Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies
About the Book Series
This series is our home for cutting-edge, upper-level scholarly studies and edited collections. Considering theatre and performance alongside topics such as religion, politics, gender, race, ecology, and the avant-garde, titles are characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and innovative studies on emerging topics.
Stop Memorizing Your Lines: Be Undeniable and Ready for “Action!”
1st Edition
By Loren E. Chadima
March 23, 2026
In Stop Memorizing Your Lines, acclaimed Director and Acting coach Loren E. Chadima introduces an innovative methodology tailored precisely for the rapid demands of contemporary acting work. Unlike traditional methods that assume weeks of rehearsal time, Chadima's system equips actors to deliver ...
Zombies, Werewolves, Robots, and Extraterrestrials: Actor Training and the Performance of Non-Human Characters
1st Edition
By Gerald Large
March 13, 2026
Zombies, Werewolves, Robots, and Extraterrestrials provides a broad survey of acting theory and training technique through the lens of the performance of non-human characters found in horror and science fiction film, television, and theatre. Specifically, the book examines the performance ...
Making Muslimness: Race, Religion, and Performance in Contemporary Manchester
1st Edition
By Asif Majid
March 09, 2026
Making Muslimness explores how British Muslims navigate the United Kingdom's sociopolitical and religious tensions through performance in everyday life. Drawing on nearly two years of interdisciplinary research in Manchester during the late 2010s and early 2020s, this book examines diverse ...
Echoes of Violence on the Early Modern English Stage and Beyond
1st Edition
Edited
By Samantha Dressel, Matthew Carter
March 02, 2026
This book offers a compelling examination of how violence reverberates through Renaissance drama and early modern society. This edited collection explores the multifaceted nature of violence in early modern England, revealing how violent acts create ripple effects that extend far beyond their ...
Reverberations of Culture: Racialized Performance in Early Twentieth-Century Musical Variety by Just a Buncha Clowns
1st Edition
By Shane Breaux
February 25, 2026
This book examines musical variety clowns and the broad array of racial and ethnic impersonations they performed on four distinct touring circuits and apparatuses: the African American Theatre Owners Booking Association (TOBA), the Chinese American so-called Chop Suey Circuit, the Mexican and ...
Performing Waste: To Re-member Pasts and Fabulate Futures
1st Edition
Edited
By Dorota Sajewska, Małgorzata Sugiera
February 24, 2026
Performing Waste offers groundbreaking insights into the vibrant interdisciplinary field of waste studies through the lens of performance and artistic practice. This pioneering collection examines how waste and wasting are performed across diverse media and genres, from Afrofuturist musical works ...
No Mother, No Future: Performing Motherhood and Reproductive Loss
1st Edition
By Kailin Wright
February 20, 2026
No Mother, No Future investigates how theatre and performance use pregnancy loss to represent a lost future. Spanning the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this book analyzes performances that challenge dominant cultural scripts linking motherhood with futurity and nationhood in Canada and the ...
Contemporary North American History Plays: Jaclyn Backhaus and Lauren Gunderson’s Feminist Reworkings
1st Edition
By Beth Roberts
February 17, 2026
Contemporary North American History Plays examines how feminist theatre makers employ metadramatic techniques to revolutionize historical storytelling on the American stage. This groundbreaking study investigates the intersection of feminist theory and historical reimagining in contemporary ...
Performing the Edible: Sustenance, Sensation, and Sustainability
1st Edition
Edited
By Kristin Hunt
February 13, 2026
At the intersection of performance studies and food studies, this pioneering collection explores food as more than just a subject of study—it’s a medium of artistic expression, communication, and embodied knowledge. Drawing from a decade of collaborative work through the American Society for ...
Creative Production and Management in the Performing Arts: Modus Operandi
1st Edition
By Vânia Rodrigues
January 30, 2026
This volume takes stock of the ways in which the regimes of artistic creation and production intersect, lending special attention to emergent discourses and work models of producing and managing theatre, dance, and performance – through the lenses of creative producers. This book suggests that ...
Dramaturgy to Make Visible: The Legacies of New Dramaturgy for Politics and Performance in Our Times
1st Edition
By Peter Eckersall
January 30, 2026
This book argues that dramaturgy makes things visible and does so in two distinct and interrelating ways: creative processes and formal elements of performance are rendered visible and readable; and performance dramaturgy becomes an expanded practice in which performance is a locus for creating ...
Directorless Shakespeare: Transformations through collective Embodied Literary Criticism
1st Edition
By Elena M. Pellone
December 31, 2025
Challenging received scholarship on the practice of Shakespeare’s theatre, this book displaces a contemporary cultural bias towards leadership models to reconsider possibilities of working in a non-hierarchical and inclusive creative theatrical practice. It offers ways of restoring to actors a ...