Entangled Performance Histories New Approaches to Theater Historiography

Entangled Performance Histories is the first book-length study that applies the concept of "entangled histories" as a new paradigm in the field of theater and performance historiography. "Entangled histories" denotes the interconnectedness of multiple histories that cannot be addressed within national frameworks. The concept refers to interconnected pasts, in which historical processes of contact and exchange between performance cultures affected all involved. Presenting case studies from across the world—spanning Africa, the Arab-speaking world, Asia, the Americas and Europe—the book’s contributors systematically expand, exemplify and examine the concept of "entangled histories," thus introducing various innovative concepts, theories and methodologies for investigating reciprocally consequential processes of interweaving performance cultures from the past. Bringing together examples of entanglements in theater and performance histories from a broad variety of geographical and historical backgrounds, the book’s contributions build together a broad basis for a possible and necessary paradigmatic shift in the field of theater and performance historiography. Ideal for researchers and students of history, theater, performance, drama and dance, this volume opens novel perspectives on the possibilities and challenges of investigating the entangled histories of theater and performance cultures on a global scale.

List of Figures List of Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction: Entangled Performance Histories: New Approaches to Theater Historiography (Erika Fischer-Lichte) PART I: Methodological Reflections 1 Interweaving Stories, Altering Discourses (Malgorzata Sugiera) 2 Writing Entangled Theater/Performance Histories in the Arab World (Khalid Amine) PART II: Hidden Histories—Forgetting and Remembering 3 William Kentridge’s The Head & The Load: Theatrical Collage and the Color of Memory (Catherine M. Cole) 4 Hijikata Tatsumi at the Osaka World Exposition’s Pepsi Pavilion, 1970: Multiple Historiographies of a Lost Performance (Stephen Barber) PART III: Entanglements between Drama, Theater and Colonial Historiographies 5 Disentangling Colonial Archives: The Combustible Affair of Ensuring/Insuring Theater Safety in Colonial Singapore (meLê yamomo) 6 The Thorny Entanglements of Theater and Colonial Historiography in the Netherlands: Anti-colonial Critique and Imperial Nostalgia in J. Slauerhoff ’s Play Jan Pieterszoon Coen (1931) (Sruti Bala) PART IV: Emergence and Transformation of Genres 7 Reversibility as Historiographical Method: Japanese Theater and Its Doubles (Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei) 8 Plumbing the Past to Project into the Future: The Entangled Trajectories of Flamenco’s Twenty-First-Century Avant-Garde (Catherine Diamond) PART V: National Theater Histories—Entanglements and Disentanglements 9 The Interwoven Performance Culture of Algeria (Marvin Carlson) 10 Writing History as Disentanglement: Toward a Historiography of Modern Greek Theater (Platon Mavromoustakos) Coda: The Whirligig of Tech: Theater as Media Archaeology (W. B. Worthen) Index

Erika Fischer-Lichte is Director of the International Research Center “Interweaving Performance Cultures” at Freie Universität Berlin. Malgorzata Sugiera is a Full-time Professor at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Poland, and Head of the Department for Performativity Studies. Torsten Jost is a Researcher and academic coordinator at the Cluster of Excellence Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective at Freie Universität Berlin. Holger Hartung is a theater and dance scholar from Berlin, who works at the Hanns Eisler School of Music, Berlin, where he oversees digital transformation. Omid Soltani is a Researcher at the International Research Center "Interweaving Performance Cultures" of Freie Universität Berlin.