Introduction - Henry BIAL

Part I: What is performance studies?

1 Performance studies: the broad spectrum approach - Richard SCHECHNER

2 Disciplines of the text: sites of performance - W.B. WORTHEN

3 The liminal-norm - Jon McKENZIE

4 Professing performances: disciplinary genealogies - Shannon JACKSON

5 Performance studies - Barbara KIRSHENBLATT-GIMBLETT

6 Performance studies in an age of terror - John BELL

Part II: What is performance?

7 Performances: belief in the part one is playing - Erving GOFFMAN

8 Blurred genres: the refiguration of social thought - Clifford GEERTZ

9 What is performance? - Marvin CARLSON

10 Life the movie - Neal GABLER

11 Marina Abramović: witnessing shadows - Peggy PHELAN

Part III: Ritual

12 Liminality and communitas - Victor TURNER

13 'Performance' and other analogies - Catherine BELL

14 'The blood that runs through the veins': the creation of identity and a client's experience of Cuban-American Santería Dilogún divination - Michael Atwood MASON

15 Saint Orlan: ritual as violent spectacle and cultural criticism - Alyda FABER

16 Performance commemoratives, the personal, and the public: spontaneous shrines, emergent ritual - Jack SANTINO

Part IV: Play

17 The nature and significance of play as a cultural phenomenon - Johan HUIZINGA

18 A theory of play and fantasy - Gregory BATESON

19 The ambiguity of play: rhetorics of fate - Brian SUTTON-SMITH

20 Just doing - Allan KAPROW

21 Falling apart to stay together: deep play in the Grand Marais Mardi Gras - Barry Jean ANCELET

Part V: Performativity

22 How to do things with words: lecture II - J.L. AUSTIN

23 Excerpt from 'Signature Event Context' - Jacques DERRIDA

24 Performance acts and gender constitution: an essay in phenomenology and feminist theory - Judith BUTLER

25 Introduction to Performativity and Performance - Andrew PARKER, Eve KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK

26 Theater and anthropology, theatricality and culture - Johannes FABIAN

Part VI: Performing

27 A dialogue about acting - Bertolt BRECHT

28 The actor's technique - Jerzy GROTOWSKI

29 A dream of passion - Lee STRASBERG

30 Presenting and re-presenting the self: from not-acting to acting in African performance - Frances HARDING

31 Reconsidering Stanislavsky: feeling, feminism, and the actor - Rhonda BLAIR

Part VII: Performance processes

32 First attempts at a stylized theatre - Vsevolod MEYERHOLD

33 The oral artist: training and preparation - Isidore OKPEWHO

34 The performance text - Marco DE MARINIS

35 The deep order called turbulence: the three faces of dramaturgy - Eugenio BARBA

36 The archaeology of performance - Mary ZIMMERMAN

Part VII: Global and intercultural performances

37 Performing ethnography - Victor TURNER

38 Of mimicry and man - Homi K. BHABHA

39 Culturas-in-extremis: performing against the cultural backdrop of the mainstream bizarre - Guillermo GOMEZ-PENA

40 Reverend Billy: preaching, protest, and post-industrial flânerie - Jill LANE

41 Performance studies: interventions and radical research - Dwight CONQUERGOOD

42 Translating performance - Diana TAYLOR