Textbook Contents

PREFACE: INTERPRETING PERFORMANCES AND CULTURES

First mapping: About this book
Second mapping: Cultural performances, theatre, and drama
Third mapping: History, historiography, and historical methods
The historian’s sources
New theories and approaches to historical interpretation
Problems of representation and interpretation
Fourth mapping: Periodization through modes of human communication
Case studies and interpretive approaches: The historian at work

PART I: Performance and theatre in oral and written cultures before 1600
PHILLIP B. ZARRILLI, Editor

The evolution of human language and consciousness
Episodic and mimetic modes of communication
The evolution of human speech
Human language, writing, and society
Band, tribe, chiefdom, state
The invention of systems of writing
Performance, communication, and remembrance

CHAPTER 1: Oral, ritual, and shamanic performance

Primary orality
Oral performance
‘Seeing’ words in the mythic mode
Oral texts and their transmission under the written sign: vedic chanting in India
Ritual specialists: accessing sacred power
Late neolithic ritual landscapes and pilgrimage in England
Early celtic oral and ritual festival performance
Interpreting and understanding ritual
Between ritual and theatre
Ritual, ceremony, and collective social life
Hopi ritual performance cycles
The healing powers of ritual/shamanic specialists
An exorcistic shadow puppet performance in bali
Case study: Yoruba ritual as ‘play,’ and ‘contingency’ in ritual process
Interpretive approach: theories of play and improvisation
Case study: Korean shamanism and the power of speech
Interpretive approach: Speech act theory

CHAPTER 2: Religious and civic festivals: Early drama and theatre in context

Commemorative ritual ‘drama’ in Abydos, Egypt
Dialogic drama in the city-state of Athens
Dialogic drama in the dionysia festival in Athens
After the fifth century B.C.
Mesoamerican performance
Sung dance-drama: The Mayan rabinal achi
Mayan texts
Texts in other traditions
Medieval Christian liturgy and drama
Dramatic and performative elements related to the Latin liturgy
Bible dramas, Latin and vernacular
Other Christian religious plays
Dramas of Christian conquest: ‘In this sign’
Islamic commemorative mourning ‘dramas’: The ta’zieh of Iran
Commemorative mourning rituals and the development of ta’zieh
Non-representational reading and representation in ta’zieh
Case study: classical Greek theatre: Looking at Oedipus
Interpretive approach: Cognitive studies
Case study: Christians and moors: Medieval performance in Spain and the new world
Interpretive approach: Cultural hierarchy

CHAPTER 3: Imperial theatre: pleasure, power, and aesthetics

Drama, theatre, and performance in the roman republic and empire
Comedies in the republic
Imperial spectacles
Indian literary and commemorative drama and theatre
Commemorative devotional drama
Early Chinese and Japanese drama, theatre, and performance
Case study: Plautus’s plays: What’s so funny?
Interpretive approach: Henri Bergson’s theory of laughter
Case study: Kutiyattam Sanskrit theatre of India:
Rasa-bhava aesthetic theory and the question of taste
Interpretive approach: Reception theory
Case study: The silent bell: The Japanese noh play, Dôjôji
Interpretive approach: Feminist and gender theory, modified for medieval Japan

PART II: Theatre and print cultures, 1500–1900

BRUCE McCONACHIE, Editor

China and western Europe
The rise of European professional theatres
Commedia dell’arte
Institutionalizing drama in Europe
Golden age theatre in Spain, 1590–1680
Le cid and French absolutism
Scenic perspectivism in print and on stage
Acting and print in Europe after 1700
European dramatists claim authority
Theatre, print, and the public

CHAPTER 4: Theatre and the state, 1600–1900

Theatre and state in France, 1630–1675
From patronage to control in France, 1675–1789
Samurai warriors versus kabuki actors, 1600–1670
Regulating kabuki, 1670–1868
Theatre and state in England, 1600–1660
Patents, censorship, and social order in England and France, 1660–1790
Theatre and the state in England and France, 1790–1900
Case study: Moličre and carnival laughter
Interpretive approach: Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque
Case study: Kabuki and bunraku: mimesis and the hybrid body
Interpretive approach: Mimesis, hybridity and the body
Case study: Shakespearean sexuality in Twelfth Night
Interpretive approach: queer theory

CHAPTER 5: Theatres for knowledge through feeling, 1700–1900

Sentimental drama in England
Sentiment on the continent
Acting in the eighteenth century
Feeling and knowledge in kathakali dance-drama
Changes and challenges in sentimentalism
Melodrama and the French revolution
Melodramatic spectacle
Melodrama gains spectators
Case study: Theatre iconology and the actor as icon: David Garrick
Interpretive approach: Cultural studies and theatre iconology
Case study: Kathakali dance-drama: divine ‘play’ and human suffering on stage
Interpretive approach: Ethnography and history
Case study: Theatre and hegemony: comparing popular melodramas
Interpretive approach: Cultural hegemony

CHAPTER 6: Theatre, nation, and empire, 1750–1900

Romanticism and the theatre
Romanticism, history, and nationalism
Nationalism and imperialism in theatre in the United States
Nationalism and imperialism on the Russian stage
Orientalism on the European stage
Theatre riots
Case study: The Playboy riots: nationalism in the Irish theatre
Interpretive approach: cognitive linguistics

PART III: Theatre in modern media cultures, 1850–1970

BRUCE McCONACHIE, Editor

Historical changes after 1850
Photography and audiophony in the theatre
Spectacular bodies on the popular stage
The rise of realism in the west
Realist producer-directors
The rise of realism in Japan
Avant-garde theatres in the west
The great war as a turning point in world theatre
Shakespeare and film in England
Lyrical abstraction and the radio in France
Psychological realism in the United States
Theatre and politics
The continuing power of print

CHAPTER 7: Theatres of popular entertainment, 1850–1970

Promoting popular entertainment
Urban carnivals and optical delights
Variety theatre
English music hall
Theatrical revues
Popular melodrama and comedy
Musical theatre
Case study: ‘Blacking up’ on the U.S. stage
Interpretive approach: reification and utopia in popular culture
Case study: British pantomime: how ‘bad’ theatre remains popular
Interpretive approach: phenomenology and history

CHAPTER 8: Theatres of the avant-garde and their legacy, 1880–1970

Naturalism on stage
Symbolism and its influence
Strindberg and the expressionists
Retrospectivists and futurists
Meyerhold and constructivisim
Dadists and surrealists
Institutionalizing the avant-garde
The end of the avant-garde
The avant-garde legacy in the United States
The avant-garde legacy in France, 1945–1970
Theatrical innovation in Latin America, 1930–1970
Theatrical innovation in Eastern Europe, 1955–1970
Theatrical innovation in south and southeast Asia, 1950–1970
The avant-garde and political theatre
Case study: Selves, roles, and actors: actor training in the west
Interpretive approach: Cognitive psychology
Case study: Discoursing on desire: Desire under the Elms in the 1920s
Interpretive approach: Discourse theory
Case study: Beckett’s theatrical minimalism
Interpretive approach: Performative writing

CHAPTER 9: Theatres for reform and revolution, 1880–1990

Liberalism in the theatre, 1914–1930
Socialism in the theatre before 1914
Theatricalizing the Russian revolution
The influence of the revolution in the west
Theatres of anti-imperialism, 1900–1960
Postwar theatre in Japan and Germany
Theatre and the Cold War in the 1960s
1968 and its consequences
Case study: Ibsen’s A doll house: If Nora were a material girl
Interpretive approach: Cultural materialism
Case study: Social drama in Kerala: staging the ‘revolution’
Interpretive approach: Politics, ideology, history, and performance
Case Study: Brecht directs Mother Courage
Interpretive approach: Semiotics

PART IV: Theatre and performance in the age of global communications, 1950–2005

GARY JAY WILLIAMS, Editor

Colonialism, globalization, media and theatre
Media and theatre: All in the family
Globalization
The media: power and resistance
Performance art
Theatre in postcolonial African nations

CHAPTER 10: Rich and poor theatres of globalization

National theatres in the international marketplace
International festivals
Mega-musicals
Radical theatre in the West after 1968
Post 1968 radical theatre in developing nations
Theatres for development
Nuevo teatro popular
Community-based theatre since 1990
Case study: The vortex of Times Square
Interpretive approach: Vortices of behavior
Case study: Media and theatre: Niche marketing
Interpretive approach: Niche theory

CHAPTER 11: Director, text, and performance in the postmodern world

Aristotle to postmodernism: texts and contexts
Director and text in Antonin Artaud’s theatre of cruelty
The holy actor as text in Jerzy Grotowski’s ‘Poor theatre’
Peter Brook’s Shakespeare and contemporary authenticity
Terayama Shűji’s disquieting critique of theatrical convention
Suzuki Tadashi’s contemporary Japanese Euripides
Other negotiations with the classics: Roger Planchon’s Moličre
The United States: The performance group, Lamama, and the Wooster Group
Theatre of images: Robert Wilson and others
Case study: The crisis of representation and the authenticity of performance: Antonin Artaud and Jacques Derrida
Interpretive approach: Deconstruction
Case study: Global Shakespeare
Interpretive approach: Postcolonial criticism

CHAPTER 12: Interculturalism, hybridity, tourism – the performing world on new terms

Globalization and cross-cultural negotiations in theatre
Historical cross-cultural conversations
Intercultural theatre
Intracultural theatre
Syncretism and hybridity
Tourism and performance
Case study: Whose Mahabharata is it, anyway?
Interpretive approach: Ethics, aesthetics, and the spectator
Case study: Imagining contemporary China: Gao Xingjian’s Wild Man in post-cultural revolution China
Case study: Backstage/frontstage: Ethnic tourist performances and identity in ‘America’s little Switzerland’
Interpretive approach: Sociological theories of tourism and everyday performance

Index