ABSTRACT
How do cultures process change and transformation? While history allegedly unfolds in ruptures and jumps, this chapter argues for a more nuanced model of circulation and recycling in theatrical practice. Despite the idea of radical change and the abolition of previous practices and regimes, cultures must negotiate change and act out processes of discarding, reusage, and repurposing. Circulation and recycling describe two different modes of historical movement. Circulation calls for conceptualisation of historical development, formation, and reformation. The impact of time passing is not just a fact but a condition that needs to be culturally brokered and negotiated. Circulation, like recycling, draws attention to the extent to which performance and theatre are privileged places for societies to act out the impact of time passing, to highlight changes, or to provide anachronistic elements as a consolation against time and change. While both deal with the passing of time as a fact that needs to be culturally mediated and negotiated, recycling accounts in a more specific way for processes in which objects, ideas, and techniques are reconfigured and repurposed in different contexts. But this is not merely a process of shifting contexts because its theatrical/performative appropriation is also a way for societies to process change and transformation.
