Theatre and Revolution: Global Perspectives on Performance

Theatre and Revolution explores the dynamic and complex relationship between theatrical expression and revolutionary movements across diverse historical and cultural landscapes. This illuminating volume examines the intricate connections between theater and revolution through a global lens, featuring scholarly essays that analyze performances during revolutionary periods and theater’s role in preserving, transmitting, and reimagining revolutionary histories. Organized around three key paradigms – theater as an archive of past revolutions, revolutionary time, and revolutionary spaces – the collection offers rich insights into revolutionary and performance practices across Chile, China, Cuba, Egypt, France, Germany, the Caribbean, Iran, Mexico, Russia, the United States, Venezuela, and beyond. Through careful analysis of site-specific examples, the book reveals how theatrical expressions both document and actively participate in revolutionary processes, highlighting the uncanny parallels and stark differences in how revolution manifests through performance across different cultural contexts. This book will appeal to scholars and students in theater and performance studies, history, political science, and cultural studies who seek to understand how revolutionary movements are embodied, remembered, and reimagined through theatrical practice.