S08 E02 | The Time and Place of Performance

C19: America in the 19th Century

“The Time and Place of Performance” looks at the vast circuits of nineteenth-century performance. Amy Huang (Bates College) and Kellen Hoxworth (University at Buffalo, SUNY) consider how nineteenth-century performances move backward and forward, citing past moments, and themselves undergoing processes of recycling and re-presentation to move into the future and challenge the framework of the nation-state. This conversation explores the transoceanic circuits of plays and artists (such as Ira Aldridge and Rose Quong) and the unexpected connections between blackface and yellowface performance to consider how and whether it might be important to teach nineteenth-century theatre and performance. Although Huang and Hoxworth both find some of this theatre “bad,” they discuss how we might teach these plays and performances in ways that do not depend on shoring up these works’ exemplariness or exceptionality. How might we stay with the “bad,” the partial, and the minor moments of theatre and performance history? Full transcript available at https://bit.ly/S08E02Transcript.