Theatre/Performance Historiography

the long version

The questions that frame the discussion of theatre and performance historiography today often concern its relationship to the cultures performing it and the thought processes it expresses. This volume draws attention to and investigates a historiography whose function is to be a mode of thinking, a model of action within the existing real. These essays address how theatre/performance historians analyze the historiographical methodologies that have been used to write theatrical and performance histories, how they resituate theorizations of the archive, of periodization, and of the past within theatre/performance research. As a result, the focus of this volume is not on the way reality is experienced by an historical subject, but how the reality of time, space, and matter mediates historical subjects. This exploration exposes the inner contradictions in the social and ideological organizations of history by establishing a different way of thinking about historiography, one which presents a challenge to current social organizations of and ontologies about historical subjects.