ABSTRACT
The historiography of theatre/performance embraces complicated culturally contingent circulation of different forms and manifestations of repertoires accounted for as Critical Media History. This argument is based on two principles: first, performance and theatre are not categorically opposed to each other but rather closely related (there is no theatre without performance, so theatre history exists within performance practice and performance history can likewise be nested within theatre practice). Second, theatre/performance are historically and culturally contingent media ecologies, interdependent with various media representations yet offering specific perspectives. This privileges materiality linked with the sensorium, location in time and space (or across times and spaces in manifestations of situatedness), historicising, and scaling (zooming in to examine specific phenomena while also describing related developments), emphasising social production and reception.
