The Performance Studies Reader (4^th Ed.)

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

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).