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The Methuen Drama Companion to Performance Art offers a comprehensive guide to the major issues and interdisciplinary debates concerning performance in art contexts that have developed over the last decade. It understands 'performance art' as an institutional, cultural, and economic phenomenon rather than as a label or object. Following the ever-increasing institutionalization and mainstreaming of performance and its methods of display, representation, and mediation in the wider cultural sphere, the book's chapters identify a marked change in the economies and labor practices surrounding performance art and its institutional curating and presenting practices, reflective of an advanced stage of capitalism that approaches art production in tandem with event production. Embracing what we perceive to be the 'oxymoronic status' of performance art-where it is simultaneously precarious and highly profitable-the essays in this book map the myriad gestures and radical possibilities of this extreme contradiction.The Companion activates an interdisciplinary perspective to better attend to performance art's legacies and its current practices. It brings together specially commissioned essays from leading innovative scholars from a wide range of approaches including art history, visual and performance studies, dance and theatre scholarship in order to provide a non-hierarchical merging of the disciplines within and between the humanities. It provides ten methodological directions that examine possibilities of transformative change-the core of performance art's transgressive radical legacy. The book also includes a section on new directions and resources devoted to performance art. The chapters will thus provide multifocal perspectives on recent research trends to offer an array of intertwined methodologies.

The Methuen Drama Handbook of Theatre History and Historiography offers an authoritative guide to contemporary debates and practices in this field. The book covers current key themes and methods in theatre history research, and expands the object of study to include engagement with theatre and performance practices and the development of theatre histories around the world. Central to the book are 16 specially commissioned essays by established and emerging scholars from a wide range of international contexts, whose discussion of individual case studies is predicated on their understanding and experience of their 'local' landscape of theatre history. These essays reveal where important work continues to be done in the field and, most valuably, draw on academic contexts beyond the Western academy to expand our knowledge of the exciting directions that such an approach opens up. Prefaced by an introduction tracing the development of the discipline of theatre history and changing historiographical approaches, the handbook explores current issues pertaining to theatre and performance history research, and provides up to date and robust introductions to the methods and historiographic questions being explored by researchers in the field.Featuring a series of essential research tools, including a detailed list of resources and an annotated bibliography of key texts, this is an indispensable scholarly handbook for anyone working in theatre and performance history and historiography.

The Methuen Drama Handbook of Interculturalism and Performance explores ground-breaking new directions and critical discourse in the field of intercultural theatre and performance while surveying key debates concerning interculturalism as an aesthetic and ethical series of encounters in theatre and performance from the 1960s onwards. The handbook's global coverage challenges understandings of intercultural theatre and performance that continue to prioritise case studies emerging primarily from the West and executed by elite artists. By building on a growing field of scholarship on intercultural theatre and performance that examines minoritarian and grassroots work, the volume offers an alternative and multi-vocal view of what interculturalism might offer as a theoretical keyword to the future of theatre and performance studies, while also contributing an energized reassessment of the vociferous debates that have long accompanied its critical and practical usage in a performance context. By exploring anew what happens when interculturalism and performance intersect as embodied practice, The Methuen Drama Handbook of Interculturalism and Performance offers new perspectives on a seminal theoretical concept still as useful as it is controversial. Featuring a series of indispensable research tools, including a fully annotated bibliography, this is the essential scholarly handbook for anyone working in intercultural theatre and performance, and performance studies.