Opening Acts

Opening Acts offers new, rigorous ways to analyze communication and culture through performance. It offers cutting edge readings of everyday life, space, history, and intersections of all three, using a critical performance-based approach. Key features: - familiarizes readers with the core elements and commitments of performance-based analysis; - links performance-based analysis to theoretical and analytical perspectives in communication and cultural studies; - provides engaging examples of how to use performance as a critical tool to open up communication and culture; - combines the best features of two classroom formats. Like a reader, it offers a menu of diverse approaches to performance-based analysis. Like a monograph, these approaches are organized into a coherent conceptual and pedagogical frame; - explicitly links developments in performance theory and methodology to current theories and methodologies in communication and cultural studies; - a topical organization mirrors those theoretical and methodological concerns most likely to engage students and scholars: how to analyze practices of everyday life, history, space, and intersections of all three.