A seminal text on what live performance is, what it means, and how it can be theorised. Its second edition is required reading on many theatre and performance studies courses. Uniquely controversial on a subject which continues to be topical. Thoroughly updated to take into account changes in media, scholarship and digital technologies.

Over the past twenty years, 'performance' has emerged as a central analytical and critical concept. Now the focus of a burgeoning academic discipline, performance studies, it is also crucial to many other fields, including anthropology, sociology, communications, art history, cultural studies, linguistics and rhetoric. This collection brings together major texts articulating perspectives on performance and performativity.
The multi-disciplinary approach of this collection reflects the growing importance of the concept of performance across a variety of disciplines. With a new introduction contextualising the concept's rise, and a full index to guide the reader through the work, this will be an invaluable reference tool for students and researchers alike.

A seminal text on what live performance is, what it means, and how it can be theorised. Its second edition is required reading on many theatre and performance studies courses. Uniquely controversial on a subject which continues to be topical. Thoroughly updated to take into account changes in media, scholarship and digital technologies.

From Acting to Performance collects for the first time major essays by performance theorist and critic Philip Auslander. Together these essays provide a survey of the changes in acting and performance during the crucial transition from the ecstatic theatre of the 1960s to the ironic postmodernism of the 1980s.
Auslander examines performance genres ranging from theatre and dance to performance art and stand-up comedy. In doing so he discusses an impressive line-up of practitioners including Antonin Artaud, Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Brook, Willem Dafoe, the Wooster Group, Augusto Boal, Kate Bornstein, and Orlan.
From Acting to Performance is a must for all students and scholars interested in contemporary theatre and performance.

"From Acting to Performance" collects for the first time major essays by performance theorist and critic Philip Auslander.
Spanning over a decade, the essays survey the changes in acting and performance that occurred during the transition from the ecstatic theatre of the Vietnam era to the postmodern irony of the 1980s. Starting with the modern acting theories that inspired theatrical experimentalists of the 1960s such as Jerzy Grotowski and Jacques Copeau and ranging to 1990s performance artists and stand-up comics such as Kate Bornstein and Rosanne Barr, "From Acting to Performance" provides critical analyses of modernist acting theories. Auslander argues that traditional theatre and contemporary performance studies are united by shared concerns and critical approaches.

This study sheds light on the political nature of postmodern performance, the understandings of postmodern culture that underpin it, and the particular strategies it employs. The first three chapters are devoted to a discussion of postmodern culture, which Philip Auslander sees as "mediatized" culture (borrowing Baudrillard's term), and to the general positioning of political art and performance within it. The five subsequent chapters are devoted to comparative discussions of issues raised by this positioning and by the critical strategies within specific performance practices drawn from both the avant-garde and popular performance, and to resistant representations of race and gender and performance's engagement with an information-saturated culture. Presence and Resistance will interest readers in theater, drama, and performance studies as well as those concerned with issues in postmodern theory, cultural theory, feminism, popular culture, and media theory.

The conventional way of understanding what musicians do as performers is to treat them as producers of sound; some even argue that it is unnecessary to see musicians in performance as long as one can hear them. But musical performance, counters Philip Auslander, is also a social interaction between musicians and their audiences, appealing as much to the eye as to the ear. In Concert: Performing Musical Persona he addresses not only the visual means by which musicians engage their audiences through costume and physical gesture, but also spectacular aspects of performance such as light shows. Although musicians do not usually enact fictional characters on stage, they nevertheless present themselves to audiences in ways specific to the performance situation. Auslander's term to denote the musician's presence before the audience is musical persona. While presence of a musical persona may be most obvious within rock and pop music, the book's analysis extends to classical music, jazz, blues, country, electronic music, laptop performance, and music made with experimental digital interfaces. The eclectic group of performers discussed include the Beatles, Miles Davis, Keith Urban, Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj, Frank Zappa, B. B. King, Jefferson Airplane, Virgil Fox, Keith Jarrett, Glenn Gould, and Laurie Anderson.

Most people agree that witnessing a live performance is not the same as seeing it on screen; however, most of the performances we experience are in recorded forms. Some aver that the recorded form of a performance necessarily distorts it or betrays it, focusing on the relationship between the original event and its recorded versions. By contrast, Reactivations focuses on how the audience experiences the performance, as opposed to its documentation. How does a spectator access and experience a performance from its documentation? What is the value of performance documentation? The book treats performance documentation as a specific discursive use of media that arose in the middle of the 20th century alongside such forms of performance as the Happening and that is different, both discursively and as a practice, from traditional theater and dance photography. Philip Auslander explores the phenomenal relationship between the spectator who experiences the performance from the document and the document itself. The document is not merely a secondary iteration of the original event but a vehicle that gives us meaningful access to the performance itself as an artistic work.