Professing Performance
Professing Performance
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Today's academic discourse is filled with the word 'perform'. Nestled amongst a variety of prefixes and suffixes (re-, post-, -ance, -ivity?), the term functions as a vehicle for a host of contemporary inquiries. For students, artists, and scholars of performance and theatre, this development is intriguing and complex. By examining the history of theatre studies and related institutions and by comparing the very different disciplinary interpretations and developments that led to this engagement, Professing Performance offers ways of placing performance theory and performance studies in context. This 2004 book considers the connection amongst a range of performance forms such as oratory, theatre, dance, and performance art and explores performance as both a humanistic and technical field of education. Throughout, she explores the institutional history of performance in the US academy in order to revise current debates around the role of the arts and humanities in higher education.
- Shows the relationship between past institutional histories and tradition and current scholarly and artistic practices in performance
- Shows both the opportunities and hazards of using performance as an interdisciplinary site of inquiry
- Critiques rather than perpetuates the professional underpinnings of the opposition between the scholar and the artist
Awards
Winner of the Lilla A. Heston Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Interpretation and Performance Studies from the National Communication Association
Reviews & endorsements
"Highly recommended for its detailed treatment of the obstacles and promise of performance studies." Theatre Journal
"Although a relatively slim volume, Professing Performance is an unusually ambitious, far-ranging and richly textured study." The Drama Review David Savran
Product details
April 2004Hardback
9780521651899
268 pages
216 × 140 × 19 mm
0.49kg
Available
Table of Contents
- 1. Discipline and performance: genealogy and discontinuity
- 2. Institutions and performance: professing performance in the early twentieth century
- 3. Culture and Performance: structures of dramatic feeling
- 4. Practice and performance: modernist paradoxes and literalist legacies
- 5. History and performance: blurred genres and the particularising of the past
- 6. Identity and performance: racial performativity and anti-racist theatre.
