Incredibly important. Performance is a proffer of a new way of looking and thinking about performance.
Robert Summers
CAA Reviews
This book is a valuable introduction to performance art and performance studies. It is deftly argued and elegantly composed. Taylor concludes by saying that performance is `world-making' and that we need to understand it (208). ... Read moreThis book helps us to do just that.
Adrian Curtin
Studies in Theatre and Performance
Introduction, reflection, and provocation coalesce most successfully in Taylor's passionate insistence on the necessity of performance and its academic study. Performance, Taylor argues, has real effects, but the nature of those effects is not pre-determined. The wielder determines the worth of the weapon. These passages alone would suffice to make the book a trusted companion of students and senior scholars alike.
David Calder
New Theatre Quarterly
The book is performative and multivocal, combining images of performances in the Americas, Taylor's narrative essays, and important excerpts from key texts on performance by academics, activists, and artists....The result is a work that gives ample space to artists/artivists as the creators of tactics rather than to performance studies scholars who analyze nonperformance phenomena as performance.
Patricia Ybarra
TDR
Taylor's fascinating, multicultural analysis of performance explores not only what performance is but also what it does-what it allows one to see, to experience, and to theorize-and 'its complex relation to systems of power.' . . . Recommended.
M. S. LoMonaco
Choice
Performance offers scenarios... for active pedagogy, inviting students and others to explore and perhaps undo the links between images and writing, texts and performances, so as to conduct their own performatic appropriations.
Loren Kruger
Critical Inquiry
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