ABOUT THIS BOOK

"Performance" has multiple and often overlapping meanings that signify a wide variety of social behaviors. In this invitation to reflect on the power of performance, Diana Taylor explores many of its uses and iterations: artistic, economic, sexual, political, and technological performance; the performance of everyday life; and the gendered, sexed, and racialized performance of bodies. This book performs its argument. Images and texts interact to show how performance is at once a creative act, a means to comprehend power, a method of transmitting memory and identity, and a way of understanding the world.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Diana Taylor is University Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at New York University. She is the author and editor of several books, including The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas and Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's "Dirty War", both also published by Duke University Press.

REVIEWS

"Performance offers scenarios... for active pedagogy, inviting students and others to explore and perhaps undo the links between images and writing, texts and performances, so as to conduct their own performatic appropriations."

-- Loren Kruger Critical Inquiry

"Taylor's fascinating, multicultural analysis of performance explores not only what performance is but also what it does—what it allows one to see, to experience, and to theorize—and 'its complex relation to systems of power.' . . . Recommended."

-- M. S. LoMonaco Choice

"The book is performative and multivocal, combining images of performances in the Americas, Taylor’s narrative essays, and important excerpts from key texts on performance by academics, activists, and artists....The result is a work that gives ample space to artists/artivists as the creators of tactics rather than to performance studies
scholars who analyze nonperformance phenomena as performance."

-- Patricia Ybarra TDR: The Drama Review

"Introduction, reflection, and provocation coalesce most successfully in Taylor’s passionate insistence on the necessity of performance and its academic study. Performance, Taylor argues, has real effects, but the nature of those effects is not pre-determined. The wielder determines the worth of the weapon. These passages alone would suffice to make the book a trusted companion of students and senior scholars alike."

-- David Calder New Theatre Quarterly

"This book is a valuable introduction to performance art and performance studies. It is deftly argued and elegantly composed. Taylor concludes by saying that performance is ‘world-making’ and that we need to understand it (208). This book helps us to do just that."

-- Adrian Curtin Studies in Theatre and Performance

“Incredibly important. Performance is a proffer of a new way of looking and thinking about performance.”

-- Robert Summers CAA Reviews

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

1. Framing [Performance]

2. Performance Histories

3. Spect-Actors

4. The New Uses of Performance

5. Performative and Performativity

6. Knowing through Performance: Scenarios and Simulation

7. Artivists (Artist-Activists), or What's to Be Done?

8. The Future(s) of Performance

9. Performance Studies

Notes

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