Peter Dickinson World Stages, Local Audiences: Essays on Performance, Place, and Politics

Abstract

PETER DICKINSON World Stages, Local Audiences: Essays on Performance, Place, and Politics. Theatre: Theory Practice Performance. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2010. Hb 272pp. Peter Dickinson's World Stages, Local Audiences is a book I really, really wanted to like. It takes significant risks style and structure. It is personal and invested. It is compelled by the same kinds of questions--about political performance, social justice, community affect, and cultural change--that motivate a great deal of my own work. It is relentlessly eclectic its choice of primary sources, examining everything from the Beijing and Vancouver Olympics to the drama of Tony Kushner to the media spectacles of professional soccer. It is a scholarly nomadology (136-175)--a term I suspect Dickinson won't mind me applying here--as well as a book with real heart. And yet, for all that, it doesn't really work. That does not, however, mean you should not read it. As a document of contemporary performance and as a thoughtful exegesis of the kinds of ethical struggles that mark so much of our labour the peripatetic discipline(s) of theatre and performance studies, it is one of the most comprehensive texts I've encountered a long time. Dickinson begins by marking his debt to a variety of scholars that readers will not be surprised to find among the book's fellow travelers--including Jill Dolan, David Roman, and Jose Munoz--and suggests that his project the book will be to think through the ways which events played out on the world stage (wars, acts of terror, religious gatherings, natural disasters, sporting contests, human-rights protests) can never be interpreted apart from the local constituencies to whom and through whom they are being mediated, while also considering some of the ways which local works speak (effectively and politically) to global urgencies (7). He then attempts to walk the talk four chapters and a coda that develop these central concerns remarkably different ways: by comparing Olympic showcases and other cultural engagements with the games (chapter one); by reading the politicized spectacles of same-sex marriage in North America and beyond (chapter two); by reading Tony Kushner through David Beckham's global wanderings (chapter three); by thinking about queer mourning through the work of two women artists (Paula Vogel and Margie Gillis) whose brothers died of AIDS (chapter four); and by encountering his own limits as a spectator the face of climate change (in the coda). The problem with this approach is probably pretty clear: it is way too vast to make a cohesive book. As a reviewer, I read this text a condensed period of time and thus approached it as a monograph; hindsight, I see this was an error. World Stages is not a monograph, after all; it is a collection of essays, and it needs to be read this way, by dipping and out. Once I realized that I should take my cue from Dickinson's own travelogue (137) style I found I enjoyed all he had to offer much more. Dickinson is at his best when writing about local performance, and I cheered to see so much of what is excellent about Vancouver's performance scene both lauded and critiqued seriously under his care. …