Drama and Performance Studies

The omnipresence of digital technologies and social media has affected the recording and dissemination of histories—both personal and institutional—in ways that render the distinctions blurry between what is real, edited, or simulated. In recent years, Drama and Performance Studies have responded to this context by becoming increasingly interested in the challenges faced by, and the forms and possibilities of, dramatizing, performing and documenting histories and understandings of reality. The chapter is divided into two sections: 1. Performance Art, Histories and Institutionalizations; 2. Realistic Theatre and Theatricalized Reality: Experiments with ‘Theatre of the Real’. These two sections focus on work in Drama and Performance Studies published between 2012 and early 2013; one of the texts published in paperback in 2012 originally appeared in hardback in 2011. In the first section, Daniël Ploeger reviews current debates on the historicization of performance art since the 1960s; in the second section, Louise LePage examines the dynamic relationship between theatre and reality in the milieus of theatre practice and scholarship, where it is presently enjoying productive tensions and engagements.

Aesthetics · Art · Context (archaeology) · Drama · Epistemology · Literature · Media studies · Omnipresence · Section (typography) · Sociology · Theatre studies · Visual arts · Computer Science · History · Philosophy · Theatre and Performance Studies