Repertoire

Abstract

This keywords entry proposes that critical infrastructure studies allows us to better understand the cultural lives of nineteenth-century theatrical repertoires and asks: How would conceptualizing theatrical repertoire as an imaginative infrastructure help us understand its cultural legacies in our own day? Nineteenth-century theatrical repertoires functioned in analogous ways to material-technical infrastructure: on one hand, providing routine and taken-for-granted conditions of performance; on the other, encoding asymmetric patterns of belonging and inclusion, proximity and distance, that we see reinforced by infrastructure. Repertoire is thus recast as a means of actively communicating and managing meaning on an enormous scale.