Palgrave Studies in Performance and Migration – serie

This open access volume explores the crucial yet insufficiently addressed phenomenon of European theatre migration in the long nineteenth century.

This open access volume explores the crucial yet insufficiently addressed phenomenon of European theatre migration in the long nineteenth century. It argues that theatre migration went far beyond the popular phenomenon of touring, significantly shaping the historical discourse on theatre and mobility. The hidden and multifaceted histories of European theatre migration that this book seeks to explore allow us to rethink national theatre histories as histories of mobility, entanglements, and negotiations. They also allow the reader to challenge and to decenter a European self-understanding of insularity and a European cosmopolitanism ignorant of its imperial and colonial roots.

This book maps the history of circus practice in colonial and post-colonial India, locating it as a unique genre within a larger field of cultural practice. It facilitates a close study of acts, performers, and performances, both historically and in the contemporary repertoire, with changing patterns of migration. At the centre of the research remains the debate which on the one hand labels the circus as ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’ against its contrasting narrative as a marginal form and even an exploitive entity towards animals and child performers. Cosmopolitanism, actor network theories, phenomenology, feminist, gender, and the postcolonial discourse are some of the theoretical frameworks which enable and inform this reading of the distinct circus practice in India.

This book pioneers a systematic inquiry into the link between theatrical performances and histories of Philippine labor migration in the late-20th and early-21st centuries. Focusing on plays mounted by Tanghalang Pilipino of the Cultural Center of the Philippines, the Philippine Educational Theater Association, and the Dulaang Unibersidad ng Pilipinas, it argues that Filipino theatre-makers have rendered migration-related issues and figures of overseas Filipino workers available for circulation, comprehension, and critique through their stage and dramatic productions. Deploying different aesthetic and spectacular modes, they have represented labor migration as a complex phenomenon implicated in various ideological formations and generative of a range of affective states. This book emphasizes the role of drama, theatre, and performance in reframing discourses on labor migration and refocusing the narrative of the Philippine nation on the figure of the Filipino migrant.