Performance in America

Abstract

Here and NowPerformance in America argues for the significance of the performing arts in contemporary U.S. culture by challenging the conventional wisdom that performance is marginal to the national imaginary.The book takes seriously the role that the performing arts play in shaping American culture, especially around ideologies of race, citizenship, and national identity.Through a series of case studies drawn from contemporary culture, the book demonstrates the vitality of theatre, performance, and dance to local, regional, and national communities and poses the question: What might be gained by placing performance at the center of current national inquiries and debates?In order to begin answering this question, the book proposes a way of thinking about performance as a practice that both shapes and informs a space that I call the ''contemporary.''I here understand the contemporary as a critical temporality that engages the past without being held captive to it and that instantiates the present without defining a future.Performance proves an especially effective means to engage the contemporary in that artists and audiences are constituted and composed as a provisional collective in a particular temporal moment and in a specific localized space.They may or may not share the same history or future, but in the moment during which they compose a group, they enact and perform a temporary and conditional we.Performance's liveness and impermanence allow for a process of exchange-between artists and audiences, between the past and the

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