Women’s Innovations in Theatre, Dance, and Performance is a four-volume series (forthcoming with Bloomsbury-Methuen Press) edited by Wendy Arons, Melissa Blanco Borelli, and Elizabeth W. Son that aims to capture the innovations women have made to the performing arts in their historical, geographical, and disciplinary diversity. The definitions of both “performance” and “woman” are capacious. The former includes all forms of theatre, dance, opera, performance art, and solo performance. The latter includes cisgender, women-identified, trans, and femme bodies. Our definition of “woman” is also undergirded by Black, Asian, Latinx, Indigenous, and other intersectional feminisms alongside queer theories which trouble the gender construct/binary. Innovation is defined by the context in which it happens. It can be something that disrupts or breaks from conventions; it can create new methods (forms, styles, aesthetics, etc.); it can be something that establishes a strong influence in the development of the field. This series seeks to broaden, celebrate, and recover historical awareness of these performance-based artmakers and their contributions; as such, it showcases innovative, intersectional feminist historiographical approaches along with a history of women’s innovation in the field.
The four volumes in the series are:
Vol. 1: Performers (co-edited by Colleen Kim Daniher and Marlis Schweitzer)
Vol. 2: Creators (co-edited by Indu Jain, Jill Lane, and Elliott Gordon Mercer)
Vol. 3: Designers & Crafters (co-edited by Greer Crawley and Carolina E. Santo)
Vol. 4: Leaders (co-edited by Eva Aymami-Rene, Anita Gonzalez, and Kimberly Jew)
The primary goals of this series are to:
- Showcase and recuperate the innovative contributions of women to theatre, dance, and performance from a broad geographical and historical scope.
- Emphasize novel, intersectional feminist historiographical approaches to the writing of women’s innovations in theatre, dance, and performance.
- Highlight the necessary relationship between form (the way in which history is written) and content (historical material in the chapter) in the writing of women’s performance histories.
- Resist tendencies to canonize while reframing historiography to increase inclusivity, uplift collective artmaking, and counter historio/hagiographies of the individual.
Women’s Innovations in Theatre, Dance, and Performance, Volume 1: Performers
Volume 1: Performers focuses on innovations by women and femme artists such as dancers, actors, musicians, storytellers, performance artists, and other entertainers who appear in public within an audienced context. We are specifically interested in innovations in performance practices as a way to uncover new historiographies of women’s performance across time and space. How might the way that women performers innovatively use voice, gesture, role/repertory, technologies of appearance, publicity, and social experimentation open up new genealogies of innovation, lines of influence, and contact zones of performance history? Conversely, how might new geographies and temporalities of relation across women’s performance practices open up new conceptualizations of both innovation and feminist historiography? Instead of an exceptionalist/individualist account of innovation or a strictly chronological approach to documenting women’s innovations in performance across time but not space, we aim to produce a relational historiography that spatializes as well as temporalizes women’s innovations in performance. Thus, we take our cue from feminist historiographical methods of “connective comparison”—as modeled by The Modern Girl Around the World (Duke 2008) project—to track convergences of innovations in women’s performance across time and space.