When a group comprised primarily of African-derived “people”—yes, the scare quotes matter—gather at the intersection of performance and subjectivity, the result is often not a renewed commitment to practice or an explicit ensemble of questions, but rather a palpable structure of feeling, a shared sense that violence and captivity are the grammar and ghosts of our every gesture. This structure of feeling is palpable even in the place-names “Africa” and “the Caribbean,” names whose articulation (grammar) and memory (ghosts) would not be names at all were it not for the trade in human cargo. The promise of sense and meaning, when these place-names are spoken, is imbricated in the syntax and morphology of structural violence. Isolation of its performative and episodic instances (the violent event) often robs us of our ability to see it as a grammar of emergence and being: the Maafa, or African Holocaust, as the condition for the emergence of African being, just as grammar conditions the emergence of speech. We know the apparitions: ghosts of lost ancestors whom Ghanaians mourn each year at the sea when they mark the Maafa on their side of the Atlantic; the strange surnames on this side, haunted by the memory of names unknown; that empty space between children and their grandparents where the scourge of AIDS walks in silence; civil wars and famines induced by “natural” disasters like World Bank policies and U.S. intervention—one need not name each and every ghost to remind oneself of their omnipresence.

The greatest challenge that theatre scholars face today—as we watch the seemingly inexorable march of U.S. imperialism and capitalist globalization— is to remember, to historicize rigorously and resourcefully, to render events (in Brecht's words) “remarkable,” to “expose the world's mechanism on a grand scale and to copy it in such a way that it would be more easily serviced.” When we practice a mimeticism that keeps “impermanence always before our eyes, . . . our own period can be seen to be impermanent too.” We must remember in order to be able to demystify the pieties disseminated by our politicians, pundits, and journalists who so blithely disregard the brutalities and deceptions that structure the histories they glibly rewrite that one would think they sprinkled water from the River Lethe on their Cheerios every morning. For remembering, as Pierre Bourdieu points out, represents a reconstruction not only of the past but also of the dynamics of disavowal and forgetting. To historicize means to “reconstruct the history of the historical labour of dehistoricization [italics in original quote].” This reconstructive labor seems all the more urgent during a period when theatre scholars (who have long been considered more or less irrelevant within the humanities) must face the increasing corporatization of the universities for which we work, the continuing intellectual paralysis of the Left, the relentless commercialization and retrenchment of American theatre (for better or worse), and the rise of a discipline, performance studies, that is challenging, reinvigorating, and partially displacing theatre studies.

Photographs show what performers actually look like. They show details of costume. They apparently show gesture, posture, stance, and expression, which sometimes can be linked with specific moments in a drama. The idea of photographs as pictorial evidence of actors' work appeals because photos seem, paradoxically, both to describe and to resolve the disturbing contradiction which lies close to the heart of the historian's work: the transient intimate moment (the inherently unstable and ephemeral) arrested, caught forever. This is an idea (or an ideal) that makes the use of photos so appealing. Photographs seem to tell us that we have passed from the realm of the subjective artist, who aspired to reproduce a likeness of an event that lay beyond his or her capacity to realize fully, into the domain of the scientific observer. The camera, we are led to understand, is merely a scientific recording instrument, an objective machine that simply transcribes onto a sensitized plate anything which is placed before it. A baby, an actor, a steam engine, or a cow is recorded with equal impartiality. We are so grateful for any image of these elusive and fugitive moments of distant performance that we hesitate to query the source.

It is as good a division of the world as any other to observe that there are and have been societies with theatre and others without theatre. And that in societies that know this strange public place, where fiction is consumed as a repeatable event, this has always met with reticence, anathema, major or minor excommunications, as well as enthusiasm. More specifically, next to the spiritual suspicion that befalls theatre, there is always the vigilant concern of the State, to the point where all theatre has been one of the affairs of the State and remains so to this day!

The New Negro, Indigenist, and Négritude movements of the 1920s and 1930s constitute the grounded base of contemporary Afro-American, Caribbean, and African literary scholarship. Critics return repeatedly to this textual field as if to embrace a heralded center, familiar and stable. Skepticism regarding presentations of the era as a coherent whole has inspired redefinitions of the period's demarcations, classic works as well as national and transnational intertextualities. Bearing in mind the discontinuities, one must acknowledge, however, that among other achievements, the new letters movements provided an epistemological break away from the predominance of Euro-American influences on black texts, the discursive agendas previously defining textual production particularly in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Caribbean writing. New letters works became communal property to be read and revised across national boundaries. Antilleans and some Hispanics, for instance, embraced texts by Langston Hughes and Claude McKay and were challenged by the Afro-American example to respond in stylistic kind. Unlike any other epoch of African-American expression, new letters shared a common ideology: writing regional, ethnic, and peasant experiences into existence. Their very articulation signified protest directed against cultural repression on the one hand and racial self-hatred on the other. The paradox of such a posture is suggested by Jean Price-Mars's use of the term collective bovaryism to describe in retrospect his generation's capitulation during the American Marine Occupation of Haiti (1915–1934). From the Haitian contradictions emerged defensive political, cultural, and textual agendas as of 1927, which paralleled the black revolts of Harlem and Paris but were determined by the particular circumstances provoking their enunciation.

In recent critical theory, the word performance has undergone a significant expansion, some would say an inflation. As the Editor's Note to the May issue of PMLA (“Special Topic: Performance”) observes, “What once was an event has become a critical category, now applied to everything from a play to a war to a meal. The performative … is a cultural act, a critical perspective, a political intervention.” Theatre historians will perhaps greet such pronouncements with mixed emotions. On one hand, they may welcome the acknowledgment by the principal organ of the Modern Language Association that performance (as opposed to drama merely) can count for so much. On the other hand, they may wonder what exactly is intended by the conceptual leap that takes performance beyond the established theatrical genres to encompass armed conflict and comestibles.

On 15 May 1995, the Alliance for Change (AFC), a coalition of opposition leaders in Ghana, organized a demonstration that came to be known by the name Kume Preko (which translates as “Kill me once and for all”) to protest the government's new value-added tax (VAT) policy. During the demonstration, armed supporters of Jerry Rawlings, Ghana's president, set upon the marchers, killing four people, including a fourteen-year-old boy. The AFC charged that members of the ruling party were implicated in the killings. It also dismissed a police report on the incident as a “cheap and fraudulent cover-up” that was “contradicted by the abundant evidence.” An article in the leading opposition newspaper, the Ghanaian Chronicle, criticized Rawlings's government for flouting the constitutional right to public dissent and called the violence against the demonstrators “Hitlerism in Ghana.” The Kume Preko violence dealt Rawlings a political blow: it dented his image as a man of the people and the credibility of his commitment to a new liberal democratic political regime in Ghana.

Fin-de-siècle Russia was a culture replete with interest in the occult, spiritualism, and the religions of the Far East. Curiosity about the mystical infused all tiers of society. Among those influenced by the spiritual was none other than Konstantin Stanislavsky himself, who experienced a personal crisis in which he began to doubt his own ability as an actor. In 1906, he took his now-famous trip to Finland, where he sequestered himself for the summer, examined his artistic life, and began to reconsider seriously his process as an actor. While reflecting on his past artistic work, he began to organize years of notes on acting; and several notions drawn from Eastern mysticism in general and Yoga in particular found their way into his “system.” Although a handful of articles that examine Stanislavsky's use of Yoga have been published in the West, over the past century scholars and teachers have paid little attention to the spiritual facets of Stanislavsky's thinking, focusing instead on the psychological aspects of his work. Given, however, the presence of important Yogic elements in the system at its very inception, a full understanding of Stanislavsky's technique is impossible without knowledge of the intersections between his system and Yoga. Borrowing from Yoga, Stanislavsky offers actors much more than theories about how to be more believable or psychologically realistic in their roles. He adapts specific Yogic exercises in order to help actors transcend the limitations of the physical senses and tap into higher levels of creative consciousness.

In the minute investigation of old oil canvases, modern art restorers use a technique called rigatino to fill in where flecks of paint are damaged or missing. These fine hatch marks, made with thin paint, signal to later scholars and restorers what constitutes the restorer's work while fully maintaining the distinctiveness and integrity of the original artist's brush strokes. In other words, restorers have devised a straightforward method to indicate the exact positions of evidentiary lacunae and to mark the impositions of their own hand amidst the work of old masters. Unlike the superscripts of footnotes amidst a printed text, rigatino blends with the original picture, though upon close investigation it is always distinct.

As a performance scholar and music lover, I find it strange that the fields of theatre and performance studies historically have been reluctant to engage with musical performance. Even as theatrical a musical form as opera is generally excluded from the history of theatre, on the grounds that “the predominant force in opera was the music rather than the words,” as Vera Mowry Roberts, my theatre history professor, puts the case.1 Roberts points to the nonliterary character of music as the reason for the exclusion; I speculate that the perception of music not only as nonliterary but, more broadly, as nonmimetic may seem to place it outside the realm of theatrical representation. While performance-oriented scholars spurn music, music-oriented scholars generally spurn performance. Traditional musicologists remain focused on the textual dimensions of musical compositions, whereas scholars who look at music from the perspective of cultural studies are generally more concerned with audience and reception than with the actual performance behavior of musicians.

Soon after he was consecrated bishop in 963, Æthelwold of Winchester (909–84) began to promulgate a series of new rules for worship and religious life in the monasteries of England. In one passage that is well known to theatre historians, Æthelwold insisted on the following performance of the Easter morning liturgy.

I am happy to take up this request to speak to the state of the field of performance studies, though I will be arguing here against the felicity of such a project. Performance studies, to my mind, is less “a thing done” than a set of questions asked, and the more performance studies keeps on the slip, remains diffuse, and resists congealing within delimited boundaries, the greater service it provides to our collective inquiries in the academy. This may be, oddly and even disturbingly, to argue for performance studies’ hollowness, its (in)capacity, its necessary infelicity—even, dare I suggest, its theatricality.

The so-called river view of the Dorset Garden playhouse and the Dolle engravings in Settle's The Empress of Morocco (1673) have long been familiar to theatre historians, but these are not the only pictures we have of this elegant Restoration theatre, and it may be helpful to gather together here all the pictorial material that has been found, much of which is new, intriguing, and sometimes baffling.

In 2004, Singaporean presenter Tang Fu Kuen commissioned French avant-garde choreographer Jérôme Bel to create a work in collaboration with classical Thai dancer-choreographer Pichet Klunchun. The resulting piece is unlike most intercultural collaborations. In the world of concert dance, East–West interculturalism takes place in a variety of ways: in costuming or set design, in theme or subject matter, in choreographic structure, in stylings of the body, in energetic impetus, in spatial composition, in philosophical attitude toward art making. Bel's work, titled Pichet Klunchun and Myself, does not combine aesthetics in any of these ways. In fact, the piece may more accurately be described not as a dance but as two verbal interviews (first by Bel of Klunchun and then vice versa) performed for an audience and separated by an intermission. There is no actual intermingling of forms—Thai classical dance with European contemporary choreography—in this performance. The intercultural “choreography” here comprises a staged conversation between the artists and some isolated physical demonstrations by each.

That theatre is a place of work seems beyond debate. But what kind of workplace is it? And under what conditions does theatre conform to a capitalist production process? At first glance these questions may seem obviously, even inextricably, linked; but investigating theatre as somewhere people go to work is a far different enterprise than specifying its economic connection to capital.

The two white male cosponsors, a Democrat and a Republican, dressed as King George and Hamilton, respectively, as they rapped the resolution in the state senate. In Hamilton, chief creator Lin-Manuel Miranda stakes out space for an immigrant from the Caribbean who was in the room where the United States of America was founded. Based on Ron Chernow's biography, Hamilton follows the struggles and successes of Alexander Hamilton in a story largely told by his nemesis, Aaron Burr. The musical opened Off-Broadway at the Public Theater in 2015 and subsequently moved to Broadway. With its Founders Chic historical approach, hip-hop aesthetic, and multiracial cast, this Broadway blockbuster has earned substantial commercial and critical acclaim from across the political spectrum. Former President Barack Obama joked, “Hamilton, I'm pretty sure, is the only thing Dick Cheney and I agree on.”

If a model haunts my inauguration of “Critical Stages,” then it is the “Forum on Theatre and Tragedy in the Wake of September 11, 2001” that David Román commissioned for the March 2002 issue of Theatre Journal. Yet there would be little room in that important historical document for what I have to say here. Though I greatly admire Román for commissioning that forum and am still profoundly moved by the thoughts of its twenty-seven contributors, I must ask how much more significant that forum would have been had the original commission focused on “Theatre and Politics” rather than “Theatre and Tragedy.” Would Diana Taylor's suggestion that the events of 9/11 have given us “a different kind of tragedy” have been a suggestion that 9/11 has given us a different kind of political theatre? What is that theatre? Is it even progressive? At the very least, a more direct focus on theatre and politics in the forum might have constituted a reply to the debate among theatre practitioners (particularly those in the United States) about the role of theatre in the politics of a post-9/11 world. As Marvin Carlson has pointed out, those debates initially centered on whether, in one fell swoop, historical forces had cowed political theatre into voluntary silence if not obsolescence. Five years later, what he describes as a retreat “from any consideration of an engaged theatre”—a retreat that ran the gamut from the “commercial theatre of Broadway” to “New York's most experimental and uncommercial ventures”—casts a shadow out of which we have yet to emerge.

Given performance history's disciplinary complexity, not to mention the complications of a “we” comprised by so many different scholars, Theatre Survey's question is, in one sense, unanswerable. In another sense, if I translate the question to what I can do (staying fully aware that others will propose answers different from mine), however, I can offer an answer from my position as a feminist performance historian and historiographer. My response to it is twofold. The argument I make here is for performance that foregrounds historiographical operations, making physical, gestural, emotional, and agonistic the processes that construct history out of the past. Concomitantly, I am arguing for history that overtly acknowledges the ways in which it is a performance of the past, but not the past itself. This dual approach is especially important in feminist accounts of the past because performance has historically been a crucial constituent of feminist theories and practices.

In The Semiotics of Performance, Marco de Marinis notes that the field of performance studies has greatly expanded the traditional categories of drama and theatre. “It is obvious,” he writes, “that we are dealing with a field that is far broader and more varied than the category consisting exclusively of traditional stagings of dramatic texts, to which some scholars still restrict the class of theatrical performances.” A few scholars of early theatre history have embraced expanded categories of performance. Jody Enders's “medieval theater of cruelty,” for example, rests on a concept of “a theory of virtual performance” that translates “into actual medieval dramatic practice.” Carol Symes's study of the “dramatic activity” suggested by medieval French manuscripts identifies “a vital performative element within the surrounding culture.” Both writers have shown how new ideas of performance enlarge the category beyond the “traditional stagings” described by de Marinis.