ABSTRACT
What would theatre history look like if it were to be written backwards from the Futurist banquets and Dali dinners and performance art? Canonical histories of theatre take as their point of departure that which counts as theatre in the modern period – namely, theatre as an autonomous art form – and search for its “origins” in fused art forms. Central to the notion of theatre as an independent art are plays, and as an indication of the maturing of this form, a dedicated architecture or theatre (literally a place of seeing). Canonical theatre histories are written with the aim of understanding how modern theatre came to be. Understandably, the search is for corollaries in the past. Thus, Oscar G. Brockett’s History of Theatre is a history of drama and its performance: it does not view courtly banquets, tournaments, royal entries, and street pageants as performance genres in their own right but as occasions for plays and playlets. Such histories attend not to the fusion but to the seeds of what would become an independent art form called theatre.
