Table of Contents

Authors Acknowledgements Preface: Interpreting performances and cultures

Part I: Performance and theatre in oral and written cultures before 1700 1. Oral, ritual, and shamanic performance Case studies: Yoruba ritual as "play," and "contingency" in the ritual process Intepretive approach Theories of play and improvisation Korean Shamanism and the power of speech Interpretive approach Speech act theory 2. Religious and civic festivals: Early drama and theatre in context Case studies: Classical Greek theatre: Looking at Oedipus Interpretive approach Cognitive spatial relations Christians and Moors: Medieval performance in Spain and the New World Interpretive approach Cultural hierarchy 3. Early theatre in the court, temple, and marketplace: Pleasure, power, and aesthetics Case studies: Plautus's plays: What's so funny? Interpretive approach, Part I Henri Bergson's theory of laughter Interpretive approach, Part 2 Bergson's theory in historical perspective Kuttiyattam Sanskrit theatre of India: Rasa-bhava aesthetic theory and the question of taste Interpretive approach Reception theory Case study: Kathakali dance-drama: Divine "play" and human suffering on stage Interpretive approach Ethnography and history The Silent Bell: The Japanese no play, Dôjôji Interpretive approach Feminist and gender theory, modified for medieval Japan

Part II: Theatre and print cultures, 1500-1900 4. Theatre and the state, 1600-1900 Case studies: Molière and carnival laughter Interpretive approach Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque Kabuki and bunraku: Mimesis and the hybrid body Interpretive approach Mimesis, hybridity, and the body Shakespearean sexuality in Twelfth Night Interpretive approach Queer theory 5. Theatres for knowledge through feeling, 1700-1900 6. Theatre, nation, and empire, 1750-1900 Case studies: Theatre iconology and the actor as icon: David Garrick Interpretive approach Cultural studies and theatre iconology Theatre and hegemony: Comparing popular melodramas Interpretive approach Cultural hegemony 6. Theatre, nation, and empire, 1750-1900 Case studies: Friedrich Schiller’s vision of aesthetic education and the German dream of a national theatre Interpretive approach Studies in national/cultural identity The Playboy riots: Nationalism in the Irish theatre Interpretive approach Cognitive linguistics

Part III: Theatre in modern media cultures, 1850-1970 7. Theatres of popular entertainment, 1850-1970 Case studies: "Blacking up" on the U.S. stage Interpretive approach Reification and utopia in popular culture British pantomime: How "bad" theatre remains popular Interpretive approach Phenomenology and history 8. Theatres of the avant-garde and their legacy, 1880-1970 Case studies: Psychological and sociological training for the actor Interpretive approach Cognitive psychology Discoursing on desire: Desire Under the Elms in the 1920s Interpretive approach Discourse theory 9. Modernism in drama and performance, 1890-1970 Case studies: Ibsen's A Doll House: If Nora were a material girl Interpretive approach Cultural materialism Modernism in Chekhov, Pirandello, and Beckett Interpretive approach Comparative analysis 10. Theatres for reform and revolution, 1880-1970 Case studies: Social drama in Kerala, India: Staging the "revolution" Interpretive approach Politics, ideology, history, and performance Brecht directs Mother Courage Interpretive approach Semiotics

Part IV: Theatre and performance in the age of global communications, 1950 to the present 11. Rich and poor theatres of globalization Case studies: The vortex of Times Square Interpretive approach Vortices of behaviour Athol Fugard: Theatre of witnessing in South Africa Interpretive approach Social justice and the artist 12. Director, text, and performance in the postmodern world Case studies: The crisis of representation and the authenticity of performance: Antonin Artaud and Jacques Derrida Interpretive approach Deconstruction Global Shakespeare Interpretive approach Postcolonial criticism 13. Interculturalism, hybridity, tourism: The performing world on new terms Case studies: Whose Mahabharata is it anyway? The ethics and aesthetics of intercultural performance Interpretive approach The historian between two views of intercultural performance Imagining contemporary China: Gao Xingjian’s Wild Man in post-Cultural Revolution China Interpretive approach Theories of national identity Backstage/frontstage: Ethnic tourist performances and identity in "America’s Little Switzerland" Interpretive approach Sociological theories of tourism and everyday performance Glossary Index

About the Author

University of Pittsburgh, USA University of California, Los Angeles, USA University of Exeter, UK

Reviews

'This is the strongest introduction the theatre history available ... its greatest strength is the thematic focus and incorporation of performance traditions from around the world' - Christian Billing, University of Hull 'This is a great teaching aid, packed with anthropological observations, written by academics from the UK and the States.' - WhatsOnStage.com `Theatre History: An Introduction (second edition) rejects the objectivity and documentarianism of what is called foundationalist history, and recognizes that the writing of history has been affected by historical and cultural formations within which historians work.’ - Michal Kobialka, The Drama Review