Theorizing about Performance: Why Now?

Abstract

This article continues NTQ's recent exploration of the interaction between the study of theatrical performance and other disciplines – in this case, relating in particular to ‘Quantum Physics and the Language of Theatre’, published in NTQ 18 (1989). Schmitt argues that there is a correspondence between the contemporary interest in performance theory and the view of nature provided by modern physics. The analysis of nature in terms of events rather than objects, the perception of reality as a network of non-teleological, non-hierarchical relations, the interest in the interplay between nature and our perception of it: all correlate, she suggests, with an interest in theory of performance. Natalie Crohn Schmitt is Professor of Theater at the University of lllinois at Chicago. She published ‘Stanislavski, Creativity, and the Unconscious’ in NTQ 8 (1986), and has also published in Theatre Notebook, The British Journal of Aesthetics, Theatre Journal, Comparative Drama, Theatre Survey, and elsewhere. Her full-length study. Actors and Onlookers: Theater and Twentieth-Century Scientific Views of Nature has just appeared, from Northwestern University Press.