Theatre/Performance Historiography ― Time, Space, Matter

The question that frames the discussion of theatre and performance historiography today often concerns its relationship to the cultures performing it and the thought processes it expresses. The sciences - cognitive studies and neurobiology, for example - are evoked to enunciate the materiality of the object of study, a materiality molded by the contemporary post-humanist and post-political predicament of bringing natural science and cultural theory into theatre and performance historiography (how the historical record has been arranged). 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. Accordingly, the focus 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 social and ideological organizations of historical subjects by establishing a different way of thinking about historiography, one which presents a challenge to current social organization of and ontologies about historical subjects.

Rosemarie K. Bank is Professor of Theatre at Kent State University, USA. She is the author ofTheatre Culture in America, 1825-1860, and has published widely in the fields of nineteenth-century American theatre and culture and theatre historiography. She is a member of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre and past editor of several theatre journals, as well as an active member of the International Federation for Theatre Research's Working Group in Theatre Historiography, which she has served as a convener.

Michal Kobialka is Professor in the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance at the University of Minnesota, USA. His most recent publication isFurther on, Nothing: Tadeusz Kantor's Theatre. He has published in the fields of medieval, eighteenth-century, and contemporary European theatre, and theatre historiography. He is internationally known for his work on Polish performance artist Tadeusz Kantor.