ABSTRACT
We start this chapter by reviewing some established accounts of the emergence of contemporary Performance. Then, by widening the frame to include a less known narrative, we attempt to defamiliarise those established stories and maps. From here we arrive at the event – May 1968 – that generated the problematic underpinning so much of the poststructuralist theory that was to impact on performance and its associated studies in the 1980s. Occasionally in what follows, we refer to practitioners. There is not room here to describe their work. But reference can of course be found in the books and articles cited.
