Theatre and Performance at a Time of Shifting Disciplines

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

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‘The Most Traditional and the Most Pioneering’: New Concept Kun Opera

New Theatre Quarterly ◽

10.1017/s0266464x20000469 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 36 (3) ◽

pp. 223-236

Author(s):

Chengzhou He

Keyword(s):

Performance Studies ◽

First Century ◽

Modern Life ◽

Chinese Opera ◽

American Theatre ◽

The Awakening ◽

Alternative Future ◽

New Form ◽

And Performance ◽

Chinese And English

Featuring hybridity, transgression, and improvisation, New Concept Kun Opera refers to experimental performances by Ke Jun and other Kun Opera performers since the beginning of the twenty-first century. From telling the ancient stories to expressing the modern self, this new form marks the awakening of the performer’s subjectivity and develops a contemporary outlook by rebuilding close connections between Kun Opera and modern life. A synthetic use of intermedial resources contributes to its appeal to today’s audiences. Its experimentation succeeds in maintaining the most traditional while exploring the most pioneering, thus providing Kun Opera with the potential for renewal, as well as an alternative future for Chinese opera in general. Chengzhou He is a Yangtze River Distinguished Professor of English and Drama at the School of Foreign Studies and the School of Arts at Nanjing University. He has published widely on Western drama, intercultural theatre, and critical theory in both Chinese and English. Currently, he is the principal investigator for a national key-research project, ‘Theories in European and American Theatre and Performance Studies’.

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Music as Performance: Living in the Immaterial World

Theatre Survey ◽

10.1017/s004055740600024x ◽

2006 ◽

Vol 47 (2) ◽

pp. 261-269 ◽

Cited By ~ 12

Author(s):

Philip Auslander

Keyword(s):

Cultural Studies ◽

Performance Studies ◽

Musical Performance ◽

Musical Form ◽

Theatre History ◽

Actual Performance ◽

Theatrical Representation ◽

History Of ◽

And Performance ◽

Performance Behavior

As a performance scholar and music lover, I find it strange that the fields of theatre and performance studies historically have been reluctant to engage with musical performance. Even as theatrical a musical form as opera is generally excluded from the history of theatre, on the grounds that “the predominant force in opera was the music rather than the words,” as Vera Mowry Roberts, my theatre history professor, puts the case.1 Roberts points to the nonliterary character of music as the reason for the exclusion; I speculate that the perception of music not only as nonliterary but, more broadly, as nonmimetic may seem to place it outside the realm of theatrical representation. While performance-oriented scholars spurn music, music-oriented scholars generally spurn performance. Traditional musicologists remain focused on the textual dimensions of musical compositions, whereas scholars who look at music from the perspective of cultural studies are generally more concerned with audience and reception than with the actual performance behavior of musicians.

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On Teaching Kim’s Convenience: Asian American Studies, Asian Canadian Studies, and the Politics of Race in Asian Canadian Theatre and Performance Studies

Theatre Research in Canada ◽

10.7202/1055465ar ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 39 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Colleen Kim Daniher

Keyword(s):

Los Angeles ◽

Performance Studies ◽

Asian American ◽

Learning Experience ◽

Institutional Setting ◽

American Theatre ◽

Canadian Theatre ◽

Canadian Studies ◽

And Performance ◽

Politics Of Race

This article offers a critical overview and rationale for why and to what ends Daniher put a comparative Asian North American method into practice in her classroom on Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies at Brown University in Spring 2016. In particular, Daniher focuses on pairing Ins Choi’s play-text Kim’s Convenience (2011) alongside a viewing of the made-for-PBS broadcast of Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (2001) in order to broach the topic of anti-Black racism in both Canada and the US in the Black Lives Matter moment . Although Daniher describes here a course and learning experience from within a US-American institutional setting, she directs the following emergent queries to the field of Canadian Theatre and Performance Studies in light of its recent inauguration of the new “sub-field” of Asian Canadian Theatre and Performance Studies: How should we frame Asian Canadian theatre and performance in the classroom? For what purpose and under what curricular conditions do we teach racialized “minority” repertoires of theatre and performance in Canada? Drawing on overlapping genealogies of Asian American and Asian Canadian Studies, Daniher contends that a more rigorous engagement with existing theories, methods, and critical analyses of racial power is urgently needed if Asian Canadian Theatre Studies hopes to coincide with the larger political-ethical stakes of “Asian Canadian studies projects” writ-large.

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A Forum on the State of Latin American Theatre and Performance Studies in the United States Today

Theatre Journal ◽

10.1353/tj.2004.0099 ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 56 (3) ◽

pp. 445-445

Author(s):

Jean Graham-Jones

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Latin American ◽

Performance Studies ◽

The United States ◽

The State ◽

American Theatre ◽

United States Today ◽

And Performance ◽

Latin American Theatre

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Cultural Labour

10.1093/oso/9780199490813.001.0001 ◽

2019 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Brahma Prakash

Keyword(s):

Conceptual Framework ◽

Performance Studies ◽

Life Experience ◽

Social Hierarchies ◽

Folk Performance ◽

And Performance ◽

The Relationship

Folk performances reflect the life-worlds of a vast section of subaltern communities in India. What is the philosophy that drives these performances, the vision that enables as well as enslaves these communities to present what they feel, think, imagine, and want to see? Can such performances challenge social hierarchies and ensure justice in a caste-ridden society? In Cultural Labour, the author studies bhuiyan puja (land worship), bidesia (theatre of migrant labourers), Reshma-Chuharmal (Dalit ballads), dugola (singing duels) from Bihar, and the songs and performances of Gaddar, who was associated with Jana Natya Mandali, Telangana: he examines various ways in which meanings and behaviour are engendered in communities through rituals, theatre, and enactments. Focusing on various motifs of landscape, materiality, and performance, the author looks at the relationship between culture and labour in its immediate contexts. Based on an extensive ethnography and the author’s own life experience as a member of such a community, the book offers a new conceptual framework to understand the politics and aesthetics of folk performance in the light of contemporary theories of theatre and performance studies.

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Cultural History, Ritual and Performance: George L. Mosse in Context

Journal of Contemporary History ◽

10.1177/0022009420940033 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 002200942094003

Author(s):

Peter Burke

Keyword(s):

Political Culture ◽

Early Modern ◽

Cultural History ◽

Performance Studies ◽

Early Modern Europe ◽

History Of ◽

Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽

Modern Europe ◽

And Performance ◽

Cultural Turn

George L. Mosse took a ‘cultural turn’ in the latter part of his career, but still early enough to make a pioneering contribution to the study of political culture and in particular what he called political ‘liturgy’, including marches, processions, and practices of commemoration. He adapted to the study of nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the approach to the history of ritual developed by historians of medieval and early modern Europe, among them his friend Ernst Kantorowicz. More recently, the concept of ritual, whether religious or secular, has been criticized by some cultural historians on the grounds that it implies a fixed ‘script’ in situations that were actually marked by fluidity and improvisation. In this respect cultural historians have been part of a wider trend that includes sociologists and anthropologists as well as theatre scholars and has been institutionalized as Performance Studies. Some recent studies of contemporary nationalism in Tanzania, Venezuela and elsewhere have adopted this perspective, emphasizing that the same performance may have different meanings for different sections of the audience. It is only to be regretted that Mosse did not live long enough to respond to these studies and that their authors seem unaware of his work.

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