One of the more obscure episodes in the long history of the English stage is the foundation and short-lived existence of a French language Royal Academy of Music in the early 1670s. I intend to sum up here the evidence so far available and to show, using for the purpose a double MS. of Pierre Perrin's Ariane in the Bibliothèque Nationale, together with a few other documents, that the enterprise was indeed a very serious one, and was modelled on an earlier and very similar attempt in Paris a few years previously.

One of the things that strikes one most forcibly in surviving images of early commedia dell'arte is its enigmatic physicality, the manner in which its actors everywhere adopt postures and make gestures that seem not merely emphatic and exaggerated but almost hieroglyphic, full of some additional implication, laden with a figural and emblematic resonance that we sense but no longer see. In general terms, this quality is easily understood, as the body clearly served in commedia as a complex and polyvalent instrument of expression. Its gestures and movements were, as in all theatre, indexically linked to dramatic action, and they also served, as in much masked drama, as surrogates for the facial expression of affect, in that the movements and aspects of the whole body were enlisted to articulate the motions and mien of a veiled face and to overcome or play upon the sensation of estranged speech produced by the half-mask's bifurcation of the visage. Moreover, in a manner less familiar but illustrated well in Fig. 1, these movements and aspects also functioned as expressions in their own right, not articulating the affect or expression attendant upon immediate speech or situation or delineating the lines of external action but signaling the many impulses and various appetites of the world, the varied aspects of all persons and of the body itself, and invoking at times as their implicatory context human nature, common character, and identity rather than situation, attitude, or emotion.

The crowded marketplace in Thiruvananthapuram (aka Trivandrum) thronged with people in the late nineteenth century. Men and women clad in white mundu teemed about the busy street buying oil and salt, horseshoes and iron farm implements, coarse cloth, coir rope, jaggery, and palm toddy. The men were mostly bare-chested, though some, unmindful of the sweltering heat, wore white long shirts or an upper-body cloth. While a few young women wore printed blouses, many, particularly the older women, wore no upper-body clothes except for large, beaded necklaces made of red-colored stones. Most people, with the exception of the men who clothed their upper body, walked along the sides of the road, leaving the path clear for the occasional bullock cart. These bullock carts, also known as villuvandi, carried young men-about-town, almost exclusively landowning, upper-caste Nairs. Dressed in a spotless white shirt, white mundu, and matching white turban, the Nair riding his villuvandi assumed the haughty air of a master surveying his subjects; out to observe his inferiors as much as be seen as a superior. These Nairs, and other upper-caste men and women, had the exclusive right of way, on bullock cart or on foot, the right to wear clean white clothes, and, of course, the right to ride a villuvandi. These rights were codified through caste-based rules or norms known as jati maryada, which governed all aspects of social behavior.

Anyone who has staged a show has an idea of the numberless odd things that can go wrong. We expect, of course, that they will go right. From experience and knowledge, we can conceive the contingencies in categories; they range from the personal to the institutional and the natural (as in a force of nature). Contingencies of performance are the many variables that could impact performance in any number of ways, mostly unforeseen, and even if foreseen, mostly unpredictable in effect. Of course, contingency factors are time and space dependent, as what is contingent in one context or time may be completely under control in another context or time. We need to conceive of performance as fundamentally “a changing function of multiple variables,” as Barbara H. Smith once said of value. This changing function is a concept we need to hold tightly as we navigate common challenges of performance: What is our purpose or goal? What should we perform? What are the mechanics of the performance? Where should we perform? When? And for whom? These challenges are theoretically of indeterminate and indeterminable chronological sequence, and beginning from and working diligently through any one of them is bound to lead us into the others.

In October 1926 a leading African-American newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier, featured adjacent photographs of two young women with a provocative caption: “White Actresses Who Open with Robeson and Bledsoe on Broadway during Week.” The actresses featured were Lottice Howell, starring with Jules Bledsoe in the musical play Deep River, and Edith Warren, starring with Paul Robeson in the drama Black Boy. In reporting this latest bit of integrated casting, however, the Courier was wrong on two counts. First, they misidentified the photographs, identifying Howell as Warren and Warren as Howell; and second, they misidentified Warren, whose real name was Fredi Washington, as “white.” Washington (who dropped the stage name during previews) was, by self-identification, Negro, or, in the language of the Savannah official who recorded her birth in 1903, “colored.”

During the early years of Elizabeth's reign, the theatre was dominated by boy companies:

Out of seventy-eight rewards for Court performances between 1558 and 1576, twenty-one went to the Paul's boys, fifteen to the royal chapels, and ten to schoolboys, making a total of forty-six, as against only thirty-two paid to adult companies.

Six African students enact a somber, silent dance. They stage a series of striking images at the base of South African artist Willie Bester's sculpture Sara Baartman, in the Chancellor Oppenheimer Library at the University of Cape Town (UCT). Their faces and bodies smeared with black paint, the students articulate their protest of Sara Baartman in explicitly racial terms, aligning their critiques of economic, colonial, and racial oppression under the sign of blackness.

Consider an unlikely scenario. In the midst of World War I, a motley group of Jewish refugees in their teens and early twenties becomes obsessed with the idea of creating a “Yiddish art theatre” modeled upon Stanislavski's famous Russian company. By day they work as laborers, storekeepers, housepainters, and wartime smugglers; by night they teach themselves the basics of acting and stagecraft from outdated Russian and German books. The only theatre building where they can afford to perform is a dilapidated former circus on the outskirts of town, repurposed by the German army as a military stable. The roof leaks, and the stage reeks of horse dung. It is a bitterly cold winter, and since there is no money for heat, the actors rehearse with frozen limbs and thaw their stage makeup over the footlights. They eat one meal a day—a single boiled potato—and rehearsals are routinely interrupted when actors faint from hunger.

Clearly the attacks of 11 September 2001 served as a defining moment in the contemporary American political, social, or cultural imagination, and led directly to the invasion of Afghanistan and the far more controversial invasion of Iraq. Both wars were brief, the modest forces of these countries quickly capitulating to the overwhelming military superiority of Western forces, headed by the United States. On 1 May 2003, President George Bush announced victory and the end of the war in Iraq. Although the much more difficult and complex problems of occupation and pacification clearly will continue for some time, 1 May may be taken to have marked an end of a major phase in the crisis that was initiated on 9/11.

It has become a firm article of belief that tragic drama, in Greece, grew out of the worship of Dionysus; that is to say, out of ideas and rites connected with the circling year, the mysteries of death and rebirth, alternating joy and sorrow, the sufferings and the triumph of the god, and so on. No doubt this might have happened; it sounds plausible. But did it happen? I think there are good reasons for being very sceptical about the whole theory.

In The Great Wet Way, a humorous account of transatlantic travel, American theatre critic Alan Dale represents ocean liners as sites of transformation, frivolity, and performance. In the passage above, he ponders the peculiar metamorphosis that overtakes him whenever he crosses the Atlantic. Cut off from the hustling world of Broadway and Fifth Avenue, he loses his “real self,” becoming instead an autograph-hunting, bridge-playing, opera-glassing “ship self.” It is as though the ship has remade Dale and the social world around him (Fig. 1). Within this altered world, new sights become old sights, and eccentric clothing or mannerisms come to seem commonplace. Dale recalls seeing a young woman wearing a Panama hat covered with autographs from her fellow passengers. If the woman dared to “walk down Broadway or Fifth Avenue wearing that hideous autograph hat,” he writes, “[s]he would probably be followed by a howling and derisive mob. . . . Yet on board she was unmolested. After the first few days nobody noticed the autograph hat.”

In a 1950 letter, choreographer Katherine Dunham mentions trouble keeping dancers with her troupe “[i]n spite of the fact that we are the only non-subsidized professional group that has remained self-supporting over these years, and in spite of the fact that we are loved and respected all over the world and work more weeks out of the year than any other dance group in existence.” Although some of these claims would be challenging to validate empirically, Dunham is not exaggerating when she describes the amount of work it took for her and her dancers to keep going without the benefit of public funding or an enduring private patron. This essay is part of a larger critical mixed methods project on historical dance touring and transmission: Dunham's Data: Katherine Dunham and Digital Methods for Dance Historical Inquiry. We turn here to the scale of the “everyday,” beginning by building a daily itinerary of Dunham's travels so as to understand better the global method necessary for her company's survival, and how the ongoing pursuit of solvency propelled her, her performers, and her work into the world.

The Parliamentary Act of 1843 that eradicated the duopoly of Covent Garden and Drury Lane affected London taverns as well as theatres. To skirt the ban on drama, minor theatres had long interpolated musical interludes into any sort of play, thus naturalizing indoors a variety format more common to the fairground or circus. The growing taste for miscellaneous entertainment was also served by tavern saloons, where variety bills supplemented alcoholic conviviality. The Act of 1843, amending the licensing act of 1737, merely recognized this fact of life and extended a welcoming hand to these and other performance spaces. All places of entertainment holding a “burletta license” might stage plays, provided that smoking and the sale of spirituous beverages were banned from the premises.

In the decade before the Revolutionary War, the city of Newport was one of the major centers of Colonial culture, ranking with New York and Philadelphia, and far ahead of the village of Boston. It was the only settlement in New England thought cosmopolitan enough by David Douglass to support the introduction of a professional theatre troupe. The Douglass-Hallam company had performed successfully in the southern and middle-Atlantic colonies, and the manager apparently was determined to attempt his luck further north in order to supplement the rather thin living the company managed to make from giving performances in America. Boston, with its sectarian rigidity, was clearly out of the question. Newport, on the other hand, with its wealthy and travelled shipping interests, seemed distinctly possible as a base for what was hoped to be a larger sphere of performance. Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (“Rhode Island” in Colonial times meant only the Island of Rhode Island, not the entire area we now know as the State) had no law against theatrical performances, principally because none had ever been given in the Colony to object to. The Douglass-Hallam company moved north in 1761 and began what was to be a series of attempts to penetrate the resistance of New Englanders to frivolities and delights.

A television documentary on speech therapy is visible on the screen. A logopedist (speech-defect expert) coaches a young man to overcome his stutter through hypnosis. “You will speak loudly and clearly, freely and easily, unafraid of your voice and your speech,” she instructs. The boy hesitates but finally musters the words: “I can speak.” Thus Andrei Tarkovsky begins Zerkalo [Mirror], his poetic film about personal memory and cultural trauma (conceived in 1964 and completed in 1974).3 The symbolism of this scene was impossible for Tarkovsky's Soviet intelligentsia audience to miss. The stutterer coming to speech allegorized the artist coming to free expression in Russia after Stalin, struggling to adapt to alternating intervals of liberating “thaw” and oppressive “freeze,” fluency and silence, in the period of de-Stalinization that Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech at the 20th Party Congress of 1956 set into motion. The crisis of the solo stutterer's speech in the film stood in for the larger emerging crisis of how to represent socialist reality, a world that once had been captured solely by socialist realism—that is, until Khrushchev deprived Stalinism of its status as real socialism and thus invalidated the basis of socialist realism.

Most know Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81) for his dramatic theory, specifically that which is found in his periodical the Hamburg Dramaturgy (1767–69), a collection of 101 essays that has since earned Lessing the moniker of “the first dramaturg.” Many are also familiar with Lessing's major plays, Miss Sara Sampson (1755), Minna von Barnhelm (1767), Emilia Galotti (1772), and Nathan the Wise (1779). Fewer, however, may be familiar with his acting theory and his long association with actors, an association that began in his college years and which so disturbed Lessing's father that the respectable pastor lured the wayward student home by falsely claiming that Lessing's mother was ill. During his time as a university student in Leipzig, Lessing translated plays for the troupe of Karoline Neuber (1697–1760) and socialized with the company's actors; over time he would continue to accrue significant firsthand knowledge of actors and the art of acting, not only through his frequent theatregoing but also through the coaching of his own plays. Lessing's familiarity with actors and acting informs both his performance and dramatic theory, including that which one finds in the Hamburg Dramaturgy; in Anglophone studies of Lessing's journal, however, one infrequently sees Lessing's dramatic theory placed in conversation with his acting theory, reception theory, or performance reviews. Due to the short and contentious life of the Hamburg National Theatre, the experimental theatre project to which the Hamburg Dramaturgy was ostensibly attached, historical narratives more often focus on Lessing's strained relations with the actors of the Hamburg acting company. If one views Lessing's writing about performance solely in terms of a frustrated critic's attempts to rein in “unruly” actors, however, one loses sight of how Lessing's acting theory supports his wider ideas about the form and function of theatre and about how the Hamburg Dramaturgy and the Hamburg theatre experiment might function as a force for social change.

British Library Additional MS 27962 is a transcript of the diplomatic dispatches sent from London to Florence by Tuscan agents in the seventeenth century. Among the mass of contemporary political comment are regular notices of the Court drama of the period of much the same kind as those which can be found in the Calendar of State Papers (Venetian), and of nearly equal, though complementary, value as a source of information about masques, Court plays, tilts and other entertainments.