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At an ecopark in Mexico, tourists pretend to be illegal migrants, braving inhospitable terrain and the U.S. Border Patrol as they attempt to cross the border. At a living history museum in Indiana, daytime visitors return after dark to play fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad. In the Mojave Desert, the U.S. Army simulates entire provinces of Iraq and Afghanistan, complete with bustling villages, insurgents, and Arabic-speaking townspeople, to train soldiers for deployment to the Middle East. At a nursing home, trainees put on fogged glasses and earplugs, thick bands around their finger joints, and sandbag harnesses to simulate the effects of aging and to gain empathy for their patients.

These immersive environments in which spectator-participants engage in simulations of various kinds—or “simming”—are the subject of Scott Magelssen’s book. His book lays out the ways in which simming can provide efficacy and promote social change through affective, embodied testimony. Using methodology from theater history and performance studies (particularly as these fields intersect with cultural studies, communication, history, popular culture, and American studies), Magelssen explores the ways these representational practices produce, reify, or contest cultural and societal perceptions of identity.

In Smaddification, Amanda Michelle Reid uses performance and dance studies to consider body politics in mid-twentieth-century Jamaica following its independence. According to Jamaican scholar and artistic leader Rex Nettleford, cofounder of the National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica, smaddification refers to the process of becoming someone: of self-actualization through movement, spectacle, and taking up space. Through this lens, Reid traces a dynamic approach to Jamaican decolonization wherein the arts, and movement in particular, became central to activist-dancers’ performances and theories of freedom. She also takes up the work of artists and scholars such as Katherine Dunham, Ivy Baxter, and Sylvia Wynter to bring the maximalist and expressive dance theater productions of this period to life, arguing that their embrace of the spectacular demands that we expand our understanding of Jamaica’s vanguard contributions to global black nationalist aesthetics. Bringing a queer and feminist approach to interpretating this moment of liberation, Smaddification follows the processes through which Jamaican dancers identified, defined, and institutionalized how to move freely as black people in a newly independent nation.

Winner of the Marcia Herndon Prize (Gender and Sexualities Studies Section), Society for Ethnomusicology, 2024

In Sonic Strategies, author Christina Baker highlights the tactics employed by contemporary performance artists in Mexico in response to the violence surrounding the nation’s War on Drugs. The introduction opens with a description of the 2007 reenactment of the Grito, or “cry,” of independence, a moment fraught with sonic sparring, setting the stage for how each subsequent chapter focuses on themes related to war and violence. Each chapter focuses on the works of one or more performance artist, and taken together, the case studies illuminate how critiques of the nation’s rising death tolls, governmental corruption, and gendered violence very literally sound, whether in Música de balas, a post-dramatic piece by Hugo Salcedo; the lamentations of the nation’s Antigones in works by Violeta Luna and Lukas Avendaño; satirical revisions of Mexican Golden Age film in the cabaret piece Nosotras las proles; or the story of transfeminicide in César Enríquez’s La Prietty Guoman by way of US pop music.

Written in an accessible style grounded in theater studies but interdisciplinary by design, Sonic Strategies will appeal to literary critics, students, musicologists, and theater and performance scholars alike. By paying close attention to planned and spontaneous sounds within live and textual experiences, Sonic Strategies contends that conscientious listening reveals dynamic practices that reside beyond the linguistic and embodied gesture.

As critic for the Soho Weekly News and the Village Voice during the 1970s and 1980s, Sally Banes enjoyed an incomparable perspective on the development of what she describes as "the mongrel, elusive, indefinable genre of performance art." In fact, Banes was present during a crucial point in that development, when a previously marginalized form took, quite literally, center stage and emerged as the preeminent form of avant-garde activity. Her reviews and articles explore the work of established artists such as Meredith Monk, Robert Wilson, Ping Chong, and Joan Jonas; events by the Bread and Puppet Theater, Robert Whitman, Charlotte Moorman, and Chris Burden; revivals of classic avant-garde performances; and the emergence of famous (and some notorious) performers such as Anne Bogart, Karen Finley, Spalding Gray, Steve Buscemi, Tim Miller, and Whoopi Goldberg. The depth and breadth of Banes's criticism realizes not only the continuing growth and development of American performance, but also the complex and sometimes surprising intersection of performance with the "other side" of the art/life divide, the "paratheater" of Japanese tea ceremonies, cat shows, circuses, art exhibits, and amateur nights at the Apollo. Banes's work recognizes the crucial importance of the critic as a situated self that must understand not only the concepts and techniques of avant-garde art, but the rich textures of the community spaces in which that art occurs. Much as her earlier book Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body captured the elusive artistic communities of America's postwar avant-garde activity, Subversive Expectations revels in the invigorating energies of Soho. The author's approach to this complex matrix of art, community, and culture is as interdisciplinary as performance itself, drawing on the histories and theories of painting, photography, dance, theater, and folklore. Her vivid descriptions of ephemeral events and her provocative interpretations fill a gap in the history of contemporary performance, when the avant-garde met the mainstream.