Performing Objects and Theatrical Things

Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. Front Matter....Pages i-xv Introduction: Object Lessons....Pages 1-17 Front Matter....Pages 19-19 Technology and Wonder in Thirteenth-Century Iberia and Beyond....Pages 21-35 “Nothing but a string of beads”: Maud Allan’s Salomé Costume as a “choreographic thing”....Pages 36-48 Cartomania and the Scriptive Album: Cartes-de-Visite as Objects of Social Practice....Pages 49-62 The Linguistic Animation of an American Yorick....Pages 63-75 House Arrest: Museological Performance, Animacy, and the Remains of Rural America....Pages 76-88 Front Matter....Pages 89-89 The Unfolding Roles of a Walking Map within NVA’s Half Life....Pages 91-103 Military Memorialization and its Object(s) of Period Purification....Pages 104-117 Entided, Enwatered, Enwinded: Human/More-than-Human Agencies in Site-specific Performance....Pages 118-131 Front Matter....Pages 133-133 “All Transparent”: Pepper’s Ghost, Plate Glass, and Theatrical Transformation....Pages 135-148 Que(e)rying Theatrical Objects....Pages 149-160 Making the Invisible Visible: Virtual Stage Props and Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus....Pages 161-172 Relic, Souvenir, or Just Hair?: Exploring the Complexities of Objects as Actants and Things as Mementos in the Merchandise of El Vez, The Mexican Elvis....Pages 173-184 Front Matter....Pages 185-185 Props Breaking Character: The Performance and Failure of Real Objects on the Naturalist Stage....Pages 187-199 Bodied Objects: An Analysis of the Whip in George Aiken’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Matthew Lopez’s The Whipping Man....Pages 200-213 Translocalized Drums: Mobilizing the Intercultural in the Cantares Mexicanos....Pages 214-227 Back Matter....Pages 228-264 "Performing Objects and Theatrical Things rethinks historical and contemporary theatre, performance, and cultural events from the perspective of the objects and things that activate stages, venues, environments, and archives. Embracing methodologies from across the humanities and social sciences, we understand physical materials as actants, with particular frequencies, energies, and potentials to affect human and nonhuman worlds. The texts, stage properties, instruments, costumes, photographs, and detritus that animate this collection emerge from the thirteenth- to the twenty-first century, traversing sites across Europe and North America. Challenging anthropocentric narratives that foreground humans as sole agents, our authors present object and 'thingcentric' methodologies that range from deeply personal autoethnographic reflections and close textual readings to carefully researched archival studies and rhizomatic explorations of an object's journey from one place and time to another"-- Provided by publisher This book rethinks historical and contemporary theatre, performance, and cultural events by scrutinizing and theorizing the objects and things that activate stages, venues, environments, and archives.