Since its first publication in 2004, The Performance Studies Reader has become the leading anthology of key writings on performance studies. Now in its fourth edition, it continues to offer an unparalleled selection of work by the foremost scholars in this continually evolving field, offering a stimulating introduction to the crucial debates of performance studies.
These critical and theoretical contributions are joined in this edition by 23 new chapters, bringing the collection up to date with current discourse and ideas, and significantly expanding the range of subjects and authors represented. Each essay includes contextual headnotes from the editors, to introduce students to the writer and their impact on the field. Newly added to this edition are contributions from: Swati Arora, Sara Ahmed, Sarah Bay-Cheng, Claire Bishop, Felipe Cervera and Theron Schmidt and Hannah Schwadron, Anita E. Cherian and Gargi Bharadwaj, Thomas DeFrantz, Soyica Diggs Colbert, Tracy C. Davis, Saidiya Hartman, Travis Jackson, Branislav Jakovljevic, Ailton Krenak, Andre Lepecki, Fred Moten, José Esteban Muñoz, Tavya Nyongo, Tamara Searle, Stephanie Nohelani Teves, and Mackenzie Wark.
This new edition of The Performance Studies Reader provides an overview of the full range of performance theory for undergraduates at all levels, and beginning graduate students in performance studies, theatre, performing arts, and cultural studies.
Introduction
Henry Bial and Sara Brady
Part 1: Reading Performance
1. Performances: Belief in the Part One is Playing
Erving Goffman
2. Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought
Clifford Geertz
3. From “Restoration of Behavior”
Richard Schechner
4. From “The Ontology of Performance”
Peggy Phelan
5. Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research
Dwight Conquergood
6. From The Archive and the Repertoire
Diana Taylor
7. From Stages of Emergency
Tracy C. Davis
8. Professing Performance: Disciplinary Genealogies
Shannon Jackson
9. Social Performance Studies: Discipline vs. Freedom
Faye C. Fei and William H. Sun
10. Magic of Objects
Fred Moten
11. The Theorist and the Theorized: Indigenous Critiques of Performance Studies
Stephanie Nohelani Teves
Part 2: Play and Ritual
12. The Nature and Significance of Play as a Cultural Phenomenon
Johan Huizinga
13. Liminality and Communitas
Victor Turner
14. “Performance” and Other Analogies
Catherine Bell
15. Just Doing
Allan Kaprow
16. The Ambiguity of Play
Brian Sutton-Smith
17. From “Jazz Performance as Ritual”
Travis Jackson
18. Performative Commemoratives, the Personal, and the Public: Spontaneous Shrines, Emergent Ritual
Jack Santino
19. From Gamer Theory
Mckenzie Wark
20. Reenactment and Relative Pain
Rebecca Schneider
21. Burning the Bull: the Changing Meanings of a Harvest Ritual in the Anthropocene
Tamara Searle
22. Cliodynamics: An Evolutionary Approach to Rituals and Performance History
Bruce McConachie
Part 3: Performativity and the Social
23. How to do things with words: Lecture II
J.l. Austin
24. From “Signature Event Context”
Jacques Derrida
25. Performative Acts and Gender Constitution
Judith Butler
26. Destination Museum
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
27. From Disidentifications
José Esteban Muñoz
28. Shattered Back wall: Performative Utterance of a Doll's House
Branislav Jakovljević
29. From “Shame Before Others”
Sara Ahmed
30. Utopian Performatives
Jill Dolan
31. Addenda, Phenomenology, Embodiment: Cyborgs and Disability Performance
Petra Kuppers
32. The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents
Claire Bishop
33. Unburdening Representation
Tavia Nyong'o
34. God, the Pilot, and the Bugsplat: Performance and the Drone Effect
Sara Brady
Part 4: Repetition and Resistance
35. A Dialogue about Acting
Bertolt Brecht
36. The Actor’s Technique
Jerzy Grotowski
37. The Oral Artist: Training and Preparation
Isidore Okpewho
38. Of Mimicry and Man
Homi K. Bhabha
39. From Rainbow of Desire
Augusto Boal
40. From Cities of the Dead
Joseph Roach
41. The Centrality of Practice
Saidiya V. Hartman
42. From The Emancipated Spectator
Jacques Rancière
43. Choreopolice and Choreopolitics: or, the Task of the Dancer
André Lepecki
44. Reconstruction, Fugitive Intimacy, and Holding History
Soyica Diggs Colbert
45. Constructing Genealogies of Disobedient Performance: Disappearance by/in the Media
Anita E. Cherian and Gargi Bharadwaj
Part 5: Futurity and Possibility
46. The Archaeology of Performance
Mary Zimmerman
47. From Postdramatic Theatre
Hans-Thies Lehmann
48. Interweaving Cultures in Performance: Different States of Being In-Between
Erika Fischer-Lichte
49. Temporality
Sarah Bay-Cheng
50. Hemispheric America in Deep Time
Jill Lane
51. Orature and Cyberture
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
52. Performance Studies 3.0
Henry Bial
53. The Future Has Always Been Black: a dancing word manifesto
Thomas F. Defrantz/SLIPPAGE
54. From Ideas to Postpone the End of the World
Ailton Krenak
55. A Manifesto to Decentre Theatre and Performance Studies
Swati Arora
56. Towards Planetary Performance Pedagogy: Digital Companions in Multipolar Classrooms
Felipe Cervera, Theron Schmidt, and Hannah Schwadron
Biography
Henry Bial is Professor and Chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Kansas, USA. He is the author of Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (2005) and Playing God: The Bible on the Broadway Stage (2015).
Sara Brady is Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at Bronx Community College of the City University of New York, USA, and Managing Editor of TDR: The Drama Review. She is the author of Performance, Politics and the War on Terror (2012) and coeditor with Lindsey Mantoan of Performance in a Militarized Culture (2018).
