Performance and Its Opposition

Abstract

As with many in our field, I did not fall in love with theatre through the written word. I became enraptured with theatre—its history, influence, and ephemerality —through performance. As a child, I remember watching actors use their bodies to make an idea, quality, or feeling tangible to the audience. By middle school, I decided to try my hand at creating a performance. I convinced four of my younger sisters and niece to form an acting troupe and perform Anton Chekhov’s one-act comedy The Bear (1888) for our neighborhood. As an eleven-year-old selfappointed producer, director, and company member, I quickly learned that I was in over my head. How can I mount a show with a limited budget of five dollars? How can I persuade my sisters to stay involved in the production even though I can’t make good on my promise of paying them? How can I help my four-year-old niece memorize lines when she could not read? After trying to problem-solve, I realized I had no other choice but to cancel the production and disperse what remained of my acting troupe. I share this silly personal anecdote because, in all seriousness, this early experience creating an amateur production served as a foundation for my knowledge of performance (broadly construed) and its opposition. Performance is messy, ephemeral in nature, and relies heavily on the devotion and commitment of artists and spectators to make vision a reality. Whether investigating antitheatrical tracts of the seventeenth century, early Black women musical performers, the reality in materiality of Sherlock Holmes, or Germany’s agitprop amateur theatre movement of the twentieth century, the articles in this issue engage with the complexities of creating or disavowing live performance, encouraging readers to consider the oppositional forces that both hinder and sustain craft. Joy Palacios considers how the embodied activities of seventeenth-century Catholic priests fostered the growth of antitheatrical sentiments alongside the Grand Siècle, or golden age, of French theatre. In “Antitheatrical Prejudice: From Parish Priests to Diocesan Rituals in Early Modern France,” Palacios argues that in addition to writing, the Catholic church utilized what performance and theatre scholars would consider a “performance repertoire” to circulate theological ideas, values, and arguments to the laity. Paradoxically, the use of performance repertoire—including the bodily comportment of priests and the gestures, ceremonies, and sacraments that made up the liturgy—helped situate actors as “public sinners” and theatre as a site of moral decay. Ultimately, Palacios finds that without ceremonial support to bring life into their argument, antitheatrical texts would have remained nothing more than “dead letters.” By exploring the (often overlooked)