Performing Objects and Theatrical Things

By Marlis Schweitzer and Joanne Zerdy

This book rethinks historical and contemporary theatre, performance, and cultural events by scrutinizing and theorizing the objects and things that activate stages, venues, environments, and archives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Aug 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9781137402455

Book preview

Performing Objects and Theatrical Things

Also by Marlis Schweitzer

WHEN BROADWAY WAS THE RUNWAY: Theater, Fashion, and American Culture

TESTIMONIAL ADVERTISING IN THE AMERICAN MARKETPLACE: Emulation, Identity, Community (ed. with Marina Moskowitz)

Performing Objects and

Theatrical Things

Edited by

Marlis Schweitzer

and

Joanne Zerdy

Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Marlis Schweitzer and Joanne Zerdy 2014

Individual chapters © Contributors 2014

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.

Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published 2014 by

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN

Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

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ISBN 978–1–137–40244–8

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Performing objects and theatrical things / [edited by] Marlis Schweitzer and Joanne Zerdy.

pages cm

Summary: Performing Objects and Theatrical Things rethinks historical and contemporary theatre, performance, and cultural events from the perspective of the objects and things that activate stages, venues, environments, and archives. Embracing methodologies from across the humanities and social sciences, we understand physical materials as actants, with particular frequencies, energies, and potentials to affect human and nonhuman worlds. The texts, stage properties, instruments, costumes, photographs, and detritus that animate this collection emerge from the thirteenth- to the twenty-first century, traversing sites across Europe and North America. Challenging anthropocentric narratives that foreground humans as sole agents, our authors present object and ‘thingcentric’ methodologies that range from deeply personal autoethnographic reflections and close textual readings to carefully researched archival studies and rhizomatic explorations of an object’s journey from one place and time to another—Provided by publisher.

ISBN 978–1–137–40244–8   (hardback)

1.  Theater—Philosophy.   2.  Material culture.   3.  Theater—Historiography.    4.  Symbolic anthropology.   I.  Schweitzer, Marlis, editor.   II.  Zerdy, Joanne, 1979- editor.   III.  Title.

PN2039.P396 2014

792.01—dc23

2014022926

Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India.

For Finlay Emilio Zerdy Daddario "Remember you have

friends here as faithful as grass and sky."

—Rumi

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Notes on Contributors

Introduction: Object Lessons

Marlis Schweitzer and Joanne Zerdy

Part I   Archival Digs

  1   Technology and Wonder in Thirteenth-Century Iberia and Beyond

Christopher Swift

  2   Nothing but a string of beads: Maud Allan’s Salomé Costume as a choreographic thing

Marlis Schweitzer

  3   Cartomania and the Scriptive Album: Cartes-de-Visite as Objects of Social Practice

Nicole Berkin

  4   The Linguistic Animation of an American Yorick

Lezlie C. Cross

  5   House Arrest: Museological Performance, Animacy, and the Remains of Rural America

Margaret Werry

Part II   Embodied Research Practices

  6   The Unfolding Roles of a Walking Map within NVA’s Half Life

Joanne Zerdy

  7   Military Memorialization and its Object(s) of Period Purification

Helene Vosters

  8   Entided, Enwatered, Enwinded: Human/More-than-Human Agencies in Site-specific Performance

Minty Donald

Part III   Materialist Semiotics

  9   All Transparent: Pepper’s Ghost, Plate Glass, and Theatrical Transformation

Aileen Robinson

10   Que(e)rying Theatrical Objects

Benjamin Gillespie

11   Making the Invisible Visible: Virtual Stage Props and Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus

Joanne Tompkins

12   Relic, Souvenir, or Just Hair?: Exploring the Complexities of Objects as Actants and Things as Mementos in the Merchandise of El Vez, The Mexican Elvis

Karen Jean Martinson

Part IV   Excavating Between the Lines

13   Props Breaking Character: The Performance and Failure of Real Objects on the Naturalist Stage

Kee-Yoon Nahm

14   Bodied Objects: An Analysis of the Whip in George Aiken’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Matthew Lopez’s The Whipping Man

Chandra Owenby Hopkins

15   Translocalized Drums: Mobilizing the Intercultural in the Cantares Mexicanos

Leo Cabranes-Grant

Notes

Works Cited

Index

List of Illustrations

Cover: The beaded top from Maud Allan’s Salomé costume, now performing in the archives of Dance Collection Danse in Toronto. Courtesy: Dance Collection Danse

Acknowledgments

All performance is collaborative. By this, we mean that no performing artist or performative act can exist apart from other human and nonhuman collaborators, irrespective of genre, place, or identity. As humans, we continually make and remake one another, just as the nonhuman (or more-than-human) world continually makes, unmakes, and remakes us. And so it is with the collection here. This book is an act of collaboration, developed over years of conversation, in-person meetings, and online discussions. It is also a script for future collaborations, in that it anticipates the moment when you, the reader, will hold, interact, and perform with/alongside it.

This book had its beginnings in a Working Group convened for the 2012 American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) in Nashville, Tennessee. We would therefore like to acknowledge and thank the members of that Working Group, many of whom are represented in the collection: Nicole Berkin, Lezlie Cross, Minty Donald, Stephen DiBenedetto, Benjamin Gillespie, Chandra Owenby Hopkins, John Mabry, Karen Jean Martinson, Kee-Yoon Nahm, Joy Palacios, Aileen Robinson, Christopher Swift, and Gero Toegl. In 2013, we convened a second ASTR Working Group to continue exploring many of the themes first touched upon in 2012. For the lively conversations that ensued in Dallas, Texas, we’d like to thank Lis Austin, Lindsay Cummings, Allan Davis, Heather Fitzsimmons Frey, Rachel Gilbert, Jeanmarie Higgins, Annie Holt, Gabrielle Houle, Victoria Lewis, Karen Jean Martinson, Adeleke Ogunfeyimi, Paul Rae, Bruno Roubicek, and Alan Sikes. Thanks as well to the conference chairs of ASTR 2012, Patricia Ybarra and Patrick Anderson, and ASTR 2013, Jonathan Chambers and Scott Magelssen, as well as the committees and technologies that worked behind the scenes putting the respective programs together.

We are extremely grateful to our Palgrave editor, Paula Kennedy, who first saw the potential in this project at a meeting with us in Leeds and has offered her support and encouragement at every step of the process. We also acknowledge Peter Cary and Monica Kendall’s invaluable assistance in taking the manuscript from a digital document to a material object. Thea Fitz-James, our stalwart editorial assistant (at York), was an MLA and indexing whiz. And we thank each contributor in this collection who has spent many hours tackling multiple rounds of revisions as they refined their ideas and arguments. Our sincere thanks, as well, to the varied subjects/objects of inquiry that have directed, puzzled, and provoked each author.

We also extend a very special thank you to our Palgrave reader, Rebecca Schneider, who offered inspired and inspiring readings of our proposal and final manuscript, gently pushing and prodding us to dig further into the complicated issues at stake in new materialist scholarship. We consider ourselves very fortunate to have had such an engaged and generous reader.

This project was made possible by the generous support of several funding agencies and associations. Joanne would like to thank ASTR for the David Keller Travel Grant that allowed her to attend the 2013 ASTR meeting. Marlis would like to acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and a Faculty of Fine Arts Minor Research Grant from York University. Thanks as well to the Mary Evans Library, the National Portrait Gallery, NVA, and Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando for assistance with image permissions.

On a more personal level, Marlis would like to thank Joanne for being such an amazing collaborator at every stage of this process. It is a rare gift to find such a compatible co-editor. She would also like to thank her colleagues at York, her husband Dan, and her two wonderful sons, Marcus and Isaac, for whom objects have always been animate. Joanne would especially like to thank Stuart McLean and Margaret Werry for introducing her to many of the scholars and theories that appear in this collection during her doctoral study at the University of Minnesota. She’d also like to express gratitude to Marlis for her continued diligence, flexibility, and terrific communication skills as co-editor. Joanne sends out heartfelt thanks to her husband and partner, Will, for his boundless support that bolsters many facets of this collection. And to her son Finlay who has animated.

Finally, we wish to acknowledge the theatrical objects, performing things, and nonhuman organisms that direct, script, move, shake, transform, and animate our daily lives. The following entities are only a fraction of the dynamic materials that comprise the assemblage that is this book: cell phones, laptops, Dropbox software, email programs, Skype and Google chat, transportation technologies, paper, pens, coffee, tea, alcohol, coffee, chocolate, coffee, and dozens of articles, books, images, and artworks. We’d also like to thank our animal companions who have provided useful distractions and comforting purring and have made us rethink our relationship to the more-than-human world: Miikka, Miles, and Ollie. And to you, our readers, we thank you for your attention to this material and look forward to the ways in which you extend, challenge, and rethink the ideas we collectively present here.

Notes on Contributors

Nicole Berkin is a PhD candidate in Theatre at The Graduate Center, CUNY, US. She has taught theatre history and dramatic literature at Brooklyn College and at Hunter College. She is also the former graduate student representative for the American Theatre and Drama Society. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century US theatre and cultural history, material and print culture, and the construction of celebrity.

Leo Cabranes-Grant is Associate Professor at the Departments of Theater and Dance and Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Santa Barbara, US. He specializes in Golden Age Drama and Intercultural Performance in Latin America and the Caribbean. His article From Scenarios to Networks: Performing the Intercultural in Colonial Mexico (Theater Journal 63.4, December 2011) won the ATHE Outstanding Article Award and the ASTR honorable mention for the Oscar G. Brockett Award (both in 2012). Cabranes-Grant was Associate Editor (2008–2010) and Chief Editor (2010–2012) of Theatre Survey, a journal published by Cambridge University Press and the American Society for Theatre Research. He is also an award-winning playwright; his plays have been produced in New York and San Juan (Puerto Rico). Recently he published his first poetry collection.

Lezlie C. Cross is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, US where she teaches courses in theatre history, dramatic literature, and critical studies. Her published articles appear in The Journal of American Drama and Theatre and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom. Lezlie holds a PhD from the University of Washington; an MA from the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK; and a BA from Whitman College. A theatrical practitioner as well as a scholar, Lezlie is also the literary manager of Mozawa and works as a freelance dramaturg at regional theatres across the United States.

Minty Donald is an artist and lecturer in Contemporary Performance Practices at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. Her practical and theoretical research is in the intersecting areas of site-specific, critical spatial, and ecological performance practice. Recent work has focused on human/water interdependency. It includes the performances/actions: Bridging Part 1 (Glasgow, Scotland, 2010); High-Slack-Low-Slack-High (Glasgow, Scotland, 2012); Guddling About: Calgary (Calgary, Alberta, Canada 2013); and articles in Contemporary Theatre Review and Performance Research. Current and forthcoming projects include performances/actions Guddling About: Glasgow (2014) and a co-authored book, Performing Landscapes: Rivers, part of a proposed series on performing landscape.

Benjamin Gillespie is a PhD student in Theatre at The Graduate Center, CUNY, US. He holds an MA in Theatre Studies from York University in Toronto, where he also received his BA with honors. His research constellates around related interests in queer theatre and theory; performance art and the everyday; performing objects; the theatrical Avant-Garde; and intersections in US and Canadian performance. He teaches theatre and performance studies at Hunter College, CUNY and is the Director of Events and Outreach at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS). Benjamin has presented at multiple conferences across the US and Canada and has been published in Canadian Theatre Review, in the anthology TRANS(per)FORMING Nina Arsenault: Body of Work/Body of Art (2012), and has published reviews in Theatre Survey and Theatre Journal.

Chandra Owenby Hopkins is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Converse College, US, where she teaches courses in performance studies, theatre history, and dramaturgy. Her writing and reviews have appeared in Theatre Annual and Theatre Survey. In conjunction with her work on theatre and performance studies, her primary areas of research include gender and race studies, Southern studies, and American popular culture. As a director and dramaturg she has worked with Georgia Shakespeare, Kansas Summer Theatre, and Theatre Converse.

Karen Jean Martinson is a Lecturer in the Department of Communications, Media Arts, and Theatre at Chicago State University, US. She explores the intersection of contemporary USAmerican Performance, consumer culture, and the processes of identification through her scholarly and creative work. She focuses her scholarly research on El Vez, The Mexican Elvis/Robert Lopez, interrogating his use of performance and branding to complicate, confound, and ultimately cross separating lines of difference such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality. Creatively, she works as both a dramaturg and director, staging and devising works of social import and engagement.

Kee-Yoon Nahm is a Doctorate in Fine Arts candidate at Yale School of Drama’s Department of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism, US, where he is writing his dissertation on American theatre from 1960 to today that appropriates culturally prevalent stereotypes with the intended effect of irony or political subversion. Kee-Yoon has published articles and criticism in Theater, Theater Journal, and Contemporary Western Theater Directors (Korean publication). He also works as a dramaturg and translator.

Aileen Robinson is a doctoral candidate in the Interdisciplinary Program in Theatre and Drama at Northwestern University, US. Her dissertation project, entitled Technological Wonder: The Theatrical Fashioning of Scientific Practice, 1780–1905, traces the development of public scientific performances through lectures, magic shows, and theatrical performances. She is currently completing research in the United States and United Kingdom funded by the Social Sciences Research Council and NSF.

Marlis Schweitzer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre at York University, Toronto, Canada and author of When Broadway Was the Runway: Theater, Fashion, and American Culture (2009). Her articles have appeared in Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Theatre Research International, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Performing Arts Resources, and TDR. She is the Editor of Theatre Research in Canada/Recherches théâtrales au Canada and has co-edited issues of Canadian Theatre Review and Performance Research. Her current book project explores the technological advances in transportation and communication that accelerated the transnational movement of theatrical commodities and supported the expansion of transnational business networks in the pre-World War I period.

Christopher Swift is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at New York City College of Technology, CUNY, US, where he teaches play analysis, the history of stage design and technology, and theories of performance space. He has published in Theatre Journal and The Journal of Religion and Theatre, a chapter in Crying in the Middle Ages (2012), and an entry on Medieval Iberian Theatre for Oxford University Press. He is currently a NEH Fellow in a seminar investigating intersections between Humanities and STEM teaching and research. His current book project explores devotional and festive theatre in late medieval Andalusia.

Joanne Tompkins teaches Drama in the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of Queensland, Australia; she is Associate Dean (Research) in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. She is the (co-)author of Post-Colonial Drama (with Helen Gilbert; 1996), and of Women’s Intercultural Performance (with Julie Holledge; 2000). She is author of Unsettling Space: Contestations in Contemporary Australian Theatre (2006) and Theatre’s Heterotopias: Performance and the Cultural Politics of Space (2014). She is co-editor, with Anna Birch, of Performing Site-Specific Theatre: Politics, Place, Practice (2012), and co-editor of Theatre Journal. She has produced the interdisciplinary research tool, Ortelia, to analyze theatre space through virtual reality.

Helene Vosters is a PhD candidate in Theatre and Performance Studies at York University, Toronto, Canada, where her performance and research focus is on the role of public commemoration practices in constructing narratives related to militarism and war. Helene has performed her memorial meditations Impact Afghanistan War; Unravel: A meditation on the warp and weft of militarism; and Haunting the Past’s Present: Falling for the Forgotten (and not) Dead of History throughout Canada, the US, and Europe. She presented her most recent memorial performance, Shot at Dawn: Embroidery for the forgotten dead of history, in Toronto on Remembrance Day, 2013.

Margaret Werry is Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota, US, in the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance. Her recent book, The Tourist State: Performing Leisure, Liberalism, and Race in New Zealand (2011) examines the relationship between tourism, performance, indigenous politics, and (neo)liberal statehood. She has published on this topic and on others—critical pedagogy, spatial theory, photographic criticism, multimedia performance, museums, and cultural policy—in a range of US and international journals. Her current research pursues two projects, one on the history of Oceanic performance, and early intimations of global indigeneity, and the other on the performance of human remains in contemporary museums.

Joanne Zerdy is an Instructional Assistant Professor in the School of Theatre and Dance at Illinois State University, US. Joanne primarily researches contemporary Scottish theatre and performance and cultural and environmental policies and is also interested in the texts, gardens, and installations of Ian Hamilton Finlay. Her articles have appeared in Contemporary Theatre Review, Theatre Research International, and TDR and her reviews in TDR, Theatre Survey, Theatre Journal, and New England Theatre Journal. She has a chapter in A Further Shore: Essays in Irish and Scottish Studies (2008) and one co-written with Will Daddario in Food and Theatre on the World Stage, ed. Dorothy Chansky and Ann Folino White (forthcoming).

Introduction: Object Lessons

Marlis Schweitzer and Joanne Zerdy

Theatre and performance histories are littered with objects: props, costumes, sketches, prompt books, letters, diaries, paintings, ledgers, newspaper clippings, scrapbooks, photographs, film reels, video recordings, architectural ruins, etc., etc. Though often consigned to history’s metaphorical dustbin, the objects that remain allow performance scholars to touch time, to experience the past in the present and to imagine new futures (Schneider). Housed in archives, museums, galleries, storage facilities, performance venues, rural and urban sites, and personal collections, these objects open doors to the past; they help us to reclaim forgotten performance practices and to reimagine historical narratives. Yet while most of us tacitly acknowledge the importance of objects to our work, how many of us identify objects as collaborators on grant applications, dissertation projects, article submissions? How many of us acknowledge the lessons that objects have taught us?

Victorian object lessons were designed to teach children to make careful observations of discrete objects and their own surroundings through a language educed from the objects. Contemporary object lessons, for adults, might take the shape of Neil MacGregor’s recent popular historical non-fiction works, A History of the World in 100 Objects (2010), and, perhaps more pertinent to theatre and performance scholars, Shakespeare’s Restless World: A Portrait of an Era in Twenty Objects (2012). These texts track the production, circulation, and preservation of obscure and famous objects, providing insights gleaned from them into sociocultural, artistic, commercial, governmental, and theatrical histories. While humans emerge alongside the objects, the texts foreground the materials themselves.

This kind of object-centric methodology, coupled with scholarship emerging from the social sciences and humanities, drives this assemblage of case studies in which banal and theatrical, religious and secular, scientific and artistic objects and things step into the limelight. Challenging narrowly anthropocentric narratives, we understand physical materials not as inert human possessions but instead as actants, with particular frequencies, energies, and potentials to affect human and nonhuman worlds (Latour, Politics of Nature; Reassembling). As such, we aim to rethink historical and contemporary theatre, performance, and cultural events from the perspective of performing objects and theatrical things. Our guiding questions evidence the broad scope of this project: Which things take focus when the human recedes in a historical or contemporary performance event or text? What can a theatrical object’s production history and circulation teach us about the movements of ideas, languages, and bodies at specific times and places? When, where, and how does an everyday entity take on a theatrical life and contribute to spectacular public events? What tacit instructions and directions do the objects that we encounter on stages and in archives, dramatic texts, and site-specific environments offer us? What are the ethical implications of an object- or thingcentric study?

These questions prompt us to think outside of methodologies in theatre and performance studies that feature solely human agents of artistic practice and scholarship. They necessitate our self-reflexive awareness as scholars and practitioners, a reexamination of how research materials (books, photographs and paintings, theatrical properties, fabrics, architectures, boats) construct and challenge our thinking and writing. In this, we draw from feminist theorist Karen Barad, Objectivity, instead of being about offering an undistorted mirror image of the world, is about accountability to marks on bodies, and responsibility to the entanglements [of subject and object] of which we are a part (52).

Significantly, our central research questions resonate with the creative work of contemporary visual and performing artists. Consider, for example, the everyday moving objects (aluminum foil, laundry basket, headphones) that feature in Koki Tanaka’s film installation, Everything is Everything (2006); individual and grouped objects fill up each frame, while the human bodies working with the objects exist as peripheral components in the film. For a more sinister object-centric performance, interrogate the banal domestic commodities (plastic cups, pushpins, matches) that enable Eva Meyer Keller to kill 35 cherries in Death is Certain (2002–2013).¹ A more overtly theatrical performance featuring human-like objects, Nathalie Claude’s Le Salon Automate (The Automata Salon) (2008) is a stage work set in a Victorian salon for solo human actor and three human-sized robot performers. While the aesthetics and medium of each performance vary greatly, all three works highlight the interplay between human and nonhuman entities, establishing and querying subject–object relationships and notions of human agency.

Of course, as Claude’s explicit reference to the Victorian era suggests, these contemporary projects are part of a lengthy genealogy of human and nonhuman collaboration that includes everything from religious rites (the corpus Christi) to popular entertainment (medicine shows, Wild West spectacles) to modernist experimentation (naturalist drama, futurist sintesi, epic theatre) and beyond. Where this recent work (possibly) departs from its historical predecessors is in the willingness of human artists and audiences to listen to and act on object lessons and to rethink their relationship with nonhuman entities. As political theorist Jane Bennett reminds us, There was never a time when human agency was anything other than an interfolding network of humanity and nonhumanity. What is perhaps different today is that the higher degree of infrastructure and technological complexity have rendered this harder to deny (The Agency of Assemblages 463). Caught in the webs of late capitalism, we can no longer ignore how enmeshed our lives have become with objects and other nonhuman entities, nor can we claim autonomy from objects in our daily performances, both onstage and off.

Though scholars often use the words object and thing interchangeably, the authors gathered here pay attention to slippages between the two in an effort to unsettle our lingering humanist tendencies. In particular, Bill Brown’s articulation of moments when an object asserts itself within a field of matter (Bernstein, Racial 69) and enters the world of things, resonates with the work of many theatre and performance scholars marking and tracing the labors of materials. We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us, Brown writes. The story of objects asserting themselves as things is the story of a changed relation to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation (Thing Theory 4). In moments when objects slip (or leap) into the realm of things, we become aware of our indebtedness to and enmeshment within the more-than-human realm. Importantly, though, some of our contributors foreground the category and characteristics of objects over things. They do so in order to challenge the ways in which subjectivity and objectivity on- and offstage are constructed and maintained.

As these chapters scrutinize organic and inorganic entities (clothing, a map, whips, drums, an unlit pipe, a human skull, photo albums, lollypops, gallstones), we take up, in different registers, Barad’s understanding of materiality. She writes, Matter itself is not a substrate or a medium for the flow of desire. Materiality itself is always already a desiring dynamism, a reiterative reconfiguring, energized and energizing, enlivened and enlivening (59). In this formulation, matter does not function as a passive channel for human action, affect, and desire; instead, it acts. By constructing, reshaping, choreographing, and obstructing the humans with which it interacts, the materiality of, say, a wool thread or an oil lamp carries a charge or pulse that radiates energy into those (things) in proximity. This current brought forth by matter transforms—visibly, tangibly, or imperceptibly—the sociocultural, economic, and/or theatrical conditions in which it takes part, as well as those who bring their scholarly attention to it.

Our case studies and analyses draw inspiration from an array of scholars and their subjects/objects of study, from disciplines and subfields as varied as sociology, cultural material studies, science and technology studies, feminist theory, Marxist theory, queer studies, cultural geography, museum studies, and medieval history. This collection aligns itself with those who insist that foregrounding material factors and reconfiguring our very understanding of matter are prerequisites for any plausible account of coexistence and its conditions in the twenty-first century (Coole and Frost 2). In their introduction to New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (2010), Diana Coole and Samantha Frost call on humanities scholars to be more attentive to developments within the natural sciences so that they might address the emergence of pressing ethical and political concerns that accompany the scientific and technological advances predicated on new scientific models of matter and, in particular, of living matter (5). Of course, as some our contributors make apparent, scientific and technological advances over the past several centuries have necessitated ethical and political engagement on the part of artists and scholars alike.

Following from the work of philosophers Manuel DeLanda and Rosi Braidotti, with their independent coining of neo-materialism in the late 1990s, Coole and Frost’s new materialism presents an alternative method for analyzing the material world, especially with regard to the formation and perpetuation of oppressive ideologies. Their collection identifies moments when things challenge existing perspectives and facilitate positive change.² Yet the new in new materialism is potentially misleading in that it suggests that scholars who identify with this perspective have wholly rejected or proceeded beyond the basic tenets of an historical or old materialism rooted in Marxist thought. For instance, strands of thought considered old materialism focus on how historical conditions and labor practices shape humans and human relationships and foreground the impossibility of a mind or spirit existing independently of matter.

Rather than view these methodologies as diametrically opposed to one another, we follow the logic of Dolphijn and van der Tuin, who insist that new materialism:

is not necessarily different from any other materialist, pragmatic or monist tradition either, since it carefully works through all these traditions in order to avoid, along with the trap of antagonism, the trap of anachronism (Lyotard [1988] 1991, 26–7) […] New materialism says yes, and to all of these intellectual traditions, traversing them all, creating strings of thought that, in turn, create a remarkably powerful and fresh rhythm in academia today (Simondon [1958] 1980). (89)

In other words, new materialism shares old materialism’s commitment to understanding the constitution of sociopolitical and geocultural worlds and how objects shape human relations. However, new materialism perhaps most overtly diverges from old materialism through its movement away from binaries (human/nonhuman, nature/culture) and a dialectical methodology. While an extreme edge of new materialism may take the form of a pre-Enlightenment understanding of objects participating in the world of their own accord (evident in the work of speculative realists like Graham Harman), many posthumanist thinkers aim to prioritize objects, animals, environments, forces, et al. in order to de-center human agency, often through self-reflexive analysis and theorization. These scholars do not deny the importance of human subjects but rather trouble traditional Western hierarchies that place humans at the top of a great chain of being (see Lovejoy) by insisting on the dynamic collaborations that occur daily between nonhuman and human entities.

Conversant fields

One might ask what theatre and performance studies stand to gain from multiple materialist approaches. A focus on the material culture of performance is hardly new; indeed, the field (and many scholarly publications) would not exist were it not for performing objects and theatrical things. And certainly scholars engaged with the history and practices of puppetry and object theatre