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.
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 ...
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 ...
Contemporary North American History Plays: Jaclyn Backhaus and Lauren Gunderson’s Feminist Reworkings
1st Edition
By Beth Roberts
February 27, 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 Waste: To Re-member Pasts and Fabulate Futures
1st Edition
Edited
By Dorota Sajewska, Małgorzata Sugiera
February 25, 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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Kierkegaard and the Performatics of Philosophy
1st Edition
By Leo Cabranes-Grant
December 29, 2025
This groundbreaking work explores Søren Kierkegaard as a pioneering figure in Performance Theory, revealing how his philosophical approach anticipated contemporary Performance Studies concepts. The book examines Kierkegaard's use of pseudonyms and dialectical discourse to create a performative ...
1964, A Year in African American Performance History
1st Edition
By David Krasner
December 26, 2025
This book examines the Civil Rights Movement from the perspective of a single year, 1964. The book analyses specific events that occurred in 1964 as benchmarks of the Civil Right Movement, making the case that 1964 was a watershed year. Each chapter considers individually politics, rhetoric, sports...