Theatre and Performance Studies
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Why It Matters

Theatre and Performance Studies matters because it supplies concepts and methods used to design, interpret, and evaluate real-world performance practices in education, activism, cultural institutions, and community arts, where questions of documentation, transmission, and audience experience have practical consequences. "The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas" (2003) argues that performance functions as a means of “storing and transmitting” knowledge across contexts that range from “plays” to “official events” to “grassroots protests,” making the field directly relevant to how institutions and communities preserve and contest cultural memory. "Unmarked: The Politics of Performance" (1994) explicitly links performance analysis to public issues—photography, film, theatre, political protest, reproductive rights, and AIDS—showing how performance scholarship informs interpretation of politically charged cultural production and the ethics of representing bodies and identities. In applied theatre-making and dramaturgy, "Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic" (1964) provides a durable framework for staging and spectatorship through Epic Theatre and Alienation, which continues to guide concrete choices in rehearsal, design, and audience address. At a funding-and-infrastructure level, the news items provided indicate substantial public investment in cultural activity that performance scholars frequently study and support, including $750,000 in upgrades at the Highland Arts (2025-09-22) and more than $5.6 million in cultural grants approved by Vancouver City Council (2026-01-20), underscoring that theatre and performance operate within policy, institutions, and resource ecosystems that benefit from rigorous analysis.

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Open Research Questions

• ? How can Theatre and Performance Studies operationalize the archive–repertoire distinction from "The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas" (2003) to evaluate what is lost or transformed when embodied practices are documented, institutionalized, or digitized?
• ? Which analytical units best capture performance as distributed action—performers, audiences, objects, venues, media, policies—when applying the complexity and topology concerns raised in "Actor Network Theory and After" (2001)?
• ? How can researchers integrate audience experience, narrative, and cultural expression into performance analysis without reducing experience to textual interpretation, as posed by the program of "The anthropology of experience" (1986)?
• ? What methodological standards should govern the comparative study of ritual, carnival, film, and theatre as “performance,” given the cross-domain scope asserted in "The Anthropology of Performance" (1986) and "Between Theater and Anthropology" (1985)?
• ? How can performance scholarship address the political stakes of embodiment and representation highlighted in "Unmarked: The Politics of Performance" (1994) while remaining attentive to the pedagogical and affective dimensions emphasized in "Touching feeling: affect, pedagogy, performativity" (2003)?

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