Women's Innovations in Theatre, Dance, and Performance

This volume will focus 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.

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