Performance, Politics and Activism

This collection of essays on politics, the performing arts, and various forms of activist performance uses the framework of performance studies to explore the engagements of political resistance, public practice and performance media. It places these engagements on various scales of performance production within local, national and transnational structures of neoliberal and liberal government and power. Performance has always been a way of articulating the conditions of contemporary society, and of pointing through the body of the performance to ways of defining, understanding and changing those conditions. Throughout these essays performance takes place in the environments of heightened everyday action, the aesthetic and cultural activity of the performing arts, and in the activist performance of political commitment. These trajectories in performance studies delineate the way people identify themselves and communicate with one another, both in attempts to change the structures of governance they experience, and vitally, alongside those structures.

Peter Lichtenfels teaches in the Undergraduate, MFA, and PHD program in the Department of Theatre and Dance, University of California, Davis, USA. He is co-author of Negotiating Shakespeare's Language in Romeo and Juliet (2009), and co-editor of Shakespeare, Language and the Stage (2005), both with Lynette Hunter.

John Rouse is Head of the PhD program in the Department of Theatre and Dance, University of California, San Diego, USA. He is the author of Brecht and the West German Theatre (1989) and co-editor with James Harding of Not the Other Avant-Garde: On the Transational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance (2006).