In an 1879 production of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, the esteemed British actor Henry Irving offered a new interpretation of Shylock, sparking a debate that roiled the London press.Footnote ¹ Instead of portraying the Jewish miser as a comic scapegoat as had been tradition, Irving lent dignity and pathos to the misunderstood figure, soliciting an unexpected sympathy from many in the audience.Footnote ² By all accounts, the scene that created the most striking effect was one of Irving’s own invention. It followed Act ii, scene vi, after Jessica elopes with Lorenzo. As they disappeared into a crowd of masked revelers, a gondola floated under the bridge, and, as it passed offstage, the festive noises of the merrymakers diminished into silence. After a pause, the faint tapping of a cane could be heard as Shylock made his way home. Over the bridge, the old man appeared, moving slowly with fatigue. Upon reaching his front door, he knocked, and, receiving no answer, knocked again. Then, “raising his lantern to search the darkened upper windows,” the father now dispossessed of his daughter came to understand his loss. According to one eyewitness, Irving turned to the audience, and “across his features came a look of dumb and complete despair” (anonymous, quoted in Bulman, 38). Communicating such pathos in this scene, Irving primed his audiences to sympathize with the hated Jew, even and especially during the Trial Scene toward the end of the play. There, when Shylock’s punishment is announced, Irving’s posture collapsed. As his despised character prepared to leave the court, he raised himself up with a wounded dignity that, according to the Saturday Review, “seemed the true expression of his belief in his nation and himself” (quoted in Bulman, 46).

Among those seated in the audience was Karl Marx, the exiled German political theorist who was an ardent fan of the theatre and who knew his Shakespeare by heart. Unlike the critic John Ruskin, who felt that Irving’s sympathetic portrayal contravened the overall design of Shakespeare’s play (Richards, 435), the supposedly self-loathing author of “The Jewish Question” was deeply moved, reversing his critical assessment in that 1844 essay to recast the Jew as a member of an oppressed class in a late revision of a passage in Capital (Prawer, 328).Footnote ³ In a footnote to his discussion of how industrial capitalism devalues the laborer’s artisanal skills, Marx cites the lines that Irving intoned with such pathos in Act iv, scene i: “You take my life/When you do take the means whereby I live.” Evidently, the character that Irving created prepared Marx to hear a new meaning in these familiar lines in Shakespeare’s play.

This experience at London’s Lyceum Theatre was not a singular event in Marx’s life. Intellectual historian S. S. Prawer identifies the “state as theatre” as one of the major topoi in Marx’s writings (59), tracing his skills in cultural critique back to his doctoral thesis in which he analyzed Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound (65). Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue notes that Aeschylus, Goethe, and Shakespeare were among the political economist’s favorite authors, adding that “there was a veritable Shakespeare cult in the Marx family” (10). Biographer Francis Wheen reports that, “[d]uring the long years of exile in London, Marx’s only forays into English culture were occasional outings to watch the leading Shakespearean actors Salvini and Irving. It is no coincidence that one of the Marx children, Eleanor, went on the stage and another, little Jenny, yearned to do likewise” (20). In treating dramatic literature – and its realization in theatrical production – as occasions for philosophical reflection, Marx was not unusual among nineteenth-century thinkers. Drawing on his aesthetic education in Friedrich Schiller’s Letters and G. W. F. Hegel’s Phenomenology, he was simply responding to the most popular art form of his day, extrapolating from its material production what Schiller describes as the “semblance” of form that gives shape and meaning to our lives. Even as a boy, Marx recognized the power of the aesthetic experience to help us understand and adapt to a changing world, writing in a letter to his father that, “At such moments[,] … an individual becomes lyrical, for every metamorphosis is partly a swansong, partly the overture of a great new poem that is trying to find its right proportions amid brilliant colors that are not yet distinct” (quoted in Prawer, 4). Although he attempted to create works of art himself as a young man, wooing Jenny von Westphalen with surprisingly good verses and trying his hand at playwriting with his drama Oulanem, Marx proved to be a better cultural critic sitting in the audience, identifying the semblance of forms enacted on stage and adding them to our conceptual vocabulary. Schiller’s theory that material life forms give rise to our conceptualizations about them would indelibly stamp his thinking.

But in identifying the theatre as a site of aesthetic engagement for Marx, my interest is less in the speculative origins of his ideas than in the spectatorial phenomenon I posit here. Specifically, I want to suggest that the theatre not only gives material form to ideas that appear in the language of the dramatic text, but also bodies forth new experiences, feelings, thoughts, and concepts that have yet to be named. Such ideas emerge into the semblance of form in performance. Which is to say that performance is not simply a medium through which other art forms communicate their meanings, but an art form in its own right. As such, it generates for its audience its own kind of aesthetic experience in which an emerging conceptual gestalt forms around the kinesthetic shapes that appear on stage.

In performance, I argue, the process of thought itself takes shape as intuitions and insights are pressed into bodily forms that pass by way of metaphor into consciousness and language. Although this epistemological function is likely constitutive of performance in general, and can be seen at work in a range of performances across time, it becomes especially visible in the modern era, when modernizing processes begin to transform the texture of everyday life at an unprecedented rate, necessitating new strategies for understanding and adapting to the changes in our world. When those changes multiply quickly over a relatively short period of time, modernity itself comes into view as a historical epoch marked by modernizing processes that cascade in waves of unrelenting force. In such a moment, new artworks – including new styles of performance – appear, giving modernist form to the experience of change and expression to its cultural meanings.

After all, if the historical period of modernity is marked by an accelerated rate of change that radically alters the experience of everyday life, then what better way to understand it than through a processual art form that likewise unfolds as movement in time? In new styles of performance – including stage acting, pageantry, dance, music, avant-garde provocations, film acting, and digital media – this book finds fresh evidence for how modernity has been understood and lived, both by artists, who, in modeling new habits, give conceptual form to emerging experiences, and by their audiences, who, in borrowing the strategies that performers enact, learn to adapt to a modernizing world.

Stretching from 1800 to the present day, this book takes an expansive historical view of both modernity and modernism, understanding the significance of the economic, industrial, political, social, and psychological changes associated with the historical period to have been registered first in the unexpected – often experimental – forms of expression associated with the artistic movement.Footnote ⁴ Conventional periodizations typically date modernism from the 1890s to 1945, with recent scholarship pushing that end date later to include modernist works produced in non-Western (often postcolonial) contexts. This elastic end date is meant to acknowledge a stylistic continuity that links so-called classic works of Anglo-American and European modernism to those produced under late capitalism in other parts of the world to expand our definition of modernism, while accounting for comparative differences in the movement’s global expressions. This book honors the inclusivity of that flexible end date, but also rolls modernism’s start date back from the 1890s to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, contending that conventional periodizations are based primarily on evidence in literary and visual modes of art that have long dominated Western aesthetics. If we look to performance, however, we can find evidence for a modernism that not only predates the literary and visual record, but also complicates the distinction between art and artifact that is often mapped onto Western and non-Western cultures, respectively. Indeed, a broader artistic palette may help us dismantle the persistent center–periphery bias in modernist scholarship that privileges the West above “the rest”.

Susan Stanford Friedman has recently proposed to correct for this bias with a comparative model of what she calls “planetary” modernisms, setting various manifestations in relation to each other and mapping changes across “deep time” (78). I admire her objectives and aspire to the global scope of her comparative method, but differ from her in three fundamental ways. First, I focus on performance rather than the visual arts and literature, believing that this movement-oriented art form better captures the fluidity of exchange in what are often described in modernist scholarship as networks, circuits, and flows. Second, I posit a “singular modernity” rather than the alternative modernities proposed by Dilip Gaonkar and others, maintaining with Fredric Jameson that changes in the historical epoch are propelled by the singular logic of instrumental capitalism, the transformational energies of which endlessly erupt in different cultures at different times in different ways to produce multiple modernisms that may indeed be put in comparative relation. Third, I focus on the dialectical relationship between such formations and the heuristics used to study them, understanding that cultures and their artistic expressions are as metamorphic as the material forces that act upon them, and that any nominalization or periodization used to situate them as an object of analysis is both necessarily provisional and provisionally necessary.Footnote ⁵ As Friedman points out, for example, the term “modernism” is a Western construct that embeds culturally specific assumptions in what appears to be an unmarked universal, and even specifications of “the West” enact a critical orientalism in acknowledging the geographical center of a perspective that pretends to disavow its own centrality (121). While we should be attentive to how these categories are constructed, as she insists, we should also recognize that nominalizations and periodizations are also useful tools for thinking, and that the histories of the categories we use (however problematic) are part of the story we tell.Footnote ⁶ Dipesh Chakrabarty has it right when he says that we should distinguish between our judgments and methods, “consciously recognizing our judgments as such” (262), even as we acknowledge that both have shaped the discipline and the object of its study. Insofar as modernism tells the story of how the “now” has been experienced, of how it has been felt, thought, and lived, then we must understand the field to have been produced through a meta-critical process of its own self-naming as Ástrá∂ur Eysteinsson pointed out more than thirty years ago. “Modernism,” in other words, does not exist outside its own discursive history.

Drawing its case studies primarily from the Global North and West, this book extends its reach into the East and Global South, recognizing that styles of performance are as multiple and uneven as the global experiences of modernization that find expression in them. Taking a comparative approach to its subject, each chapter sets two or more performances in relation to each other, noting differences in style that manifest under the pressures of the same modernizing impulse, even as they are also brought into alignment by homogenizing forces that constitute them as a collective “style.” While the first chapter begins in the well-trod territory of the United Kingdom and the United States, subsequent chapters move from Europe into Egypt, Algeria, China, and Brazil to show how the center–periphery model of modernism has begun to wobble off course. Metacritically, then, this book demonstrates that, as rival points of geographical influence exert their gravitational effects upon scholarly consensus in the West, our understanding of modernism expands its revolutionary orbit into a globalizing ellipse.

Challenging conventional periodization, this book historicizes two of modernism’s definitive features – its historical self-consciousness and its self-reflexive strategies of representation – to show how they first come into view on the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century stage to lay the foundations for the canonical works of the 1890s and beyond. Modernism’s historical self-consciousness, for example, was first aroused in the Romantic vogue for history plays such as Schiller’s Don Carlos (1787), his Wallenstein trilogy (1799), Mary Stuart (1800), The Maid of Orleans (1801), and William Tell (1804). Staging history as political allegory and advancing dramatic action through the dialectical scene structure he developed in his earlier play The Robbers (1781; 1782), Schiller’s history plays invite audiences to imagine themselves as witnesses to an unfolding historical process. At least one particularly attentive fan – Karl Marx – appears to have gleaned an important insight from his influential The Robbers. A loose revision of the biblical story of Jacob and Esau, the play alternates dialectically between scenes of brothers Franz and Karl Moor to stage an allegorical conflict between the historical forces of capitalism and anarchism, represented as the natural descendants of a weakened feudal state. Although we cannot know with any certainty whether a specific material production of Schiller’s play inspired Marx to turn Hegel’s idealist model of history on its head, we do know that The Robbers is an important intertext in Marx’s early work. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, for example, he makes a sly allusion to the play when describing how capitalism makes “brothers of impossibilities” when equating moral and economic values that are in contradiction (104). That he illustrates this and other theoretical insights throughout his life’s work with references to plays such as Goethe‘s Faust and Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens establishes strong evidence that the theatre was more than just an entertaining diversion for the Karl who was nick-named “Moor.”

If, indeed, the theatre played some small role in shaping Marx’s insights into his theory of dialectical materialism, it may have been because its conditions of production radically changed over the course of his lifetime. The exquisitely painted backdrops that appeared on the Romantic stage in his birth year of 1818 increasingly gave way to the three-dimensional box sets of naturalism, in which actors mirrored the bourgeois relationship to commodity culture that Marx diagnosed in the cultural critiques that would be published soon after his death in 1883. As the fourth wall gradually lowered into place, the social relationship that had long obtained between actors and their audiences became reified, objectifying what had been a dynamic process of exchange into a fetishized image of the actor’s body within the mise-en-scène. The sumptuous material details of the naturalist stage dazzled audiences, making the fictional world of the play look very much like their own, beginning – not insignificantly – with those Romantic history plays, whose lavish costumes and illusionistic scenery boasted a fidelity to history never before seen on stage. In making their mimetic strategy of representation visible, then, such productions revealed the theatre’s potential for self-reflexivity when something real (e.g., a side of beef, a smoking stove) appeared as both that thing and a representation of it. Naturalism – as rendered by the technologies of stage realism – does not merely precede modernism, then; it actively produces it, bringing the act of representation into full view for the contemplation of audiences that included some of those literary and visual artists who would go on to create “classic” modernist works beginning in the 1890s and beyond.

If modernist scholars have failed to acknowledge the historical self-consciousness and self-reflexive strategies of representation evident in these Romantic history plays and their realistic stage productions, it may be due to the fact that they were quickly eclipsed by the revolutionary music-dramas of Richard Wagner. Recasting history as myth (well in advance of James Joyce and T. S. Eliot), the German composer flattened its temporality in favor of spatial and sonic dimensions that overwhelmed audiences with his music-drama’s visual and aural appeals. Even so, the seeds of historical self-consciousness had been sown, allowing for another particularly attentive fan of the nineteenth-century theatre – Henrik Ibsen – to make what was implicit for Marx explicit in his own prose play cycle that is foundational to modern – or, as Toril Moi properly insists, modernist – drama. As I demonstrate in Chapter 2, Ibsen’s plays not only represent history in the dialectical structure of their narrative action (following Schiller), but also inscribe patterns of stage movement that directly implicate his audiences in world-historical time. Those patterns of bodily movement – introduced by the ensemble players of the Saxe-Meiningen court theatre, under their patron, Georg II – constituted a new style of performance on the late nineteenth-century stage.

Theatre scholars typically attribute new styles of performance to the creative genius of individual actors, those seen to imbue their art with the mysterious force of their own charisma. Joseph Roach calls this quality “It,” and has analyzed its elusive energies through the play of contradictory meanings that momentarily ionize on surface features of the actor’s body to materialize cultural desire. Sharon Marcus identifies celebrity likewise with the production of cultural desire, demonstrating how stars such as Sarah Bernhardt carefully cultivated relationships with their publics through the modern mass media. Indeed, the history of the stage is often narrated as a long list of exceptional performers whose singularity is at once a property held in the public trust yet uniquely the performer’s alone. Taking a macrohistorical perspective on this phenomenon, Performance and Modernity pulls back its focus to offer a panoramic view, identifying clusters of charismatic performers who collectively define a series of period styles. The analysis in Chapter 1 of Fanny Kemble’s performance in Henry Milman’s Fazio (1815), for example, treats her as representative of the Romantic style essayed by other Anglo-American actors of her day, including her famous father (Charles Kemble), uncle (John Philip Kemble), and aunt (Sarah Siddons), as well as Edmund Kean, Edwin Forrest, Charlotte Cushman, and – before all of them – David Garrick, who is often credited with originating this style.

Considered as macrohistorical phenomena, such styles invite us to identify the cultural pressures – not only desires, but also fears, anxieties, and ambivalences – that shaped their internal logic and aesthetic appeal, especially as they came to define a specific historical period. To do so, I turn to the written record of reception history, examining each chapter’s distinct style of performance in terms of the formal properties that contemporary critics and audiences identified as remarkable or “new.” As rhetorical shifts in the historical record reveal, such novelty was often expressed through metaphors that reveal other – especially salient – preoccupations of the moment. The Romantic style of acting addressed in Chapter 1, for example, was typically discussed in terms of literary, theatrical, and cultural “value.” I thus examine the signature point technique of Romantic actors and actresses in relation to anxieties provoked by the consolidation of modern banking practices, showing how, in a moment when gold and silver specie was being replaced by a paper currency backed by the modern nation-state, the dynamic exchange between actor and audience facilitated even as it figured an exchange of a representation for the real.

Subsequent chapters likewise examine a constellated performance style in relation to a specific impact of modernization and the metaphors through which it was grasped. Chapter 2 considers the late nineteenth-century vogue for stage naturalism in relation to a deepened sense of space and an accelerated experience of time introduced by railroad travel, noting Dion Boucicault’s anxieties about “social mobility” and Konstantin Stanislavsky’s plotting of motivational “throughlines.” Chapter 3 explores eurhythmics, the influential early twentieth-century mass movement exercises of Swiss music educator Émile Jaques-Dalcroze that provided a visual and aural map of “social harmony” for enacting consensus – or difference – within a nationalizing body politic. Chapter 4 reads the provocative strategies of the historical avant-garde in relation to the performance repertoire of early twentieth-century advertising, showing how artists such as Alfred Jarry, F. T. Marinetti, Aristide Bruant, and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven made multi-sensory assaults on the “good taste” of their bourgeois audiences to expose the emerging capitalist formation of “consumer” culture and its manipulable “appetites.” Chapter 5 examines the psychological realism of mid-twentieth-century film acting in relation to air conditioning, finding the “cool” style of gestural restraint practiced by actors such as Marlon Brando or Marpessa Dawn to promote a new kind of intersubjective identification that invited audiences to cross the racial divide. In an epilogue that examines the current shift from human to animatronic performers, the book concludes with a meditation on the contemporary ambition to “go viral,” suggesting that the pixelated form of computer-generated imaging technology presages an emerging concept of self for the twenty-first century. Inscribed in this new performance form, I suggest, is yet more evidence for the ways we seek to comprehend and adapt to changes in our ever-modernizing world.

Once highly charged ideas such as “cool” or “going viral” enter into language and take semantic form, they often assume the force of instant recognition, reifying – and thus obscuring – the embodied experiences that structure the root metaphors of their conceptualization. The history of modern performance, however, can reveal a formative moment in this process, when an idea is given material form through the act of grasping or enacting the metaphorical vehicle by which the tenor is made known. Bruce McConachie was the first in theatre and performance studies to recognize the importance of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s groundbreaking Metaphors We Live By (1980) for explaining how this process works. As he observes, in identifying the experiential orientation and bodily movements that are foundational to language – up/down, in/out, center/around, source/path/goal, for example – Lakoff and Johnson implicitly recognize the epistemological power of performance in giving expressive form to our thoughts. But by “thought,” neither they nor I mean the bloodless abstraction of the Cartesian cogito. Rather, as Johnson insists in his more recent The Meaning of the Body (2007), what we call reason is “tied to structures of our perceptual and motor capacities and … is inextricably linked to feeling” (13). This book draws from this non-dualistic model of embodied meaning to demonstrate how new styles of performance reveal the emerging epistemological contours by which we “make sense” of a changing world.Footnote ⁷

As McConachie points out, the brain’s mirror neuron system facilitates the mimetic process of identification which allows audiences to imaginatively align themselves with characters on stage.Footnote ⁸ But this only explains what happens when the action performed is “citational” and recognized as already imbued with meaning. What happens when new movement formations appear? According to literary theorist Mark Turner, aesthetic cognition can be anticipated in the future-oriented narrative form of parable. Reversing Schiller’s act of extrapolating semblance from a present experience of material life forms, Turner understands parable to project a narrative pattern onto a possible future event, providing a provisional gestalt to make that event meaningful, while leaving its interpretation open to accommodate unknown variables as it unfolds. This implies a meta-critical dimension to narrative cognition, suggesting that existing thought patterns are constantly modified to meet the needs of changing circumstances. If those changing circumstances include multiple sensory appeals, however, we also need to consider how the body processes such stimuli into patterns of thought. For this, I turn to the bio-mechanical research of John Henshaw. Bringing an engineer’s perspective to an understanding of the body’s sensory mechanisms, he expands Aristotle’s five sensory modalities of vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch by adding four more – temperature, pain, balance, and body awareness – outlining a broader array of responses that the human organism is capable of making to its world (7).

Henshaw’s expanded list of sensory modalities has significant implications for the philosophy of aesthetics, enlarging its traditional focus on art forms that appeal primarily to the eye and ear to include those – such as the movement-based art forms of performance – that appeal to these other newly named senses. The avant-garde legacy that traces back to the French symbolists, for example, makes explicit appeals to the less commonly engaged classical senses of taste, smell, and touch, if not also Henshaw’s newly added pain. Of temperature, I will have more to say in Chapter 5. But for the purpose of outlining this book’s overall argument here, I wish to emphasize the last two sensory modalities in Henshaw’s augmented list. If balance (the vestibular system) and body awareness (proprioception) are sensory modalities by which we come to know our world and our phenomenological orientation in it, then art forms that make an explicit aesthetic appeal through them activate in their audiences what dance scholars refer to as a kinesthetic mode of understanding. Susan Leigh Foster has suggested that such a response may have achieved its own historical self-consciousness in the modern period, demonstrating how terms of art such as “choreography,” “kinesthesia,” and “empathy” developed in relation to modern dance and modern dance criticism. Indeed, we might see modernist forms of performance as appealing to – in order to make visible – the aesthetic responses in Henshaw’s list that have been missing from Western aesthetics.

After all, the performing arts are almost always complex, appealing to multiple sensory modalities – often in tandem but also at times in counterpoint with each otherFootnote ⁹ – and requiring methods of analysis that can account for the various aesthetic pathways by which audiences engage a work of art. That audiences must also work to synthesize each element into the whole (and that modernist works often challenge a thrust toward interpretive closure) makes any such critical assessment all the more difficult, especially when movement is involved. Even more so when the key term for analyzing movement in performance – “mimesis” – is used in a way that obscures our understanding. Often treated as a synonym for verisimilitude, “mimesis” in its original Aristotelian sense means “imitation,” with tragedy cited as a particularly powerful if not also exemplary form of an “imitation, through action rather than narration, of a serious, complete, and ample action” (Poetics, 11). When used to express the general idea of verisimilitude, mimesis emphasizes mere likeness, as if it pertained to any representational element within a work of art. But when used in its original sense relating to the drama, mimesis refers specifically to the action that unfolds in and as movement in performance. It is this sense of movement unfolding in time that I want to restore to our analysis, recuperating in the process a kinesthetic mode of understanding for the aesthetic process of reception.

That Aristotle chose to illustrate the critical concept of mimesis by way of the drama – a term often used to designate a specifically literary mode distinct from prose and poetry – may explain why past scholars have tended to focus on narrative action at the expense of actual movements on stage (pace Nietzsche). If, however, we regard drama as a truly mimetic art form – one in which the symbolic power of narrative action is realized in heightened moments of literal action on stage – then we can see how movement in performance is made meaningful, remembering that its literal and representational functions are almost always coextensive. An actor’s movements, in other words, do not merely render greater verisimilitude of character. Rooted in classical rhetoric, they are also part of a performance style that highlights certain narrative elements to make audiences understand them feelingly. This is why narrative action is important: it helps us understand how patterns of movement in performance are imbued with meaning by providing verbal cues that can guide us down paths of signification to help us grasp a work’s overall artistic design. The shape of that gestalt may vary – duck or rabbit, vase or faces – from one audience member to the next, but narratives help to consolidate the cultural meanings that take provisional form in performance by assigning semantic associations to a movement pattern before it dissolves into another such formation.Footnote ¹⁰ In this way, narrative and literal actions become intertwined. Which is why I want to preserve methods of literary analysis for our study of performance rather than dispense with them, as Alan Ackerman has recently lamented of the performative turn in theatre studies.Footnote ¹¹ Narrative is not only one among many self-standing elements within a theatrical work of art (as in Mary Overlie’s influential Viewpoints), but also a particularly charged one that, in becoming conjoined with patterns of bodily movement, helps us to capture the ephemeral meanings that emerge in new styles of performance.Footnote ¹² This kind of narrative analysis is not a simple return to old-fashioned methods of dramatic criticism, but a way of building on the insights of performance studies to enhance our understanding of the complex ways that cultures make meaning.

Attention to the relationship between movement and language can be especially useful to the history of performance since the archive is notoriously thin, making the task of documenting the changing lineaments of movement that constitute new styles of performance difficult, to say the least. While, at times, I draw from what Diana Taylor calls the “repertoire,” with its emphasis on the historical continuity of performance forms (as in my discussion of movement choirs in Chapter 3 or commercial touts in Chapter 4), most of the styles discussed in my book have disappeared – or are quickly receding – into the past. In such cases, textual records – contemporary reviews, actor biographies, autobiographies, letters, fan journals, sketches, musical scores, and promptbooks – offer insights into the cultural functions and discursive meanings of historical performance forms, even if those extant sources tend to document performers or performances that have since become canonical. In choosing such archives to anchor each chapter’s argument about a period style, I have made a virtue of this necessity by recognizing that, in being the subject of critical acclaim in a moment of profound cultural-historical change, the performances they document reveal not only how that style was illuminated by a particularly charged narrative, but also how the archive itself formed to give material expression to a powerful – if as yet inchoate – thought or experience that was enacted before fully emerging into language. These archives exist, in other words, because the performances they document can help us identify moments of heightened cultural awareness, when actors and audiences alike recognized, even as they struggled to grasp, a thought or experience in the process of being named.

Important recent work on the archive, especially coming out of Black performance studies, has pointed to serious gaps in the textual record, noting the absence of certain voices and experiences that have been relegated to historical silence for far too long. Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection (1997) is a foundational work in this scholarly tradition.Footnote ¹³ As she shows, the public transcripts of slave auctions may document the oppression of Africans in the New World, but, by also looking for what political scientist James C. Scott refers to as the “hidden transcripts” buried in that same public record, we can find evidence of a resistance that bespeaks an agency otherwise denied by official accounts. As a cultural history of modern performance, my book looks for the hidden transcripts of raced, classed, gendered, and other minority subjects in addition to the archive’s official accounts in order to reconstruct the necessarily speculative contours of historical performance forms. While it centers on artistic events – the kinds of performances that typically appear on a proscenium stage – this book also analyzes cultural performances occurring off stage, such as commercial transactions at a slave auction (Chapter 1) or in a department store (Chapter 4); the opening ceremonies for the Suez Canal in 1869 (Chapter 2) and the Olympic Games in 1936 (Chapter 3); and existentialist debates in open-air cafés (Chapter 5). In assuming a broad-spectrum approach, however, this book does not simply add cultural performances to its purview. Rather, it reveals the internal logic that links artistic and cultural events, showing how the aesthetic and formal dimensions of one shape the other – especially when the historical record reveals them to be discursively intertwined. If artistic events take center stage, as it were, it is because the self-reflexivity of the proscenium frame (whether literal or metaphorical) shows us how cultural performances are imbued with meaning and how artistic performances work to make that meaning available for critical reflection.

Moving between a specific performance and the collective style it represents, each chapter shows the dynamic interplay of meanings available to modern audiences when negotiating between the phenomenological experience of an event and the ideological frame of its authorizing culture. Susan Bennett has described the movement between these two perspectives as constitutive of the audience’s experience, analyzing the sensory, semiotic, conventional, and resistant possibilities that inhere within the act of reception. Any movement between these two perspectives is further complicated, however, by the fact that the experience of an individual audience member is also doubled. As Bennett points out, each individual is at once part of a homogeneous collective, vulnerable to the infectious spirit of others’ laughter or gasps of distress, yet also subject to their own predispositions, often taking pleasure from interpretive discoveries made in solitary reflection (153–4). In this book, I likewise move between the documented response of an actual historical audience member and a broad swath of evidence that captures some of the meanings generated by the performance more generally. If an “ideal” audience is implied, it is less an invocation of the perfect respondent than a hypothetical projection of the average spectator, one whose aesthetic response is imagined in terms of an (able-bodied) human physiology. As that parenthetical qualification makes clear, however, any claims for universality are necessarily conditional, since even that capacious figure is defined by its categorical outliers.

Period styles may consolidate into relatively fixed because identifiable entities, but they nonetheless remain unstable, deteriorating into half-lives almost as soon as they compound into recognizable forms. Given the limited conditions of its temporality, performance has tended to suffer from a crisis of self-definition, even among theatre and performance studies scholars who have debated its so-called “ontology.” For theorists such as Peggy Phelan, writing in the midst of the AIDS epidemic, absence is the defining condition of performance, its radical potential existing in the fact of its disappearance. Marvin Carlson reads performance through the metaphor of “ghosting,” defining it as a palimpsest of past actions that haunt the live event. For Rebecca Schneider, the defining emphasis lies less in the past than in the living present of the audience that participates in the performance event; what “remains” after it is over are the active meanings of the experience that the performance has made possible. For their part, Jill Dolan and José Muñoz look to the future, regarding performance as the act of staging utopian possibilities, of unmaking and remaking the world by reconstituting affective bonds among its audience members.

While acknowledging the ephemerality of performance, my book locates its ontology not in its disappearance, nor in the remains of the active memories and living bodily habits it leaves in its repertoire, nor in the structures of affect it generates to realize a utopian future. Rather, it locates the ontology of performance in the material form of bodies in motion. In the dynamic exchange between Romantic actors and their audiences, in the social topography of moving crowds, in marching assemblies that subdivide and reunify, in the accosting shout of the street tout or insinuated intimacy of the commercial shill, and in the contrapposto posture of the cultural rebel, this book reveals how bodies make meaning in the very ways that they move. I thus propose a new theory of performance, one that anchors its ontology in material practice, arguing that performance should not be reduced to the limiting condition of its temporality, but that temporality should be recognized as one of its enabling – because efficient – conditions. When performance is iterable and citational, it constitutes itself over and across time as an identifiable style. When it is not – when it introduces new forms into existence – it helps us to conceptualize the experience of change. In such cases, performance reveals formal homologies between the shape of an actor’s stance or of dancers’ bodies in motion and the embodied habitus we engender when responding to modernizing forces of change.

As outlined in this introduction, the process by which cultures create new meanings is necessarily complex. My heuristic for understanding it is five-fold. It begins with a historical phenomenon that changes the material experience of everyday life – a process of modernization that alters social relations, a physical habitus, and/or a model of self. This is step one (shock). The modernizing phenomena that inform each chapter’s focus appear in their respective titles: money, the railroad, the nation-state, advertising, and air conditioning. Step two (sensation) involves a felt response to this material change, and is often collectively experienced as what Raymond Williams calls a “structure of feeling.” Step three (performance) occurs when embodied responses to that change are set inside a literal or metaphorical frame to invite self-reflection. Appearing in the form of performance, they invite audiences to feel their way toward a comprehension of the modern phenomenon and the new experience it has introduced. When such forms consolidate into a recognizable style, they begin to make that experience visible as such. Each of the book’s five chapters takes up a specific historical style, examining it in relation to its formal cause: Romantic stage acting, with its dynamic actor–audience exchange; deep-stage naturalism, with its expanded spatio-temporal dimensions; eurhythmic pageantry, which gives expressive form to a collective people; avant-garde provocations, with their self-promotional tactics; and psychological-realist film acting, with its aesthetic of “cool” indifference. Step four (aesthetics) is the sensory engagement of that performance form by audiences whose own embodied responses are stimulated to process its meanings-in-formation. By “aesthetics,” however, I mean neither a general sense of beauty nor an idealized experience of art. Rather, as my usage throughout this introduction makes clear, I root it in the modern definition proposed by Alexander Baumgarten (1714–1762) to mean the experience of processing sensory stimuli – often, but not only, through an engagement with art – in an affective response that transforms embodied understanding. Step five (epistemology) is the imprint of those perceived cultural meanings in concepts that are given linguistic form. Through this complex process, the experience of modernity is rendered palpable, emerging into consciousness as a change that is experienced as such through the temporal art form of performance.

The experience of temporality, after all, is crucial to modernism’s self-conception, especially when modernity’s historical self-consciousness becomes intertwined with its self-reflexive strategies of representation. In such instances, modernism becomes performative, enacting even as it represents a changing world. Renato Poggioli famously observes that, at the end of the nineteenth century, the once venerated “schools” of art were superseded by small groups of artists who declared themselves to be “movements,” inscribing a sense of motion into the institutional function they understood themselves to fulfill: just as one movement or “-ism” captured the style of its particular historical moment, it was replaced by another claiming to be more up to date. Even as an institution, then, modernism has enacted its own temporality, revealing historicity to be the cause of its crisis in self-representation and the act of self-representation to be caught in the crisis of its own historicity. It is in performance that these two defining features of modernism converge.

And so we come full circle, back to performance on the modern stage, where period styles came as quickly as they went, with transitions metamorphosing in between. As we shall see, modern performers and their audiences worked together to forge an aesthetic and conceptual gestalt around the stances, postures, and movements of bodies whose experiences of modernity they sought to name. It was in performance, after all, that Karl Marx recognized the semblance of the historical period itself. In The Communist Manifesto (1848), he gives modernity a shape and a name, distinguishing it from all other historical epochs by remarking on its ever-changing modes of production and ever-altering social relations: “Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.” It is almost as if he were sitting in a theatre, watching a fictional world of social relations materialize into form before dissolving into palpable nothingness as the actors take their collective bow. For Marshall Berman, this passage would prove foundational to the new modernist studies, allowing him to refute postmodernism’s postmortem by attesting to modernity’s ever-expansive energy to grow and absorb, morph and change. Berman’s book draws its title from this passage, paying homage to Marx, who famously concludes that “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and” – as if in reference to Prospero’s masque, interrupted by the August sicklemen who prompt him to self-reflection – “man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

Performance and Modernity demonstrates how performers helped modern audiences do just that, figuring new categories of thought, materializing new social relations, and enacting new models of self in the very ways their bodies moved. Taken all together, the book’s five chapters demonstrate the process of cultural change writ large, revealing how the contours that give definition to a living culture are always in a state of motion, but especially when they morph and fold in response to the pressures of modernization. Although it makes no claim to have exhausted all the possible pairings of modern performance styles and modernizing processes, this book offers the following case studies to demonstrate how performance brings into visibility the change it both represents and enacts.