Theatre/Performance Historiography: Time, Space, Matter ed. by Rosemarie K. Bank and Michal Kobialka (review)

By grouping eleven essays about theatre and performance history around notions of “space,” “time,” and “matter,” Theatre/Performance Historiography seeks to offer a “corrective to a theatre/performance historiography that dislodged its own presence in favor of the pursuit of ‘methods,’ ‘theories,’ ‘interpretations,’ and ‘representations’” (12). To do so, editors Rosemarie K. Bank and Michal Kobialka smartly focus their cadre of writers on discussing how “particular modes of thinking have been embedded in our perceptions of time, space, and matter and how those modes have been shaped to serve political, cultural, and ideological agendas” (12). It is this approach that somewhat separates this compilation from other volumes focused on theatre/performance historiography. Some recent, notable examples include Theater Historiography: Critical Interventions (2010), Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography (2010) and The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography (2009).

Part one, “The Space of Formations,” opens with “Performing Speciation: The Nature/Culture Divide at the Creation Museum.” Here co-authors Angenette Spalink and Scott Magelssen look at the Christian apologetics ministry Answers in Genesis website and the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. This careful consideration reveals “not just systems of museological performance or of biblical literalism, but much larger political and social systems, systems that serve reactionary corporate and political, not just religious agendas” (34). Kelly Aliano next turns her attention to the Theatre of the Ridiculous, suggesting the “Ridiculous space is this sort of queer archive” in that “Ridiculous artists collected ideas, characters, lines of text, and anything else one could imagine from anywhere in the cultural spectrum” (48). Cultural spectrum is at the heart of Yael Zarhy-Levo’s “The Evolving Process of an Historical View: Aleks Sierz and British Theatre in the 1990s,” which asks, “[h]ow do the mediating agents that preserve and foster past critical perceptions contribute to the shaping of histories that follow?” (63). The end of part one finds Patricia Ybarra engaging in a close reading of Victor Cazares’s 2011 play Ramses Contra Los Monstruous. In doing so she affirms that spatial eschatology (broadly eschatological historiography) within Latino/a dramaturgy is a “mode of understanding how the collapse of time, space, and matter can help us see connections between discrete oppressions without reducing them to narrative explanations” (88). What is most interesting about this first section is the way that these four essays point to the deep impact situated socio-political, cultural, and economic forces have not only on held notions of “the historical record” but also on the reception of “beingness” emerging from a historiographic project.

Patricia Badir begins part two, “Temporal Matters,” with “The Design of Theatrical Wonder in Roy Mitchell’s The Chester Mysteries” (95). In journeying through the archive of Mitchell’s early-twentieth-century revival of The Chester Mysteries, Badir shares the “conversation taking place between the medieval and the modern” (96) to propose, convincingly, that when the medieval history Mitchell chases “enters into a conversations with the modern archive, they become together, the artwork under investigation” (116). Notions of precaution are what drive Jan Lazardzig’s “Performing Ruhe: Police, Prevention, and the Archive.” Turning to Derrida’s understanding of  “archive,” Lazardzig details the “development of theories of the police and theories of theatre reform in the eighteenth century” (125), elegantly demonstrating that Ruhe is a “nonspecific preventative goal, always to be interpreted with respect to time and context” (137). Kaitlin M. Murphy closes part two with “The Materiality of Memory: Touching, Seeing, and Being the Past in Patricio Guzman’s Chile, Memoria Obstinada.” In taking the documentary film as her site of analysis, Murphy makes a compelling argument that in studying the relation between memory and materiality “we may begin to illuminate how the intersections among time, space, and matter work on, and create, history and truth” (170).

Part three, “Material Spaces,” leads with “Adorno, Baroque, Gardens, Ruzzante: Rearranging Theatre Historiography.” Here, Will Daddario capably...