dentata for a nominal charge in Fee for Service (2006).
Many factors explain these forms’ proliferation and popularity. They are often
site-responsive, reflecting on the location of performance, its histories, its meanings
and, sometimes, emerging environmental issues. They can be fun, beautiful, evoc-
ative and pleasurable, for example, because of their imagery, their invitation to play
and the proximity to performers they allow. They provoke strong feelings in audi-
ences, such as excitement, adventure, intimacy, desire, sensuality and spirituality.
They may offer the thrills of gaming without technological mediation and with the
viscerality of liveness. They usually provide a range of sensory stimulations,
including stunningly detailed spectacles, complex sound, bodily movement some-
times including dance, taste, smell (for example, a pine forest in Punchdrunk’s 2006
Faust) and – especially in one-to-one performance – touch. They invite audiences to
experience unique events, such as opportunities to discover secret rooms or secluded
scenes in immersive theatre, and to act or to share a private conversation in one-to-
one performance. One-to-one in particular affords audiences the prospect of intense,
intimate and even therapeutic communication. As this example suggests, perhaps

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most importantly, these forms can give audiences agency, the opportunity actively to
improvise, and to influence, direct, co-devise and co-create the performance, even
to make a relationship.
However, for some observers such as Jacques Rancière, this sense of audience
agency may be more apparent than real. The spectre of agency these forms appar-
ently proffer can not only mislead audiences but, worse, train them to misrecognize
the limits of both their own power and others’ authority over them. Such perfor-
mance can coerce audiences into acting in ways they might not want to, whether
through implicit direction, explicit command or simply the audience’s sense of obli-
gation. Many observers criticize Punchdrunk’s shows, for example, for the ways
they mandate audiences’ obedience, deliberately spatially confusing them, requiring
them to wear masks and forbidding them from speaking. As in what Bertold Brecht
called ‘culinary theatre’, these forms’ spectacle can also be seen as superficial and
trivial in ways that both distract audiences from responding to more important issues
and reinforce theatre as part of an entertainment or culture industry, rather than an
arts culture or a socially engaged theatre, let alone a sphere of activism. From these
perspectives, these forms of performance can cultivate negative feelings, from the
banality of boredom, disappointment, frustration, awkwardness and embarrassment
to the more disturbing vulnerability and anger.
‘Good’ or ‘bad’, these forms do raise – and potentially productively trouble – a
range of important questions about: narrative and spectacle; activity and passivity;
giving and taking; relationships between host and guest; consent; emotional and ethical
risk; mutual ethical responsibilities shared by performer and spectator; normative
distinctions between the public and the private; normative assumptions about who
should touch whom, where and how; and gender and power relations in economies of
service labour, whether that is banking, hairdressing, sex work or performance.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Detailed information on immersive theatre is available in Machon’s book and also

White’s article. On one-to-one performance see: Zerihan’s fulsome study guide,
which contains a large bibliography, as well as her article on eroticism; the article by
Heddon, Iball and Zerihan; and the special issue of Performing Ethos co-edited by
Kartsaki, Lobel and Zerihan. For complementary reading on participation in recent
art practices, see Bishop’s edited collection and the catalogue edited by Frieling.

Bishop, Claire (ed.) (2006) Participation, London: Whitechapel.

Frieling, Rudolf (ed.) (2008) The Art of Participation: The 1950s to Now, London: Thames &
Hudson.
Heddon, Deirdre, Helen Iball and Rachel Zerihan (2012) ‘Come Closer: Confessions of
Intimate Spectators in One to One Performance’, Contemporary Theatre Review 22:1
(March), 12–133.
Iball, Helen (2013) ‘Towards an Ethics of Intimate Theatre’, Performing Ethos: International
Journal of Ethics in Theatre and Performance 3:1 (July): 41–57.

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Kartsaki, Eirini, Brian Lobel and Rachel Zerihan (eds) (forthcoming 2014) Performing Ethos:
An International Journal of Ethics in Theatre and Performance, Special Issue: ‘One-on-One
Encounters: Desire, Reciprocity and Ethics’, 4:1
Machon, Josephine (2013) Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary
Performance, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Punchdrunk. Online. Available www.punchdrunk.com (accessed 7 October 2013).
White, Gareth (2012) ‘On Immersive Theatre’, Theatre Research International 37:3 (October):
221–35.
Zerihan, Rachel (2009) One to One Performance, Live Art Development Agency Study Room
Guide, London: Live Art Development Agency. Online. Available http://dev.thisisliveart.
co.uk/uploads/documents/SRG_Zerihan_reducedsize.pdf (accessed 7 October 2013).
—— (2010) ‘La Petite Mort: Erotic Encounters in One to One Performance’ in Karoline
Gritzner (ed.), Eroticism and Death in Theatre and Performance, Hatfield: University of
Hertfordshire: 202–23.

IMPROVISATION
Improvisation is the spontaneous invention of performance. It has a long theatre
history, for example in commedia dell’arte, which has been practised in Italy since
about the mid-sixteenth century. In commedia, performers improvise unique perfor-
mances within set rules regarding stock characters, plots and jokes. Commedia
demonstrates improvisation’s particular ability to produce ‘new’ shows quickly and
with few resources and, by responding to local contexts and current issues, to produce
topical satire. Improvisation achieved popularity elsewhere in the West in the 1960s
and 1970s, when its defining principles of spontaneity, creative play, openness to
chance and group participation captured the imagination of artists and teachers. For
these practitioners, improvisation seemed to hold out the possibility of escaping
learned taboos, achieving freedom of expression, producing unexpected outcomes
and developing more democratic group practices. These practitioners included:
composer John Cage, dance-makers whose contact improvisation produced chore-
ography out of performers’ unplanned movements; theatre-makers and perfor-
mance artists including Richard Schechner, Laurie Anderson; and creators of
happenings. Such practitioners were inspired partly by theatre’s own history of
improvisation, but also by such things as improvisational jazz and contemporary
educational theories about stimulating children’s learning through play. Improvisation
in this context and beyond is a tool of creative stimulation both for its own sake and
for devising performances. It is a method of facilitating better collaboration by
requiring practitioners not to block a partner’s proposition, but to go with it and build
on it. And it is a vital training and rehearsal tool, encouraging the breaking of habit,
building of character, and generation of devised performance material. It also has
links with stand-up comedy – which has to respond spontaneously to heckling and
other audience interjections – as with a lot of political comedy, such as the long-
running American television programme Saturday Night Live.
Improvisation’s capacity to be topical, to evade censorship and to facilitate demo-
cratic participation gives it enormous political potential that has been harnessed by

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performance artists like Guillermo Gómez-Peña, body artists such as Orlan and
theatre artists including Augusto Boal, with his Forum Theatre. Improvisation’s
capacity to challenge the received wisdom of ‘grand narratives’ has also made it a
favoured tool of many postmodern performance-makers, including the Wooster
Group. Despite its emphasis on freedom, improvisation relies on the observation of
certain rules – for example, of genre and characterization. And, while it specifies a
particular form of performance, elements of improvisation are intrinsic to all perfor-
mance and the quality of liveness it produces, as performance must constantly be
prepared to adapt to its live, unpredictable conditions.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Spolin and Johnstone’s books are early testimonies to the value of improvisation as
a creative and self-actualizing practice. Frost and Yarrow and Johnston’s books
provide historical and theoretical context and contemporary examples as well as
practical exercises. Nachmanovitch has written a more theoretical behavioural
analysis of what improvisation is and how it functions. Numerous ‘how to improvise’
books are available though are not included here.

Frost, Anthony and Ralph Yarrow (1990) Improvisation in Drama, London: Macmillan.
Johnston, Chris (2006) The Improvisation Game, London: Nick Hern Books.
Johnstone, Keith (1981) Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre, London: Eyre Methuen.
Nachmanovitch, Stephen (1993) Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art, New York: Jeremy
P. Tarcher/Putnam.
Spolin, Viola (1973) Improvisation for the Theatre: A Handbook of Teaching and Directing
Techniques, London: Pitman Publishing.

INSTALLATION ART
This term has been used since the 1960s to designate art practice which is not simply
displayed in a supposedly neutral site, like most paintings hung in galleries, but which
explicitly aims to include and refer to its site and context as a crucial constituent of
its meanings. As in the installations of Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Abramović,
installation art sometimes involves the artists as performers. Usually, it is three-
dimensional, temporary, and can be entered and possibly interacted with by its
audience/spectators. Almost always both the site and the spectator are regarded as
necessary to the completion of the piece and its constitution as meaningful; often, as
in relational art, the art is designed to produce social interactions between audience
members more than between people and objects. Sometimes installation art occupies
an art gallery unconventionally, as in such pieces as Abramović’s Balkan Baroque
(1997), in which she scrubbed beef bones in a gallery for hours at a time, or Tracey
Emin’s My Bed (1998), in which she challenged the putative austerity and objectivity
of the public gallery by putting the intimate space of her dishevelled bedroom within
it. Sometimes it occupies a space not normally dedicated to art, as in the ‘wrappings’

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of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, where they temporarily engulf in fabric natural sites
or famous buildings such as Berlin’s Reichstag. Like performance art, installation
art arose at a point in art history when, in a political assault on the status quo, bound-
aries between art disciplines and media were breaking down to develop hybrid new
forms.
Like immersive theatre, environmental theatre and site-specific performance,
installation art compels its audiences to reflect on the meanings and histories of its
site. Like performance art, it challenges the institutionalism of much fine art, inter-
rogating the ways galleries feign neutrality and contain, delimit and commodify art
practices. Because it is almost always temporary, it argues against universalism and
for the value of seeing art’s meaning as not only site-specific but also time-specific.
It is directly relevant to theatre and performance for a number of reasons. For
example, it is often indisputably performance, as in Gómez-Peña’s work, and its
interactive models of the event–audience relationship bear useful comparison to
more conventional theatrical models, as well as to such ideas as Augusto Boal’s
‘spectactor’. Perhaps most influential, however, is the way art scholar Michael
Fried’s 1967 condemnation of installation art explicitly blamed what he saw as its
moral failure on its inherent theatricality. For Fried, installation art was morally
bereft because it relied on the theatrical features of duration and audience in order to
produce its meaning. Unlike such modernist forms as painting and sculpture, which
he saw as inherently complete and therefore achieving subjecthood, it needed contex-
tualization to be complete and was therefore consigned to ‘objecthood’. Fried’s
provocative argument denounced not only installation art, but also theatre and such
inherent features of theatre and performance as duration and audience. It thus
compelled reflection on these crucial aspects of theatre and demanded defence of
what for many are precisely what makes theatre an ethical practice – its audience’s
responsibility to it, and its responsibility to its social, temporal and spatial contexts
of production. Despite Fried’s attack, the explicit relation of installation art to its
audience and context actually secured its widespread acceptance and even main-
stream popularity in the 1990s and on, as indicated by the title of Reiss’s book and
the fame of such British artists as Emin, Sarah Lucas and Damien Hirst as well as the
institutional rise and dominance of such sites of installation as the Turbine Hall in
London’s Tate Modern and the central hall in New York’s Guggenheim.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bishop offers an excellent overview and critical context. Reiss provides an inform-
ative history. Both of Oliveira et al’s books include excellent illustrations. Bourriaud’s
theory of the relational aesthetics often posed in installation works has been very
influential.

Bishop, Claire (2005) Installation Art, New York: Routledge.

Bourriaud, Nicolas ([1998] 2002) Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza
Woods with the participation of Mathieu Copeland, Dijon: Les presses du réel.

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Fried, Michael (1967) ‘Art and Objecthood’, Artforum 5.10: 12–23. Reprinted in Philip
Auslander (ed.) (2003) Performance: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies,
vol. 4, London: Routledge, pp. 165–87.
Oliveira, Nicolas de, Nicola Oxley and Michael Petry (1994) Installation Art, London: Thames
and Hudson.
—— (2003) Installation Art in the New Millennium: The Empire of the Senses, London:
Thames and Hudson.
Reiss, Julie H. (1999) From Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art, Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.

INTERCULTURALISM
The term ‘interculturalism’ describes cultural interaction which confronts and/or
combines the practices of one culture with those of one or more others. Intercultural
theatre and performance can thus be understood as referring more accurately to
hybrid activities rather than to specific genres of performance. Intercultural perfor-
mance is visible in the assimilation of Asian and African aesthetics by such Western
directors as Antonin Artaud, Bertold Brecht, Ariane Mnouchkine, Peter Brook,
Robert Wilson, Robert Lepage and Julie Taymor. It is also visible in the pre-
performance work of such Western directors as Richard Schechner, Jerzy
Grotowski and Eugenio Barba, who have used Asian forms of psycho-physical
preparation such as yoga to inform their methods of both training and devising. As
these examples indicate, the term ‘intercultural’ is used more commonly to describe
the influence of practices from the South, East or third world on those of the North,
West or first world. But it can also be used to describe movement in the other
direction, as in the cases of Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka, who combines
narrative forms from classical Greek and Shakespearean drama with local Yoruba
myths, and of Tadashi Suzuki, who directs Western plays using Asian perfor-
mance practices and traditions. It can also describe the hybrid ‘border art’ of
Guillermo Gómez-Peña.
Following the sympathy for multicultural integration that was characteristic of
much Western culture in the 1960s and 1970s, interculturalism partly arose in
response to an increased desire – fuelled by postmodernism – to articulate cultural
differences. As its widespread and longstanding practice indicates, intercultural
performance has a number of irrefutable attractions. It can develop indigenous prac-
tices; it can lead to the creation of hybrid new forms of performance and expression;
and it can help facilitate the understanding of different cultures. However, it has also
been the subject of intense criticism. Because intercultural exchange often occurs
between cultures with different levels of privilege and power, it can be exploitative,
lacking respect or reciprocity or treating culture as commodity. And because inter-
cultural performance is a form of cultural representation, it can be susceptible to
misrepresentation, often trivializing and denigrating source cultures as cliché or
stereotype, as when Western performance represents Asian and African forms as

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primitive. Such arguments have been made most boldly by Rustom Bharucha in his
criticism of Brook’s The Mahabharata (1985).
Patrice Pavis has argued that interculturalism’s arguments have become reductive,
circular and outmoded. However, its practice and analysis usefully demand attention
to the ethics of exchange and difference, to relationships of power, and to ideas of
cultural autonomy. And such attention may be especially important as intercultural
practices continue to spread within the contexts of globalization and the ongoing
expansion of international theatre festival circuits.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fischer-Lichte et al provide geographic spread, Gainor provides historical depth,

Holledge and Tompkins focus on women’s performance, and Marranca and Dasgupta
collect a strong range of critical articles and interviews. Martin’s is a handbook for
performance preparation. Pavis’s analyses are seminal.

Bharucha, Rustom (1993) Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture,
London: Routledge.
Fischer-Lichte, Erika, Josephine Riley and Michael Gissenwehrer (eds) (1990) The Dramatic
Touch of Difference: Theatre, Own and Foreign, Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag.
Gainor, J. Ellen (ed.) (1995) Imperialism and Theatre: Essays on World Theatre, Drama and
Performance 1795–1995, London: Routledge.
Holledge, Julie, and Joanne Tompkins (2000) Women’s Intercultural Performance, London:
Routledge.
Marranca, Bonnie and Gautam Dasgupta (eds) (1991) Interculturalism and Performance:
Writings from PAJ, New York: PAJ Publications.
Martin, John (2004) The Intercultural Performance Handbook, London: Routledge.
Pavis, Patrice (1992) Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, trans. Loren Kruger, London:
Routledge.
—— (ed.) (1996) The Intercultural Performance Reader, London: Routledge.

INTERNET
The rapid growth in the use and potential applications of the internet in the last ten
years of the twentieth century, an expansion that is continuing inexorably in the
twenty-first, has had some notable impact on the field of performance. Although
performance in ‘cyberspace’ can scarcely be considered ‘live’ in terms of direct
presence, it can question this very liveness through online and remote interaction.
The fine line between reality and what is merely a construct becomes more and more
fragile in such works. Exponential improvements in the growth of computer memory
and the development of webcams, digital video and streaming have enabled perfor-
mances of all kinds (sadly much of this dominated and driven by pornography) to be
transmitted immediately to millions worldwide, following Paul McCartney’s
landmark concert in December 1999 from the Beatles’ venue The Cavern in Liverpool.
As such, the internet can be considered another form for distributing performance

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material as well as an efficient and global marketing and information tool for artists
interested in promoting their profile or networking possibilities. Most artists have
their own official websites for advertising and employment purposes such as casting,
as well as for artistic ends.
The potential is far greater, though, than mere self-promotion, as has been indi-
cated by multimedia performance, Net Art, experiments with online games,
research into virtual reality, and the use of the internet directly in performance by, for
example, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Stelarc. Gómez-Peña solicited audience
confessions online in response to his installation piece The Temple of Confessions
(1994–97). Stelarc shifted his practice from total ‘body suspensions’, hanging from
meathooks in both public and private spaces, to virtual ‘suspensions’, linking himself
to the internet through specially created Stimbod software. Such interactions are
understandably costly, technologically extremely complex and even dangerous, so
he performs them rarely. What these and other examples of internet-based perfor-
mance proffer is a community for performance and the creation of interhuman
networks, many of which were subsequently established as and called ‘social media’,
that differ markedly from a live audience interacting in one shared space. The
immersive world of virtual reality and interactive gaming further extends the process
of being a spectator, promoting interactivity rather than passivity. These commu-
nities have an interesting political as well as social dimension too, protected as they
can be by their technological and actual remoteness. But such protection can also be
a problem as evidenced in incidences of cyberbullying and abuse through media such
as Twitter.
The internet and related technology inevitably have become a common topic
within performances, as both subject matter and media for human interaction. An
early influential example was in Patrick Marber’s play Closer (1997), where two
characters meet after an initial online chat, the content of which was projected on a
screen. Companies like British group Blast Theory continue to explore the internet in
their multimodal artistic experiments, moving on from early investigations such as
Can You See Me Now? (2001), a sort of interactive online game that also deployed
satellite tracking, which was quite advanced for its time. The idea of ‘internet perfor-
mance’ offers an interesting corollary to the recent growing interest in the embodied
nature of performance but the term itself has now mainly been consumed within the
broader umbrella of multimedia performance.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Few books deal exclusively with the emerging interconnection between performance
and the internet, but Giannachi gives a helpful introduction and Klich and Scheer
look at multimedia performance more broadly. The Performance Research issue
collects together short pieces, some of which refer to internet-based practices.
Birringer and Auslander focus on the broader issues that face performance in a highly
mediatized society.

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Allsopp, Ric and Scott deLahunta (eds) (1999) ‘Online’, a special issue of Performance
Research, 4.2, London: Routledge.
Auslander, Philip (1999) Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, London and New
York: Routledge.
Birringer, Johannes (1998) Media and Performance: Along the Border, Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Blast Theory. Online. Available www.blasttheory.co.uk/ (accessed 14 October 2013).
Giannachi, Gabriella (2004) Virtual Theatres: An Introduction, London: Routledge.
Klich, Rosemary and Edward Scheer (2012) Multimedia Performance, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.

LIGHTING AND SOUND

Lighting and sound may be indispensable elements of performance events but they
are often overlooked by the public, critics and academics alike. An explanation for
this invisibility is the fact that they usually have supplementary or supporting rather
than dominant roles. Used often to provoke emotional responses or create mood in a
subliminal rather than overt way, they are mostly employed non-figuratively. They
thus need to be considered in relation to other aspects of the mise en scène or
production rather than just by themselves. If they are conspicuous, this may mitigate
against the believability of a scene, as is fundamental to naturalist theatre, where the
spectator needs to focus on the stage and the actors rather than the surrounding
theatre technologies.
Lighting and sound are a vital part of scenography, though their primacy has
often been disputed. Konstantin Stanislavsky and Anton Chekhov disagreed about
the director’s inclusion of so many sound effects in production, which the writer
thought shifted his plays away from the more symbolic register he desired. With
quite another stylistic intention from Stanislavsky, designers like Edward Gordon
Craig have emphasized and advocated the role of lighting, working with swathes of
light and shadows rather than three-dimensional materials to create location, volume
and mood on stage. Bertold Brecht revealed the mechanisms at work in the theatre
to the spectator, whereas Antonin Artaud called for the use of all stage technology
as part of his manifesto for a total theatre.
Yet, however unaware of lighting and sound the spectator or critic is, there is no
denying their significance for: defining place (a room indoors as opposed to an open
field outside); indicating the passage of time (lights rising to suggest dawn, reinforced
by the sound of a chorus of birds); creating mood through colour or through suggestive
sounds; establishing links or motifs that might close or open a piece, as in blackouts
or introductory fanfares; and deliberately illuminating or obscuring what the
audience can see and hear, so prompting them to reflect on the act of spectatorship
and witnessing.
The introduction of electricity into theatres in the West at the beginning of the
twentieth century greatly enhanced lighting’s functionality as well as its creative
potential. As electricity became established, and with the arrival of computers and

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digital technology much later, lighting and sound technologies have become extremely
advanced. Intensity, colour, size, speed, volume, range and complexity of cues are all
possible with extensive variables, making lighting and sound design sophisticated art
forms in their own right. Many directors exploit the potential of these technologies
as autonomous elements in themselves. Robert Wilson uses light bars or washes on
the cyclorama as a central part of his stage action. Battersea Arts Centre, one of the
foremost experimental producing venues in London, ran a ‘Playing in the Dark’
season in 1998 without any lighting, bringing techniques familiar from radio into a
three-dimensional public shared space.
Postmodern performance practitioners have shown ongoing interest in playing
with light and sound as well as media like television, video and the internet. The
replaying of sound bites from popular culture in British group Forced Entertainment’s
work, or the relaying of video extracts of previous rehearsals of the Wooster Group,
are just two examples. Such interaction with stage technologies questions the actu-
ality and liveness of the performance event through the use of prerecorded narration,
voices off, multimedia focal points, or perhaps illogical shifts in time and space. The
ability of sound and lighting to make an impact on the spectator or auditor, evident
especially in large-scale concerts, raves, or events like the Olympic ceremonies and
parades, seems inversely proportional to the interest they attract within theatre and
performance studies. Thankfully this is now changing, especially regarding the area
of sound which is a thriving field, as evidenced by the two most recent books in our
bibliography.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The extensive chapter in the Brockett and Ball book sketches the recent histories of
these technologies and highlights practical issues. There are many handbooks like
Reid’s and Fineli’s, but fewer theoretical texts in this area, though Brown’s and
Kendrick and Roesner’s books mark an important shift. Pavis offers a short but
useful introduction to analysis of these technologies in performance.

Brockett, Oscar G. and Robert J. Ball (2004) The Essential Theatre, 8th edition, Belmont, CA:
Wadsworth/Thomson Learning.
Brown, Ross (2009) Sound: A Reader in Theatre Practice, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Fineli, Patrick (2002) Sound for the Stage, Cambridge: Entertainment Technology Press.
Kendrick, Lynne and David Roesner (eds) (2011) Theatre Noise: The Sound of Performance,
Newcastle: Cambridge University Scholars.
Pavis, Patrice (2003) Analyzing Performance: Theater, Dance and Film, trans. David Williams,
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Reid, Francis (2001) Lighting the Stage, Cambridge: Entertainment Technology Press.

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LIVENESS
Liveness describes a quality of live performance – the sense that it is happening here
and now. It is an important idea because it apparently distinguishes live performance
from recorded performance-based media such as film and television, indicating that
live performance has some intrinsic qualitative and even political difference from
other forms of performance or even its own forms of documentation. It is an espe-
cially important idea because the nature, effects and even existence of this qualitative
difference are the subject of considerable debate.
For many, performance’s liveness gives it its distinctive energy, interest and
social significance. It is in live performance that people – performers and audiences
– encounter and potentially interact with one another in real time, space and social
process. Performance’s liveness is exciting because it cultivates feelings and a sense
of presence, and because risk is unavoidable where accident cannot be edited out (as
it can in recorded media). Performance’s liveness is social because it produces
meaning in a dynamic process, rather than in the fixed and passive form that recorded
media seem to present. It gives live performance the potential to be a context where
social change can be produced. And it is a quality that has been directly explored and
exploited in theatre, stand-up comedy, speech-making, body art, happenings and
performance art.
For performance theorist Peggy Phelan, what distinguishes live performance is
the fact that it is live; the archive and the record of performance are not performance
because they are set. For her, this ephemeral quality gives performance a particular
political potential. Because it cannot be captured, performance is ‘nonreproductive’;
it resists becoming commodified, objectified and appropriated, and it maintains
instead the dynamic possibility of being continuously creative. For Phelan, what
makes performance exciting and gives it social value is not so much its sense of
presence as its sense of absence – the sense that performance is forever escaping and
cannot be reproduced. Phelan argues that performance theorists need to seek a ‘live’,
performative, creative and critical discourse for analysing performance that enhances
its ephemeral qualities, instead of trying to pin it down in conventional academic or
journalistic prose.
Philip Auslander directly challenges Phelan’s specific arguments as well as more
conventional wisdom on liveness, arguing against seeing live performance as
distinctive from other recorded media and proposing that seemingly live perfor-
mance is pervasively mediatized. He demonstrates that early television was modelled
on theatrical forms and that recent live performance is frequently adapted from films
and television shows and is often multimedia, incorporating recorded images and
sounds. Auslander concludes that the live and the recorded are deeply interlinked and
that it is inaccurate to set them up as binary opposites. He disputes the idea that
apparently live performance offers better opportunities for social exchange than
recorded media, arguing that live performance is premised not on an intrinsic
connection between audience and performer but on their necessary separation. And
by refusing to disconnect live and mediatized performance, he refutes Phelan’s

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location of performance outside of an economy of reproducible commodities.

Auslander’s arguments can come across as intentionally provocative and contrary.
However, they aim to get beyond some of the mystifying, vague language that
gathers around live performance, they question idealized notions of the performer–
audience relationship, and they challenge the very idea that performance can escape
commodity culture. They also provoke consideration of not only what distinguishes
live performance from recorded media, but importantly the many things it now
shares with those media. As technology, like the internet, becomes ever more inter-
active, and recorded media, like reality television, increasingly incorporate live
sequences, the complex relationship between the live and the recorded requires
continued critical scrutiny and articulation. Liveness is not a resolved term; it is at the
centre of what does or does not make live performance unique and particularly
meaningful.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Auslander, Philip (1999) Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, London and New
York: Routledge.
Phelan, Peggy (1993) ‘The Ontology of Performance’, in Unmarked: The Politics of
Performance, London: Routledge, pp. 146–66.

MASKING/BODY ADORNMENT
In performance, ways of masking or decorating the body have been used repeatedly
to transform, enlarge, disguise or separate performers – from the everyday, from
ancient rituals to the make-up that turns West End or Broadway performers into
cats. Archaeologists have provided evidence of such practices from prehistoric days
onwards, unearthing pictures of the large headdress masks of ancient Greek theatre,
for example. Popular theatre forms have often used masks, from the red nose of the
circus clown to the stock characters of commedia dell’arte. But such traditional prac-
tices have also become experimental when translated from their original context.
Inspired by circus and commedia, Vsevolod Meyerhold used mask-like make-up to
establish a grotesque idiom, Bertold Brecht made his Caucasian Chalk Circle
(1954) characters representative beings through masking them, and Jerzy
Grotowski’s actors adopted ‘facial masks’ in Akropolis (1962), based in part on
Asian performance practices and Kathakali. Facial transformation is needed to play
a character or role even in naturalist theatre, although in this genre the process is one
of imitation within believable realms rather than exaggeration, distortion or the
invention of a heightened stylized idiom.
Whatever their form, masking always has a double function. As make-up might
cover a face, a ‘mask’ hides the performer’s body. This reflects the common usage of
the word outside theatrical contexts. But masks also create a new identity. In the
theatre, masks project significant and complex meanings, depending on their mate-
rials, design, and the context in which they are worn.

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As well as having a strong visual impact, the power of masks to transport the
performer has frequently been articulated. In Asian performance, for example, where
masks occur in numerous forms and have religious, aesthetic and historical impor-
tance, the Japanese Noh shite actor meditates on his mask in the green room before
turning into one of the gods or dead beings that people the Noh stage. Jacques
Copeau’s mask training and Jacques Lecoq’s neutral masks have proved how
effective masking processes can be for performers, not just in rehearsal of a role but
also for the performer’s self-development, to rid him or her of habits or clichés.
Explorations of different styles of mask-based performance also stretch the
performer’s expressive abilities.
Such process-based explorations of what it is to perform and to metamorphose
oneself correspond to the body adornment, piercings and tattoos that permeate daily
behaviour. These are a continuation of ritually derived activities in secular contexts.
Stelarc and Orlan, with her attempted The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan (1990–93)
as St Orlan to be brought about by radical cosmetic surgery, have further explored
this crossover between everyday life and performance, as have many others involved
in body art or performance art. Both these artists have examined how one can
employ both simple and sophisticated technologies to test, alter or transform the
body. Through her ongoing reconstruction, Orlan is interrogating how identity is
constructed and how people perform themselves, ideas explored theoretically by
Judith Butler. Masks and masking still make a significant contribution to contem-
porary performance exploration, even if technological advances and recent theories
have shifted us well beyond the mythical awe inspired by ancient totemic face masks.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Emigh and Lommel have both discussed masks from an anthropological perspective.
Schechter’s collection explores masks in a range of performance forms from diverse
cultural perspectives. Bell’s edited collection was originally published in the journal
The Drama Review and considers puppets as well as some mask-related theatre
forms and practices. Wilsher’s guide also contains some contextual material as well
as experience drawn from his time with Trestle Theatre Company, which he
co-founded.

Bell, John (ed.) (2001) Puppets, Masks and Performing Objects, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Brockett, Oscar G. and Robert J. Ball (2004) The Essential Theatre, 8th edition, Belmont, CA:
Wadsworth/Thomson Learning.
Emigh, John (1996) Masked Performance: The Play of Self and Other in Ritual and Theatre,
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania.
Lommel, Andreas (1981) Masks: Their Meaning and Function, New York: Excalibur Books.
Schechter, Joel (2003) Popular Theatre: A Sourcebook, London and New York: Routledge.
Wilsher, Toby (2007) The Mask Handbook: A Practical Guide, London: Routledge

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MEGAMUSICALS
Megamusicals are big-budget, massively publicized, slickly produced, scenographi-
cally and technologically complex musicals featuring epic, sentimental narratives,
pop-influenced musicality and sung texts. They typically originate on Broadway in
New York or in London’s West End but are copied in franchise productions
worldwide, usually running for years, even decades, and becoming fixed global
cultural reference points. They are important partly for the ways they have influenced
musicals in particular, but they also reveal epochal changes in theatre more broadly.
These include the effects of megamusicals’ developing technologies on audience
experience and the liveness of performance and, in particular, the theatre’s export
across global markets, astronomical financial growth and ever-increasing mass
industrialization through reproduction on a scale even Walter Benjamin might
never have imagined.
Many observers parse musical history into two main eras: BC, ‘Before Cats’; and
AD, ‘Andrew [Lloyd Webber] Dominant’. Cats was first produced in London in 1981
and then on Broadway in 1982, with music by the form’s pioneer, Lloyd Webber, a text
adapted partly by director Trevor Nunn from T.S. Eliot’s book of poems Old Possum’s
Book of Practical Cats (1939) and production by Cameron Mackintosh, who would
become one of the form’s most important producers. Where Cats led, many megamu-
sicals followed, including Les Misérables (first produced in Paris in 1980, London in
1985 and New York in 1987), The Phantom of the Opera (London, 1986; NY, 1988)
and Miss Saigon (London, 1989; NY, 1991). Megamusicals are scenically extravagant:
the oversized (and sanitized) garbage dump in which the performers in Cats roam
literally spills out – revolve and all – into the theatre auditorium. They are technologi-
cally elaborate: Cats features a hydraulically lifted oversized tire, Phantom a crashing
chandelier and Miss Saigon a real, flying helicopter. Since Cats, they have used radio
mikes as standard, utterly transforming performance sound and styles by allowing for
sequences in apparently cinematic close-up. They run for years and accumulate colossal
global audiences: Cats played in London for twenty-one years, on Broadway for
eighteen and has been produced in over 300 cities worldwide; by 1996, over 40 million
people had seen ‘Les Miz’, as it is popularly known. They have giant budgets: the
original Broadway production of Cats reportedly cost about US$4 million. And they
make astronomical returns: by 1999, Phantom had made approximately $2.8 billion –
more than the blockbuster films Star Trek or Titanic; and in 1993/94, gross musical
revenues in North America alone were over $1 billion, enough to lure cinema giants
such as Disney, which produced megamusical versions of Beauty and the Beast (NY,
1993) and The Lion King (NY, 1996).
The figures speak for themselves: audiences evidently want megamusicals, a lot.
Megamusicals’ many attractions for audiences include: their sheer entertainment, the
spectacle and wonder of their scenographic or technological feats, their powerful
stimulation of feeling, the catchiness of their tunes, the sense they give of partici-
pating in a shared global culture and the pleasurable narrative clarity their through-
running music creates. Many performers love megamusicals, both for the pleasure of

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the work and the employment income. Culture and tourist economies worldwide
benefit from megamusicals’ success. Megamusicals often tell culturally important
stories, regularly engaging issues of social consciousness or social empowerment.
And megamusicals’ popularity can be seen as democratizing, giving huge audiences
worldwide access to the same cultural event – provided they can afford the often high
ticket price.
But for many critics, megamusicals exemplify serious problems. As part of what
cultural critics T. W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer influentially identified in the
mid-twentieth century as the culture industry, megamusicals can be accused of
‘dumbing down’ audiences, offering them simplistic, formulaic fare that is easily
summarized in a logo such as Cats’ eyes, Les Miz’s waif or The Phantom’s mask.
They can be seen to cultivate passive consumption rather than engagement which is
active, critical, creative, genuinely democratic or even properly engaged with any
particular cultural context. After all, how much do audiences really learn from Les
Miz about revolutionary France, or from Miss Saigon about the Vietnam War? And
how relevant is a musical about revolutionary France, for example, to all audiences
everywhere; might it be better for performance explicitly to address its particular
contexts of production and its audiences there? Megamusicals’ performers are
employed, yes, but they can also be seen as profoundly alienated: globally replicated
productions fiercely standardize their performances and delimit their creative agency;
their gruelling performance schedules are often packed out with evening and matinée
performances and are very long-running; and their voices are disembodied and dehu-
manized through the use of radio mikes, over-amplification and the synthesizing,
voice-smoothing effects of live mixing. Franchise productions’ ruthless cloning has
earned megamusicals the derisive nickname McTheatre, indicating not only their
sameness (like the fare at McDonald’s restaurants) but also their potential metro-
politan neo-imperialism, as Broadway and London dictate terms of production
worldwide (see interculturalism). The vastness of megamusicals’ budgets further
limits innovation and variety as risk-averse producers turn to proven hits and generic
templates and help commercial, industrial and capitalist imperatives ultimately to
trump creativity, craft and art. Time will show how the megamusical evolves, and
whether it can retain its pleasures while diminishing any of its possible problems,
whether it is the shape of industrialized theatre to come, or whether new forms of
globally franchised theatrical industrialization – such as global screenings of produc-
tions by London’s National Theatre or New York’s Metropolitan Opera – might
prevail.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The literature on musicals is vast; most recent publications examine megamusicals to

some degree. Sternfeld’s book provides the most sustained discussion of the form.
Burston offers excellent technological, industrial and cultural information and
analysis. Rosenberg and Harburg’s book contextualizes megamusicals in the longer
history of the business of Broadway musicals. Prece and Everett give detailed

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readings of a plethora of shows. Stempel and Wollman each offer observant, pithy
analysis of the megamusical in their two books cited here. Vagelis situates the mega-
musical in critical cultural context.

Burston, Jonathan (1998) ‘Theatre Space as Virtual Place: Audio Technology, the Reconfigured
Singing Body, and the Megamusical’, Popular Music 17.2 (May): 205–18.
Prece, Paul and William A. Everett (2002) ‘The Megamuscial and Beyond: The Creation,
Internationalism and Impact of a Genre’, The Cambridge Companion to the Musical, William
A. Everett and Paul R. Laird (eds) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 246-65.
Rosenberg, Bernard and Ernest Harburg (1993) The Broadway Musical: Collaboration in
Commerce and Art, New York and London: New York University Press.
Stempel, Larry (2010) Showtime: A History of the Broadway Musical Theater, New York and
London: W. W. Norton & Company.
Sternfeld, Jessica (2006) The Megamusical, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indianapolis
University Press.
Vagelis, Siropoulos (2011) ‘Megamusicals, Spectacle and the Postdramatic Aesthetics of Late
Capitalism’ 5:1 (March): 13–34.
Wollman, Elizabeth L. (2006) The Theater Will Rock: A History of the Rock Musical, from
Hair to Hedwig, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan.

MISE EN SCÈNE
This is a term from French which literally denotes the act of putting something on
stage. In the nineteenth century it was used to describe the staging of the text and
specifically the text’s direction. This is partly because its original use coincided with
the rise of the director or, in French, the metteur en scène. However, an awareness of
theatre as a total act which was more than the sum of its various parts began to
coalesce in the late nineteenth century, was furthered by artists and critics like
Antonin Artaud in the early twentieth century, and was secured by the rise of
semiotic analysis from the early 1980s on. In these contexts, ‘mise en scène’ has
increasingly been used in both theatre and film to articulate the total multidisciplinary
act of staging the performance or film. It is thus understood to include the perfor-
mance’s direction, but also its acting, scenography, lighting and sound, costumes,
use of multimedia, organization of time and space, and so on. Further, the term
‘mise en scène’ has emphasized how performance’s meanings are produced not only
in the performance product – the show – but also through the processes of both
production and audience reception. A concept of mise en scène helps the critic to
differentiate between different stagings – or mise en scène – of the same text and to
designate them as, effectively, different theatrical texts. The term ‘mise en scène’ has
been widely adopted in English theatre vocabularies especially, because it conveys
these expanded senses of theatre as a multidisciplinary process and product that is the
creative outcome of many contributors. Most recently, scholar Patrice Pavis has tried
to reclaim the term as a way of describing and analysing contemporary performances
that cross over between theatre and performance, which might now be called post-
dramatic and which he dubs, his tongue in cheek, ‘performise’.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Pavis defines the term and its history in detail in his dictionary as well as in his recent
book.

Pavis, Patrice (1998) Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts, and Analysis, trans. Christine
Shantz, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
—— (2012) Contemporary Mise en Scène: Staging Theatre Today, Oxon: Routledge.

MOVEMENT
Movement is as intrinsic to performance and the theatre as it is to life. We recognize
death by the absence of movement just as we identify performance as the movement
of bodies in space through time – whether this passage is tortuously slow, as in
butoh; aims at stillness, as in some of Tadashi Suzuki’s work; or is based on a
familiar repertoire of daily gestures or means of locomotion, as in naturalist theatre.
Whatever the stylistic end point, movement training or the aestheticized enactment
of movements in performance requires discipline and rehearsal practice. It also
necessitates more heightened attention than we give our body in everyday life. Our
bodies are constantly in animation, be it through breathing, the circulation of blood,
or the shifting of muscles as we negotiate the battle against gravity that a seemingly
simple action like standing demands of us. We usually only pay attention to such
movements if we are ill, injured or operating dysfunctionally for whatever reason, or
if it is intrinsic to our vocation, as it is with sports. But performance frames and thus
draws attention to movement. In performance, everyday functions need to be
harnessed and exaggerated, repeated or isolated, coordinated or relaxed, in order for
the body to engage with a different range and repertoire of movements than the
habitual. One extreme is choreography in dance, where set movements are learned so
that they can be precisely executed and become second nature.
All directors, teachers and performers inevitably explore movement in their
work, but some do so more deliberately than others. As a teacher of actors, Jacques
Lecoq developed a systematic pedagogical structure and training exercises for
evolving performances and character from movement. Konstantin Stanislavsky’s
approach to character and physical actions looked less at movement per se but rather
for the psychological motivation for movement, arguing that all movements have a
psychophysical purpose. But none have explored the potential of movement more
than dancers. Choreographer/director Pina Bausch has prioritized why we move
rather than how. Rudolf von Laban also used movement in performance for aesthetic
purposes, as do all dancers, but he carried this interest over into everyday life. He
observed, analysed and systematically annotated movement, seeing it as a way of
knowing people. Many artists (and especially modernist ones) involved in the field of
movement-based performance believe, as did dancer Martha Graham, that ‘movement
never lies’. They consider that it somehow shows us as we really are, an idea that
postmodern theory has interrogated closely, arguing that ideas of reality, fixity and
essence are highly questionable.

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Some performance forms operate within a taxonomy of a daily repertoire of

movements, to explore social relations, performative identities and connections
with everyday life, while others are more abstract, exploring weight, velocity,
patterns and shape, for example, as much dance does. There is general consensus that
the daily gestures and range of movements of naturalist theatre do not need equiv-
alent preparation or training time as do the codified gestures and ways of moving of
Asian performance or ballet. Whether this is true is debatable, but codified
movement forms are often very extreme, like being on pointe in ballet. Some even
demand reshaping the body – to enable a particular bow-legged stance or way of
walking in Kathakali, for example. Yet through an emphasis on duration, even daily
or social movements can be given new purpose and significance; for example, Ulay
and Marina Abramović walked towards each other along the Great Wall of China,
one from each end, to meet in the middle in The Lovers: Walk on the Great Wall
(1998). The movement might be everyday, but the spatial and temporal dynamics of
the action make it extraordinary, a feature of much performance art. The specta-
tor’s interest can be aroused as much by a demanding disciplined approach, which
desocializes or reforms the body’s mechanisms, as by the reframing of seemingly
mundane movements.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lecoq and Newlove each describe a particular approach to training. Fleshman

includes introductory chapters on various aspects of movement systems, movement
in therapy, and other applications, as well as covering practices worldwide. Goodridge
focuses on rhythm in different cultures and across varying forms.

Fleshman, Bob (ed.) (1986) Theatrical Movement: A Bibliographical Anthology, Metuchen, NJ,
and London: Scarecrow Press, Inc.
Goodridge, Janet (1999) Rhythm and Timing of Movement in Performance: Drama, Dance and
Ceremony, London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
Lecoq, Jacques with Jean-Gabriel Carasso and Jean-Claude Lallias (2000) The Moving Body,
Teaching Creative Theatre, trans. David Bradby, foreword by Simon McBurney, London:
Methuen.
—— (2006) Theatre of Movement and Gesture, trans. and ed. David Bradby, London:
Routledge.
Newlove, Jean (1993) Laban for Actors and Dancers, London: Nick Hern Books.

MULTIMEDIA PERFORMANCE
Broadly speaking, this is any performance that combines different media. While it
can therefore describe theatre that incorporates dance and music, it more commonly
specifies work that mixes live performance with machines and/or mediated forms,
such as computer technology, television, video, film and slide projection. As in
Antonin Artaud’s total theatre and in postmodern and postdramatic forms of

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visual theatre, multimedia performance aims to extend and enhance performance by

exploring the full range of expressive media available. By juxtaposing the live and
the mechanical or mediated, exploring questions analysed by Walter Benjamin
even in the late 1930s, it also raises issues of liveness and presence and interrogates
the aesthetic and social potentials of contemporary technology and media culture as
well as live performance.
Multimedia performance was pioneered by futurism’s incorporation of machines
and films into performance and by Bertold Brecht’s important predecessor, director
Erwin Piscator, who put staged fictions in the context of real historical events by
using large-scale documentary film projections as scenographic backdrops for live
performance. It has proliferated since the 1960s and the rise of performance and
body art, both as technological equipment and expertise have become more
pervasive, but more importantly as questions about the relationships and boundaries
between humans, our identities, our bodies, media and technologies have become
more pressing (for example, in the work of the Wooster Group). An early example
is Robert Lepage’s Seven Streams of the River Ota (1994), which presented a char-
acter who disappears into the private space of an on-stage photo booth whilst his
fantasies are simultaneously broadcast in large-scale projection. Such theatrical
devices question our changing relationships to time and space by placing the ‘there
and then’ of recorded performance within the ‘here and now’ of live performance.
They also explore the technology of the body itself, often in relation to our highly
medicalized culture and sophisticated computer and audio technologies. Artists such
as Orlan, Stelarc and Laurie Anderson question where, how and by whom our
identities, bodies, voices and realities are performatively produced in a technologi-
cally developed culture. By presenting multiple perspectives simultaneously, multi-
media performance also examines how electronic surveillance is increasingly
infiltrating our lives and our privacy. Internationally-renowned British company
Blast Theory have investigated such issues in their extensive and often quite contro-
versial multimedia work. Performance at the interface of the live and the mediated is
expanding, moving on from virtual theatre, internet performance and cyber-perfor-
mance, where artists like Stelarc become part man and part computer, and can be
controlled by a near or remote audience. Such performance not only draws the
performer increasingly into cyberspace; it leads the audience there too, often
immersing it in a parallel, or at least proximal, digital world.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Auslander’s volume includes important articles on media and technology. Giannachi

introduces key issues in, and practitioners of, different forms of virtual theatre as
well as other aspects of performance in relation to technology. Klich and Scheer
provide a thorough overview of multimedia performance.

Auslander, Philip (ed.) (2003) Performance: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural
Studies, vol. 4, London: Routledge.

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Giannachi, Gabriella (2004) Virtual Theatres: An Introduction, London: Routledge.

—— (2007) The Politics of New Media Theatre: Life TM, Oxon: Routledge.
Klich, Rosemary and Edward Scheer (2012) Multimedia Performance, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.

MUSEUM DISPLAY
Museum display has attracted the interest of performance studies scholars because it
forces engagement with important issues about representing cultures and identities
and the social production of meaning in time and space. Like other contexts of
performance, museums are spaces in which audiences encounter and engage with
selected and displayed objects and sometimes also sounds, moving images, multi-
media installations, performers, and so on. As in other forms of performance,
museum display aims to achieve a variety of effects, from instructing its audiences, to
persuading them to a particular point of view, to producing a strong aesthetic effect,
even one of charismatic presence. Influential performance studies scholar Barbara
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett argues that museums are fundamentally performative,
creating and repeating their own practices, their contents, the behaviour of audiences
and ultimately the identities of audiences.
Following the influence of historiographers and postmodern theorists in the late
twentieth century, museums have increasingly been recognized as contexts where
knowledge is not objectively presented but is subjectively made. This recognition has
provoked analysis of how museums produce meanings through processes of selection,
omission, display and (re)contextualization. Despite their common best intentions to
preserve and instruct, museums risk succumbing to familiar limitations of intercul-
tural practice, potentially appropriating, decontextualizing and disrespecting the
source cultures they represent. Performance artists and writers Guillermo
Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco make this point in their ‘living dioramas’, which chal-
lenge conventional, patronizing practices of ethnographic display. The point is also
increasingly made by museums themselves, as they acknowledge the impossibility of
achieving either comprehensive representation or complete objectivity and try to
invoke broader contexts for understanding selected display materials. As discussed in
the entry on Holocaust memorials and museums, architect Daniel Libeskind’s
Jewish Museum in Berlin, for example, demonstrates its subjective selectivity by
focusing on a clearly limited choice of material that often relates to particular indi-
viduals’ stories. The museum nevertheless aims to put these stories into a larger
context beyond its own physical and temporal limits; it is marked externally with lines
that, if extrapolated, ‘join’ the museum to important sites in Berlin’s Jewish history.
In a bid to explicitly share their subjective creation of meanings with their audiences,
many museums have developed interactive multimedia installations. As with other
experiments with audience interaction, however, it is worth asking whether the control
these innovations seem to cede to their audiences is actually more apparent than real.
Museum practices of curatorship and display raise issues that are important well
beyond the museum – in theatre programming; tourist attractions like Shakespeare’s

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Globe in London; heritage sites; and historical recreations, perhaps especially those
which incorporate performers, as at Plymouth Plantation in the USA. Like site-
specific performance, heritage sites invoke the site constructively as a memory
trigger for events that happened there; more problematically, they suggest that the
sites’ meanings transcend both time and change. A performance studies concept that
might usefully challenge and develop museum practices is that of liveness, since it
acknowledges the evanescence of the live event and raises fundamental issues about
how to represent that event for future consideration.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bennett’s book summarizes key debates and discusses a range of vivid examples of
theatricalized museums. Coming out of the field of museum studies, Karp and
Lavine’s book gathers excellent essays, which engage in detail with specific exhibi-
tions and address a wide range of issues. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is one of the most
influential analysts of museums within performance studies.

Bennett, Susan (2013) Theatre & Museums, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

Karp, Ivan and Steven D. Lavine (eds) (1991) Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of
Museum Display, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara (1998) Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage,
Berkeley: University of California Press.

MUSIC, THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE

As Philip Auslander has pointed out, many theatre and performance academics have
all but ignored music. This may be because of the commercial or conservative nature
of many musicals and opera, which as a body of practice are not known for their
radical form or content, and thus perhaps do not accord with the political or artistic
interests of many scholars. Equally it may be that musical performance’s focus on
rhythm, sound, tone, pitch and voice requires expertise other than that demanded by
the text–meaning–interpretation axis of conventional studies of the theatre. But music
is a part of performance and the links between the disciplines are extensive, as even
this fleeting survey suggests. We do not want to further perpetuate the omission
Auslander has identified, but are concerned here not so much with music for its own
sake but with how music relates to our specific focus on theatre and live
performance.
Spectacular events accompanied musical concerts played in European courts in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but the nineteenth century saw more
considered theatrical experiments in musical performance in the West. Richard
Wagner’s idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk advocated a total theatre in which music was
one of several indispensable strands. Melodrama was a popular theatre form in
which all action was underscored and accompanied by music, often to heighten
feeling or support the stylistic exaggeration. More recent music/performance

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interactions include the avant-garde experimentation of John Cage and Harrison

Birtwhistle, with pieces like the latter’s ‘punk’ opera Punch and Judy (1967). In
some ways these have been no less influential than global commercial successes and
megamusicals like Miss Saigon (1989), even if their audiences have been consid-
erably smaller. Music can be, and has been, used for various ends in live perfor-
mance: to expose characters’ feelings; to create mood or a setting; or to comment
through songs on plot, as in Bertold Brecht’s work. These are just some
applications.
Some of the world’s foremost directors have repeatedly returned to the potential
of musical performance. Robert Wilson has collaborated frequently with singer-
songwriter Tom Waits, Peter Brook has directed many operas, and Peter Sellars has
presented several experimental operas based on real political events in a postmodern
vein. As well as pointing to the precision demanded of his actors, Jerzy Grotowski’s
use of the term ‘score’ shows the proximity between the fields, a gap which narrows
further when a performance is based on movement and song as much as text, as in
his own work. The idea of a score also reiterates the point that it is the playing or
acting that makes a performance rather than the structure or content alone – just as
notes written on paper do not make a piece of music.
Unlike the theatre, music travels easily, does not depend on live performance, and
has therefore easily absorbed intercultural influences. Most traditional African
and Asian performance forms are based on dance and are thus rooted in music and
rhythm, the participants being performers rather than actors in the mimetic
Aristotelian sense. They utilize stylized modes of representation that lie outside the
familiar tropes of realism, an approach that has influenced artists like Vsevolod
Meyerhold and Eugenio Barba. Music’s prolific cross-cultural hybridization has
helped shape Western theatre.
Music is also infinitely reproducible, operating in a realm of commercial possi-
bilities of which live performance can only dream, and eschewing the difficulties of
documentation and longevity which trouble the theatre and dance. But, whatever the
scale of its appeal, live theatre-related music suffers from charges of narrow elitism,
especially in relation to opera and classical works. The accusations against producers
of opera have been slightly allayed by the popularization of the form through produc-
tions like Britain’s National Theatre’s Jerry Springer the Opera (2003), based on the
TV chat show host. The tide might be turning, with rapid advances in digital tech-
nology opening up potential for further interaction between acoustic and musical
technologies and the sort of conceptual investigations that have sustained much
performance art, from Cage and happenings onwards, up to Laurie Anderson.
This may help bring music and theatre closer together for mixed audiences, inte-
grating the popular and the traditional with the sophisticated and the innovative.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Auslander has been a persuasive and almost isolated proponent, arguing for the
inclusion of more music within performance analysis, as his book and his article in

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Little’s diverse collection demonstrates. Frith writes from a cultural studies perspective
but has a clear grasp of music as performance. Theaterschrift brings together inter-
views and reflections in English, German, Flemish and French whilst Rebstock and
Roesner have collated a diverse range of essays about all aspects of music and
performance.

Auslander, Philip (1999) Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, London and New
York: Routledge.
Frith, Simon (1998) Performing Rites: Evaluating Popular Music, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Little, Henry (consultant ed.) (2004) ‘Adventures in Music Theatre’, a special issue of
Contemporary Theatre Review, 14.1, London: Routledge.
Rebstock, Matthias and David Roesner (eds) (2012) Composed Theatre: Aesthetics, Practices,
Processes, Bristol: Intellect.
Van Kerkhoven, Marianne (ed.) (1995) ‘Theatre and Music’, a special issue of Theaterschrift,
9, Brussels: Kaaitheater.

NATURALISM AND REALISM

Naturalism and realism are aesthetic and literary categories, but in the theatre they
refer specifically to artistic movements that represent real life on stage, using what
now seem the overly familiar devices of believable characters, narrative action and
plot. The two terms can be used with reference to most art forms, but in the theatre
they are almost interchangeable, with only nuances of difference between them.
Some theorists suggest that naturalism pays more attention than realism to social
environment as an influence on character, and that realism tends to proffer a more
critical and less imitative or illusionistic aesthetic, but these distinctions are too
subtle and contentious to be of much use today and it is difficult to achieve consensus
on this subject. What is important is that realism and naturalism are both founded on
the premise that art should hold up a mirror to nature, a once revolutionary concept.
This demands a mimetic mode of representation, drawing in part on the logic of
narrative structures and staging implied by Aristotle’s unities of time, space and
action.
Whatever the word hints at etymologically, naturalism in the theatre has nothing
directly to do with the ‘natural’, just as realism only implies the real through its
manipulated reconstruction or reproduction. These genres are highly artificial
conventions. Their well-established techniques and processes enable the suspension
of belief that they ask of audiences, and create the imitation that is at their heart.
Interestingly, naturalist theatre was initially a response to the even more artificial and
exaggerated devices of melodrama and other ‘pictorial’ styles that dominated the
theatre up to the middle part of the nineteenth century. As such, it was an innovative
avant-garde form that challenged the aesthetic status quo.
Developments in the theatre followed the lead of fiction and novels by writers
including Emile Zola. Zola was one of the key early proponents of naturalism, as

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demonstrated by his 1867 novel and eponymous play Thérèse Raquin (1873), and his
1881 manifesto advocating naturalism in the theatre. Although Thérèse Raquin has
naturalist elements, it reveals an immature genre in development, leaning as it does
frequently towards melodrama. Naturalism in the theatre took hold more firmly in
the late 1880s and 1890s, cultivated by André Antoine of the Théâtre Libre, the first
naturalist director of note, and groups like the Meiningen Company (from the south
of Germany). It was then fostered by Konstantin Stanislavsky whose system for
actors and detailed directorial vision are almost considered templates for the creation
of naturalist theatre.
One of the priorities of naturalist artists and writers was to expose on stage the
minutiae of social life, depicting families in real contemporary situations, as in Anton
Chekhov’s play The Cherry Orchard (1904). Naturalism and realism were informed
by Karl Marx’s political theories, scientific advances and growing interest in classifi-
cation, medical progress and increased knowledge about diseases and the body, and
Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (first published in 1859). Darwin’s evolu-
tionary theory inspired naturalism’s constructions of socially determined beings
located in and reacting to specific environments, like Nora in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s
House (1879). His Ghosts (1881) introduced the issue of genetics that was coming to
the fore in fervent debates about the environment and heredity. Under such influ-
ences, theatre moved on from melodrama and nineteenth-century Romanticism.
Naturalism and realism heralded modern drama and all the artistic, social, cultural
and scientific innovations that followed in the twentieth century and beyond.
However revolutionary it was in the beginning, naturalism’s subsequent main-
stream positioning has fuelled many counteractive revolts and experiments, from
Dada through Bertold Brecht’s epic theatre to performance art. These have all
questioned the social function of art and its forms by focusing on the presentational
aesthetics of performance and its processes, as opposed to the supposedly realist
representation of everyday life. It has repeatedly been argued that representation
through naturalist aesthetics reinforces rather than challenges the status quo, and is
therefore considered politically (as well as artistically) ideologically conservative. But
naturalism and its history are complex and cannot be set against more experimental
forms in an easy oppositional binary. The work of playwrights with explicit or
implicit political or social messages – ranging from the ‘kitchen-sink’ drama of post-
Second World War Britain, through Arthur Miller or Tennessee Williams’ writings,
to the plays of David Hare – contests such a view.
One question that refuses to go away is whether the role of naturalism in the
theatre has been superseded by television and film, which can replicate reality so
precisely. Yet, however much it might be considered the rather tired or conservative
norm today, and in spite of such doubts about its current function or value, natu-
ralism has shown extraordinary resilience, popularity and longevity. It still remains
the dominant theatre form in the Western world today, be it in political verbatim
theatre or commercial West End productions of Chekhov or Ibsen.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Innes offers an introduction to naturalism, with a focus on and extracts from works
by Ibsen, Chekhov and Bernard Shaw as well as Zola’s manifesto. Styan takes a
longer view of naturalist/realist playwrighting throughout the twentieth century.
Williams’ text is influential for its contextualization of naturalist theatre as an experi-
mental form. Diamond analyses mimesis and realism from a feminist perspective.
Pickering and Thompson have written a much-needed overview which considers
naturalism’s historical development.

Diamond, Elin (1997) Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theatre, London:
Routledge.
Innes, Christopher (ed.) (2000) A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre, London: Routledge.
Pickering, Kenneth and Jayne Thompson (2013) Naturalism in Theatre, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Styan, J. L. (1981) Modern Drama in Theory and Practice, vol.1, Realism and Naturalism,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Williams, Raymond (1989) ‘Theatre as a Political Forum’, in The Politics of Modernism,
London: Verso.

PARATHEATRE
Para, from the Ancient Greek, means ‘beyond’. In practice, paratheatre therefore lies
outside and beyond the spatial, temporal and structural forms of the theatre, denoting
instead related practices such as workshops, rituals, training programmes, drama
therapy or even Augusto Boal’s ‘invisible theatre’ with its unwitting spectatorship.
Jerzy Grotowski, in relation to whose practice the term is frequently applied,
conducted his paratheatrical work in the 1970s, after and beyond his successes in
theatre. He removed the spectator from the performance equation to encourage wider
participation in what was termed ‘active culture’, centred on the non-professional
performer as maker in a series of workshop-type activities rather than as passive
recipient of events made for them. With no paying spectators, paratheatre operates
according to very different economic criteria from aesthetic performance, although it
can be commercially lucrative as business training or personal development
programmes prove.
Paratheatrical activities often draw on skills, techniques, strategies and even
personnel that are deployed in the theatre. As in much paratheatre, Grotowski focused
on the participant actor rather than the spectator, if indeed there is one. This emphasis
can be seen in dramatherapy sessions, acting workshops and business team-building
courses. In these contexts, ‘performance’ is not integral or an immediate corollary to
the process, even if it may be the future longer-term aim or the motivation behind
these practices. The participants are aware of being observed, judged, led or coached,
but the role of observer is inside the process rather than the familiar more passive
role of the external theatre spectator.

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Paratheatre also refers to non-theatrical processes or activities that might be

construed as theatre or defined as performance. The way of framing an event might
draw it within the parameters of what can be considered theatre, as Banes’ book on
subversive art demonstrates. ‘Paratheatre’ is a fluid term that encompasses many
aspects of performance beyond the familiar spectator–actor binary.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Literature related to paratheatre is extensive even if it does not use this specific term.
It ranges from self-help books to theoretical texts that explore performance outside
artistic frames, as in McKenzie’s challenging theoretical exposition. Banes’
collection of performance reviews scarcely defines paratheatre, but the term allows
her to include ‘cat’ shows and the Japanese tea ceremony.

Banes, Sally (1998) Subversive Expectations: Performance Art and Paratheater in New York,
1976–85, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Kumiega, Jennifer (1985) The Theatre of Grotowski, London: Methuen.
McKenzie, Jon (2001) Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance, London: Routledge.

PERFORMANCE/PERFORMING
‘Performance’ has at least five relevant meanings in this context, indicating its
importance but also its semantic instability and dynamism. First, it is used to identify
the live event of presenting something usually pre-prepared before an audience. This
can be the presentation of any performing art, including theatre, music, dance, circus
or martial arts skills, happenings, improvised performance, and so on. Important
features of this definition are the performance’s liveness and usually an expectation
that the performer will produce a sense of presence. This use of the term can also
denote a particular performer’s execution of a piece of music or a role, such as Ellen
Terry’s performance of Ophelia.
Secondly, and more broadly, performance describes all social behaviour including,
as Erving Goffman argued, everyday behaviour. This understanding gained
currency in the mid to late twentieth century as scholars from philosophy to anthro-
pology and sociology identified in social behaviour and ritual the repetitive or
restored behaviour that Richard Schechner saw as essential to performance. For
scholars in other disciplines, including Judith Butler in feminist philosophy, this
association of behaviour with performance helped to pioneer a theory of behaviour
as performative and constitutive of identity. It thus helped to theorize a political
response to oppression by enabling the argument that interruptions and variations in
repeated behaviours could help to transform that oppression. Initially, this wide-
spread theoretical use of the term ‘performance’ from the 1980s on made little direct
reference to theatre or performance studies, seeming to deploy ‘performance’ more
as a metaphor than a term with its own disciplinary genealogy, tools of critical
thinking, or practices (as discussed by States). This decontextualized application of

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the word partly inspired performance studies’ development as a discipline by chal-

lenging it to demonstrate how it could help to enhance understandings of perfor-
mance’s practices and effects through its own conception of the relationships between
activities and audiences, space and time, process and product, activity and effect,
and so on.
A third and growing use of the term denotes success or achievement, as we might
talk of sexual performance, or the performance of a car, a company, the global
economy, or a sports or Olympic athlete. While this particular deployment of the
term might seem to have little direct relevance to performance in the context of this
Companion, it is important to consider how its expansion and impact on ideas of
power and knowledge might relate to other deployments, as Jon McKenzie does in his
influential book Perform or Else. For example, this use shifts focus from the process
of performance to the outcome or product, making not only a semantic shift but also
an ideological one, for example, towards the values of capitalism.
Fourth, performance often is and has been used as a synonym for performance
art and body art, coming out of a history of fine art practices. These forms of perfor-
mance achieved prominence in the 1980s and have often exploited the liveness,
presence and embodiment associated with the first use of the term to advocate for the
rights of particular identity groups, such as women or lesbians and gay men.
While performance art is sometimes deconstructive, it can also intentionally rein-
force ideas of coherent identity, narrative and representation in order to make political
claims for the identities it represents. This sets it somewhat apart from the fifth and
final form of performance to be discussed here, the form of deconstructive perfor-
mance distinguished primarily by its distinction from acting in theatre. Where most
acting aims to achieve mimetic representation, this form of performance is usually at
least partly presentational, working to challenge naturalistic characterization and
narration in order to question the apparent truths ‘shown’ by representational forms.
This mode of performance has a long history, for example in avant-garde practices
like Dada, futurism, expressionism and Bertold Brecht’s epic theatre. But it has
been developed most extensively in postmodern performance, where the will to chal-
lenge the assumptions of received representational forms has produced a host of
deconstructive and metatheatrical performance strategies that foreground process
over product, interrogate theatrical illusionism and resist offering stable, conclusive
meanings.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Carlson’s study of performance’s recent meanings and practices is informative and

comprehensive. The other suggested sources each concentrate on one or two of the
above definitions.

Auslander, Philip (1997) From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism and

Postmodernism, London: Routledge.
Carlson, Marvin (2004) Performance: A Critical Introduction, 2nd edition, London: Routledge.

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Kershaw, Baz (1999) The Radical in Performance: Between Brecht and Baudrillard, London:
Routledge.
McKenzie, Jon (2001) Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance, London: Routledge.
States, Bert O. (1996) ‘Performance as Metaphor’, Theatre Journal 48.1: 1–26. Reprinted in
Philip Auslander (ed.) (2003) Performance: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural
Studies, vol. 1, London: Routledge, pp. 108–37.

PERFORMANCE ART/LIVE ART

Performance art (often called live art, especially in the UK) is a live artistic practice
that evolved chiefly out of fine art – as differentiated from theatre. It developed as
artists sought to extend art beyond the conventional media and practices of painting
and sculpture. Much performance art was (and is) explicitly politically motivated,
aiming to challenge dominant values and practices and to respond to social crises.
Thus, though its roots reach back to performance in the 1910s, including Dada and
the Cabaret Voltaire, it came of age in the era of second wave feminism, Vietnam
protests and happenings in the 1960s and 1970s, continued throughout the 1980s
during the right-wing leaderships of President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher
and the rise of AIDS, and continues still. Performance art is difficult to define because
it potentially combines so many media – including performance, text, music, dance,
architecture, sculpture, video, film and multimedia – but also because it often aims
to challenge categorization, exploring the expressive possibilities of combining
diverse elements to produce new hybrids.
Performance art’s initial rejection of traditional painting and sculpture reflected a
widespread feeling in Western art practice from the 1950s onwards that these forms
were limited by the piety and burden of their fine art histories. Performance art
rejected their focus on representation, exploring the more direct possibilities of pres-
entation. It displaced a conventional emphasis on the commodified art object,
concentrating instead on the transient artistic process. Performance art shifted the
emphasis from the object to the event, simultaneously refocusing on the artist as
creator, the relationship of art to everyday life, the ephemeral event as art, and the
very difficulty of documenting (or rendering as commodified object) artistic practice.
This focus on the artist meant that much performance art was and is concerned
with identity and is frequently performed solo or by pairs rather than groups. Laurie
Anderson, Bobby Baker, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Spalding Gray, Karen Finley,
and many others, have performed autobiographical monologues, exploring issues of
memory, the social construction of the subject through everyday life activities, and –
especially for feminist artists – women’s limited access to the public sphere and the
right to speak in it. Partly through the influence of 1970s improvisational dance
techniques that used everyday movement, performance art also presents and self-
consciously frames everyday actions. Thus, it recuperates activities often seen as
banal, valuing them instead as worthy of artistic exploration and crucially perform-
ative, in the sense that their very repetitiveness contributes to identity formation (see
Judith Butler). Such everyday activities include cleaning, as in Marina Abramović’s

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Balkan Baroque (1997); food preparation, as in Bobby Baker’s Kitchen Show (1991);
and masturbation, as in Vito Acconci’s infamous Seedbed (1971), where he reportedly
masturbated under a ramp built into the gallery floor while visitors walked above
him, unable to see him (Marina Abramović re-performed this work in Seven Easy
Pieces in 2005). Like its close relation body art, much performance art also deliber-
ately explores the materiality of the performer’s body as an artistic medium – its
physical limitations, fluids and social significations (see, for example, the work of
Ron Athey).
Performance art’s interest in the liveness and ephemerality of the performance
event indicates its broader interest in time. This is reflected in its more common
British name, ‘live art’, and also in the names ‘durational art’ and ‘time-based art’.
As part of a widespread postmodern refusal of dominant representational conven-
tions including ‘grand narratives’, performance art often rejects conventional linear
narrative, using rules of duration instead to produce new patterns of sequencing and
structure. Joseph Beuys spent a week with a coyote in a New York gallery in Coyote:
I Like America and America Likes Me (1974). Linda Montana and Tehching Hsieh
tied themselves together with a 2.5m rope in New York for a year in Art/Life One
Year Performance 1983–84. Such work draws attention to time partly to show the
making – or processes – of art, even when the activity of making is precisely not very
physically active or creative, according to conventional criteria. In Ulay and
Abramović’s Night Sea Crossing (1981), the artists sat and stared at each other over
a table daily for up to twelve hours at a time, making an emotional crossing if not a
physical one. Such durational work also draws attention to the effects of endurance,
such as exhaustion and euphoria; the ironic ephemerality of the event – even if the
event is a year long, ultimately, it will endure only in images and memories, which
Peggy Phelan has discussed; and the resulting resistance to commodification of this
artwork in an era that is witnessing the ongoing rise of consumer culture. Running
parallel to performance art’s concern with time is an interest in space, which it shares
with installation art. Artists including Baker and Anderson have performed their
site-specific work in such everyday spaces as homes and streets, again framing and
drawing attention to conventional ideas of how to behave in these contexts.
Performance art is often ridiculed by popular culture as self-indulgent, esoteric, or
even downright ridiculous, potentially compromising its counter-cultural ambitions
but also indicating important questions about its possible elitism, solipsism and
emphasis on individual over community. Despite this criticism, artists continue to use
performance art’s hybrid possibilities and its fundamental concern with identity to
explore ‘othered’ identities such as queer identity. They also continue to hybridize its
forms, increasingly by introducing techniques from multimedia and visual theatre.
An innovation of the twentieth century, performance art continues in the twenty-first
century not least because it is effective in responding to political issues – especially
those that deal with identity and commodity culture. Beyond simply continuing, it
may even be thriving, thanks in part to the popular cultural profile of Abramović and
efforts made by her and others to secure live art’s institutional present and future, for

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example, in the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI) and through London’s Live Art
Development Agency.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

See also the entry on performance. Stiles et al, Goldberg’s two books and Phelan’s
book provide histories of the form as well as excellent photographic illustrations.
Banes and Carr collate their New York newspaper criticism on performance art.
Shank describes many American examples. Carlson places performance art in a more
developed critical and historical framework. Johnson’s edited collection gathers
together a range of interesting articles. RPA

Banes, Sally (1998) Subversive Expectations: Performance Art and Paratheater in New York
1976–85, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Carlson, Marvin (2004) Performance: A Critical Introduction, 2nd edition, London: Routledge.
Carr, C. (1993) On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century, Hanover, NH:
Wesleyan University Press.
Goldberg, RoseLee (1998) Performance: Live Art since the 60s, London: Thames and Hudson.
—— (2001) Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, revised and expanded edition,
London: Thames and Hudson.
Johnson, Dominic (ed.) (2013) Critical Live Art: Contemporary Histories of Performance in
the UK, foreword by Carolee Schneemann, London and New York: Routledge.
Live Art Development Agency. Online. Available www.thisisliveart.co.uk/ (accessed 14
October 2013).
Phelan, Peggy (2012) Live Art in LA: Performance in Southern California, 1970-1983, New
York: Routledge.
Shank, Theodore (2002) Beyond the Boundaries: American Alternative Theatre, revised and
updated edition, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Stiles, Kristine, Guy Brett, Hubert Klocker, Shinichire Osaki and Paul Schimmel (1998) Out
of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949–1979, London: Thames and
Hudson.

PERFORMATIVE/PERFORMATIVITY
‘Performative’ (as both noun and adjective) and ‘performativity’ have become key
terms in performance studies, even though they are often used rather generally (like
the term ‘theatricality’) to include anything that has a theatrical or performance-like
quality. As an adjective, ‘performative’ was coined by John Austin, Professor of
Philosophy at the University of Oxford, in his William James Lectures delivered at
Harvard University in 1955. Austin argued that words are not just for naming or
describing things but can also do things, effecting change. Utterances, or ‘speech
acts’ as he called them, can be performative and causal, pronounced in order to make
something happen, as in the two simple but powerful words ‘I do’ at a wedding. This
focus on action is what links the idea to performance, a connection that was promul-
gated by performance studies departments like that at Northwestern University in

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Chicago, Illinois, which emerged partly from the field of communication studies. In
the theatre, words are carefully and intentionally selected either by an author or by
the devising performer, to develop a character or plot, to evoke a feeling or to
indicate something to an audience. Their causal effect is thus more manifest than
words spoken in a daily context. Focus on the performative within performance has
developed Austin’s initial theoretical treatise to consider in detail how, as well as
why, words are actively stated or brought alive through their utterance.
Discussions responding to Austin and attempting to define performativity multi-
plied with the rise of poststructuralist and postmodern thinking in the 1970s, spurred
on by questions about how reality and actions are constructed. In the 1980s, Judith
Butler developed Austin’s theories to suggest that identities are performed, that they
are not necessarily biologically predetermined but are constructed through a ‘stylized
repetition of acts’. If this is so and identity is not something that is fixed, hegemonic
understandings of identity (gender, sex, sexuality, etc.) can then be undermined
through variations and disturbances in these. Butler argued that, if performance is
constructed through its iteration (in rehearsals and through repeated showings) then
the same can be applied to behaviour. The performative as both a practice and an idea
therefore has a radical potential, as Orlan and Ron Athey’s performances have
forcibly demonstrated.
The term ‘performative’ has been co-opted by a range of disciplines, from
philosophy (where it began), through sociology, to theatre and performance studies.
Its nuances vary greatly according to the context in which it is used. Debates about
performativity rage on, as they do with its sister ‘theatricality’, a term equally open to
interpretation and misunderstanding, as Davis and Postlewait have suggested in their
tracing of that term’s lineage and complexities.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Austin’s book reads in an informal oral style, as it comprises posthumously annotated

lectures. Butler’s range of texts develops her views on the performative nature of gender,
whereas the Parker and Sedgwick collection (which includes another text by Butler)
focuses on catharsis in the theatre but also performativity in non-theatrical contexts.

Austin, John L. (1962) How to Do Things with Words, London: Oxford University Press.
Butler, Judith (1990) ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology
and Feminist Theory’, in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre,
Sue-Ellen Case (ed.), Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
—— ([1990] 1999) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London:
Routledge.
—— (1997) Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, London: Routledge.
Davis, Tracy C. and Thomas Postlewait (eds) (2003) Theatricality, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Parker, Andrew and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (eds) (1995) Performativity and Performance,
London: Routledge.

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PHENOMENOLOGY
As enquiries into what consciousness is and how it is constructed have become
dominant in the sciences, phenomenology, with its emphasis on the experience of the
spectator and the performer, has attracted growing interest as a philosophical
framework for analysing performance. It challenges semiotics and other meaning-
based systems of performance analysis, whose attempts to rationalize and explain
communication in the theatre purely as a system of codes have proved limiting.
Phenomenology emphasizes the role of the senses in reception, prioritizing sensa-
tions, feelings and other emotional phenomena and consequently valuing descriptive
modes. It implies a form of enquiry that penetrates the specific and local context, what
Clifford Geertz has called ‘thick description’ in relation to anthropological observa-
tions. Such evaluation centres on the perspective of the person perceiving and their
physical presence within the work being observed. The very active responsiveness
that this implies is diametrically opposed to the idea of cool, objective analysis.
Phenomenology also resists the segmentation that is intrinsic to semiotic analysis.
Consideration of units of meaning is replaced by an emphasis on the total embodied
experience and flow. As activities in dance and physical theatre have expanded, so
has phenomenology gained ground, often operating in conjunction with theories that
place performance work in a wider sociological or cultural context, balancing the
personal response with a more social or public framework. Phenomenology has also
been useful for studies of the work of the performer and process-based accounts where
personal and individual development take priority over the encounter or interaction
with an audience, which are usually founded on reception theories.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, one of the main exponents of phenomenology as a philo-
sophical theory, has had a central influence on performance analysis because of his
interest in the body. Merleau-Ponty developed the earlier ideas of Martin Heidegger
and phenomenology’s founder, Edmund Husserl, and notably challenged Jean-Paul
Sartre’s existentially-based theories. Merleau-Ponty considered these theories to be
predicated on a problematic Cartesian dualism that separated mind and body. Much
of the pioneering work in applying phenomenological approaches to performance
that drew on Merleau-Ponty’s groundbreaking writings has originated in dance
studies. Proxemics, kinaesthetics and sound, aspects of performance to which
Antonin Artaud paid special attention and which resist the closure or fixity that a
more semiotic approach might produce, are primary focuses for phenomenological
analysis. In the theatre, Bert States’ writing and Stanton B. Garner’s work on Beckett
have been influential, for Beckett’s plays, like dance, rely as much on movement,
rhythm and space as they do on text. Judith Butler has extended such considerations
of performance into her work on gender, where she has argued that identities and
even gender are constructed and performed rather than being predetermined or given.
Although critics have decried phenomenology for being essentialist and individu-
alized, or too detached from political, cultural or social mechanisms, there is no
doubting its important place within a range of potential theoretical systems for the
analysis of performance and performance processes.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Merleau-Ponty’s book and other philosophical texts are significant primary sources
but are inevitably dense. Much insight into this difficult area can be gained by reading
their theories through examples of performance in the more directly relevant books
of Garner, States and Sheets-Johnstone, for example. RPA

Garner, Stanton B. (1994) Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary

Drama, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Geertz, Clifford (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice ([1945] 1962) Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith,
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine (1966) The Phenomenology of Dance, Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press.
States, Bert O. (1985) Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater,
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

PHYSICAL THEATRE
Physical theatre is a much used but problematic term with an uncertain history. Even
whilst it seems to include so many types of practice across countries and periods, it
is nevertheless culturally specific and located, most probably originating in the
United Kingdom in the 1970s. Broadly, it denotes performances that do not begin
with a pre-written playtext but which instead evolve from adapting a story or other
non-dramatic text, from improvisation and devising, from movement and dance, or
from a starting point which is visual, thematic or crosses disciplinary boundaries,
such as Pina Bausch’s dance-theatre. What is evident in all these modes is that
material and physical aspects, such as the body, the scenography or elements like
objects and puppetry are foregrounded rather than a structured prewritten text.
Physical theatre therefore often requires careful dramaturgical structuring and
usually demonstrates, following growing interest in physical approaches to actor
training, technical mastery by the performer. Although the term is still mainly used
in the UK, it now covers a wide range of forms such as circus and mime and has
inevitably gained international currency. Interest in intercultural practices and
theories has further promulgated its development and it has been especially influ-
enced by Asian performance forms like butoh, many of which are dance-based and
foreground a virtuosic body.
Historically, physical theatre started to be used as a means to define specific
theatre and performance practices in Britain in the late 1970s and more firmly estab-
lished itself in the 1980s, linked to companies like Complicite and DV8, whose 1988
dance piece Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men came to epitomize the genre. As the
form became popular, so it multiplied and spread to other English-language coun-
tries like the USA and Australia, and to some parts of Europe with Eurocrash dance,
for example, and the spectacular often outdoor or environmental work of companies
such as the Catalan group La Fura dels Baus. Several scholars have since applied the

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term retrospectively to encompass the work of Antonin Artaud, Vsevelod

Meyerhold, and Jerzy Grotowski, for example, even though they of course never
considered themselves physical theatre practitioners and would barely recognize the
concept, seeing themselves rather as makers and directors of theatre, pure and simple.
A categorization like physical theatre needs to be used and treated with caution and
circumspection, especially when applied across time and cultures.
The term is partly problematic because it is tautological, given that all theatre is,
of course, physical. Whilst this is a truism, it does raise interesting questions –
perhaps especially in countries outside Britain where theatre is frequently predicated
as much on physical or visual concepts and starting points as textual ones, or where
approaches to playtexts tend to be dominated by auteur directors like Robert Wilson
or the late Tadeusz Kantor, to name just two examples. Debates in the UK circle
around whether the term is useful, whether it should be more precisely located in a
particular historical moment rather than still being current, and how much
geographical reach it has. Two of the main books on this subject by Keefe and
Murray try to address such issues by using the phrase ‘physical theatres’, plural,
rather than the singular term, and by focusing on the physical in theatre. Such termi-
nological slippage leaves the genre of physical theatre a wide open field. Consensus
about what physical theatre is seems a distant prospect. Such vagary might not matter
so much for artists, where positioning as a physical theatre troupe might have efficacy
for attracting funding or audiences and where ‘physical theatre techniques’ are
widely referenced; but it is an issue for academics who work or conduct research in
this area and who are seeking greater terminological clarity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Callery’s and Keefe and Murray’s books broadly cover the term and its field of
practice, with Keefe and Murray’s simultaneously published texts offering both a
reader as well as a more analytical survey, the critical introduction. Callery’s long-
established book also includes practical exercises and games. There are of course
many more books about and by single practitioners and companies working in this
area and their approach to physical actor training, such as the Frantic Assembly one
included here.

Callery, Dymphna (2001) Through the Body: a Practical Guide to Physical Theatre, London:
Nick Hern.
Graham, Scott and Steven Hoggett (2009) The Frantic Assembly Book of Devising Theatre,
London: Routledge.
Keefe, John and Simon Murray (2007) Physical Theatres: A Critical Reader, London:
Routledge.
—— (2007) Physical Theatres: A Critical Introduction, London: Routledge.

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PLAY
Play is a huge area for investigation and an activity that touches on folklore, anthro-
pology, philosophy, psychology and ethnology, as well as being central to theatre
and performance in general. It is also something that is practised by cultures and
societies globally, even if each of them describes it differently. Play is ubiquitous –
we all play – yet it is hard to pin down what we are doing when we do it, let alone to
discover why we do it.
Analyses of play have ranged from British psychoanalyst Donald Woods
Winnicott’s case studies of child behaviour to the broader influential work of French
sociologist Roger Caillois and Dutch historian Johan Huizinga. These last two have
been central in assessing what play is from the perspective of their own disciplines.
Attempts by Caillois and others to systematize and categorize types of play have
been interesting, but ultimately they merely reinforce how both fluidity and an
absence of boundaries are endemic to play and games. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
referred to such a capacity – the state of being inside an experience and of losing
oneself in it – as ‘flow’, with the recognition that this mode is somehow outside the
daily weft of life or, as Victor Turner put it, ‘subjunctive’. As such, through
proposing the question ‘What if?’, play has the power to subvert or undermine
authority through parody, critique or mere laughter, as indicated in studies of
clowning and carnival, and as evidenced by the appearance of the trickster figure in
many cultures, as in Augusto Boal’s joker, to name one specific theatre-related
example. It is naive, though, to believe that games are not serious, as Clifford Geertz
has shown in his analysis of ‘deep play’, which emphasizes the potential risks and
serious consequences of playing. Play easily crosses over from being a discrete and
safe activity to one that is consequential – the phrase ‘We were only pretending’ has
been uttered countless times by children to cover up a more serious transgression
when play has got out of hand. Play transports its participants, altering biological
patterns and mental states, speeding up the heartbeat, making participants alert and
sending adrenalin coursing through the veins.
Within performance studies, Richard Schechner has been central in analysing the
role of play in performance or play as performance, addressing the vexed question of
what the function of play might be. His enquiry is inevitably limited and he openly
admits that any analysis of play postulates more questions than it can answer. His
work draws on myriad theories and a vast range of exemplars, from sports to chil-
dren’s games, through the theatre’s formal structures, to animal behaviour, all of
which fall within play’s auspices. Animal play is striking for its similarity to human
games, which suggests a biologically-driven need for play. This can be set against
the idea that play has evolved as a cultural form, part of civilizing progress linked to
aesthetic expression. Certainly, both aspects pertain to play, though to what extent
depends on the form the playing adopts. Rugby, for example, is animalistically terri-
torial and violent, yet (as the haka and rugby’s rules and tactical skills all demon-
strate) it is also sophisticated, formal and aesthetically pleasing to watch. Such
complex possibilities arise because playing is a fundamental human activity and as

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such varies from individual to individual and across cultures in its form, function and
articulation. It spans an individual’s trivial inconsequential prank or joke to part of a
community’s calendrical ritual, the practice of which is deemed vital in order for
plants to grow. It is thus culturally specific and yet also enacted by animals, and so
eludes easy definitions.
The other difficulty with defining what play is, as some theorists like Erving
Goffman have argued, is that we continually play by adopting roles in our everyday
lives according to differing social situations and their needs or assumed hierarchies.
We improvise continually in our interactions. Postmodern thinking has extended
this idea that there is no such thing as a stable or fixed identity, for if even gender is
a construct, as Judith Butler has suggested, then playing with representations of
who we are is central to our being.
The kind of play practised in performance forms like the theatre, to which Peter
Brook alluded when he wrote in The Empty Space (1968) that ‘a play is play’, has
much clearer parameters. In such play or plays a specific space for the event is
chosen and there is mutual agreement between all participants about the rules of the
game. If naturalist in style, this depends on imitation and an accepted lie, recog-
nizing that the character should somehow mask the actor, though both co-exist
simultaneously and cross-refer. In devised work, the role of play is more experi-
mental and encourages risk-taking, not just for the performers. The devising process
might extend into a show, so that the spectator is unaware of what is scripted and
what is improvised, reinforcing the sense of liveness in performance. Playing reveals
and hides, it separates and integrates. It is the sheer complexity and range of such
multiple understandings and practices of play that makes the term fascinating yet all
but meaningless unless precisely contextualized.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Schechner has written extensively on play and performance. Other key texts more
generally on play are listed below, a tiny selection of the vast amount of material
available.

Caillois, Roger (1979) Man, Play and Games, New York: Shocken Books.
Geertz, Clifford (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books.
Huizinga, Johan (1970) Homo Ludens, New York: Harper.
Schechner, Richard ([1977] 1988) Performance Theory, London: Routledge.
—— ([2002] 2013) ‘Play’, in Performance Studies: An Introduction, (3rd edn edited by Sara
Brady), Oxon: Routledge, pp. 89–122.
Winnicott, Donald Woods (1982) Playing and Reality, London: Routledge.

POPULAR THEATRE
Popular theatre is a broad category for defining performance whose forms range
across melodrama, street theatre, circus, vaudeville, clowning, mime and musicals.

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Historically and culturally, it encompasses ancient Greek theatre in the West and
Kabuki and Kathakali in Asian performance, as well as many types of contem-
porary and twentieth-century performance practices. It immediately becomes evident
that the term means little if separated from the ideologies that inform it, the forms in
which it is manifest and the context in which it happens. What is popular in Britain
might not be so in Augusto Boal’s Brazil. Beyond cultural specificity, though, there
have recently been a number of productions that have mass popular appeal worldwide,
like the commercial circus work of Cirque du Soleil, the Abba tribute musical
Mamma Mia (1999), which has been presented in at least eighty countries, or the
megamusical Cats (1981), which played in London for twenty-one years. These
examples point to the need to make a distinction (even if this formula is not rigid and
the gap is sometimes bridged) between popular commercial theatre and, at the
opposite end of the spectrum, popular theatre that has an overt political agenda.
Outside commercial contexts, popular theatre refers more frequently to a politi-
cally- and socially-engaged approach to making theatre, as Bertold Brecht, Boal or
Vsevolod Meyerhold practised, that aimed to bring working-class audiences into
theatres or take the theatre out to them. At its most extreme, this impulse materializes
as demonstrations, like the street performances of America’s Bread and Puppet
Theatre. Popular theatres often share similar priorities. They want to be accessible
and cheap to make and participate in. They are often large-scale and rough-and-ready
in their format, use vernacular materials or sources, and provide entertainment as
much as education or instruction. Popular theatre also draws readily on structures like
carnival, sports, happenings and the circus, and familiar forms like puppetry or
masks to broaden its appeal and encourage access. Throughout twentieth and twenty-
first century theatre history, numerous artists and directors have consciously
modelled their work on older popular theatre models in order to increase and broaden
the currency and impact of their own practices. Peter Brook favours the immediate
and rough Elizabethan theatre, whereas Jacques Copeau toured French villages with
models based on Greek theatre and commedia dell’arte.
Inevitably, popular theatre often occurs in non-theatre spaces and is site-specific.
Italian performer/playwright Dario Fo has shown his Mistero Buffo (1969) in football
stadia and factories, and the San Francisco Mime Troupe toured to targeted
community venues, just as John McGrath took his company 7:84 to the remote
Scottish Highlands in the 1970s. Those who have continued to work predominantly
within theatre architecture, like Meyerhold and Brecht, have attempted to change its
atmosphere, its scenography and even its construction, with cigar smoke, construc-
tivist sets or theatres in the round.
Even if in practice it already existed for thousands of years, the idea of formal-
izing popular theatre as an institution or recognized term began most evidently in
mid-eighteenth-century France with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s call for a ‘théâtre
populaire’. In the following centuries and in a range of countries, such aspirations
materialized in diverse forms, from transitory festivals to the establishment of culture
centres to receive work as well as promote artistic involvement. Such multi-purpose
buildings multiplied throughout Communist Eastern Europe and Russia. Britain’s

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creation of a single national theatre in London in 1976 diminishes next to the estab-
lishment of five regional national theatres in France, which began with the founding
of the Comédie-Française in 1680. Arguments continue to rage about how these
institutions are or are not elitist, and numerous strategies have been tested to bring in
a wider audience base. But the popularizing of theatre is complex and needs to
encompass many sociological as well as aesthetic considerations: about the space in
which the events happen, the form it takes, its content, the economics of the artistic
exchange, cultural diversity (of which intercultural practice and theory have made
us acutely aware) and the message or import of the work and its life after the perfor-
mance. To sustain a popular theatre it is vital to build audiences while challenging
them – no mean feat! Audiences are unpredictable and often fickle. Most artists might
want their work to be popular, but how is such esteem achieved without compro-
mising artistic values? And how does one innovate with traditions, while maintaining
their essential qualities? In such conundra lie the complexities that make the very
idea of popular theatre an ideology that is hard to attain in practice.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

There are as many books as there are types of theatre within this broad category. The
two edited collections below exhibit this range and introduce key practices and
issues, most usefully in the up-to-date Schechter collection. McGrath’s is a classic
and influential practitioner’s manifesto.

McGrath, John (1981) A Good Night Out: Popular Theatre: Audience, Class and Form,
London: Eyre Methuen.
Mayer, David and Kenneth Richards (eds) (1977) Western Popular Theatre, London: Methuen.
Schechter, Joel (2003) Popular Theatre: A Sourcebook, London and New York: Routledge.

POSTDRAMATIC THEATRE
‘Postdramatic theatre’ is a name popularized by German theatre scholar Hans-Thies
Lehmann in his 1999 book of the same name (published in English translation in
2006). It identifies avant-garde theatre principally of the late twentieth to early
twenty-first centuries which de-prioritizes narrative text (or drama) based in psycho-
logically coherent characterization and plot-driven action, and instead foregrounds
theatrical aspects of theatre as well as structuring which is non-linear. It is often
more about the sensory than rational sense; it tends to be self-reflexive, metatheatrical
and concerned with time, space and image for what they are as experiences rather
than how they convey narrative; and it interrogates conventional realist practices of
representation. Compared to more conventional forms of theatre, it attributes greater
value to the meanings of affect and feeling, movement, the visual, sound, multi-
media elements, the significations of performing bodies, the real-time theatrical
event (as distinct from a fictional story) and other sensory theatrical elements. The
acute demands it places on audiences to construct meaning acknowledges them as

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the principle makers of theatre’s meanings and challenges dominant theatrical hier-
archies which invest authority in the text, its author and the director. If it seeks to be
political, it does so through the ways it problematizes perception, rather than through
attempting to tell a political story.
Lehmann’s book on postdramatic theatre focuses extensively on continental
European artists and companies such as Tadeusz Kantor, Jan Fabre and Socíetas
Raffaello Sanzio. It includes much devised theatre work whose processes often
produce non-linear narration (for example, in the work of the Wooster Group). And
it includes much highly visual theatre, for example by Marina Abramović, Robert
Wilson and Pina Bausch and the Wuppertal Dance Theatre.
Postdramatic theatre overlaps significantly with postmodern forms. What makes
the theory of postdramatic theatre distinctive and most constructive within theatre
and performance studies is that it is specifically a theory of theatre practice, generated
from within theatre. It is therefore distinct from theories of postmodernism which
originated in discussions of architecture and literature and were then applied to
theatre and pays more attention to the specificities of theatre than much postmodern
theory. Postdramatic theatre has been widely accepted as a useful theory, not least
because it seems accurately to identify predominant trends. However, critics argue
that it does not account for the ongoing popularity of linear, narrative-based, coherent,
realist theatre, nor for the contemporary theatre’s persistent interest in, and experi-
ments with, storytelling.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lehmann, Hans-Thies ([1999] 2006) Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby, Oxon:
Routledge.

POSTMODERNISM
Postmodernism is a range of cultural practices and sensibilities that have developed
since the 1980s especially and that reject some of the apparent certainties, or ‘grand
narratives’, of modern paradigms of thought. Challenging ideas of coherent identity
and universal value and truth as not only impossible but also duplicitous, it proposes
that these ‘grand narratives’ only pretend to represent everyone’s interests and
actually represent dominant class interests. Having discarded universalism, postmod-
ernism explores how meaning is always multiple and contingent on contexts, audi-
ences and makers. Roland Barthes influentially proclaimed ‘The Death of the Author’
(1977) and advocated a more democratic understanding of the production of meaning
by emphasizing meaning’s contingency even in a written text and attributing its
production to the reader/audience. Jean Baudrillard argued that the media saturation
of contemporary consumer culture made it impossible to distinguish between the
real, or truth, and the representation: everything is simulation. Because it is concerned
with meaning’s representation – however compromised – postmodern art practice is
often conspicuously self-conscious or meta-representational. Thus it is interested not

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only in what meanings it is making, but also in how it is making them, often empha-
sizing process over product.
In performance, postmodernism’s rejection of apparent certainties takes numerous
forms. It is visible in movements away from text-based theatre towards the poten-
tially more democratic devising techniques practised by Split Britches and Robert
Lepage and the playful and destabilizing approaches to identity that are character-
istic of much performance art. It is present in the hybridization of performance
disciplines epitomized by Pina Bausch’s dance theatre, Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s
and Annie Sprinkle’s activist performance/protest interventions, and in the diversi-
fication of the disciplines of theatre and performance studies. Postmodernism’s media
saturation is explored in the multimedia work of Orlan, Stelarc and Laurie
Anderson. And the visual theatre of Robert Wilson or Tadeusz Kantor pursues
postmodernism’s interrogation of the image as truth or simulation. For many critics,
postmodern performance is epitomized in the work of the Wooster Group. This
queries the truth of naturalist theatre through different approaches to: acting/
performing, which aims less to represent character than to acknowledge that it
presents the performer; text, which appropriates and mixes high and low cultural
source material; and style, for example in the Group’s use of violently non-linear
composition and multimedia. For many critics, performance’s liveness makes it the
ideal medium through which to test postmodernism – but for two different reasons.
For some, this liveness seems to insist on performance’s authenticity, authority and
truth, presenting a useful challenge to postmodernism. For others, performance’s
liveness insists on the material presence of the body and resists the abstraction of
universalist thinking.
While postmodern performance is often easy to recognize, its effects are widely
debated. For its supporters, it is democratizing because it challenges elitist, univer-
salist assumptions, and it is often thrillingly pleasurable in its playful abandon of the
familiar, its renegade engagement with diverse source materials, its exuberance and
its humour. For its detractors, these same qualities can make it descriptive of too
broad a range of practices to be critically useful. Worse, they can make it deliberately
obscure, elitist and – while spectacular – emotionally and politically empty. Its
critics also point out that postmodernism’s aim to challenge racist or sexist cultural
assumptions by presenting controversial material is fundamentally compromised by
its simultaneous interrogation of the possibility of representing anything truthfully.
For example, the Wooster Group’s refusal to provide explicit rationale for including
taboo material risks allowing that material to be read as condoned by the perfor-
mance rather than as the object of the performance’s critique or at least its enquiry.
Similarly, postmodernism’s radical contingency can seem to place it outside of
history, beyond the possibility of commenting on the past, the present or the future.
In other words, postmodern performance risks a dangerous ethical relativism.
In response to such criticisms, Philip Auslander has argued that postmodern
performance does not aspire to be a political theatre; rather, he argues, it is a ‘resistant’
theatre with politics, aware of its political and ideological effects but not necessarily
making an explicit argument because it does not assume this is possible. Baz Kershaw

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regrets the way Auslander’s model casts postmodern performance as politically

passive rather than active. He proposes that we look to a greater range of performance
practices (from prison theatre to protest) to see how they make interventions in much
broader contexts that are less compromised by the theatre’s commodification, and to
appreciate how their political radicalism is enhanced by their contexts and reception.
As the scale of debate around postmodern performance’s effects makes clear, it chal-
lenges representational practices but has by no means resolved them. It is a term
which is used with less frequency in the twenty-first century, when much of what it
meant to capture is now encompassed by postdramatic theatre.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Seminal postmodern theory texts include those by Barthes, Baudrillard and Jameson.
Auslander, Kaye and Kershaw explore at length the relationships between post-
modernism and performance. Bertens and Natoli’s collection includes articles on
Chinese-American performance-maker Ping Chong, Robert Lepage and the Wooster
Group. Birringer makes reference to (among others) Laurie Anderson, Pina Bausch
and Robert Wilson. Lehmann’s text has largely displaced discussions of postmodern
theatre.

Auslander, Philip (1997) From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism and

Postmodernism, London: Routledge.
Barthes, Roland (1977) ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image Music Text, ed. and trans. Stephen
Heath, London: Fontana.
Baudrillard, Jean (1994) Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser, Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press.
Bertens, Hans and Joseph Natoli (eds) (2002) Postmodernism: The Key Figures, Oxford:
Blackwell.
Birringer, Johannes (1991) Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism, Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press.
Jameson, Fredric (1991) Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London:
Verso.
Kaye, Nick (1994) Postmodernism and Performance, London: Macmillan.
Kershaw, Baz (1999) The Radical in Performance: Between Brecht and Baudrillard, London:
Routledge.
Lehmann, Hans-Thies ([1999] 2006) Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby, Oxon:
Routledge.

PRACTICE AS RESEARCH
Practice as research (‘PaR’ for short) has come to be recognized as a mode of research
within academic institutions that departs from traditional written methods of investi-
gating, articulating and disseminating original ideas. It occurs predominantly within
visual and performing arts and can encompass artefacts, products, events or other
outputs that are the result of, but to some extent also demonstrate, a research process

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and findings. In our field, a performance or event might be presented that shows new
ways of working, techniques or concepts of theatre and performance. Of course, all
performance and theatre-making involves some research, be it into a period, theme,
characters or ways of working, often done as part of dramaturgical research. PaR is
therefore not so much about content or revised ways of looking at a particular subject
matter (such as a performance piece which casts fresh light on a historical figure) but
about original techniques, tools, methods or practices. Many scholars and funding
bodies have therefore understandably been careful to make the distinction between
creative practice as a primarily artistic process, and creative practice which has
research at its core and which usually therefore takes place within educational estab-
lishments. PaR is also different from applied research, though not exclusively. The
latter generally denotes original ideas that are then put into practice in a particular
field, but where the research is largely done prior to engaging with the target
community. One of the burning issues PaR raises is how the research might be eval-
uated or even accessed for auditing or assessment purposes, if the event is ephemeral
or ‘live’ and thus not easily retrievable; one might then have to use proxies, and
inevitably writing, to access these. Such debates have fed into discussions around the
much picked over notions of liveness and presence. This concern is as pertinent at
doctoral level where practice is nearly always accompanied by written reflection and
documentation as it is in government audits, such as the 2014 Research Excellence
Framework (REF) in the UK, where all submitted PaR has to be accompanied by a
300-word statement outlining the research imperatives and context, further supported
by other forms of evidence.
Since PaR became accepted towards the end of the twentieth century the term has
become richer but more complex, in that it has spawned related concepts such as
practice-led research, practice-based research or performance as research. All these
add nuance, but in so doing the emphasis can shift away from practice as the final
outcome – for example, an author might explore practice-led research to write a book
about actor training, without presenting aspects of that practice as the result of their
research. Defenders and supporters of PaR fear such redefinitions might signify a
conservative retrenchment to more traditional research methods, though this seems
unlikely in the UK at least. As the term has moved beyond the UK where it began,
and has now come to be recognized and utilized in parts of Europe, North America
and Australia, culturally-specific notions and differentiated levels of institutional
integration and acceptance have been foregrounded. In the USA, where there is still
widespread scepticism about the legitimacy of this method of research, performance
as research is the more familiar, perhaps safer and narrower, term. Interpretations
inevitably depend on the institutional and national contexts in which the research
operates. Debates rage about what PaR constitutes, with its validity often probed
according to more established ‘harder’ scientific models; with such inappropriate
comparators and criteria it can inevitably fall short.
Practice as research evolved in the UK in part because of the increasing emphasis
on practice in the study of theatre and performance at tertiary level, but also because
of the increasingly thin line between academic teaching and research and

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professional bodies like theatre and performance groups and artists. Countless people
now migrate across both platforms, investigating ideas and practices in the academy
as well as in the profession in work that extends well beyond traditional scholarly
writing. In addition, advances in digitalization have allowed the documentation of
practice in myriad ways, just one of which is film. As such, PaR looks set to feature
as a vital element in academic research within the creative and performing arts for
many years to come, widening the scope of the object of study but also how we
approach and document it.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

These books predominantly include case studies from across the creative disciplines
as a way of unpicking issues around practice as research, its context and its docu-
mentation. Nelson’s combines international case studies as well as a survey. PARIP
was a pioneering funded project exploring Practice as Research in Performance in
the UK. RPA

Allegue, Ludivine, Simon Jones, Baz Kershaw and Angela Piccini (eds) (2009) Practice-as-
Research in Performance and Screen, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Barrett, Estelle and Barbara Bol (eds) (2007) Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative
Arts Enquiry, London: I.B. Tauris.
Freeman, John (ed.) (2010) Blood, Sweat and Theory: Research through Practice in
Performance, UK: Libri Publishing.
Nelson, Robin (2013) Practice as Research in the Arts, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
PARIP. Online. Available www.bris.ac.uk/parip/ (accessed 3 May 2013).
Smith, Hazel and Roger Dean (eds) (2009) Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in
the Creative Arts, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

PRESENCE
In the context of performance, ‘presence’ is used to describe a perceived quality of
performance – that is usually live but is sometimes recorded – where the performer
appears to be notably focused or ‘in the moment’. What these tautologies mean is
that performers convey charisma, strong engagement with themselves, their roles
and/or their work, a particular quality of concentration, and a special ‘aura’, to use
Walter Benjamin’s term from a different but related context. The performer’s
presence strongly engages the audience’s attention and cultivates the audience’s
own sense of presence – a feeling of the importance of being in that moment at that
event. Some performance traditions such as Method acting seek to maximize this
sense of presence because they perceive it as consonant with focused performers and
an audience that is engaged, responsive and even enthralled. Other performance
traditions, including postmodern ones, often seek to challenge performance’s
apparent reliance on presence. This is because they see it as potentially manipulative
– as in the seductive, charismatic performance of state leaders such as Hitler – and

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exclusive, since it is only available to those audience members privileged enough to

witness the performer’s ecstatic moment here and now, and it is often perceived as
introspective and self-indulgent. By drawing attention to a sense of selfhood, presence
can facilitate critical engagement with ideas of subjectivity, be that the psychologi-
cally coherent subjectivity cultivated by the presence of naturalism’s characters or
the fractured subjectivity often explored through the qualified presence of postmod-
ernism’s performers. Because of its reliance on a sense of immediacy, it shares with
the concept of liveness not only many features, but also many points of contention
and debate. Benjamin’s reflection on what happens to the aura of the unique painting
now that mechanical reproduction has challenged the uniqueness of any artwork is
useful to consider in relation to the fate of presence in an age of multimedia
performance.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Auslander’s discussion of presence identifies some of its potentials and problems.

Giannachi, Kaye and Shank’s edited collection gathers a great range of articles. For
a fuller discussion of related issues, see the entry on liveness.

Auslander, Philip (1997) From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism and

Postmodernism, London: Routledge.
Benjamin, Walter (1973) ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in
Illuminations, London: Fontana Press.
Giannachi, Gabriella, Nick Kaye and Michael Shanks (eds) (2012) Archaeologies of Presence:
Art, Performance and the Persistence of Being, Oxon: Routledge.

PROTESTS, DEMONSTRATIONS AND PARADES

These are forms of mass group performance that generally take place in public
spaces in order to influence public opinion by occupying and exploiting the power of
those sites. While not strictly theatre, these forms often deploy its features – such as
music, props, orchestrated movement and organized time – to harness its symbolic
effects. While protests and demonstrations are broadly associated with counter-
cultural activism, parades are often State-organized and State-supporting: consider,
for example, Olympic ceremonies, Victory parades, Hitler’s infamous Nazi
Nuremberg rallies, and inaugural processions for State rulers. Parades can also
support other forms of social authority – Christmas parades common in many
Western cities, for example, can be seen to support capitalist consumerism.
Most commonly, though, protests and demonstrations occupy public space in
ways intended to challenge authority, claim freedom of movement and expression,
consolidate a sense of counter-cultural group identity, and reclaim a sense of demo-
cratic agency for the people rather than the State. As twentieth-century political
theatre-makers grew dissatisfied performing for self-selecting audiences inside
theatre buildings, they moved their work outside and adopted practices from protests

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and demonstrations. This is illustrated in happenings, the work of the Bread and
Puppet Theatre, performance art and installation art. In complementary ways,
political activism co-opted more and more performance techniques to enhance its
symbolic and actual power. Thus, early feminist suffragettes used marches and other
forms of visible public protest to insist on and occupy their literal and metaphorical
space within a democratic society, and they often protested on sites associated with
the State in order directly to challenge its authority. Many other civil rights protesters
have done the same, including: African-Americans in the 1950s; anti-war protesters
in the 1960s, 1970s and early twenty-first century; las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo
in Argentina from the late 1970s on; anti-nuclear protesters in the 1980s; gay, lesbian
and queer rights activists in Pride marches from the 1980s on; Greenpeace and other
ecological protesters from the 1980s on; Chinese protesters in Tiananmen Square
and East Berliners on the Berlin Wall in 1989; anti-globalization protesters from the
late 1990s on; Occupy protestors across the world from 2011; and participants in
protests in the Arab Spring.
While the pervasiveness of twentieth and twenty-first century protest and demon-
stration is not in dispute, its political efficacy has been questioned. Richard
Schechner and others have argued that protests and demonstrations share with
Bakhtinian carnival the potential to be both socially transgressive and – by acting
as a short-term valve that releases social pressure – always only temporary and often
supportive of the status quo. Baz Kershaw acknowledges that protests and demonstra-
tions are at least partly conservative because they are always somewhat repetitive
and familiar, but he argues that they nevertheless continue to take new forms and so
they are not purely conservative. Responding to arguments that theatre has become
less political in postmodern contexts, Kershaw also argues not only that culture has
become more pervasively performative, but also that it has become more politically
performative, the proliferation of protest offering a case in point.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cohen-Cruz brings together a vast international selection of writings on the topic.

Schechner’s analysis of a range of events – including the fall of the Berlin Wall and
the Tiananmen demonstrations – considers their political effects centrally in the
terms of Bakhtinian carnival. Kershaw considers many of the same examples and
argues for an analysis that goes beyond Bakhtin’s liberating–oppressive binaries.

Cohen-Cruz, Jan (ed.) (1998) Radical Street Performance: An International Anthology,

London: Routledge.
Kershaw, Baz (1999) ‘Fighting in the Streets: Performance, Protest and Politics’, in The
Radical in Performance: Between Brecht and Baudrillard, London: Routledge.
Schechner, Richard (1993) ‘The Street Is the Stage’, in The Future of Ritual: Writings on
Culture and Performance, London: Routledge.

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PSYCHOANALYSIS
Psychoanalysis is the study of mental processes, especially unconscious ones.
Pioneered by Sigmund Freud from the late nineteenth century into the 1930s as a
therapeutic treatment for neurosis, it has become an important tool of cultural practice
and analysis. Freud established that the self is made up of three parts: the id, composed
of instinctual desires; the super-ego, the repressive social rules we internalize; and
the ego, the social individual who partly reconciles the id and super-ego. Socialization
requires the individual to repress many of the id’s desires, but these do not vanish.
Instead, they form the individual’s unconscious – active mental processes that we
may feel we have little knowledge of, let alone control over. The unconscious cannot
be analysed directly because it is repressed. Therefore, it has to be studied through its
indirect expression in jokes, slips of the tongue, repetitions, dreams, creative practices
including performance and writing, and physical symptoms that have no apparent
organic cause.
Freud linked psychoanalysis to theatre by using names of dramatic characters for
psychoanalytic concepts including the Oedipal and Electra complexes, exploring
subjectivity through characterization in dramatic literature and performance, and
describing many formative events as acts of social mise en scène. The primal scene,
for example, is the real or imagined scene where the child first witnesses parental sex
and perceives his or her own origins. Theatre and psychoanalysis are further linked
through many other shared concerns. Psychoanalytic paradigms for understanding
identity, desire, relationships and feelings are visible in the family dramas of William
Shakespeare, August Strindberg, Henrik Ibsen, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee
and Federico García Lorca, for example. Frank Wedekind’s drama and the writing
and theatre practice of Antonin Artaud share psychoanalysis’s interest in repressed
desires. Strindberg’s A Dream Play (1902) and Hélène Cixous’ Portrait of Dora
(1976) attempt to mimic the non-linear structure of the unconscious.
Psychoanalysis’s greatest contributions to theatre and performance have been the
tools it provides for critical analysis. Feminist theories of audience spectatorship,
for example, have been influenced by psychoanalytic concepts of scopophilia (the
love of looking), masochism (the drive to be controlled by another) and the mental
processes that produce sexual identity. Performance itself has been understood as
fantasy, the mise en scène of desire, and a safe way of enacting desire by displacing
it through identification on to characters who stand in for ourselves. Relationships
between the actor, director and audience, and within processes of rehearsal,
improvisation and devising, have been informed by reflection on their psychody-
namics. Analysis of the fetish – the object that stands in for something that is absent
– provides a means of understanding the unconscious investment that audiences make
in willingly suspending their disbelief. Theories of the abject – that which bodies
expel and which we may find both repulsive and compelling – can inform under-
standing of the body art of Franko B, Stelarc, Ron Athey and Orlan. As thera-
peutic psychoanalysis can help to work through trauma by staging it through the
‘talking cure’, performance can aim to do the same through a performative cure or

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enactment. Such a critical approach helps to explain the social function of many
Holocaust memorials and museums, performances like Orlan’s The Reincarnation
of Saint Orlan (1990–93), such repeated protest as that staged by las Madres de la
Plaza de Mayo and, for Peggy Phelan, all performance. Phelan argues that perfor-
mance’s liveness, evanescence and ensuing absence and loss make it a helpful form
of rehearsal for experiencing loss elsewhere in life – for example, through
bereavement. Freudian psychoanalysis has been widely criticized; for example, its
theories of human development have been seen as falsely universalizing. But psychoa-
nalysis’s theorization of the unconscious remains crucial to current understandings of
subjectivity and human behaviour, including performance.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Reinelt and Roach include a useful introduction to psychoanalysis and two essays
focusing on identification. Campbell and Kear’s collection addresses a broader range
of topics, from rehearsal and therapeutic processes, to melancholy and homesickness,
to social trauma. Murray focuses on the relationship of trauma to the production of
racial and gender identities in theatre and film. Pellegrini explores intersections
between psychoanalytic theory and gendered and racial identity in contemporary
performance. Walsh examines the relationship between theatre and therapy.

Campbell, Patrick and Adrian Kear (eds) (2001) Psychoanalysis and Performance, London:
Routledge.
Murray, Timothy (1997) Drama Trauma: Specters of Race and Sexuality in Performance,
Video and Art, London: Routledge.
Pellegrini, Ann (1997) Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race,
London: Routledge.
Reinelt, Janelle G. and Joseph R. Roach (eds) (1992) Critical Theory and Performance, Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Walsh, Fintan (2013) Theatre & Therapy, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

PUPPETRY
What separates puppets in performance from art objects or anthropological curios
hung on a domestic or art gallery wall is the puppeteer or performer’s ability to
manipulate the object and thus bring it to ‘life’. This principle can be carried over to
any object, from a crudely shaped piece of wood to a sophisticated mask, costume or
other body adornment. Tadeusz Kantor’s mannequins shadow his actors, overtly
exploring the dialectical dynamic between animate and inanimate beings and ques-
tioning how theatre uses artifice to bring events to life and plays with liveness. As
children manipulate puppets or dolls to represent challenging real-life situations by
safe proxy, so can puppets intimate other worlds. Edward Gordon Craig empha-
sized this potential in his writings on the Übermarionette, recalling how puppets
evolved from ritual and totemic representations of another spiritual dimension. This

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is still seen in much Asian performance, where the use of puppets is common, as in
Balinese shadow puppetry. They can possess great power and transport vital messages
to a community through the puppeteer/medium, who is sometimes also a shaman.
Craig’s vision was shared by many modernist artists and groups such as the surre-
alists, Dadaists and futurists in the early part of the twentieth century, who believed
puppets make striking metaphors, representing the human condition of subjugation
and powerlessness in an often absurd but immediate way. Power play lies at the heart
of puppetry’s interactions with live performers.
Even detached from any religious or spiritual implications, puppets can carry
authority because of their visual impact rather than their suggestions of a meta-
physical realm. Julie Taymor’s Lion King (1997) was one of the best-known early
examples, followed by War Horse a decade later with giant horse puppets by South
Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company. Interestingly, both examples bring animals
to life. An inanimate object can provoke human sensitivities and diminish our self-
importance through its vastness, exposing feelings of vulnerability or, alternatively,
reinforcing them through placing the human body alongside miniatures. Such qual-
ities have been utilized by Bread and Puppet Theatre for mass participatory events
as well as for protests, demonstrations and parades. Puppets can also broach
taboos and do the humanly impossible, like the moon-walking astronaut puppet of
Robert Lepage’s The Far Side of the Moon (2000) or the wife- and child-beating
violence of a Punch and Judy show illustrate. In such knock-about forms, puppets are
frequently satirical, can carry topical and critical messages, and are a highly acces-
sible style of popular theatre. Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (1896) exploited such popular
but transgressive potential in its characterizations, as did the Cabaret Voltaire, with
their inclusion of puppets and objects in their cabaret events.
Whatever form puppets possess, be it as shadow, rod, glove, marionette, body
double or ritual totem, they have a powerful transformative ability in both popular
and more esoteric modes of performance, linking ancient roots with up-to-date
concerns and practices. With the advance of nano-technology, digitization and
shrinking computers, it seems inevitable that we will become increasingly used to
robots intervening in our lives and acclimatized to the presence of the ‘puppet’
object in our homes as well as in our theatres.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Segel considers some of the forms puppets (in the loosest meaning of the word) have
adopted in the modern period. Schechter provides five articles on a range of puppet
styles from different cultures, a project that Bell’s edited collection takes further,
with numerous illustrations. His other book is a broad up-to-date historical intro-
duction, while Tillis gives a more theoretical survey and Francis offers many prac-
tical and theoretical insights.

Bell, John (2000) Strings, Hands, Shadows: A Modern Puppet History, Detroit: Detroit
Institute of Arts.

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—— (ed.) (2001) Puppets, Masks and Performing Objects, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Francis, Penny (2011) Puppetry: A Reader in Theatre Practice, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Schechter, Joel (2003) Popular Theatre: A Sourcebook, London and New York: Routledge.
Segel, Harold B. (1995) Pinocchio’s Progeny: Puppets, Marionettes, Automatons, and Robots
in Modernist and Avant-Garde Drama, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Tillis, Steve (1992) Toward an Aesthetics of the Puppet: Puppetry as a Theatrical Art,
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

REHEARSAL
The French call rehearsals répétitions, affirming the necessity that is central to most
rehearsal processes to repeatedly go back over and practise material. In English-
language usage, the word has entered into common parlance to indicate a draft run-
through, implying that this is just a stand-in for the real thing, the event or performance
itself. Yet, as all performance practitioners know, rehearsals are fundamental to the
making of a performance, though there is no prescription that good rehearsals
(whatever that implies) lead to successful performances. One primary role of
rehearsals is to create an ensemble feeling as it is often described, though few critics
or academics are ever specific about what this actually means. Feelings of ease, crea-
tivity, self-confidence and mutual trust, which are also central to training approaches,
can and should carry over into performance once the job of rehearsals is finished. But
some directors avoid constructing the rehearsal performance continuum so linearly,
calling actors back for rehearsals during runs of a production. Some theatres, like
Britain’s National Theatre, to name but one, also have the luxury of instituting
previews before the official press night, when a work is presented to a paying public
but is framed as still being in preparatory or rehearsal mode, not the ‘real thing’, and
therefore not subject to critical scrutiny or review. Such a practice opens up the terms
‘rehearsal’ and ‘performance’.
The substance of rehearsals is primarily contingent on the various requirements
made of actors: to learn lines; to enter into their roles; to establish their movements
and interactions (also known as blocking); to create a mise en scène or the inte-
gration of disparate parts of the staging and their related technologies; to create the
‘world of a play’ or its aesthetic, sometimes according to details like the period
setting, unity of time and space, and variations in the mood. The director’s timing of
when to bring the disparate elements of a production together, or knowing when to
run a play in rehearsal, is crucial – too late and the performance will look under-
rehearsed and half-baked, the actors hesitant and lacking confidence. Too soon and
they might become mechanical – the first night is just one of many repetitions, and
there needs to be further enrichment as the performance is run in. The idea of a
cohesive vision is fundamental, even if the style being worked on allows juxtapo-
sition and rupture. Even chaos has its own rules, and staged chaos might need to look
unplanned and as though it is happening every night for the first time, as in Forced
Entertainment’s Bloody Mess (2004, UK).

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In British theatres where the focus is on producing plays quickly, rehearsals typi-
cally last for three or four weeks. In countries where there has historically been
substantial state subsidy of the theatre, they might last a year or more. This was the
case with Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vsevolod Meyerhold, and is even true
today of an ensemble like Lev Dodin’s Maly Theatre from St Petersburg. With recent
growing interest in devised work, the nature of rehearsals has become more explor-
atory and they have subsequently needed to be longer. Rather than being for the
purpose of interpreting and blocking a text, rehearsals have become more often a
period of group-led creative exploration, though this still needs to be balanced with
or subsumed within the director’s vision and/or the requirement to deliver a ‘show’
by the opening date.
As well as fulfilling the crucial role of establishing the performers’ work, the
director also has to oversee the integration of the designer and their technical team,
unless they also take charge of the scenography, like auteur-directors Tadeusz
Kantor, Robert Wilson, Robert Lepage and Socíetas Rafaello Sanzio’s Claudio
Castellucci. In larger companies, rehearsals will be run by a stage manager and his or
her team who incrementally introduce production elements like props and costume
or a floor plan of the set, culminating in the technical and dress rehearsals when
lighting and sound are fully incorporated. On the European continent, dramaturgs
either work on specific productions or are sometimes based permanently in a theatre.
They occasionally take responsibility for script development and contextual mate-
rials that pertain to the background or translation of a play and might provide infor-
mation on its other productions for research purposes.
Of course, rehearsals cannot replicate the experience of performance, only prepare
for it. They should provide a familiar structure within which the actors are more or
less free to respond within a production’s particular parameters. Rehearsals help
make the unknown interaction of performance less daunting. Games, play and
improvisation are useful for breaking down barriers between actors and for encour-
aging relaxation and creativity, but there are very few commonly recognized and
utilized rehearsal systems. One that has recently come to prominence are the RSVP
cycles (Resources, Scores, Valuaction, Performance cycles), developed by American
dancer/choreographer Anna Halprin with her husband, architect Lawrence Halprin,
and utilized by Robert Lepage. RSVP offers a collaborative, affirmative model of
group work, useful also for companies rehearsing without a director figure, who
would normally be the outside eye and final authority. Anne Bogart’s ‘Viewpoints’ is
another dance-derived approach that provides both a vocabulary and a clear creative
methodology for group work. Such methods help formalize the process of editing and
eliminating discovered material. Seemingly, this leads to great waste but also, hope-
fully, to a concentrated distillation, and is a crucial function of rehearsals, especially
if a work is devised.
Good documentation or even accounts of rehearsals are rare, in part because they
are a time for ‘private’ exploration. Observers or outsiders might unsettle the atmos-
phere, making actors self-conscious. But the lack of documentation also indicates the
difficulty of writing about an often-serendipitous process where methods or systems

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may be inappropriate. A director’s relationship to each performer has to be individ-

ually tailored to their needs and limitations. Rehearsal methods are as varied as the
possibilities of performance they precede.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

It is necessary to read widely to garner information about specific rehearsal approaches

and strategies. Mitter’s book focuses on four directors’ theories of acting and their
training ethos and exercises, rather than the rehearsal process per se, which Toporkov
describes well. Schechner provides a brief overview and introduces the RSVP cycles.
Mitter and Shevtsova’s broad collection offers good opportunities for comparing
varied practices. Harvie and Lavender provide numerous contemporary case studies
for all, of which the contributing scholars have gained various levels of access to
rehearsal processes.

Bogart, Anne (2001) A Director Prepares, London: Routledge.

Delgado, Maria M. and Paul Heritage (eds) (1996) In Contact with the Gods? Directors Talk
Theatre, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Harvie, Jen and Andy Lavender (eds) (2010) Making Contemporary Theatre: International
Rehearsal Processes, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Mitter, Shomit (1993) Systems of Rehearsal: Stanislavsky, Brecht, Grotowski and Brook,
London: Routledge.
—— and Maria Shevtsova (eds) (2005) Fifty Key Theatre Directors, London: Routledge.
Schechner, Richard ([2002] 2013) Performance Studies: An Introduction, (3rd edn edited by
Sara Brady), Oxon: Routledge.
Toporkov, Vasily Osipovich (1998) Stanislavski in Rehearsal: The Final Years, London:
Routledge.

RITUAL
Ritual is impossible to encapsulate simply and briefly, ranging from ubiquitous
everyday aspects of human behaviour, through specific cultural patterns of action
that are much closer to formal performance, to a theoretical term that has multiple
possible definitions and applications. Broadly, the term ritual denotes an action or
series of actions that are done in order to have an effect – to alter the weather, to bring
prosperity or to move a person emotionally and practically from one phase of life to
another in a rite of passage. This last function is frequently linked to difficult life
events, of growing up, conjoining or separation, and in these contexts rituals function
as a support and a means to enable transitions. With their emphasis on efficacy, rituals
can be distinguished from much performance in that they have at their centre active
participation, an individual or a group doing rather than presenting something – for
it is by this activity that a belief is confirmed or change is thought to be brought about.
However many elements ritual and performance share, this shift away from the
actor–spectator binary towards paratheatre and the actions of the performer is
crucial for understanding the substance and significance of ritual activities.

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In psychological terms, a ritual denotes repetitive behaviour that may be a sign of

an individual’s mental instability or disorder. Beyond the individual, rituals often
have a social function, for example, in encouraging group cohesion. This is very
evident in youth culture and in sports. Supporters’ songs, movements, chants and
gestures all have ritual qualities, defining one community in relation to their oppo-
sition. The haka epitomizes this element of display within sports. A sense of group
identity is involved on a much larger scale with regard to the religious aspects of
rituals. Ritual ceremonies exist as forms of prayer and worship in most cultures.
Rituals are not only part of human behaviour, however. Just as animals play, so do
some animals practise what can only be called rituals. This is usually related to
courtship challenges and demonstrations – peacocks flourishing their tails, for
example. It appears that rituals have more than a purely cultural basis. Victor Turner
explored this view and tentatively proposed that rituals have a biological basis and
our participation in them is genetically conditioned.
Any serious study of what rituals are needs to begin with anthropology. However
different his views at the end of his life, Turner began his research in anthropological
fieldwork, which led later to his adoption of a process he called ‘performing ethnog-
raphy’. Rituals were re-enacted in the classroom in order for students to learn about
them through active participation rather than just observation, even if the ritual was
decontextualized and performed. Similarly, Richard Schechner’s observation of
Yaqui Lent and Easter ceremonies helped his research into possible sources of the
theatre by looking at ancient but still extant practices. Such comparative present-day
analysis differs from the more familiar historical trajectory that considers the thea-
tre’s evolution from Dionysian ritual into ancient Greek theatre and beyond.
Investigation of current ritual practices has proved more fruitful than historically-
based analyses, partly because of the lack of information about pre-Dionysian rituals.
They have been inspirational and offered practical materials for theatre artists like
Tadashi Suzuki and Jerzy Grotowski. Grotowski pursued detailed research into
‘objective’ elements of practice informed by ancient crafts and knowledges embodied
in ritual gestures, songs and ways of moving, often derived from Haitian voodoo.
An inseparable conjunction between religious ceremony and dramatic presen-
tation lies behind many Asian performance forms such as Balinese dance-theatre,
a factor Antonin Artaud clearly identified. This proximity has informed intercul-
turalism and has bled into secular events otherwise framed as performance art or
happenings. Paradise Now (1968) overtly used ritual structures in performance.
Marina Abramović, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Joseph Beuys – in his Coyote: I
Like America and America Likes Me (1974) – have all adopted ritualistic elements
as ways of structuring and framing their artworks, with Beuys operating almost as a
shaman. Shamans are central to many rituals and, attributed by their community with
special powers, they often initiate, guide and control proceedings, much as a director
might orchestrate a theatre event. Fruitful comparisons have been made between
Western magicians, performers or theatre artists and the shaman’s role as a conjuror
or medicine man.

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At the core of the numerous comparisons that exist between rituals and perfor-
mance lies the fact that performance shares with rituals a non-daily and specialized
use of time and space, often enacted in buildings that are set aside for that purpose,
like churches and mosques, or at least temporarily transformed from their daily use.
As such, rituals are not to be distinguished and separated from performance, but, as
Schechner has pointed out, they should rather be placed alongside each other on a
continuum, their practices, functions, aesthetics and characteristics often overlapping
and shared.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Below is just a small sample of a mass of materials, especially if this includes anthro-
pological fieldwork on rituals. Schechner devotes a useful summative chapter to
ritual in Performance Studies and Franko has edited a collection of diverse disci-
plinary perspectives on rituals in theory and practice.

Franko, Mark (ed.) (2009) Ritual and Event: Interdisciplinary Pespectives, London: Routledge.
Harvey, Graham (ed.) (2003) Shamanism: A Reader, London: Routledge.
Schechner, Richard ([1977] 1988) Performance Theory, London: Routledge.
—— ([2002] 2013) ‘Ritual’, in Performance Studies: An Introduction, (3rd edn edited by Sara
Brady), Oxon: Routledge. pp. 52–88.
Turner, Victor (1969) The Ritual Process, Chicago: Aldine.
—— (1982) From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, New York: Performing
Arts Journal Press.

SCENOGRAPHY
Even though the practice has existed for hundreds of years in various forms, as a term
‘scenography’ is relatively new and still unfamiliar. It has superseded the phrase
‘theatre design’, for ‘scenography’ denotes the integrated work on all elements of a
production, from costumes through soundscapes to masks, a breadth which the
expressions ‘stage design’, ‘scenic design’ and ‘theatre design’ cannot encompass.
Although etymologically its roots in Greek refer to scenic painting, in a performance
context it alludes to the three-dimensional construction of a visual, aural, material
and spatial mise en scène, using a synthesis of different technologies, from the intan-
gibles of lighting and sound through to the actuality of wood and cloth. It is,
however, only in the interaction of these elements with living beings, with the
performer and (more tangentially) with the audience that scenographers’ plans
become fully realized in a performance space. The idea that designers create back-
drops or decorative environments to foreground the performers was central to
Restoration theatre, for example, but was replaced by notions of total performance
environments that surround the performer and even at times the spectator, as artists
like Antonin Artaud championed. The term ‘scenography’ has evolved along this
trajectory from image to installation and participation. In the twenty-first century,

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immersive performance has become popular where participants enter into and are
often subsumed within a total 360º environment, often in a found location or building.
In practice, scenographers have to negotiate a fragile balance between the visual
and imaginative dimensions of a stage design and its functionality for performers,
technicians and a director. In order to realize a world represented in a text or to
construct a space for performers to inhabit, scenographers need to share their vision
with the director in a long process of research, consultation and negotiation.
Traditionally, a design emerges initially on paper from textual and contextual research
before appearing as a model box. It is then that the mechanics of a design become
manifest and budgetary considerations start to make a direct impact, though they will
always have been an important consideration. As well as responding to a director’s
interpretation or a devising team’s desires, the scenographer liaises closely with
production staff who will build and handle a set or environment through various scene
changes or in and out of a van if a production tours. In addition, the scenographer has
to convince the performers about his or her designs – a third but equally vital rela-
tionship, for the performers have ultimate responsibility in bringing the scenography
to life before or in proximity to the spectator. The scenographer needs organizational
and diplomatic as well as creative skills, in what is a decidedly collaborative art.
Some directors like Robert Wilson and Tadeusz Kantor eschew such collabo-
ration. From visual arts backgrounds, these two director/designers are representative
of auteur artists who take sole responsibility for designing the stage environment.
Their success has, however, supported the emergence of the scenographer’s role
within performance-making, an idea championed especially by Edward Gordon
Craig and Adolphe Appia at the beginning of the twentieth century, when scenic
design mostly involved backdrops for naturalist dramas. A turn towards abstract
and non-realist designs followed, enhanced by the harnessing of complex stage tech-
nologies – in the Constructivist scenography that Vsevolod Meyerhold developed
and in the pioneering work of Czech designer Josef Svoboda with multimedia slide
and film projection.
Today, visual aspects of performance are increasingly being foregrounded. The
growing interest in devised work, installations and performance art, as well as
environmental and physical and visual theatre, has opened up notions and under-
standing of what a scenographer does and the place of his or her work in creating a
total mise en scène. Emphasis has shifted away from designs that are finished months
before rehearsal, towards the construction of a space together with the performers.
Similarly, many artists are now more excited by pre-existing spaces, as in site-
specific performance. These serve as a reminder that design is as much about what
you leave out as what you put in. The design, architecture, architectonics and the
location of theatre and performance spaces have all become the focus of many recent
theoretical studies. The idea that these are inhabited passively by the spectator is long
gone, with questions about interaction, participation, phenomenological experience
and virtual space driving scenographic practices forward.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Howard’s book is clear and accessible, drawing on her extensive experience as a

scenographer, while Brockett and Ball present more traditional models of what they
call scene design. There are numerous books about specific designers such as Koltai’s
lavish collection. Collins and Nesbitt have compiled a fifty-two chapter collection
from across the broad spectrum of scenographic practices.

Brockett, Oscar G. and Robert J. Ball (2004) The Essential Theatre, 8th edition, Belmont, CA:
Wadsworth/Thomson Learning.
Collins, Jane and Andrew Nesbitt (2010) Theatre and Performance Design: A Reader in
Scenography, Oxon: Routledge.
Howard, Pamela (2002) What is Scenography?, London: Routledge.
Koltai, Ralph (2003) Ralph Koltai: Designer for the Stage, London: Nick Hern Books.
Thorne, Gary (1999) Stage Design: A Practical Guide, Ramsbury, Wiltshire: The Crowood
Press.

SEMIOTICS
Semiotics provides a system of analysis of performance that emerged in the 1970s.
Theatre semiotics evolved from semiological theories of communication and
language that had been used to examine the way the arts impact on the spectator/
reader. In the theatre, semiotic analyses like those of Keir Elam extended the
linguistic studies of Charles S. Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure, who were both –
broadly speaking – structuralists. This term describes theorists whose work is predi-
cated on analysing how things are constructed rather than the context in which they
operate or their history. Semiotics initially offered detailed and seemingly compre-
hensive models for analysing the minutiae of performance events. In the 1980s,
though, even as some critics like Patrice Pavis were elaborating on its overarching
concepts, its principles were repeatedly questioned. Criticism centred partly on the
need for semiotics to isolate certain aspects of a performance such as costume,
lighting or sound for analysis, before reassembling these elements. This fragmen-
tation meant that semiotics was less able to deal with the temporal flow of theatre, as
Pavis has pointed out. This approach also struggled with much experimental post-
modern performance that deliberately played with the disjunctures between signs,
and which exploited the dense layering of different systems or codes. Semiotics was
able readily to analyse visual theatre and scenographic aspects of performance,
such as a set, costume or the appearance of particular characters, but engaged inad-
equately with embodied actions. Critics also questioned the assumption that every-
thing can be subsumed within a realm of legible understanding, recognizing instead
that much of performance is ineffable, and certainly momentary. In focusing on
coded systems of signs, semiotics perhaps overvalued intention, implying that there
is a linear progression from authorial intent through the act of communication to
reception, following the sign, signifier and signified model on which structuralist
theories of language are broadly based. Roland Barthes countered such an emphasis

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on intention with his writings on ‘The Death of the Author’ and he also attempted to
look at the physicality of performance in ‘The Grain of the Voice’, for example,
which examined timbre and tonality as much as language itself. Shifts away from the
problematic closure inherent in the idea of reading and interpreting visual signs were
vital developments in semiotic analysis.
With these reservations in mind, while we might consider ourselves to be in a
post-semiotic age of performance analysis, the assiduousness, clarity and clinical
rigour of semiotic approaches still serve an important function. Used in conjunction
with other models, semiotics offers systematic ways of breaking the dense complexity
of performance events into manageable elements, whatever the inadequacy of this
segmentation. Semiotics has an indispensable role in the ongoing quest for compre-
hensive methodologies of dissecting performance, not just because of its historical
importance.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

There is a wealth of background material on semiotics and the structuralist approaches

(mentioned above) that have been central to the development of semiological
analysis. What follows is a small range of works by some of the main theorists who
have engaged with this mode of study in the theatre, both approvingly and critically.
Pavis’s more recent book has a useful section on the limitations of semiotic analysis.
Barthes’ book contains his influential articles mentioned above.

Aston, Elaine and George Savona (1991) Theatre as Sign System: A Semiotics of Text and
Performance, London: Routledge.
Barthes, Roland (1977) Image Music Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath, London: Fontana.
Elam, Keir (2002) The Semiotics of Drama and Theatre, 2nd edition, London: Routledge.
Pavis, Patrice (1982) Languages of the Stage, New York: PAJ Publications.
—— (2003) Analyzing Performance: Theater, Dance and Film, trans. David Williams, Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Ubersfeld, Anne (1999) Reading Theatre, trans. Frank Collins, Toronto: University of Toronto
Press.

SPACE
In a very basic formulation, theatre and performance are both events which take
place in time and space and in which performers and audiences participate, and
therefore thinking about space is fundamental to understanding how theatre and
performance make meaning. It has thus become a central critical practice since the
late 1960s, with the rise of newly spatialized performance practices by the likes of
Tadeusz Kantor, Peter Brook, numerous performance artists, installation artists
and makers of site-specific performance, immersive theatre and happenings, and
the development of semiotic, anthropological, phenomenological and other materi-
alist approaches to analysing performance.

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Theorists commonly divide theatre space into three categories: the stage space, the
theatre space and the theatre environment. Stage space usually refers to the on-stage
scenic area and its scenography. Examining stage space in phenomenological or
material terms, we might consider how it facilitates or limits movement for on-stage
performers and objects and how it affects opportunities for interaction between
performers. Analysing stage space in semiotic terms provokes consideration of its
metaphorical and fictional significations, such as whether it represents a recognizable
place like a drawing room, and/or whether it is abstract, invoking a mood of airy
optimism or restricted oppression, for example. The theatre space is the architecture
that encompasses stage and audience spaces. Thinking about this helps critics analyse
the relationship between the performance and the audience by considering sightlines,
acoustics, proximity, scale, furnishings, audience and performer amenities, and so
on. Common Western theatre space configurations include the proscenium-arch or
end-on arrangement, the thrust stage, the traverse and the theatre-in-the-round. In
more abstract terms, reflecting on theatre space may help us consider the space’s
emotional effects, such as whether it feels open or closed, for whom, when, and so
on. The theatre environment is the site of the theatre in its wider social geography –
where it is located geographically and what the significances of that location are. For
example, is the theatre in a marginal location off-Broadway or on ‘the Fringe’? Is it
out of the way for many but still a site of ‘pilgrimage’ such as Stratford-upon-Avon,
England, or any city hosting the Olympics?
As these examples all suggest, space is social; it produces social effects and
meanings that are, in turn, ideological. Thus, analyses of performance space must not
stop short at phenomenological and semiotic analyses but press on to consider the
social and ideological meanings of performance spaces. How, for example, does
stage space configure relationships of power between characters? How does the
theatre environment affect diverse audiences’ accessibility to the theatre – through
the expense of travelling there, or through the sense of safety or danger the site
produces? How does theatre space produce relationships of power between audiences
and performers, as well as between different performers and different audience
members, for instance in the hierarchical location of backstage dressing rooms and
seats in the auditorium? Why does theatre commonly mask its sites of labour – such
as the lighting box – in order to enhance its sense of naturalism? And what did
Bertold Brecht achieve in dismantling this kind of masking? These are all questions
that much politicized performance practice – such as protest, popular theatre and
the work of Augusto Boal – is acutely aware of. In his influential book, The Empty
Space, Peter Brook argued, ‘I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage’,
suggesting that a performance space is ideologically neutral until performers give it
meaning. However, much recent politicized performance and critical analysis of
space indicates instead that any space comes already ideologically loaded with
meanings produced by shape, decor, location, history, relationship to other perfor-
mance architectures, and so on. There are no empty spaces, only variably different
spaces.

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Although there is more extensive critical analysis of theatre space than perfor-
mance space, many of these ideas are directly transferable to thinking about such
things as ritual, sport, performance art, rehearsal and other forms of performance.
And, although space is fundamental to all performance, it has been especially
explored in the large-scale theatre work of such artists as Robert Wilson and Laurie
Anderson. Many directors, including Brook, Tadashi Suzuki, Robert Lepage and
Ariane Mnouchkine, director of Paris’s Théâtre du Soleil, founded dedicated sites for
producing their work in order to develop a sustained relationship with a particular
social, geographical and architectural environment. Similarly, many companies
produce site-specific theatre to foreground the spatial meanings of the site of
production. David Wiles argues that recent theatre practice may be moving away
from the modernist propensity to produce in ‘containers’ or supposedly ‘abstract’
dedicated theatre spaces, to produce in sites where physical and social specificities can
be engaged with more productively and directly.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

McAuley concentrates on stage space, the Leacrofts on theatre space and Carlson on
the theatre environment. Wiles develops a sustained critical analysis of the first two
aspects.

Brook, Peter (1968) The Empty Space, London: McGibbon and Kee.
Carlson, Marvin (1989) Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture, Ithaca,
New York: Cornell University Press.
Leacroft, Richard and Helen Leacroft (1984) Theatre and Playhouse: An Illustrated Survey of
Theatre Building from Ancient Greece to the Present Day, London: Methuen.
McAuley, Gay (1999) Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre, Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press.
Wiles, David (2003) A Short History of Western Performance Space, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

THEATRE
The word ‘theatre’ has interesting permutations in many languages and has encom-
passed a panoply of nuances since its etymological origins in the Greek word
theatron, a place for viewing or seeing. It is even spelled differently in American and
British usage. Intriguingly, it denotes the form itself, the repertoire of plays which
are its constituent elements, as well as the buildings in which those events occur. In
many dictionaries, the first definition listed is the building, undoubtedly the most
straightforward aspect of this term. Further definitions show how widely the term
ranges linguistically, from being the site where battles take place in wars, to a place
for medical operations – a corollary which has inspired several practitioners. This
latter meaning reminds us how, rather than being the sealed, sterile spaces they are
today, operating theatres used to be open for observation by medical students and

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even the public, a notion that Jerzy Grotowski explored in The Constant Prince
(1965). Thus the word alludes to a form which is hard to pin down and very much
defined according to its epoch and culture, as much as it refers to concrete spaces.
The theatre as a practice or form of artistic work is usually bound by the events or
playtexts which it mainly comprises at any given time. Critics and theorists have
often attempted to group these in broad categories linked to content and style, be it
the theatre of the absurd, melodrama or the drama of Angry Young Men, to name
but three. Numerous directors have been instrumental in this categorization. Peter
Brook and Jerzy Grotowski stripped the theatre down to define it as an encounter
between the actor and audience, with elements like lighting and sound having only
peripheral significance. Directors like Augusto Boal and Bertold Brecht used
popular theatre for political and social means, to educate and enlighten as much as
to entertain. Groups like America’s Living Theatre and Bread and Puppet Theatre
have found theatre buildings limiting, restricted by the formal arrangements of the
auditoria and the fact that in such a context their work is only for those who actually
enter these buildings. They have therefore taken their practice out into public and
community spaces, sometimes engaging in a kind of paratheatre, or performing in
and as demonstrations. Site-specific performance is an extension of this desire, its
playing with spatial boundaries calling into question the parameters of the nature of
theatre and where it is located.
Theatre is one part of the broad spectrum that is known as performance. At the end
of the twentieth century, there was increasing interest in this term ‘performance’.
The expansion of performance studies courses (particularly in the United States) and
cross-disciplinary discussions about performativity have demonstrated this.
Progressively, events like site-specific pieces and happenings, which do not take
place within theatres, have been studied more as part of performance than of theatre.
The growing study of the history and current manifestations of performance art
have also clarified what theatre is and is not. The idea that it revolves around play-
texts, mimetic representation or other modes of acting, and that it utilizes specific
theatre technologies, has become more entrenched, although not definitively or
unproblematically. Theatre depends on rehearsals, training and collaborative work,
even if this is just a director and solo actor. It thus operates within an economic
framework that supports groups or companies rather than individuals. Performance
art (or live art as it is also known in Britain) tends to be more individual in its
personnel, more able to adapt and respond to its environment, and is economically
more independent. More significantly, it overtly plays with the modes of represen-
tation and the roles of performer and spectators that much theatre seems to take for
granted. Its main technology has also often been the body, especially in body art
practised by the likes of Stelarc, Marina Abramović and Orlan. This is not to say
that theatre is necessarily conservative or reactionary; only that performance art has
often experimented more radically than the theatre with the forms and theoretical
positions that playing constructs.
At the heart of the theatre are its buildings, and these absorb much of the costs and
energy of supporting this art form. Theatre buildings reflect the styles, interests and

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needs of an era. The Olivier auditorium at Britain’s National Theatre (the theatre
building opened in 1976) represents the idealism of a popular theatre and mass audi-
ences, based as it is on ancient Greek amphitheatres. In the 1990s, the intimacy of the
Cottesloe Studio (at the National Theatre, to be renamed The Dorfman from 2014)
became more appealing for directors, as it was hard to make work succeed in the
1,160-seat Olivier. The availability of small cheap rooms above pubs in London and
other British cities, and of warehouse and loft spaces in New York and elsewhere,
catered for this inclination and supported the vibrant growth of Fringe theatre and
off-off-Broadway. At the other end of the spectrum, large venues have green rooms,
dressing rooms, backstage and specialist technical areas – spaces that are closed to
audiences – often with separate entrances from those used by the spectators.
Ideologies of the theatre are embedded in the bricks and mortar and the structures
into which these coalesce – a point illustrated by many nations’ efforts to affirm their
national identities by building national theatres. Some architects have tried to recon-
figure such hierarchies, building theatres-in-the-round (as at Stoke-on-Trent in
England), which have a democratic rather than hierarchical seating structure as well
as increased intimacy.
‘Theatre’ is a problematic word that implies a vast range of forms, materials or
spaces. It therefore always needs to be defined to reveal the innate assumptions its
usage contains. These assumptions may say more about the person using the term
and the context in which they operate than they do about the theatre itself.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Below is a selection of reference texts, as well as Mackintosh’s book on theatre

buildings and Carlson’s semiotic analysis of theatre architecture and sites. The Pavis
dictionary deals with more theoretical terms than the other reference sources.

Carlson, Marvin (1989) Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture, Ithaca,
New York: Cornell University Press.
Hartnoll, Phyllis (ed.) (1983) The Concise Oxford Companion to the Theatre, 4th edition,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mackintosh, Iain (1993) Architecture, Actor and Audience, London and New York: Routledge.
Pavis, Patrice (1998) Dictionary of The Theatre: Terms, Concepts, and Analysis, trans.
Christine Shantz, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Stanton, Sarah and Martin Banham (eds) (1996) The Cambridge Paperback Guide to the
Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

THEATRE ANTHROPOLOGY
It is not unrelated, but theatre anthropology should not be conflated with comparative
explorations of the discipline of anthropology as a way of understanding what theatre
and performance are. Anthropological concepts, and to a lesser extent practices, have
proved central to the evolution of performance studies, as Victor Turner’s work has

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exemplified, linking performance with other aspects of human behaviour like ritual
and play. Theatre anthropology, on the other hand, is a much more specific praxis
developed by Eugenio Barba under the auspices of the International School for
Theatre Anthropology, founded in 1979. His approach examines the differences and
similarities between Western and Asian performance practices, looking at what
common principles underlie performance cross-culturally. The analytical focus is
more on the performer rather than performance as such, examining how roles are
constructed and with what implicit assumptions. It thus considers performance
processes outside cultural and social contexts. This has attracted criticism for its
universalizing tendencies from the likes of Rustom Bharucha, as well as from
feminist critics, who have asserted that Barba has ignored or sidelined issues of
gender, especially in his analyses of female impersonators in Asian performance.
Others have protested that he has excluded African performance from his research
focus, which Barba counters by emphasizing the need to narrow down and select in
order to make his research operable. These debates have helped crystallize issues
regarding intercultural performance and the borrowing or application of non-Western
or foreign techniques in Western theatre.
Focusing on what he terms ‘pre-expressive behaviour’, Barba has identified
theatre anthropology’s core principles as follows: the amplification and dilation of
the body energetically and spatially, to create an energized and ‘extended’ performer;
the use of extra-daily rather than daily techniques, pushing and enlarging the body’s
capabilities and balance beyond usage familiar to social situations; opposition as a
guiding principle of movement, as in a counterbalance or in moving downwards to
prepare for a jump upwards; and ‘inconsistent consistency’, the internal logic or
consistency which coded extra-daily modes of performance possess. Ballet, mime or
Kabuki, for example, all have unique to them their own particular ways of moving
the feet, which must be followed precisely and sustainedly. Barba has extended his
research from training-based and theoretical enquiries into the creation of new
performances with cross-cultural forms. On paper and in the theatre, his approach has
made an original contribution to the study of performer processes and acting, though
not without stirring controversy.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barba’s two texts present the fundamentals of this approach, with numerous illus-
trative examples in the large dictionary. Watson’s book has a range of more critical
positions on theatre anthropology in broad relation to intercultural theories.

Barba, Eugenio (1994) The Paper Canoe – A Guide to Theatre Anthropology, trans. Richard
Fowler, London: Routledge.
—— and Nicola Savarese (eds) (1991) A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art
of the Performer, London: Routledge.
Watson, Ian and colleagues (2002) Negotiating Cultures – Eugenio Barba and the Intercultural
Debates, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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THEATRE OF THE ABSURD

Theatre of the absurd was a term created by Hungarian-born critic and theatre scholar
Martin Esslin in the 1960s to describe dominant trends in contemporaneous plays as
well as those of the previous two decades. The designation was summarized in a
book of this title which describes the phenomenon in relation to the oeuvre of a
selection of mostly European, all-male playwrights: notably Samuel Beckett, Eugene
Ionesco, Jean Genet and Harold Pinter. The absurd in this context relates less to
notions of the ridiculous or plain comic and more to the idea of purposelessness and
the loss of belief in God and ‘master’ narratives (as it later came to be defined under
postmodernism). Esslin’s definition drew largely on the work of Albert Camus, the
existentialist philosopher and writer and his 1942 essay ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’.
Ironically, whilst the term accounts for a particular style of playwrighting, popu-
larized in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, it actually depicts a
movement away from language, or at least language as it was previously used and
understood. Many plays at that time dispensed with narratives, psychologically-
motivated behaviour and characters and linear plots. Notable examples include
Ionesco’s The Chairs (1952) and Rhinoceros (1959), most of Beckett’s well-known
oeuvre and the likes of Edward Albee’s 1958 Zoo Story (Albee is a rare American
representative of absurdism in the book, a rarity which puzzles Esslin in his attempt
to analyse the causes and context for the evolution of this mostly European trend). In
all these and similar works, widely accepted modernist ideas and traditions were
usurped by notions and practices that subsequently became recognized as part of
postmodernism.
As well as focusing on West European writers, Esslin draws several East European
playwrights into his purview, many of whom were using drama to express the contra-
dictions and false promises of life within Soviet-run countries. Such writers were
trying to circumvent censorship through allegories and allusion (hence the epon-
ymous rhinoceros of Ionesco’s play – the inhabitants of a town gradually turn into
these thick-skinned creatures, echoing Franz Kafka’s 1915 The Metamorphosis).
This artistic mini-revolution thus battled against the Socialist Realist aesthetic which
had been politically imposed across the Eastern Bloc. But the movement also grew
out of earlier experiments with form from across Europe such as those of Dada and
the surrealists, which were themselves inspired by the huge loss of life and futility
of the First World War. Looking further back even to popular genres such as
commedia dell’arte, clowning, mime and variety theatre, the latter evident especially
in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953), theatre of the absurd used comic devices,
extraordinary characters and figures, symbolism, fantasy and dreams to create imagi-
native stage pictures and unreal scenarios. Another important theatrical reference
point was Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (1896), with its eccentric characterization, playful
punning text and non-sequiturs. In terms of cross-disciplinary influence, silent film
also made a big impact on theatre of the absurd, further emphasising how this
approach rejected the dominance of the text within plays. The movement thus synthe-
sized a range of experiments across media, cultures and periods.

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The term theatre of the absurd is rarely used today other than for describing this
historical movement. Nevertheless, it is revealing to consider just how much it
prefigured postmodern performance, events such as happenings and contemporary
physical theatre, where the appearance on stage of other worldly figures and irra-
tional behaviour was and still is quite commonplace.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Esslin’s book, which has gone through several editions, is the definitive work on this
subject. The plays by authors mentioned in this entry and by Esslin provide numerous
examples of the theatre of the absurd.

Esslin, Martin (1961) Theatre of the Absurd, New York: Anchor Books.

THEATRE OF THE OPPRESSED

The term ‘theatre of the oppressed’, coined by the late Augusto Boal after Paolo
Freire’s writings on oppression, has become recognized and adopted internationally
for denoting a way of creating theatre and conducting paratheatrical work with a
particular ideological framework. At its heart, this is the attempted liberation through
performance techniques of a group or individuals from their own restriction or
burden, be it social, cultural, financial, psychological or political. Boal developed
several techniques and modes of performance, often involving games, that can
operate in theatre and non-theatre milieus to achieve his aims of social franchisement
and support. As well as formulating new practices, these processes have resulted in
the reconception of specific terminology within the theatre, like his idea of spec-
tactors. Boal’s combined theoretical and practical approach was meant to give people
understanding and even, through rehearsal, experience of the possible means by
which they can improve their oppressive situations. Even if these do not lead directly
to change, they make the participants aware of their own potential to find other ways
of living and being.
One technique often used within theatre of the oppressed, Forum Theatre, allows
audiences to participate by halting the action of a piece, orchestrated by a go-between
figure called a joker. Typically, these ‘plays’ or short dramas tackle a local or topical
problem head-on. The audience members can then suggest alternative responses to
the issue and act these out themselves, positing ways of solving real-life difficulties
and oppressions and thereby empowering themselves and their communities. Boal
considered this to be a ‘rehearsal of revolution’, and coined the neologism ‘spec-
tactor’ to identify this new participatory role for the audience. In Invisible Theatre
the audience must remain unaware that what they are watching is in fact a carefully
rehearsed situation that intrudes into real life, such as the verbal sexual abuse of a
woman on an underground train. The ‘invisible’ actors attempt to draw an audience
in and encourage them to take sides – a situation of conflict or oppression is therefore
chosen to stimulate participation and debate. Newspaper Theatre allows workshop

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participants to read behind the lines through the enactment of news stories. Image
Theatre utilizes symbolic action and gestures rather than text, emphasizing physical
rather than verbal processes, with some affinity to Bertold Brecht’s notion of Gestus.
These are just some of the processes which Boal developed under the umbrella of
theatre of the oppressed.
Questions have been asked about the actual efficacy of such techniques and their
relationship to real life, with concerns that false hopes might be raised or unrealistic
situations presented. Boal’s own personal shift in his later life into working in politics
in Brazil and use of Legislative Theatre did not mean the abandonment of these tech-
niques. Instead it can be seen as another means of facilitating the freedom which he
sought for oppressed peoples and encouraging an active dialogue between those with
power and those who seemingly have none. The major difference in this last phase of
his work is the emphasis on changing actual legislation rather than changing situa-
tions in general.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

These ideas are presented in Boal’s books, two of which are included here, and both
of which are based loosely on Freire. Schutzman and Cohen-Cruz depict wider appli-
cations of theatre of the oppressed practices beyond Boal’s own work.

Boal, Augusto (1979) Theatre of the Oppressed, trans. Charles A. and Maria-Odilia Leal
McBride, London: Pluto Press.
—— (2006) The Aesthetics of the Oppressed, trans. Adrian Jackson, London: Routledge.
Freire, Paolo de (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York: Seabury.
Schutzman, Mady and Jan Cohen-Cruz (eds) (1994) Playing Boal: Theatre, Therapy and
Activism, London: Routledge.

TRAINING
Performer training encompasses many disparate processes, even if these often centre
on common principles and techniques, as Eugenio Barba has attempted to outline
with his theory of the pre-expressive and theatre anthropology. One fundamental
belief in training performers is that, however variable the conditions of performance,
especially regarding the unpredictability of audience reception, certain skills can be
developed to make communication clearer and the experience easier for the performer.
In training, the performer usually practises integrating the voice and body, working
towards what Phillip Zarrilli has called a ‘body-mind’, where impulse leads immedi-
ately to action without self-judgement or extended reflection. These principles are
also developed by improvisation, relaxation and muscular control, ease of breath
and an open voice, focus and concentration – fundamental elements of most training
systems, depending on the type of theatre that is dominant in any culture. In Euro-
American culture, for example, where naturalist theatre is still the main form and
television and film are so economically significant, most emphasis in training is on

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vocal delivery of text as well as the invention and psychological interpretation of a

character or role, based largely on systems articulated by Konstantin Stanislavsky or
Lee Strasberg. This is markedly different from an Eastern form such as Noh, which
emphasizes the complex codified use of the body, all but ignores originality or crea-
tivity, employs imitation of a master as its primary teaching mode and considers
longevity of training as indispensable.
The time structures in which training happens vary from short workshops
measured in days, to lifelong projects as in southern India’s Kathakali, where the
body is reshaped by vigorous massage – the hips are opened to enable a wide, deep
stance. Correspondingly, theatre school communities differ greatly according to their
context, from the family-based systems found across Asia, where the school almost
replaces the family in the student’s life, to the short-lived compressed training of
drama or acting school programmes familiar to the individualized and commercially
oriented approaches found in the West.
For many performance forms, from circus and dance to Asian performance, the
need to train is evident. With less skill-based modes, the requirement to train is more
debatable, and factors such as charisma and talent can replace systematically acquired
learned knowledge. The explorations of Yvonne Rainer and the postmodern dancers
of the 1960s in New York, epitomized in a piece like Trio A (1966), sanctioned the
rejection of technique and turned instead to everyday forms like walking (as in Steve
Paxton’s work). Some performance artists deny the need for (or are overtly disin-
terested in) training, drawing instead on themselves as social rather than trained
performative beings. Here, autobiography often takes the place of performer craft,
though dramaturgical considerations still apply, and there is no question that they
are not performing – there is simply a different emphasis on the craft. Yet even
those like Barba and Jerzy Grotowski, who have focused so much of their efforts on
establishing discipline and rigorous techniques to help the performer find spontaneity
and freedom (a central paradox within performer training), have abandoned training
at times or articulated the danger of fixing processes. At one stage Grotowski’s
Laboratory Theatre gave up their training regime as it had ceased to have any purpose
and had become a habitual ritual. The primary aim of any training is to go beyond
personal and group habits, to explore creatively, and be open to new ways of working.
This manifests itself in the sort of receptivity that an audience detect in a group when
they appear to be what is called a ‘true ensemble’. But such qualities are elusive, and
training programmes cannot ensure that such an impression will arise or be perceived
within the performance event itself.
The belief that formulaic methodologies simply do not work and that the indi-
vidual must find his or her own way in relation to the form underpins most models of
training in the West. In performance, performers must focus less on technical matters
and more on the actor–spectator relationship, their relation to other performers
working with them, and the performance material they are handling, be it a character,
a song, a dance or a piece of text. Of course, these cannot be separated from the tech-
niques with which they are enacted, but training and rehearsal periods are the time
for focusing on the minutiae – be it diction, breath, ways of moving or posture. In the

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 CONCEPTS AND PRAC T I C E S

performance, the performer must bring all the separate elements together in a
synthesis. Whatever techniques and processes have been explored in training or
rehearsal, these skills need to become ‘second nature’ for the performance. The idea
of neutrality as the performer’s vital base is central to Jacques Lecoq’s training, but
the neutral mask is just a tool, and is therefore not worn in performance. Performance
is pragmatic, and training can only ever be preparation for the high levels of stressful
– though also potentially exhilarating – uncertainty that performing entails.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

There are many books on specific approaches to acting but few about theories of
actor training in general or performer training as a whole, with Matthews’ book
being a welcome exception. Zarrilli and Hodge therefore provide useful collections.
Schechner’s chapter ‘Performer Training Interculturally’ in his 1985 book outlines
some of the functions of training cross-culturally with reference to Kathakali. The
relatively new Routledge journal Theatre, Dance and Performance Training Journal
focuses on questions of training across performance disciplines. RPA

Barba, Eugenio and Nicola Savarese (eds) (1991) A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The
Secret Art of the Performer, London: Routledge.
Hodge, Alison (ed.) (2000) Twentieth Century Actor Training, London: Routledge.
Matthews, John (2011) Training for Performance: a Meta-Disciplinary Account, London:
Methuen.
Schechner, Richard (1985) Between Theater and Anthropology, Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
Zarrilli, Phillip B. (ed.) (2002) Acting (Re)Considered: Theories and Practice, 2nd edition,
London: Routledge.

VISUAL THEATRE AND THEATRE OF IMAGES

Both of these names specify theatre that prioritizes spectacular scenographic stage
images, presenting visual language as theatre’s most important element, and radi-
cally challenging Western culture’s usual hierarchical, logocentric deference to text
and language. Theatre of images can be spectacular in visual content, scale and/or
trickery. Magnificent visual content characterizes such work as Pina Bausch’s
flower-strewn set for Nelken (1982), Tadeusz Kantor’s performances, and the work
of Italy’s Socíetas Rafaello Sanzio, which features enormous curtains, on-stage
animals and unusual bodies, from the anorexic to the obese. Robert Wilson’s and
Laurie Anderson’s performances repeatedly play with scale, introducing outsize
costumes, props and instruments. And Robert Lepage’s work is notable for its visual
trickery, seamlessly transforming a grand piano into a gondola in Tectonic Plates
(1988), and using multimedia projections in The Seven Streams of the River Ota
(1994) to overlay multiple fictional locations.

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 VIS UAL THEATRE AND THEATR E O F I MA G E S

Beyond its fundamental political commitment to celebrating the visual, however,

the theatre of images ranges widely in its political aims and effects. Writing in 1977,
Bonnie Marranca identified the theatre of images of avant-garde American directors
Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman and Lee Breuer as overtly politicized postmodern
theatre. It featured non-linear structure, non-representational performance and flat
images, she argued, in order partly to draw metatheatrical attention to how meaning
is made through representation. Such work arose from a variety of antecedents, such
as Bertold Brecht’s use of Gestus and tableaux and Antonin Artaud’s total theatre.
It also owed a debt to the rise of film and television and to the developed visual
literacy they produced in their audiences. And its politics extended not only to its
aesthetics but also to its processes, since much of it was collectively devised and
placed equal value on the work of each of its contributing artists, from designer to
performer to director. However, while this work has some potential to be politically
challenging, it can also be conservative. Its emphasis on spectacle and entertainment
potentially commodifies what it shows. Directors Lepage, Peter Brook and Ariane
Mnouchkine, for example, have all been criticized, especially in debates on intercul-
turalism, for using superficial images of cultural difference to produce visually exotic
shows that do not properly represent cultural difference. Wilson, Bausch and the
Socíetas Rafaello Sanzio could also be criticized for using unusual bodies as objects
for stage pictures rather than as subjects. The dominance of auteur-directors in this
field suggests it not only fails to escape theatre’s conventional hierarchies but actually
reinforces them. Its popularity at international festivals is secured by the accessi-
bility of its visual language, but potentially supports the commodification of both the
visual and the theatre. The theatre of images pioneered an important cultural and
aesthetic re-evaluation of the significance of the visual; what it risks is a capitulation
to empty spectacle.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Irvin surveys the work of many influential directors in this area and includes extensive
photographs. Marranca collects plays by American directors Foreman, Wilson and
Breuer, as well as providing thoughtful contextual analysis. Debord’s analysis of the
political vacuity of spectacular culture is seminal.

Debord, Guy (1994) The Society of the Spectacle, New York: Zone Books.
Irvin, Polly (2003) Directing for the Stage, Hove: RotoVision.
Marranca, Bonnie (ed.) ([1977] 1996) The Theatre of Images, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press.

259
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 Appendix
A CHRONOLOGY OF WORLD/
PERFORMANCE EVENTS, BIRTHS AND
DEATHS
This page intentionally left blank
YEAR WORLD/PERFORMANCE EVENTS BIRTHS DEATHS

1363 Motokiyo Zeami

1443 Motokiyo Zeami

1863 Konstantin Stanislavsky

1872 Edward Gordon Craig

1874 Vsevolod Meyerhold

1879 Jacques Copeau

Rudolf von Laban

1885 Mikhail Bakhtin

1892 Walter Benjamin

1896– The modern Olympics are founded Antonin Artaud

Ubu Roi, (director) Aurélien Lugné-Poe, Théâtre de
l’Oeuvre, Paris

1898 Bertold Brecht

1899–1902 Boer War

1904 The Cherry Orchard, (director) Konstantin

Stanislavsky, Moscow Art Theatre (MAT)
Moscow, Russia

1912 Titanic disaster John Cage

YEAR WORLD/PERFORMANCE EVENTS BIRTHS DEATHS

1915 Tadeusz Kantor

1916 Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich, Switzerland

1917 Russian Revolution

1919 Merce Cunningham

1920 Victor Turner

1921 Jacques Lecoq

1922 Erving Goffman

1925 Peter Brook

1926 The Government Inspector, (director) Vsevolod

Meyerhold, Sohn Theatre, Moscow, Russia

1928 Tatsumi Hijikata

1929 Wall Street Crash – worldwide economic

depression

1931 Balinese dance-theatre, The Dutch Pavilion, Augusto Boal

Paris Colonial Exposition

1933 Hitler leads Germany Jerzy Grotowski

1934 Richard Schechner

Wole Soyinka
1935 Christo
Jeanne-Claude

1936–9 Spanish Civil War Eugenio Barba

1937 Hélène Cixous

1938 Konstantin Stanislavsky

1939 Tadashi Suzuki

1939–45 Second World War

1940 Pina Bausch Vsevolod Meyerhold

Jacques Rancière Walter Benjamin

1941 Robert Wilson

1945 Atom bombs dropped on Japan

Holocaust memorials and museums begin to be
planned

1946 Rustom Bharucha

Stelios Arcadiou (Stelarc)
Marina Abramović

1947 Laurie Anderson

Orlan

1948 Antonin Artaud

YEAR WORLD/PERFORMANCE EVENTS BIRTHS DEATHS

1949 Mother Courage and Her Children, (director) William Forsythe Jacques Copeau
Bertold Brecht, Deutsches Theater, Berlin,
Germany

1952 4' 33", John Cage, Black Mountain College, North

Carolina, USA

1953 Waiting for Godot, (director) Roger Blin, Théâtre

de Babylone, Paris

1954 Annie Sprinkle

1955 Guillermo Gómez-Peña

1956 Judith Butler Bertold Brecht

1957 Robert Lepage

1958 Rudolf von Laban

1961 US troops enter Vietnam Ron Athey

Berlin Wall built
Esslin’s Theatre of the Absurd published

1962 Cuban missile crisis

1963 Bread and Puppet Theatre founded

1965 The Constant Prince, (director) Jerzy Grotowski,

Laboratory Theatre, Wrocław, Poland
1966 Trio A, (choreographer) Yvonne Rainer, Judson Edward Gordon Craig
Church, New York

1968 Riots in Paris and worldwide

Paradise Now, (director) Julian Beck and Judith
Malina, Living Theatre, Avignon, France
Dionysus in 69, (director) Richard Schechner, The
Performance Group, New York (to 1969)

1969 Moon landing

1971 Shoot, Chris Burden, Los Angeles

1973 Bausch founds Wuppertal Dance

Theatre

1974 Coyote: I Like America and America Likes Me,

Joseph Beuys, René Block Gallery, New York

1975 The Dead Class, (director) Tadeusz Kantor and Wooster Group founded, New York Mikhail Bakhtin
Cricot 2, Kraków, Poland

1976 Vietnam War finishes Market Theatre founded,

Einstein on the Beach, (director) Robert Wilson, Johannesburg, South Africa
Avignon Festival, France

1977 Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo begin protesting Sistren founded, Kingston, Jamaica

1980 Split Britches founded, New York

1981 Route 1 & 9 (The Last Act), Wooster Group, New

York

1982 Erving Goffman

YEAR WORLD/PERFORMANCE EVENTS BIRTHS DEATHS
1983 Victor Turner
1985 The Mahabharata, (director) Peter Brook, Les
Bouffes du Nord, Paris (to 1988)
1986 DV8 Founded, London Tatsumi Hijikata
1988 Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men, DV8, London
1989 Berlin Wall falls
Tiananmen Square demonstrations, Beijing, China
1990 The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan series of Tadeusz Kantor
operations begins (to 1993)
1992 John Cage
1994 The Temple of Confessions, Guillermo Gómez-Peña
and Roberto Sifuentes, toured USA (to 1997)
1999 Jerzy Grotowski
Jacques Lecoq
2001 World Trade Towers attacked, New York
2003 War on Iraq begins
2009 Pina Bausch
Augusto Boal
2010 Arab Spring protests begin
2011 Iraq War officially ends
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Auslander, Philip (1992) Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in
Contemporary American Performance, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
—— (1997) From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism and Postmodernism, London:
Routledge.
—— (1999) Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, London: Routledge.
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Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin: University of Texas Press.
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Press.
Banes, Sally (1987) Terpsichore in Sneakers, Hanover: Wesleyan University Press.
—— (1998) Subversive Expectations: Performance Art and Paratheater in New York 1976–85,
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—— (1994) The Paper Canoe – A Guide to Theatre Anthropology, trans. Richard Fowler,
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—— (2010) On Directing and Dramaturgy: Burning the House, London: Routledge.
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—— (2006) The Aesthetics of the Oppressed, trans. Adrian Jackson, London: Routledge.
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270
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—— (1982) The Director and the Stage: From Naturalism to Grotowski, London: Methuen.
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—— (1988) The Bread and Puppet Theatre, 2 vols, London: Methuen.
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—— (1997) Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, London: Routledge.
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—— (1968) Silence: Lectures and Writings, London: Calder and Boyars.
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—— (1993) Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey from the Greeks to the
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—— (2004) Performance: A Critical Introduction, 2nd edition, London: Routledge.
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—— (ed.) (1990) Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press.
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Politics, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
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271
 SELECT BI BLI OGRA P H Y

Chinoy, Helen Krich and Linda Walsh Jenkins (1987) Women in American Theatre, revised and
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—— (2001) Geographies of Learning: Theory and Practice, Activism and Performance,
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—— (2005) Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre, Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press.
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272
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—— (eds) (2000) The Routledge Reader in Politics and Performance, London: Routledge.
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Oxford University Press.
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Macmillan.
—— and Andy Lavender (eds) (2010) Making Contemporary Theatre: International
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Century, London: John Libbery.
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Huizinga, Johan (1970) Homo Ludens, New York: Harper.
Hurley, Erin (2010) Theatre & Feeling, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
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edition, London: Routledge.
Ince, Kate (2000) Orlan: Millennial Female, Oxford and New York: Berg.
Innes, Christopher (ed.) (2000) A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre, London: Routledge.
—— and Maria Shevtsova (2013) The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Directing,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
—— (eds) (2013) Directors/Directing: Conversations on Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Jackson, Shannon (2003) Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to
Performativity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
—— (2011) Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics, Oxon: Routledge.
Johnson, Dominic, (ed.) (2012) Pleading in the Blood: The Art and Performances of Ron
Athey, London and Bristol: Live Art Development Agency and Intellect.

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—— (ed.) (2013) Critical Live Art: Contemporary Histories of Performance in the UK, Oxon:
Routledge.
Johnstone, Keith (1981) Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre, London: Eyre Methuen.
Jones, Amelia (1998) Body Art: Performing the Subject, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Kaye, Nick (1994) Postmodernism and Performance, London: Macmillan.
—— (1996) Art into Theatre: Performance Interviews and Documents, Amsterdam: Harwood
Academic Publishers.
Keefe, John and Simon Murray (2007) Physical Theatres: A Critical Reader, London:
Routledge.
—— (2007) Physical Theatres: A Critical Introduction, London: Routledge.
Kendrick, Lynne and David Roesner (eds) (2011) Theatre Noise: The Sound of Performance,
Newcastle: Cambridge University Scholars.
Kennedy, Dennis (ed.) (2003) The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance, 2 vols,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kershaw, Baz (1992) The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention,
London: Routledge.
—— (1999) The Radical in Performance: Between Brecht and Baudrillard, London:
Routledge.
Kirby, Michael and Victoria Nes Kirby ([1971] 1986) Futurist Performance, New York: PAJ
Publications.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara (1998) Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage,
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Klein, Susan Blakley (1988) Ankoko Buto: The Premodern and Postmodern Influences on the
Dance of Utter Darkness, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Kleymeyer, Charles David (ed.) (1994) Cultural Expression and Grassroots Development:
Cases from Latin America and the Caribbean, Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner.
Klosty, James (ed.) (1975) Merce Cunningham, New York: Dutton.
Knowles, Ric (2004) Reading the Material Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kuhns, David F. (1997) German Expressionist Theatre: The Actor and the Stage, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Laban, Rudolf von (1960) A Life for Dance, trans. Lisa Ullman, New York: Theatre Arts
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—— (2011) Choreutics, Hampshire: Dance Books Ltd.
Law, Alma and Mel Gordon (2012) Meyerhold, Eisenstein and Biomechanics: Actor Training
in Revolutionary Russia, Jefferson: Macfarland & Co.
Lecoq, Jacques with Jean-Gabriel Carasso and Jean-Claude Lallias (2000) The Moving Body,
Teaching Creative Theatre, trans. David Bradby, foreword by Simon McBurney, London:
Methuen.
—— (2006) Theatre of Movement and Gesture, trans. David Bradby, London: Routledge.
Ledger, Adam J. (2012) Odin Teatret: Theatre in a New Century, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Lehmann, Hans-Thies ([1999] 2006) Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby, Oxon:
Routledge.
Lommel, Andreas (1981) Masks: Their Meaning and Function, New York: Excalibur Books.
Luckhurst, Mary (2006) Dramaturgy: a Revolution in Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

275
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Machon, Josephine (2013) Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary

Performance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
McAuley, Gay (1999) Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre, Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press.
McAvinchey, Caoimhe (2011) Theatre & Prison, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
McCaw, Dick (ed.) (2011) The Laban Sourcebook, Oxon: Routledge.
McConachie, Bruce and F. Elizabeth Hart (eds) (2010) Performance and Cognition, London:
Routledge.
McGrath, John (1981) A Good Night Out: Popular Theatre: Audience, Class and Form,
London: Eyre Methuen.
McKenzie, Jon (2001) Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance, London: Routledge.
Mackintosh, Iain (1993) Architecture, Actor and Audience, London and New York: Routledge.
Malkin, Jeanette R. (1999) Memory-Theater and Postmodern Drama, Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press.
Marranca, Bonnie (ed.) ([1977] 1996) The Theatre of Images, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
—— and Gautam Dasgupta (eds) (1991) Interculturalism and Performance: Writings from
PAJ, New York: PAJ Publications.
Martin, Carol (ed.) (1996) A Sourcebook of Feminist Theatre: On and Beyond the Stage,
London: Routledge.
Mayer, David and Kenneth Richards (eds) (1977) Western Popular Theatre, London: Methuen.
Melzer, Annabelle Henkin ([1976] 1994) Dada and Surrealist Performance, Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Mermikides, Alex and Jackie Smart (2010) Devising in Process, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Mitter, Shomit (1993) Systems of Rehearsal: Stanislavsky, Brecht, Grotowski and Brook,
London: Routledge.
—— and Maria Shevtsova (eds) (2005) Fifty Key Theatre Directors, London: Routledge.
Murray, Timothy (1997) Drama Trauma: Specters of Race and Sexuality in Performance,Video
and Art, London: Routledge.
Nelson, Robin (2013) Practice as Research in the Arts, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Nicholson, Helen (2005) Applied Drama: The Gift of Theatre, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Noueihed, Lin and Alex Warren (2012) The Battle for the Arab Spring: Revolution, Counter-
revolution and the Making of a New Era, New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Oddey, Alison (1994) Devising Theatre: A Practical and Theoretical Handbook, London:
Routledge.
Oliveira, Nicolas de, Nicola Oxley and Michael Petry (1994) Installation Art, London: Thames
and Hudson.
Orlan (1996) This Is My Body . . . This Is My Software, London: Black Dog.
—— (2004) Orlan: Carnal Art, trans. Deke Dusinberre, Paris: Editions Flammarion.
Orozco, Lourdes (2013) Theatre & Animals, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Parker, Andrew and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (eds) (1995) Performativity and Performance,
London: Routledge.
Pavis, Patrice (1982) Languages of the Stage, New York: PAJ Publications.
—— (1992) Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, trans. Loren Kruger, London: Routledge.
—— (ed.) (1996) The Intercultural Performance Reader, London: Routledge.

276
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—— (1998) Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts, and Analysis, trans. Christine Shantz,
Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
—— (2003) Analyzing Performance: Theater, Dance and Film, trans. David Williams, Ann
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—— (2013) Contemporary Mise–en-scène: Staging Theatre Today, trans. Joel Anderson,
London: Routledge.
Pearson, Mike and Michael Shanks (2001) Theatre/Archaeology, London: Routledge.
Phelan, Peggy (1993) Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, London: Routledge.
—— (1997) Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories, London: Routledge.
—— (ed.) (2012) Live Art in LA: Performance in Southern California, 1970–1983, London:
Routledge.
—— and Jill Lane (eds) (1998) The Ends of Performance, New York: New York University
Press.
Pickering, Kenneth ([2005] 2010) Key Concepts in Drama and Performance, Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
—— and Jayne Thompson (2013) Naturalism in Theatre, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Pollock, Della (ed.) (1998) Exceptional Spaces: Essays in Performance and History, Chapel
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Postlewait, Thomas (2009) The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography,
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—— (2010) The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott, London and New York: Verso.
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Routledge.
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Richards, Thomas (2008) Heart of Practice: within the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and
Thomas Richards, London: Routledge.
Ridout, Nicholas (2007) Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Riggio, Milla Cozart (2004) Carnival, London: Routledge.
Roach, Joseph (1996) Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, New York: Columbia
University Press.
Routledge Performance Archive. www.routledgeperformancearchive.com
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Sandford, Mariellen (ed.) (1995) Happenings and Other Acts, London: Routledge.
Savran, David (1986) Breaking the Rules: The Wooster Group, New York: Theatre
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Schechner, Richard ([1973] 1994) Environmental Theater, New York: Applause Books.
—— ([1977] 1988) Performance Theory, London: Routledge.

277
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—— (1985) Between Theater and Anthropology, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania

Press.
—— (1993) The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance, London: Routledge.
—— ([2002] 2013) Performance Studies: An Introduction, London: Routledge.
—— and Willa Appel (eds) (1990) By Means of Performance: Intercultural Studies of Theatre
and Ritual, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
—— and Lisa Wolford (eds) (1997) The Grotowski Sourcebook, London: Routledge.
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—— (2011) Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment, London:
Routledge.
—— and Gabrielle Cody (eds) (2002) Re:Direction: A Theoretical and Practical Guide,
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Schutzman, Mady and Jan Cohen-Cruz (eds) (1994) Playing Boal: Theatre, Therapy and
Activism, London: Routledge.
Servos, Norbert (1984) Pina Bausch Wuppertal Dance Theater, or, the Art of Training a
Goldfish: Excursions into Dance, trans. Patricia Stadié, Cologne: Ballett-Bühnen Verlag.
Shank, Theodore (2002) Beyond the Boundaries: American Alternative Theatre, revised and
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Shaughnessy, Nicola (2012) Applying Performance: Live Art, Socially Engaged Theatre and
Affective Practice, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Shepherd, Simon and Mick Wallis (2004) Drama/Theatre/Performance, London: Routledge.
Shyer, Laurence (1989) Robert Wilson and His Collaborators, New York: Theatre
Communications Group.
Simon, Ronald T. and Marc Estrin (2004) Rehearsing with Gods: Photographs and Essays on
the Bread and Puppet Theatre, Vermont: Chelsea Green Books.
Smith, Marquard (ed.) (2007) Stelarc: The Monograph, Cambridge, Mass: MIT.
Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson (eds) (2002) Interfaces: Women/Autobiography/Image/
Performance, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
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Methuen.
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Sprinkle, Annie (1998) Annie Sprinkle, Post-Porn Modernist: My Twenty-Five Years as a
Multimedia Whore, revised and updated edition, San Francisco: Cleis Press.
—— (2001) Hardcore from the Heart: The Pleasures, Profits and Politics of Sex in
Performance: Annie Sprinkle: Solo, Gabrielle Cody (ed.), London: Continuum.
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—— (2008) An Actor’s Work, trans. and ed. Jean Benedetti, London: Routledge.
—— (2009) An Actor’s Work on a Role, trans. and ed. Jean Benedetti, London: Routledge.
States, Bert O. (1985) Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater,
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Stelarc (2005) Stelarc: The Body is Obsolete, Melbourne: Contemporary Arts Media. DVD
and CD-ROM.
Sternfeld, Jessica (2006) The Megamusical, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indianapolis
University Press.

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Stiles, Kristine, Guy Brett, Hubert Klocker, Shinichiro Osaki and Paul Schimmel (1998) Out
of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949–1979, London: Thames and
Hudson.
Striff, Erin (ed.) (2003) Performance Studies, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Suzuki, Tadashi (1986) The Way of Acting, New York: Theatre Communications Group.
Taylor, Diana (1997) Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s
‘Dirty War’, Durham: Duke University Press.
Thompson, James (2009) Performance Affects: Applied Theatre and the End of Effect,
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Turner, Cathy and Synne Behrndt (2007) Dramaturgy and Performance, Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
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—— (1974) Drama, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society, Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press.
—— (1982) From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, New York: Performing
Arts Journal Press.
—— (1986) The Anthropology of Performance, New York: PAJ Publications.
Ubersfeld, Anne (1999) Reading Theatre, trans. Frank Collins, Toronto: University of Toronto
Press.
Viala, Jean and Nourit Masson-Sekine (eds) (1988) Butoh: Shades of Darkness, Tokyo:
Shufunotomo Co. Ltd.
Warr, Tracey (ed.), survey by Amelia Jones (2000) The Artist’s Body, London: Phaidon.
Watson, Ian and colleagues (2002) Negotiating Cultures – Eugenio Barba and the Intercultural
Debates, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Welton, Martin (2012) Feeling Theatre, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Wiles, David (2003) A Short History of Western Performance Space, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
—— and Christine Dymkowski (eds) (2012), The Cambridge Companion to Theatre History,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Willett, John (ed.) (1964) Brecht on Theatre, London: Methuen.
Williams, David (ed.) (1991) Peter Brook and The Mahabharata: Critical Perspectives,
London: Routledge.
Zarrilli, Phillip B. (ed.) (2002) Acting (Re)Considered: A Theoretical and Practical Guide, 2nd
edition, London: Routledge.
—— (2009) Psychophysical Acting: an Intercultural Approach after Stanislavski, with DVD,
Oxon: Routledge.
—— Bruce McConachie, Gary J. Williams, Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei (2010) Theatre Histories:
An Introduction, 2nd edition, Oxon: Routledge.
—— Jerri Daboo and Rebecca Loukes (2013), Acting: Psychophysical Phenomenon and
Process, Basingstoke: Palgrave.

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SELECT JOURNALS

Contemporary Theatre Review

TDR: The Drama Review: The Journal of Performance Studies
Theatre, Dance and Performance Training
The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism
Modern Drama
NTQ: New Theatre Quarterly
PAJ: Performing Arts Journal
Performance Research
Theater
Theatre Journal
Theatre Research International
Theatre Topics

280
 INDEX

Page numbers in italics indicate pages with figures.

4’ 33” 5, 18, 42, 99–100, 169 affect 8, 22, 45, 58, 99, 115, 133,
4 Scenes in a Harsh Life 23 149–51, 153, 230
18 Happenings in 6 Parts 191 African theatre 7, 66, 198, 214, 253
Akaji, Maro 160
Abba 229 Akropolis 54, 204
Abdoh, Reza 22 Albee, Edward 238, 254
abject, theories of the 70, 238 Alcestis 18, 90
Abramović, Marina 15–17, 21, 90, 129, Alfred Jarry Theatre 20
150, 153, 159, 177, 185, 196, 210, Alice in Bed 90
220–2, 231, 244, 251 ALIE/N A(C)TION 51
Absurd, Theatre of the 103–4, 109, alienation 37, 93, 102, 131
140–2, 169, 183, 189, 240, 251, All Blacks 117–8, 117
254–5 Aller à la mer 45
Acconci, Vito 221 American Beauty 175
acting 5, 20, 32, 36, 46, 54, 56, 58, 67, Anderson, Laurie 5, 17–19, 24, 42, 90,
83–4, 102, 106, 116, 131, 147–8, 133, 185, 195, 211, 214, 220, 232,
150, 155, 161, 169, 174, 182, 183, 233, 250, 258
190, 194, 208, 214, 217, 219, 232, Andrews, Raymond 90
235, 243, 251, 257, 258; acting animals 59, 107, 151–2, 227, 228, 240,
process 36, 152, 253; believability 258; animal energy 87, 151; animal
83, 174, 201, 215 play 244; animal rituals 244
Acting Out 72 Annie Sprinkle’s Herstory of Porn, from
‘Actions’ 107–8, 190 Reel to Real 81
active culture 55, 217 anthropology 3, 53, 71, 75, 88, 103,
activism 32, 45, 54, 82, 152, 162, 194, 244, 252–3; see also theatre
236–7 anthropology
‘actor’s paradox’ 147–8 Anthropométries 70
actor–audience relationship anti-theatrical prejudice 148
see performer–audience Antigone’s Claim 41
relationship Antoine, André 174, 216
Admiring La Argentina 57 Apocalypsis cum Figuris 54
Adorno, T.W. 30, 207 Appia, Adolphe 183, 246
Affective Athleticism’, ‘An 19 applied theatre 9, 33, 73, 152–4

281
 I NDEX

Arab Spring 3, 4, 65, 100–1, 137, 150, aura 30, 235, 236
237 Auslander, Philip 72, 176, 203–4, 213,
Arcades Project 31 232, 233
Archaos 165 Austin, John 222, 223
Arden, John 37 auteur directors 58, 90, 116, 174, 188,
Arien 28 226, 242, 246, 259
Aristotle 33, 94, 150, 156, 157, 215 autobiographical performance 19, 28,
Art of Movement Studio 59 81, 111, 220
Art as Vehicle 55–6 autobiography 22, 92, 185, 257
Art/Life One Year Performance 221 Avignon Festival 113, 114, 115, 121,
Artaud, Antonin 19–22, 38, 56, 73, 102, 127, 128, 187
103, 106, 128, 129, 142, 143, 147,
150, 155, 169, 193, 198, 201, 208, B, Franko 159, 238
210, 224, 226, 238, 244, 245, 259 Bacchae, The 86, 112
Artist is Present, The 16 Baker, Bobby 185, 220, 221
Asian performance 7, 27, 32, 75, 94, Bakhtin, Mikhail 2, 24–5, 163, 237
102, 103, 147, 154–6, 161, 169, Balcony, The 75
198, 204, 205, 210, 214, 225, 229, Balinese Character: A Photographic
240, 244, 253, 257; see also Analysis 102
Balinese dance-theatre; Beijing Balinese dance-theatre 20, 102–3, 155,
Opera; Bunraku puppetry; Chinese 244; shadow puppetry 240
theatre; and Noh theatre; Japanese Balkan Baroque 16, 196, 221
theatre; Kathakali Ball, Hugo 168
Athey, Ron 8, 21, 22–4, 69, 82, 129, ballet 27, 28, 50, 51, 155, 170, 210, 253
133, 136, 150, 159, 221, 223, 238 Bancroft, Anne 123
Atlas, Charles 49 Banes, Sally 139, 170, 218
audience 156–8; challenges to 16, 29, Barba, Eugenio 25–7, 32, 56, 67, 84,
130, 157, 159, 163, 168; 94, 136, 151, 154, 155, 174, 198,
confessions 16, 53, 111, 136, 200; 214, 252–3, 256, 257
contact 113, 128, 180; engagement Barrault, Jean-Louis 46
16, 23, 36, 74, 115, 119, 136, 172, barters 25, 26, 154
183, 212, 235, 192–5; feminist Barthes, Roland 231, 247
theories 238; meaning making 42, Bataille, Georges 22
49; participation 255–6; Bateson, Gregory 102
provocation 23, 29, 53, 99, 119, Batt, Mike 99
131, 140, 150, 151, 165, 166, 172, Baudelaire, Charles 31
180, 187, 193, 201; reading 94; Baudrillard, Jean 231
suspension of belief 215; see also Bausch, Pina 27–30, 59, 111, 151, 169,
spectators and spectatorship 170, 172, 184, 185, 209, 225, 231,
audience–performer interaction 104, 232, 258, 259
112, 127–8, 136, 180, 196, 197, Beauty and the Beast 80, 206
203–4, 246, 249 Beck, Julian 128
audience–performer relationship 15, Beckett, Samuel 87, 91, 141–2, 157,
54–5, 143, 192–4, 257 189, 224, 254

282
 I NDEX

behaviour; animalistic 151–2, 227; body-mind 256

performance as description of 218; Bogart, Anne 87, 155, 242
performative analysis 52 Boleslavsky, Richard 84
Behaviour in Public Places 52 Born in the RSA 66
Beijing Opera 37 Bouazizi, Mohammed 100
Belle Reprieve 80 boxing ring 37, 135
Bellywoman Bangarang 77 Boyle, Danny 125
Belo, Jane 102 Boyle, Jimmy 108
Benjamin, Walter 2, 8, 30–1, 38, 206, Brace Up! 93
211, 235, 236 ‘bread and circuses’ 164
Berkoff, Steven 60 Bread and Puppet Theatre 34–6, 35, 48,
Berliner Ensemble 36, 123–5, 123 77, 95, 137, 152, 163, 229, 237,
Beuys, Joseph 107–8, 151, 182, 190, 240, 251
221, 244 breathing, training of 19
Bharatamuni 94 Brecht, Bertold 24, 30, 33, 36–8,
Bharucha, Rustom 3, 26, 31–3, 39, 76, 73, 102, 123–5, 135, 141, 147,
122, 199, 253 150, 157, 166, 169, 174, 183,
Bing, Suzanne 47 194, 198, 201, 204, 211, 214,
biomechanics 67, 68, 116, 134 216, 219, 229, 249, 251, 256,
Birtwhistle, Harrison 214 259
Bishop, Claire 153 Brecht, George 190
BITE Festival 7 Brenton, Howard 172
Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Breuer, Lee 259
Bullets 90 Brith Gof 180
black theatre 192 Broadway 93, 157, 204, 206–8
Blast Theory 200, 211 Brook, Peter 21, 32, 38–40, 55, 66, 94,
blocking 123, 241, 242 105, 121–2, 136, 155, 187, 198,
Bloody Mess 241 214, 228, 229, 248, 249, 250, 251,
Blue Beard 28 259
Boal, Augusto 33–4, 38, 73, 77, 152, Brown, Trisha 18
153, 157, 173, 180, 196, 197, 217, bullfighting 134
227, 229, 249, 251, 255–6 Bunraku puppetry 56
Bodies that Matter 41 Burden, Chris 21, 132–4, 132, 159,
body; as artistic medium 221; medical 182
objectification 129; as site for Burroughs, William S. 90
feminist campaigning 81–2 Burton, Richard 93
body adornment 159, 204–5, 239 Buss Out 77
body art 9, 15, 22, 69, 86, 111, 149, Butler, Judith 2, 29, 40–1, 82, 89, 159,
158–9, 167, 185, 196, 203, 205, 161, 185, 205, 218, 220, 223, 224,
219, 221, 251 228
body artists see Abramović; Anderson; butoh 56, 57, 59, 150, 155, 160–1, 184,
Orlan; Sprinkle; Stelarc 209, 225
‘Body, Brain and Culture’ 88–9 Butoh Genet 57
body suspensions 159, 200 Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds 90

283
 I NDEX

Cabaret Voltaire 3, 103–4, 168, 169, circus 39, 63, 67, 151, 156, 164–6, 204,
180, 189, 190, 220, 240 218, 225, 228, 229, 257
Cabinet of Dr Caligari, The 183 Cirque du Soleil 63, 151, 165, 180, 229
Cage, John 5, 18, 41–3, 49, 99–100, CIRT (Centre International de
169, 190, 195, 214 Recherche Théâtrale) 39
Caillois, Roger 227 CIVIL warS 90, 91
camp 52, 80, 129, 161–2 Cixous, Hélène 2, 45–6, 60, 71, 185,
Camus, Albert 254 238
Can You See Me Now? 200 classical dance 27, 28, 51, 170
CanDoCo 170 Classical Graffiti 99
Caplan, Elliot 49 classical theatre 38, 40, 45, 79
carnal art 130 Clayburgh, Jim 92
carnival 24, 33, 35, 75, 77, 162, Closer 200
163–4, 180, 181, 187, 227, 229, Cloud Nine 172
237 Clowns, The 165
Carrière, Jean-Claude 121 Cocteau, Jean 63
Carrier Frequency, The 177 codified performance 102, 155, 210, 257
Cartesian dualism 224 collaboration 26, 42, 49, 62, 67, 149,
Caserne Dalhousie 62, 63 174, 195
Castellucci, Claudio 242 colonialism 45, 78–9, 102, 118, 172
Castle of Holstebro, The 25 Comédie-Française 47, 230
catharsis 33, 157 commedia 47, 60, 67, 140, 172, 195,
Cats 26, 206, 207, 229 204, 229, 254
Caucasian Chalk Circle, The 36, 204 Commune 75
Cenci, The 21 communication; ritualistic 16; theatre as
Certeau, Michel de 181 vehicle for 112, 256
Chairs, The 254 communitas 157
chance 18, 42, 49, 99, 135, 169, 195 Conference of the Birds, The 39
charisma 212, 235, 257 Confessional, The 63
Charleroi Danses/Plan K 171 Constant Prince, The 54, 55, 106–7,
Charnock, Nigel 111 251
Chaudhuri, Una 39 constructivist scenography 68, 163, 246
Cheek by Jowl 174 consumer culture 31, 130, 162, 221,
Chekhov, Anton 67, 84, 87, 93, 104–5, 231, 236
201, 216 contact improvisation 139, 195
Cherry Orchard, The 84, 104–5, 216 cop-in-the-head 33
Chiaroscuro Sewing 69 Copeau, Jacques 7, 46–8, 152, 205, 229
Childs, Lucinda 90, 113, 114 Cottesloe Studio 252
Chinese theatre 37 Coyote: I Like America and America
Christo 43–5, 197 Likes Me 107–8, 151, 182, 190,
Churchill, Caryl 172 221, 244
CICT (Centre International de Créations Craig, Edward Gordon 47, 48–9, 57, 58,
Théâtrales) 39, 121 94, 183, 189, 201, 239, 240, 246
Cieślak, Ryszard 38, 55, 106 Crommelynck, Fernand 117

284
 I NDEX

cross-cultural performance 8, 26, 32, Death and the King’s Horseman 78

87, 103, 106 deconstructive performance 26, 50, 131,
Crucible, The 92 219
Cruelty, Theatre of 19, 20, 21, 38, 129, Decreation 51
143 Decroux, Etienne 46
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly 227 deep play 227
cultural assumptions, challenges to 93, Deliverance 23
130, 136, 163, 232 Democracy’s Body 170
cultural identity 161–2, 181, 205, 221, demonstration performances 34, 229
231, 236 demonstrations 5, 75, 127, 128, 133,
cultural materialism 30, 166–8 137–8, 184, 190, 229, 236–7, 240,
Cunningham, Merce 42, 49–50, 170, 251
190 Dench, Judi 123
Cunningham technique 170 Deren, Maya 171
Derrida, Jacques 20
Dada 24, 103, 104, 140, 142, 157, devised theatre 28, 38, 45, 77, 112, 147,
168–9, 180, 183, 189, 216, 219, 161, 178, 180, 195, 228, 231, 242,
220, 254 246, 259
Dadaists 190, 240 devising 172–3
Dafoe, Willem 92 dialogism 24
Dairakudakan 160 Diderot, Denis 147
Dalí, Salvador 168 digital technologies 8, 50, 70, 176, 202,
dance 5, 7, 8, 20, 21, 59, 71, 75, 92, 93, 214
114, 125, 131, 134, 135, 143, 149, Dine, Jim 190
154, 160–1, 163, 165, 169–71, 187, Dionysus 87
189, 193, 209, 210, 214, 218, 220, Dionysus in 69 15, 75, 112–13, 127,
224, 225, 257; contemporary 49; 139, 177, 180
experimental 51, 138, 168; dioramas, living 53, 136, 212
expressive 23; feminist 185–6; directing 173–6
improvisational 28, 195; director–designer teams 48, 246
postmodern 138–9, 232; see also Disney 206
butoh; haka Dobkin, Jess 193
dance theatre 27–9, 110–1, 154, 192 see documentation 8, 30, 50, 51, 103, 133,
also Balinese dance-theatre 176–8, 203, 214, 234, 235, 242
Darwin, Charles 216 Dolan, Jill 80, 150
Dasté, Jean 46 Dollimore, Jonathan 167
Davis, Miles 63 Doll’s House, A 216
Dead Class, The 57, 108–10 Domestic Resurrection Circus and
Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men 21, Pageant, The 34
110–11, 170, 225 Domesticks 77
deadly theatre 39 Donnellan, Declan 174
Deafman Glance 90 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 24, 54
Deak, Frantisek 143 Downpression Get a Blow 77
Death of the Author’, ‘The 231, 248 Dr Faustus 54

285
 I NDEX

Dr Faustus Lights the Lights 91, 93 epic theatre 30, 37, 157, 166, 169, 219
Dragon’s Trilogy, The 62 Esslin, Martin 142, 254–5
Drama in Performance 167 Eurasian theatre 26, 32
Drama Review, The 75 Eurocrash dance movement 111, 134,
dramatherapy 217 170, 225
Dramatic Theatre 37 everyday life 28, 34, 52, 75, 83, 105,
dramaturgy 25, 32, 36, 79, 88, 104, 167, 107, 111, 128, 134, 138, 140, 159,
174, 178–9, 181, 225, 234, 257 161, 181–2, 205, 216, 220, 228;
dramaturgs 179, 242 body art 15, 159; happenings 190;
Dream Play, A/The 21, 63, 115, 238 bridging of performance and 107,
Drowned Man, The 193 141, 161; queer activism 162;
Duchamp, Marcel 42 theatrical devices in 138;
Duets on Ice 17 truthfulness to 83
Dullin, Charles 46 everyday movement 28, 42, 139, 170,
durational art 16, 182, 210, 221 209–10, 220
DV8 Physical Theatre 21, 29, 110–11, evolutionary theory 216
170, 172, 225 Ex Machina 62
Excitable Speech 41
economics 77, 80, 123, 230 existentialism 224, 225
écriture féminine 45, 71, 185 Exorcism of Violence and the Sexual
Edinburgh Fringe Festival 187 Revolution’, ‘The 128
Edinburgh International Festival 7, 187 experimental theatre 34, 38, 75, 88, 94,
Edinburgh People’s Festival 156 125, 142
ego 238 expressionism 28, 160, 169, 183–4, 219
Einstein on the Beach 90, 113–6, 114 expressionistic design 35
Elam, Keir 247
Electra complex 238 family dramas 238
Eliot, T.S. 206 Fang, Mei Lan 37, 102
Emin, Tracey 196 Far Side of the Moon, The 18, 62, 63,
emotion 8, 15, 16, 19, 21, 27, 28, 37, 240
48, 57, 71, 90, 93, 106, 119, 130, Faust 193
131, 134, 147, 148, 149–51, 157, Faust/Gastronome 75
161, 172, 183, 201, 221, 232, 243, Fee for Service 193
249 feeling 8, 16, 18, 19, 23, 45, 53, 55,
emotion memory 83, 150 101, 123, 133, 136, 149–51, 157,
Empty Space, The 39, 228, 249 159, 169, 193, 203, 206, 223, 224,
Encounters 52 230, 235, 238, 240, 241
Ends of Performance, The 72 Fellini, Federico 165
endurance 15, 22, 159, 221 female audience/spectatorship 45
English, Rose 151 feminism 9, 45, 71, 72, 81, 82, 129,
environmental theatre 35, 75, 157, 184–6, 220
179–81, 182, 190, 193, 197, 225, feminist artists 69, 129, 158
246; see also Bread and Puppet feminist dance 185
Theatre feminist suffragettes 237

286
 I NDEX

feminist theatre 80–1, 185 Geometry of Miracles 62, 63

feminists 40, 45, 69, 81, 157, 185 Georg II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen 173
Ferdydurke 109 Gerz, Jochen and Esther 119
Festival Dionysia 187 Gesamtkunstwerk 213
festivals 25, 47, 75, 136, 163, 180, 181, Gestus 37, 123, 256, 259
187–8, 229; see also theatre Ghosts 216
festivals Gilbert and George 159
fetish 31, 69, 238 Glass, Philip 90, 113–6
Finley, Karen 158, 220 Godwin, Edward William 48
Fire 34 Goethe 75
fluxus movement 75, 107 Goffman, Erving 2, 52–3, 180, 181–2,
Flying Circus 156 218, 228
Fo, Dario 60, 135, 229 Gogol, Nikolai 68, 116–7
Foot Washing for the Sole 193 Gombrowicz, Witold 109
Forced Entertainment 93, 148, 172, 202, Goméz-Peña, Guillermo 24, 53–4, 69,
241 129, 136–7, 153, 196, 198, 200,
Foreman, Richard 259 212, 220, 232, 244
Forsythe, William 8, 27, 49, 50–2, 170 Government Inspector, The 68, 116–7
Forsythe Company, The 50, 171 Graham, Martha 49, 170, 209
Forum Theatre 33, 157, 173, 196, 255 Grain of the Voice’, ‘The 248
Fountain 42 grand narratives 192, 196, 221, 231
Four Plays for Dancers 102 Gray, Spalding 92, 220
Frantic Assembly 111 Great Day in the Morning 90
Freed, James Ingo 119 grotesque style 68, 109, 111, 116, 140,
Freeing the Voice 15 204
Freire, Paolo de 33, 255 Grotowski, Jerzy 7, 21, 25, 31, 38,
Freud, Sigmund 20, 238 54–6, 66, 75, 84, 89, 94, 106–7,
Fried, Michael 197 136, 151, 155, 157, 179, 193, 198,
Fringe theatre 252 204, 214, 217, 226, 244, 251, 257
Fugard, Athol 66 Gurawski, Jerzy 54, 106
Fusco, Coco 54, 212 Gutai theatre 190
futurism 157, 168, 183, 188–9, 211, 219
haka 9, 117–8, 117, 227, 244
Gance, Abel 20 Halprin, Anna and Lawrence 61, 242
Garner, Stanton B. 224 Hamlet 48, 75
gay theatre 192 HAMLET 93
Geertz, Clifford 224, 227 Hamlet: A Monologue 91
gender identity 40, 41, 70, 184, 223, Handke, Peter 157
228 Hapgood, Elizabeth 84
gender issues 77, 172, 184–5, 253 happenings 17, 21, 58, 73, 99, 103, 107,
Gender Trouble 40 137, 151, 169, 180, 189–91, 193,
Genet, Jean 22, 56, 254 195, 203, 214, 218, 220, 229, 237,
genetics 216 244, 248, 251, 255
Gennep, Arnold van 88 Happy Days 91

287
 I NDEX

Hardcore from the Heart 81 Imagining O 75

Hare, David 216 imitative animal exercises 152
Hart, Lynda 72 immersive theatre 21, 55, 112, 157, 180,
Heidegger, Martin 224 192–5, 197, 200, 246, 248
Helms, Jesse 23 improvisation 28, 39, 47, 61, 77, 128,
Hennings, Emmy 104 135, 139, 147, 152, 161, 172, 185,
heritage sites 213 188, 190, 194, 195–6, 218, 220,
HIBIKI – Resonance from Far Away 225, 228, 238, 242, 256
160 Indiad, or the India of their Dreams,
Hijikata, Tatsumi 56–7, 160 The 45
Hirst, Damien 197 Indian performance see Kathakali
historiography 185, 191–2, 212 installation art 16, 44, 51, 53, 91, 108,
Holocaust memorials and museums 10, 136, 157, 180, 190, 192, 196–8,
118–20, 150, 212, 239 200, 212, 221, 237, 245, 246, 248
holy actors 55, 106, 155 intercultural theatre 26, 32, 39, 53, 75,
holy theatre 155 86, 105, 121–2, 198–9
Horkheimer, Max 207 interculturalism 1, 7, 32, 63, 66, 70, 75,
House with the Ocean View, The 16 76, 87, 102–3, 118, 136, 143, 147,
House/Lights 93 154, 163, 188, 198–9, 207, 214,
Howells, Adrian 193 225, 230, 253
How to Explain Pictures to a Dead International School of Theatre
Hare 108 Anthropology 26
Hsieh, Tehching 221 internet-based performance 18, 53, 85,
Hughes, Ted 39 86, 136, 159, 171, 199–201, 211
Huizinga, Johan 227 Interruption in Space 15
Husserl, Edmund 224 invisible theatre 153, 157, 173, 180,
hybridity 27, 53–4, 70, 79, 81, 118, 122, 217, 255
136, 143, 154, 155, 158, 163, 165, Ionesco, Eugene 254
197, 198, 214, 220, 221, 232 Isozaki, Arata 87
hyperrealism 20 Ito, Mr 102
It’s Not the Bullet that Kills You – It’s
Ibsen, Henrik 91, 216, 238 the Hole 133
id 238
identity; masking 204; performance art Jackson, Glenda 123
221; performativity of 18, 40–1, 80, Jamaican theatre 77–8
159, 222–3; questioning Japanese theatre 75, 86, 93, 94–5, 102,
categorisation of 29, 53; see also 155, 161, 205; see also butoh;
cultural identity; gender identity; Kabuki; Noh theatre
queer identity; sexual identity Jarry, Alfred 20, 140–1, 169, 240, 254
identity politics 111, 184 Jay-Z 17
Ignorant Schoolmaster, The 73 Jeanne-Claude 43–5, 197
Image Mill, The 63 Jerry Springer the Opera 214
Image Theatre 256 Jewish Museum, Berlin 119, 120, 212
Imaginary Landscapes No. 4 42 Jeyasingh, Shobhana 135

288
 I NDEX

‘John Cage Uncaged’ 99 Kukai/Akopeenein/Brown cross/Fat

Johns, Jasper 42 corners/Model fat corners 107
Joint Stock 172 Kusama, Yayoi 158
Jooss, Kurt 28, 59
Jouvet, Louis 46 La Fura dels Baus 21, 125, 225
Judas Cradle 22 Laban, Rudolf von 50, 59–60, 67, 169,
Judson Dance Theatre 42, 138, 139, 171, 209
170, 189 Labanotation 59
Laboratory Theatre 25, 55, 257
KÀ 63 Lady Gaga 17
KA MOUNTain and GUARDenia Lane, Jill 72
Terrace 90 Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo 3,
Kabuki 87, 161, 229, 253 64–5, 64, 100, 120, 138, 150, 185,
Kafka, Franz 254 237, 239
Kaiser, Georg 183 Laugh of the Medusa, The 45
Kammer/Kammer 51 Laukvik, Elsa Marie 25
Kane, Sarah 7 Leary, Timothy 92
Kantor, Tadeusz 48, 57–8, 103, 108–10, Lebel, Jean-Jacques 190
174, 190, 226, 231, 232, 239, 242, L’Ecole Internationale de Théâtre
246, 248, 258 Jacques Lecoq 60
Kaprow, Allan 190, 191 LeCompte, Elizabeth 92, 131
Kaspariana 25 Lecoq, Jacques 7, 46, 47, 60–1, 152,
Kathakali 75, 147, 155, 204, 210, 229, 172, 205, 209, 258
257 Le Dernier Caravansérail 45
Keersmaeker, Anna Teresa de 170 Lefebvre, Henri 181
Kershaw, Baz 233, 237 Legislative Theatre 33, 153, 256
Kester, Grant 153 Lehmann, Hans-Thies 230–1
kinetic scenography 116 Lehrstücke 36
King Lear 38 Leigh, Mike 172
Kinjiki 56–7 Lepage, Robert 18, 61–4, 172, 174, 187,
Kirby, Michael 148, 182, 190 198, 211, 232, 240, 242, 250, 258,
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara 212 259
Kiss of the Artist, The 69–70 Les Bouffes du Nord 39, 40, 105
Kitchen Show 221 Les Copiaus 47
kitchen-sink drama 216 lesbian theatre 80–1, 192
Klein, Yves 70, 158 Lesbians who Kill 80
Knapp, Alain 61 Les Misérables 206, 207
knee-plays 114 Les Naufragés du Fol Espoir 45
Knowles, Christopher 90, 115 Lessing, Gottfried Ephraim 178
Kokoschka, Oscar 183 Letter for Queen Victoria, A 90, 113
Kott, Jan 39 Libeskind, Daniel 119, 120, 212
Krapp’s Last Tape 91 Life and Death of Marina Abramović,
Kroetz, Franz Xaver 32 The 17, 90
Kuhns, David F. 183 Life and Times of Joseph Stalin, The 90

289
 I NDEX

LifeForms software 49 McBurney, Simon 109

Life of Galileo, The 36 McCartney, Paul 199
lighting and sound 5, 20, 50, 55, 61, 92, McGrath, John 229, 230
149, 171, 172, 174, 201–2, 208, McKenzie, Jon 19, 218, 219
242, 245, 247, 251 Madame Butterfly 91
Ligue Nationale d’Improvisation 61 Madmen and Specialists 78
liminality 71, 88, 161, 165 Magdalena Project 26
liminoid 88 Magnanimous Cuckold, The 68, 117
Lindtberg, Leopold 123 Mahabharata, The 32, 39, 121–2,
Lion King, The 206, 240 199
Lips of Thomas 15 Malina, Judith 127–9
Little Women 80 Maly Theatre 242
Littlewood, Joan 59, 66 Mamma Mia 229
live art see performance art Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,
Live Art in LA 72 The 40
liveness 4, 5, 9, 18, 30, 71, 72, 73, 101, Man Who, The 39
130, 143, 147, 151, 176, 190, 192, Manim, Mannie 65, 67
193, 196, 199, 202, 203–4, 206, Mann, Sara Shelton 54
211, 213, 218, 219, 221, 228, 232, Maori dance 75, 117–8
234, 236, 239 Marat-Sade 38
Liveness 72 Marber, Patrick 200
living dioramas 53, 136, 212 Margolin, Deb 80
Living Theatre 21, 113, 127–9, 172, Marina Abramović Institute 16, 222
251 Marinetti, F.T. 188
Lloyd Webber, Andrew 206 Market Theatre 65–7
Lohengrin 91 Markham, Dewey (Sweet Papa
London International Festival of Pigmeat) 92, 130–1
Theatre 7, 187 Marlowe, Christopher 54
London International Mime Festival Marowitz, Charles 38
187 Marranca, Bonnie 259
Lorca, Federico García 238 martial artists and arts 95, 134, 218
Lord of the Flies 39 Marx, Karl 164, 216
Los Angeles Festival 187 Marxism 36, 167
Lost Lounge 80 Mask 48
Lovers, The: Walk on the Great Wall masks/masking 5, 20, 34, 35, 47, 52, 60,
15, 210 104, 107, 125, 140, 143, 163, 168,
LSD (. . . Just the High Points . . .) 92, 194, 204–5, 207, 228, 229, 239,
93 245, 249, 258; see also neutral
Lucas, Sarah 197 masks
Lust and Comfort 80 masochism 15, 57, 159, 238
Lyotard, Jean-François 192 Maxwell, Richard 150
Mayakovsky, Vladimir 68
Macbeth 156, 193 Mda, Zakes 66
Macbeth, Sleep no More 193 Mead, Margaret 102–3

290
 I NDEX

Measures Taken, The 36 mise en scène 20, 67, 109, 116, 123,
Measurings 70 149, 173, 174, 178, 191, 201,
media 4, 5, 16, 22, 44, 50, 53, 61, 66, 208–9, 238, 241, 245, 246
71, 74, 101, 109, 120, 165, 176, Mishima, Yukio 56
186, 189, 197, 202, 220, 254; mass Miss America 80
137, 203; recorded 1, 203–4; Miss Saigon 206–7, 214
saturation 231–2; social 4, 100–1, Mistero Buffo 135, 229
177, 200; visual 151; see also Mitchell, Katie 7, 184
multimedia performance Miyake, Issey 129
mediate or mediation 4, 18, 42, 51, 70, Mnouchkine, Ariane 45, 60, 154, 198,
93, 101, 166, 176, 193, 210–11 250, 259
mediatize or mediatization 101, 125, mobilization, of audience/spectator or
138, 176, 200, 203 people 75, 101, 119, 138
medical enhancement 85 model books 38, 123
medical objectification, women’s bodies Molinier, Pierre 22
129–30 monologic discourse 24
megamusicals 149, 157, 191, 206–8, monologue or monologues 18, 77, 91,
214, 229; see also musical 93, 114, 115, 183; autobiographical
performance 220
melodrama 60, 149, 191–2, 213, 215, Monstrous Regiment 172
216, 228, 251; melodramatic Montana, Linda 221
techniques 83 Monument Against Fascism, War and
memorialization 118–19 Violence – and for Peace and
Mendes, Sam 175 Human Rights 119
Merce Cunningham Dance Company 49 Monument for Ishi, A 34
Mercy, Dominique 29 Moscow Art Theatre 48, 67, 83, 105
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 224–5 Mother Courage and Her Children 36,
Metamorphosis 254 37, 124–5, 124, 141
Method acting 84, 235 Mother, The 36
Method of Physical Actions 83 motion capture 49, 171
Meyerhold, Vsevolod 67–9, 84, 104, mourning 71, 72
105, 116–17, 134, 140, 174, 183, Mourning Sex 72
204, 214, 226, 229, 242, 246 movement 20, 28–9, 48, 51, 55,
Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 39, 63 59, 60, 61, 62, 67, 68, 70, 80,
Miller, Arthur 92, 216 85, 87, 89–90, 93, 112, 114,
mime 46, 60, 187, 225, 228, 229, 253, 116, 118, 138–9, 149, 151,
254 158, 161, 172, 193, 195,
mimesis 20, 52, 102, 155, 217 209–10, 214, 220, 225, 230,
mimetic 147, 190, 214; actors 48; 236, 241, 244, 249, 253; in
enactment 187; representation 20, dance 28–9, 49, 51, 59, 114,
148, 215, 219, 251; tradition 7 138–9, 161, 169–71
Mind is a Muscle, Part 1 see Trio A mudras 20, 155
minimalism 18, 89, 104, 106, 112, 121, Muffet Inna All a We 77
138–9, 141 Müller, Heiner 90

291
 I NDEX

multimedia performance 7, 17–19, 21, New York State Council on the Arts
30, 50, 62, 69–70, 81, 92, 129, 131, 131
155, 159, 189, 200, 202, 203, 208, Newlove, Jean 59–60, 210
210–12, 220, 221, 230, 232, 236, Newson, Lloyd 111
246, 258 Newspaper Theatre 255
Munch, Edvard 183 Ngema, Mbongeni 66
Musafar, Fakir 159 Night Sea Crossing 15, 221
museum display 16, 53, 70, 115, Nitsch, Hermann 151
118–20, 212–3 Noh theatre 46, 75, 87, 94–5, 102, 155,
musical performance 5, 18, 42, 50, 66, 161, 205, 257
75, 77, 99, 168, 178, 213–15, Noises, Sounds and Sweet Airs 63
228–9; see also megamusicals non-linear performance 17, 82, 90, 114,
My Bed 196 172, 185, 230, 231–2, 238, 259
My Father’s House 25 non-matrixed performance 190
Mystery-Bouffe 68 non-theatre spaces 85, 179, 229, 255
Norman, Jessye 90
Nana Yah 77 ‘Notes on “Camp”’ 162
nano-technology 240 Notes to Soap 190
Napoléon 20 Notting Hill Carnival 163–4
National Theatre [London] 63, 176, nude 70
207, 214, 230, 241, 252 nudity 75, 113
national theatres 25, 47, 63, 65, 167, Nunn, Trevor 206
178, 230, 252 Nyman, Michael 63
naturalism 20, 36, 37, 48, 52, 67, 83–4,
90, 104–5, 140, 147, 157, 174, 183, ‘O Superman’ 18
189, 215–17, 236, 249 Objective Drama 55
naturalist acting and theatre 48, 67, O’Casey, Sean 183
83–4, 87, 89–90, 102, 105, 114, Occupy movement, the 3, 101, 128,
116, 140, 147, 155, 168–9, 174, 163, 237
201, 204, 209, 210, 215–17, 219, Odin Teatret 25–7, 56, 174, 179
228, 232, 246, 256 Oedipal complex 238
Natyasastra 94 off-Broadway 123, 249
Needles and Opium 63 off-off-Broadway 252
Neher, Caspar 37 Ohno, Kazuo 56–7, 160
Nilsen, Dennis 110–11 Old Age Pensioner’, ‘The 108–9
Nelken 28, 258 Olga’s House of Shame 93
Nemirovich-Danchenko, Vladimir 83, Olivier auditorium 252
116 Olympics 4, 10, 59, 125–7, 126, 134,
Neo-Tarzanists 79 186, 249; see also sport and
Net Art 200 Theatre Olympics Festival
neutral masks 47, 60, 205, 258; see also One Flat Thing 50
masks/masking O’Neill, Eugene 183
neutrality 60, 197, 258 One-Off Striptease with Trousseau
new vaudeville 165 Sheets 69

292
 I NDEX

one-to-one performance 157, 192–5 Paxton, Steve 139, 257

On the Origin of Species 216 pedagogy 33, 54, 73
Ontroerend Goed 193 Pedagogy of the Oppressed 33, 256
opera 28, 37, 38, 39, 62, 63, 68, 89–91, Peirce, Charles S. 247
113–16, 165, 176, 186, 206, 207, People Show 172
213, 214 Perform or Else 218, 219
operation-performances see performance analysis 3, 182, 214, 224,
Reincarnation 248
oppressed, theatre of the 33–4, 255–6 performance art 2, 5, 7, 8, 9, 15, 17, 22,
oppression 29, 33–4, 41, 45, 52, 53, 65, 41, 53, 69–70, 71, 80, 81, 85, 99,
73, 77, 78, 81, 128, 143, 159, 163, 103, 129, 132–4, 149, 158–9, 165,
164, 168, 181, 184, 185, 218, 237, 167, 169, 180, 185, 190, 191, 192,
249, 255–6 197, 203, 205, 210, 214, 216, 219,
Oresteia 75 220–2, 232, 237, 244, 246, 250,
Orghast at Persepolis 39 251
Orientalism 155–6 performance artists 2, 8, 80, 151, 177,
Orlan 15, 21, 69–71, 85, 129–30, 133, 182, 186, 195–6, 212, 248, 257; see
136, 153, 158, 180, 185, 196, 205, also Abramović; Anderson; Athey;
211, 223, 232, 238, 239, 251 Beuys; Fusco; Gómez-Peña; Orlan;
Ormerod, Nick 174 Phelan; The Reincarnation of Saint
Our Town 92, 130–1 Orlan; Schechner; Sprinkle; Shoot;
outdoor performance 35, 87, 225 Stelarc; The Temple of Confessions
outdoor spaces or sites 35, 47, 87, 109, Performance Group, The 15, 75–6, 92,
143, 180, 190 112–13, 115, 127, 139, 172, 177,
179
pain 15–16, 22, 57, 102, 132, 159, 161 performance studies 2, 9–10, 24, 30, 40,
painting 69, 70, 71, 89, 91, 104, 115, 41, 52, 54, 65, 71–2, 73, 75–6, 100,
129, 136, 168, 176, 196, 197, 220, 138, 143, 149, 153, 178, 181–2,
236, 245 202, 212–13, 218–19, 222–3, 227,
Pankhurst, Christabel 185 230, 232, 251, 252
parades 25, 34, 75, 112, 125, 134, 137, Performance Studies 76, 245
162, 163, 202, 236–7, 240 performance/performing 148, 218–20,
Paradise Now 21, 113, 127–9, 139, 244 passim
paratheatre 55, 157, 217–18, 243, 251 performative cure 238
Parsifal 91 performative theatre histories 192
passivity 20, 41, 194, 203, 233; of performative writing 9, 46, 71–2
audience/spectator 29, 33, 73, 99, performative/performativity 3–4, 29, 41,
118, 157, 159, 200, 207, 217, 246; 52, 53, 70, 71, 100, 118, 129,
of artists 70, 217; of citizens 33, 137–8, 143, 147, 150, 161,
138 181–2, 183, 185, 193, 203, 209,
patriarchal oppression 45, 65, 69, 80, 211, 212, 218, 220, 222–3, 237,
185 238, 257
Pavis, Patrice 199, 202, 208–9, 247–8, performer–audience interaction 67, 112,
252 127, 136, 212, 224, 240, 245

293
 I NDEX

performer–audience relationship 15, 23, politics see identity politics; visibility

54, 55, 115, 143, 179, 185, 197, politics
204, 219, 238, 246, 249, 257 Politics of Aesthetics, The 73
performing ethnography 88, 244 Polygraph 63
Petersburg Stories 116 polyphony 24
Phantom of the Opera 206, 207 poor theatre 25, 55–6, 66, 106
Phèdre 93, 135 popular culture 28, 77, 92, 115, 118,
Phelan, Peggy 46, 71–2, 82, 134, 176–7, 181, 202, 221
185, 203–4, 221–2, 239 popular theatre 28, 34, 37, 47, 60, 67,
phenomenology 224–5 74, 77, 140, 142, 149, 155, 164,
photo-sculpture 69 191, 204, 213, 228–30, 240, 249,
physical theatre 8, 19, 21, 26, 29, 46, 251–2
57, 60, 68, 110, 116, 148, 155, pornography 81–2, 92, 131, 159, 185,
170, 172, 178, 192, 224, 225–6, 199
246, 255 Portrait of Dora 45, 238
Pinter, Harold 254 Possible Worlds 63
Pirandello, Luigi 189 postcolonial performance or playwriting
Piscator, Erwin 169, 211 25, 77, 78–9, 118, 143
plague, theatre as a 19–20 postdramatic 8, 24, 29, 51, 89, 114, 131,
play 3, 5, 18, 28–9, 39, 42, 45, 47, 51, 172, 185, 210, 230–1, 233
60, 80, 86, 88–9, 93, 99, 104, 108, Post-Porn Modernist 81–2
118, 125, 134–5, 137–8, 140, 147, Post-Post Porn Modernist 81
148, 151, 152, 162, 168, 169, 172, postmodern and postmodernism 8, 17,
193, 195, 202, 204, 214, 227–8, 24, 29, 33, 43, 51, 54, 80, 82, 86,
232, 239–40, 242, 244, 247, 251, 92–4, 99, 118–20, 130, 131, 133,
253, 258 139, 147–8, 159, 172, 185, 191,
playwrights or playwriting 2, 4, 7, 37, 192, 196, 198, 202, 209, 210, 212,
46, 66, 67, 90–1, 130, 143, 157, 219, 221, 223, 228, 231–3, 235–6,
169, 172, 174, 183, 187, 188, 237, 247, 254–5, 259
216–17, 229, 254; see also postmodern dance 138–9, 170, 257
Antonin Artaud, Bertold Brecht, postmodern directing 63, 87, 214
The Cherry Orchard, Hélène poststructuralism 118, 223
Cixous, The Constant Prince, The practice as research 8, 10, 51, 177, 178,
Government Inspector, Mother 233–5
Courage and Her Children, pre-cultural techniques 26
William Shakespeare, Wole pre-expressivity 26, 253, 256
Soyinka, Split Britches, Ubu Roi, presence 4, 5, 16, 93, 94, 106, 108, 109,
Waiting for Godot, Motokiyo 118, 120, 147, 149, 151, 159, 161,
Zeami 163, 176, 182, 199, 203, 211, 212,
Playbox Theatre 156 218–19, 224, 234, 235–6, 240
Poetics 94 primal scene 238
Points in Space 42, 49 protest and protests 3–5, 9, 25, 34, 35,
political critique 65–6 57, 64–5, 64, 78, 100–1, 110, 128,
political protest see protests 133, 137–8, 147, 150, 160–1, 163,

294
 I NDEX

180, 183, 184–5, 188, 190, 220, religious ceremony and ritual 9, 75,
232–3, 236–7, 239, 240, 249 142–3, 180, 244
PSi (Performance Studies international) religious iconography, reference and
72 symbolism 16, 22, 53, 69, 107, 122,
psychoanalysis 19, 20, 45, 71, 129, 158, 129, 205, 240
159, 183, 227, 238–9 répétition 241
psychodynamics 238 representation 7, 20, 22, 42, 48, 58, 89,
Public Cervix Announcement’, ‘A 82 100, 109, 111, 118–19, 137, 148,
Punch and Judy 214 149, 159, 176, 184–6, 198, 212,
Punchdrunk 21, 193–5 214, 215, 216, 219, 220–1, 228,
punk 22 230, 231, 233, 239, 251, 259
‘punk’ opera 214 repressed desires and feelings 169, 238
Puppet Motel 18 Request Concert 32
puppetry 5, 56, 163, 225, 229, Rhinoceros 254
239–41 rhythm 20, 42, 50, 59, 60, 68, 83, 116,
138–9, 141–2, 168, 169, 174, 213,
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy 162 215, 224
queer 22–3, 41, 149, 187, 237 Rhythm O 15
queer identities 162, 221 Richards, Thomas 56
queer theories and criticism 71, 162 Rigg, Diana 123
queer theorists 40–1, 162 Rite of Spring 28
ritual 9, 15, 16, 20, 22, 29, 34, 47, 48,
Rabanne, Paco 129 54, 55, 57, 71, 75–6, 77, 88–9, 92,
Rabelais and His World 24 102, 107, 112, 118, 127, 134, 136,
race 45, 71, 77, 92, 149, 159, 163, 172 143, 147, 151, 154–5, 159, 169–70,
Racine, Jean 93, 135 181, 187, 204–5, 217, 218, 228,
Raid 135 239–40, 243–5, 250, 253, 257
Rainer, Yvonne 42, 138–9, 257 Robins, Elizabeth 185–6
Rancière, Jacques 2, 8, 73–4, 153, 157, role-play 80, 152
194 Rosas Danst Rosas 170–1
Rasmussen, Iben Nagel 25 rough theatre 66, 80
Rauschenberg, Robert 42, 49 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 229
Ravenhill, Mark 7 Route 1 & 9 (The Last Act) 92–3,
raves 202 130–2, 147, 172, 185
Reagan, Ronald 18, 220 Royal Court Theatre 79, 178
realism 17, 67, 91, 93, 94, 116, 131, Royal Shakespeare Company 38, 46, 93
190, 214, 215–17, 230–1, 254 RSVP Cycles 61–2, 242–3
rehearsal 39, 47, 84, 112, 115, 116, 140, Rude Mechanicals 112
166, 173, 174–5, 176, 178, 190, RUFF 80
195, 202, 205, 209, 223, 238, 239, Russian theatre 116
241–3, 246, 250, 251, 255, 257
rehearsal of revolution 255 Sacks, Oliver 39
Reincarnation of Saint Orlan, The 21, Said, Edward 155
69–70, 129–30, 158, 180, 205, 239 Saint-Denis, Michel 46

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 I NDEX

San Francisco Mime Troupe 229 Seven Easy Pieces 16

Sankai Juku 160–1, 160 Seven Streams of the River Ota, The
Saratoga International Theatre Institute 62–3, 211, 258
86 Sex and the City 16
Sartre, Jean-Paul 224 sexual identity 238
satire and satirical 80, 116, 135, 195, sexuality 22, 41, 57, 71, 77, 81–2, 110,
240 158–9, 163, 167, 223
Saturday Night Live 195 Shakespeare our Contemporary 39
Saussure, Ferdinand de 247 Shakespeare, William 38–40, 63, 93,
Savran, David 72, 93, 131 140, 166–7, 187, 193, 198, 212–13,
scenography 9, 19, 28, 31, 37, 39, 44, 238
46, 52, 54–6, 60, 61–2, 68, 84, 89, shaman 107, 170, 240, 244–5
92, 104, 106, 109, 112, 113, 121, Shaw, Peggy 80
123, 140, 148, 166, 172, 174, 180, Shelley, Percy Bysshe 21
183–4, 192–3, 206, 208, 211, 225, Sherman, Cindy 159
229, 242, 245–7, 249, 258; futurist shingeki 94, 155
189; innovative 48; integration of Shiraishi, Kayoko 86
Eastern and Western 87; kinetic Shoot 3, 21, 132–4, 132, 159, 182
116; lighting and sound 201–2; see ‘Short Organum for the Theatre’ 37
also constructivist scenography Shot at a Movie series 70
Schechner, Richard 9, 15, 32, 71–2, Sifuentes, Roberto 54, 129, 136–7
74–6, 88–9, 92, 112–13, 115, 123, silent operas 90–1, 113
135, 136, 138, 139, 143, 172, 177, Simon, Barney 65–6
179, 195, 198, 218, 227–8, 237, Simov, Viktor 104
244–5 simulation 93, 231–2
Schneemann, Carolee 158 Sinfield, Alan 167
Schulz, Bruno 108–9 Sistren Theatre Collective 76–8, 152,
Schumann, Peter 34–5 185
Scofield, Paul 38 site-specific performance 9, 18, 43, 70,
scopophilia 238 157, 170, 172, 179–81, 182, 193,
Scream, The 183 197, 213, 221, 229, 246, 248, 250,
sculpture 17, 69, 91, 108, 139, 197, 220; 251
see also photo-sculpture; stomach Situationist International 181
sculptures Sixteen Dances for Soloist and
Seagull, The 84 Company of Three 49
Seedbed 221 Słowacki, Juliusz 106
Self-Hybridizations 70 Smith, Peyton 92
Self-Obliteration I 22 Snapper, Juliana 22
self-presentation 52 soap opera 131
Sellars, Peter 187, 214 social critique 17, 19, 28, 105
semiotics 149, 166, 208, 224, 247–8, social dramas 88
249, 252 social media 4, 100–1, 177, 200
Servos, Norbert 28–9 social role/function/responsibilities/
Set and Reset 18 impact of; acting 147; art 15, 23,

296
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30, 169, 196, 216, 244; body speaking-in-tongues 22

158–9, 210, 253; carnival 24–5, spectactor 33, 157, 197, 255
163–4; circus 164; culture 166, spectators and spectatorship 5, 15, 21,
211; dance 27–9, 170–1; festivals 36–7, 42, 51, 52, 53, 55, 67, 73–4,
187; memorialization 119, 239; 83, 85–6, 99, 102, 106, 119, 127,
ritual 9, 75–6, 88, 143, 244; public 132–3, 151, 152, 156–60, 164, 166,
158; theatre/performance 33, 66, 170, 175, 176, 178, 194, 196, 200,
75–6, 128, 136, 156, 167, 172, 183, 201, 202, 210, 217–18, 224, 228,
184–5, 197, 203, 207, 216, 220, 243, 245–6, 247, 251, 252, 257;
251, 255; urban life 31; writing 2 feminist 80, 185, 238; sports
socially-engaged performance 8, 22, 33, 134–5; see also audience
35–6, 54, 77, 80, 81, 93, 107, 136, speech acts 222
150, 152–4, 162, 194, 229 Split Britches 80–1, 136, 154, 162, 185,
Sociétas Rafaello Sanzio 151, 242, 232
258–9 sports 4, 9, 10, 75, 118, 125–7, 134–5,
Solar Anus 22 149, 155, 187, 209, 219, 227, 229,
Songs and Stories from Moby Dick 18 244, 250
Sontag, Susan 90, 141, 162 Sprachgesang 37
sound, experiments with 24, 39, 42, Sprinkle, Annie 69, 81–2, 154, 158,
50–1, 89–90, 92, 99, 104–5, 114, 185, 232
136, 168, 193, 201–2, 203, 206; see Spurt of Blood, A 21
also lighting and sound stage manager 242
South African theatre 65–7, 240 stage technology 104, 201
Soyinka, Wole 2, 3, 7–8, 78–9, 127, Stan’s Cafe 177
143, 198 Stanislavsky, Konstantin 48, 55, 67,
space 9, 16, 18, 26, 37, 39–40, 44, 49, 83–5, 104–5, 116, 147, 150, 174,
54–6, 61–2, 68, 73, 86–7, 88, 201, 209, 216, 242, 257
89–90, 101, 112, 114–15, 119, 121, state parades 25
128, 137, 141, 143, 151, 157, 163, state power 137
166, 168, 179, 187, 190, 196, 200, States, Bert O. 142, 218, 224
202, 203, 208, 211, 212, 219, 221, Stein, Gertrude 91, 93
224, 228, 230, 236–7, 241, 245–6, Stelarc 15, 21, 70, 85–6, 129, 133, 159,
248–52; Aristotle’s system 33, 215; 200, 205, 211, 232, 238, 251
cyberspace 18, 101, 136, 199, 211; Stephens, Elizabeth 82
movement in 48, 51, 59, 60, Stephens, Simon 7
169–70, 209; women’s Stigma 52
performance 70, 80, 163; see also Stimbod software 85, 200
non-theatre spaces; outdoor spaces; stomach sculptures 86
time and space Stories from the Nerve Bible 19
spatial awareness or sensitivity 68, 87 Story of O, The 75
spatial experiments 18, 21, 179–81, Strange Fish 111
192–4 storyboards 89–90
spatialized performance practices 248 Strasberg, Lee 84, 257
Speak Bitterness 93 Stravinsky, Igor 5

297
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Street of Crocodiles 109 internet-based performance;

street festivals see carnival multimedia performance
Street Scene, The 37 Tectonic Plates 62, 258
Strehler, Giorgio 105 Teczki (Files) 177
Strindberg, August 21, 63, 91, 183, Tempest, The 39, 63
238 Temple of Confessions, The 53, 69, 129,
structuralists 247 136–7, 200
Sturm, Robert 29 Terrible but Unfinished Story of
subjectivity 71, 80, 82, 148, 159, 181, Norodom Sihanouk, King of
191, 236, 238–9 Cambodia, The 45
Summerspace 49 Terry, Ellen 48, 218
super-ego 238 Thatcher, Margaret 220
superobjective 83 theatre 250–2, passim
surrealism 42, 103, 140, 168–9 Theatre of the Absurd, see Absurd,
surrealists 20, 140, 240, 254 Theatre of the
Surrounded Islands 44 theatre anthropology 9, 26, 71, 75, 88,
Suzuki Company of Toga 87–8 103, 155, 244, 252–3, 256
Suzuki, Tadashi 8, 86–8, 94, 105, 127, theatre buildings 33, 128, 236, 251–2
134, 151, 156, 187, 198, 209, 244, Theatre of Cruelty 19–21, 38, 129, 143
250 Théâtre de Complicité or Complicite
Svoboda, Josef 246 60, 109, 172, 225
Swamp Dwellers, The 78 Theatre of Death, The 58, 108
Sweet Sugar Rage 77 Théâtre du Soleil 45, 154, 250
symbolism 34, 48, 67, 84, 104, 107, theatre environment 249–50
137, 254 Théâtre Equestre Zingaro 151
synthetics 189 theatre festivals 7, 17, 22, 25, 26, 29,
Szajna, Józef 54 80, 87, 94, 115, 121, 127, 128, 180,
187–8, 199, 229, 259
tableaux 22, 128, 152, 259 theatre of images 89, 115, 148, 172,
tableux vivants 116 258–9
taboos, challenges to 23, 69, 112, 159, Theatre and Its Double, The 19, 102
183, 195, 240 Théâtre Libre 216
Tahrir Square 101 Theatre Olympics Festival 87, 127
‘Take Back the Night’ marches 163 theatre of the oppressed 33, 255–6
talking cure 238 Theatre Passe Muraille 172
Taylor, Frederick Winslow 67 théâtre populaire 229
Taymor, Julie 60, 198, 240 Théâtre Repère 61
technology 4, 8, 9, 18–19, 30, 34, 42, Theatre Royal 66
49, 50–1, 62, 70, 130, 170–1, Theatre of the Eighth Day 177
176–7, 188, 190, 193, 200, 204, Theatre of Sources 55–6
205, 206–7, 210–12, 214, 240, 241; theatre studies 9–11, 167, 181, passim
in body art 17, 159, 251; in Theatre Workshop 59
performance art 85–6; stage 20, Theatre and the World 32
104, 201–2, 246, 251; see also theatres-in-the-round 249, 252

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Theatreworks 32 trust exercises 128

theatricality 93, 197, 222–3 Tudor, David 42, 49, 99
theatricalization 28 Tumor Brainiowicz 109
Theatrum Mundi 26 Turner, Victor 75, 88–9, 157, 227, 244,
Thérèse Raquin 216 252
thick description 224 Twenty Four Hours 108
third theatre groups 26 Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit
Three Sisters, The 93 Spain 53
Tiananmen Square demonstrations 4, Tynan, Kenneth 39
65, 100, 137–8, 150, 237
Tight Roaring Circle 51 Übermarionette and Übermarionetten
time and space 16, 91, 115, 163, 202, 48, 57, 189, 239
208, 211, 212, 241, 245, 248 Ubu Cuckolded 140
time-based art 221 Ubu Enchained 140
Tinderbox Theatre Company 180 Ubu Roi 20, 140–1, 169, 240, 254
Tisch School of the Arts 72, 75 Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen) 15, 21, 159, 210,
Titanic 206 221
To You, the Birdie! (Phèdre) 93, 135 Ullmann, Lisa 59
Today Is My Birthday 58 Umbrellas, The 44
Toga Arts Park 87 Un Chien Andalou 168
Toller, Ernst 183 unconscious 20, 45, 181, 238–9
total act 55, 106, 208 United States 18
total theatre 20–1, 102, 169, 193, 201, United States, I–IV 19
210, 213, 259 universalism 32, 122, 197, 231
Totem 63 universality, of performance 39
Towards a Poor Theatre 25, 56 Unmarked 71
Tragedy of Hamlet, The 40 Upwardly Mobile Home 80
training 8, 9, 17, 25, 28, 46–7, 51, 55, US 38
67–8, 83, 128, 134, 147–8, 151–2,
155, 161, 165, 166, 172, 174, 190, Vakhtangov, Evgeny 84
195, 198, 205, 209–10, 217, 225–6, Valk, Kate 92
234, 241, 251, 253, 256–8; of Valley Curtain 43–4
breathing 19; Lecoq programmes valuaction 61, 242
60; sports-like 134–5; Suzuki Vandekeybus, Wim 111
method 86–7; vocal 26 Verdonck, Benjamin 108
Trance and Dance in Bali 102 via negativa 55
trance states 102–3 Vietnam War 34, 38, 132, 133, 184,
Transit Festival 26 207, 220
Travels, The 93 Vieux Colombier theatre 47
Tri Bywyd 180 Viewpoints 242
Trio A 42, 138–9, 170, 189, 257; see Vinci 63
also Mind is a Muscle violence 15–16, 17, 23, 41, 77–8, 80,
Trojan Whore 23 100, 111, 119, 128, 134, 137, 141,
Trojan Women, The 86 172, 189, 240

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visibility politics 71; see also Peggy Wilder, Thornton 92, 130–1
Phelan, Jacques Rancière Wiles, David 250
visual theatre 28, 57, 62, 108, 113, 116, Wilke, Hannah 159
140, 174, 188, 193, 211, 221, 231, Willems, Thom 50
232, 246, 247, 258–9; see also William James Lectures 222
theatre of images Williams, Raymond 167
visual trickery 258 Williams, Tennessee 216, 238
Volcano 111 Wilson, Robert 16–17, 18, 42, 89–92,
Votes for Women 185–6 113–16, 127, 148, 174, 183–4, 187,
voyeurism 53, 86, 106, 157, 185–6 198, 202, 214, 226, 231–3, 242,
VTol Dance 171 246, 249, 258–9
Winnicott, Donald Woods 227
Wagner, Richard 62–3, 91, 213 Witkiewicz, Stanisław Ignacy 109
Waiting for Godot 141–2, 254 Wojnarowicz, David 22
Waits, Tom 214 Wooster Group 24, 75, 92–4, 130–2,
Wajda, Andrzej 109 135, 147, 157, 172, 175, 185, 196,
Walkaround Time 49 202, 211, 231, 232
Way of Acting, The 87 Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Weaver, Lois 80–1 Reproduction’, ‘The 30
Wedekind, Frank 183, 238 WOW (Women’s One World) 80
Weigel, Helene 36–7, 123–4, 124 Woza Albert! 66
Weil, Simone 54 Wrapped Reichstag 43, 43–5
Weill, Kurt 37 wrappings 43–5
Weiss, Peter 38 Wright, Frank Lloyd 63
Welfare State International 163 Wuppertal Dance Theatre 27–30, 151,
Western dance 154–5, 169–70 172, 231
Western theatre 1, 7, 27, 32, 67, 102,
112, 147–8, 154, 156, 157, 173, Yaqui Lent 75, 142–3, 163, 244; and
198, 214, 249, 253 Easter Ceremonies
What Tammy Needs to Know 80 Yeats, W.B. 102
When We Dead Awaken 91
Whitman, Robert 190 Zarrilli, Phillip 155, 256
Wielopole Wielepole 57 Zeami, Motokiyo 7, 94–5, 155
Wiene, Robert 183 Zola, Emile 215
Wigman, Mary 59, 160, 169, 183 Zoo Story 254

300