In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Editorial Comment
  • David Z. Saltz

Each of the essays in this issue explores, in a very different way, a phenomenon that we might call peripatetic performance: that is to say, performance that moves, shifts, or is displaced from one socioidealogical context to another. Some of the performances these essays discuss merely depict such a movement, others literally move from one location to another, and yet others remain relatively stable while the political context within which they occur undergoes a sea change.

The issue begins with Catherine M. Cole's "Performance, Transitional Justice, and the Law: South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission," which highlights the theatrical dimensions of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings. As Cole describes them, the hearings were literally peripatetic performances: "Not only were hearings performed before spectators, they also transpired on stages—the raised platforms of town halls and churches throughout the country where the TRC toured like a traveling road show." More deeply, as a model of "transitional justice," the TRC hearings enacted a temporal journey, striving to carve out a path from a traumatic past, replete with atrocities and human rights abuses, to a peaceful future.

Emily Colborn-Roxworthy investigates the impact of enforced physical displacement and relocation in "'Manzanar, the eyes of the world are upon you': Performance and Archival Ambivalence at a Japanese American Internment Camp." Her focus is on performances by inmates at the Manzanar internment camp, where 10,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II. The public-relations machine of the time spotlighted performances in the camp that demonstrated Japanese Americans' enthusiastic assimilation into American culture. Colborn-Roxworthy corrects the historical record by accentuating performances that defiantly honored Japanese cultural traditions. Moreover, she reveals that the erasure of those performances that asserted, rather than repressed, cultural identity extends into the present; she takes the Interpretive Center at Manzanar National Park to task for preserving the memory only of the assimilationist performances and thereby perpetuating an ideologically loaded narrative that celebrates the triumphant spirit of patriotic Americans persevering in the face of adverse circumstances.

David J. Buch and Hana Worthen explore temporal and ideological dislocation in "Ideology in Movement and a Movement in Ideology: The Deutsche Tanzfestspiele 1934 (9–16 December, Berlin)." The Deutsche Tanzfestspiele in 1934, as the first of a series of prominent Nazi dance festivals, subsumed earlier Weimar-era performances that purportedly embodied diametrically opposed aesthetic and ideological values. Buch and Worthen trace the ways Nazi rhetoric strove to redefine the ideological resonance of performances that originated in a self-consciously modernist, expressionistic context, as well as the persistent if fleeting signs of "underlying tension between the artists (both as individuals and as a collective) and the fascist state they served."

Unlike the previous essays, the translocations and displacements in Peter P. Reed's "Conquer or Die: Staging Circum-Atlantic Revolt in Polly and Three-Finger'd Jack" are figured mostly within the world of the play rather than that of the performance. Reed examines John Gay's little-known sequel to The Beggar's Opera, Polly, written in 1728 and first performed in 1777 and 1782. In Polly, Macheath and his fellow outlaws don blackface and sail off to the Caribbean. Reed argues that Polly, in particular in the context of its performances toward the end of the eighteenth century, "represents eighteenth-century theatre developing new forms in an attempt to respond to the circum-Atlantic cultures of race and class." He then turns his attention to John Fawcett's 1800 pantomime Obi, or, Three-Finger'd Jack, which was performed on both sides of the Atlantic in London and New York and, he suggests, went a step further in "transforming the underclass characters popularized by Gay into compelling new embodiments of Atlantic identity."

This issue's final essay, Eitan Bar-Yosef's "'I'm Just a Pen': Travel, Performance, and Orientalism in David Hare's Via Dolorosa and Acting Up," analyzes David Hare's solo performance about his travels to Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank in 1997, a performance that [End Page ix] reflexively re-enacts the journeys that were its own genesis. In fact, Bar-Yosef shows that those initial trips...

pdf

Share