Performance and Modernity
Enacting Change on the Globalizing Stage

This book argues that ideas first take shape in the human body, appearing on stage in new styles of performance.

Julia A. Walker (Author)

9781108833066, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 6 January 2022

312 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2 cm, 0.63 kg

'Julia Walker's Performance and Modernity has all the electricity of a lightning bolt. Brilliantly reimagining performance in light of the technological, representational, and ontological crises of modernity, this book provides a breathtaking history of performance that is both truly global and shockingly new. Meticulously reconstructing accounts of changes in styles of performance as an embodiment (in every sense) of the forces of modernity itself, Walker sees different styles of performance - from the 'point' technique to psychological realism - not merely encoding desires for and fears of modernity, but enacting and fomenting them. Reading across many national traditions and genres of performance, this book recasts our sense of the modern in a way few other books have.' MSA 2021 Book Prize Committee (2022)

How do ideas take shape? How do concepts emerge into form? This book argues that they take shape quite literally in the human body, often appearing on stage in new styles of performance. Focusing on the historical period of modernity, Performance and Modernity: Enacting Change on the Globalizing Stage demonstrates how the unforeseen impact of economic, industrial, political, social, and psychological change was registered in bodily metaphors that took shape on stage. In new styles of performance-acting, dance, music, pageantry, avant-garde provocations, film, video and networked media-this book finds fresh evidence for how modernity has been understood and lived, both by stage actors, who, in modelling new habits, gave emerging experiences an epistemological shape, and by their audiences, who, in borrowing the strategies performers enacted, learned to adapt to a modernizing world.

1. Money: Transacting Value on the Romantic Stage
2. The Railroad: The Throughline to Modern Consciousness on the Naturalist Stage
3. The Nation-State: Eurhythmics and the Bohemian Model of Affiliation
4. Advertising: Avant-Garde Provocations and the Commercialization of Aesthetic Taste
5. Air Conditioning: Psychological Realism and the Circulation of 'Cool'.

Subject Areas: Theatre direction & production [ANF], Theatre studies [AN], Performance art [AFKP]