Performance and Modernity

How do ideas take shape? How do concepts emerge into form? This book argues that they take shape quite literally in the human body often appearing on stage in new styles of performance. Focusing on the historical period of modernity Performance and Modernity: Enacting Change on the Globalizing Stage demonstrates how the unforeseen impact of economic industrial political social and psychological change was registered in bodily metaphors that took shape on stage. In new styles of performance-acting dance music pageantry avant-garde provocations film video and networked media-this book finds fresh evidence for how modernity has been understood and lived both by stage actors who in modelling new habits gave emerging experiences an epistemological shape and by their audiences who in borrowing the strategies performers enacted learned to adapt to a modernizing world.