Introduction
This working bibliography began as a resource list for the CCCC Workshop “Writing Is a Serious Game: Improvisation as Exploration and Performance,” co-led by Doree Allen, Marvin Diogenes, and Jenn Fishman in 2008. It grew to include new citations for the 2009 CCCC panel “Taking the Stage: Performance and the Writing Classroom,” created and performed by Amy Devitt, Marvin Diogenes, Jenn Fishman, Clyde Moneyhun, and Mary Jo Reiff.

General theories and overviews of performance
Barba, Eugenio and Nicola Savarese. A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art of the Performer. 2e. London: Routledge, 2005.

A work of theater anthropology, this encyclopedic volume anatomizes performance through a transcultural analysis of its component physical and social parts, beginning with anatomy and apprenticeship and ending with text, stage, and training. In between chapters on montage, omission, opposition, and rhythm are full of images and information that may inspire different kinds of activities or embodied lessons on writing and rhetoric.

Bial, Henry, ed. The Performance Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 2004.
Designed to complement Richard Schechner’s Performance Studies: An Introduction (see below), this reader includes essays and excerpts that define the following terms: performance studies, performance, ritual, play, performativity, performing, and both global and intercultural performance.

Carlson, Marvin. Performance: A Critical Introduction. London, Routledge, 1996.

Carlson puts performance into both academic and artistic context. Early chapters treat anthropology and ethnography, sociology and psychology, and linguistics. Later chapters cover the history of performance, performance art, as well as contrasting theories of performance, especially those concerned with identity and different forms of protest or resistance.

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. “Performance Studies.” Rockefeller Foundation, Culture and Creativity, September 1999 .

BKG offers a highly accessible overview of performance studies, organized according to her own taxonomy of scholarship and artistic activity. She also reviews the performance studies programs at NYU, Northwestern, and the University of Paris.

McKenzie, Jon. Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance. London: Routledge, 2001.

This book historicizes post-1950s performance, focusing on three different categories or registers: organizational performance, the field that has come to be known as performance management; cultural performance, including both the theater arts and performance art; and technological performance, McKenzie’s term for logic behind the many products and technologies that we expect to perform for us, from air fresheners and refrigerators to computers and artificial intelligence.

Schechner, Richard. Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985.

With Victor Turner (see below), Schechner is one of performance studies’ two founding fathers, and this book is a foundational text. In it, Schechner defines “restored” or “twice-behaved behavior” in contrast to the everyday actions we perform as we go about our daily business. On stage, actors recreate or reconstruct everyday gestures, expressions, and movements as stage business. This book also includes a chapter called “Performer Training Interculturally,” which gives examples of the “doing as training” common to Kathakali (in India) or Noh (in Japan). It involves hands-on or direct experience, group work, and embodied speaking and movement exercises, which may be of particular interest to writing instructors.

—. Performance Studies: An Introduction. 2e. London: Routledge, 2006.

This book is a textbook of sorts, written at a high level of historical and theoretical engagement. It offers an overview of performance study and practice between the 1980s and the turn of the millennium, and it includes extended discussions of performance studies, performance, ritual, play, performing, performativity, and global and intercultural performance (the same categories used in Henry Bial’s Performance Studies Reader). It also includes a number of illustrations, as well as biographical information about key performers and theorists.

Shiff, Erin. Performance Studies. Readers in Cultural Studies. New York: Palgrave, 2003.

This reader can be seen as an expansion of the “global and intercultural performance” sections of Bial’s anthology. In it, Schiff organizes essays that exemplify or “locate” performance studies within cultural studies according to five different categories: popular performance, performing bodies and performance art, performances of history and memory, performance and the world, and performativity. What these groupings hide is the concentrated attention authors in this anthology pay to race, gender, and sexuality, along with religion and politics.

Turner, Victor. From Ritual to Performance: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ Publications, 1982.

With Richard Schechner (see above), Turner is one of performance studies’ two dads, and this slim volume is another one of the foundational texts for the field. A dense work of anthropological theory, this book contains Turner’s early explanations of liminality and the liminoid: two related terms that describe the cultural space that performance creates for not only cultural reproduction, but also reflection and reinvention.

Acting

Adler, Stella. The Art of Acting. New York: Applause, 2000.

Bruder, Melissa et al. A Practical Handbook for the Actor. New York: Vintage/Random House, 1986.

Caine, Michael. Acting on Film. New York: Applause, 1997.

Hasgen, Uta. Respect for Acting. New York: Wiley, 1973.

Lewis, Robert. Advice to the Players. New York: Theater Communications, 1980.

Mamet, David. True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor. New York: Vintage/Random House, 1997.

Manderino, Ned. All About Method Acting. Los Angeles: Manderino, 1985.

Moore, Sonia. The Stanislavski System. New York: Penguin, 1984.

Olivier, Laurence. On Acting. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986.

Rotte, Joanna. Acting with Adler. New York: Limelight, 2000.

Performance and Pedagogy

Haedicke, Susan C. and Tobin Nellhaus, ed. Performing Democracy: International Perspectives on Urban Community-Based Performance.

Hamera, Judith. “Performance Studies, Pedagogy, and Bodies in/as the Classroom.” 121-130.

Sabatini, Arthur J. “The Dialogics of Performance and Pedagogy.” 191-202.

McConachi, Bruce. “Theatre of the Oppressed with Students of Privilege: Practicing Boal in the American College Classroom.” 247-260.

Pineau, Elyse Lamm. “Critical Performative Pedagogy: Fleshing Out the Politics of Liberatory Education.” 41-54.

Roach, Joseph. “Theatre Studies/Cultural Studies/Performance Studies: The Three Unities.” 33-40.

Stucky, Nathan and Cynthia Wimmer, ed. Teaching Performance Studies. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002.

Sarason, Seymour B. Teaching as a Performing Art. New York: Teachers College Press, 1999.

On Performance, Writing, and the Classroom

Alexander, Bryant Keith. “Intimate Engagement: Student Performances as Scholarly Endeavor.” Theatre Topics 12.1 (March 2002): 85-98.

Allsopp, Ric. “Performance Writing.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. 20.1 (Jan. 1999): 76-80.

Cosgrove, Shady, “Teaching and Learning as Improvisational Performance in the Creative Writing Classroom.” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 5.3 (Fall 2005): 471-479.

Dishman, Eric. “Performative In(ter)ventions: Teaching Consulting Applications for Performance Studies.” Teaching Performance Studies. Ed. Nathan Stucky and Cynthia Wimmer. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002. 235-246.

Fishman, Jenn, Andrea Lunsford, Beth McGregor and Mark Otuteye. “Performing Writing, Performing Literacy.” College Composition and Communication. 57.2 (2005): 224-252.

Fleckenstein, Kristie S. Embodied Literacies: Imageword and a Poetics of Teaching. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003.

King, Allison. “From Sage on the Stage to Guide on the Side.” College Teaching 41.1 (1993): 30-35.

Kopleson, Karen. “Of Ambiguity and Erasure: The Perils of Performative Pedagogy.” Relations, Locations, Positions: Composition Theory for Writing Teachers. Ed. Peter Vandenberg, Sue Hum, Sue, and Jennifer Clary-Lemon. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2006. 563-70.

Love, Meredith. “Composing through the Performative Screen: Translating Performative Studies into Writing Pedagogy.” College Composition and Communication 35.2 (2007): 11-30.

McConachie, Bruce. “Theater of the Oppressed with Students of Privilege: Practicing Boal in the American College Classroom.” Teaching Performance Studies. Ed. Nathan Stucky and Cynthia Wimmer. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002. 247-260.

Newkirk, Thomas. The Performance of Self in Student Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1997.

Pelias, Ronald J. Writing Performance: Poeticizing the Researcher’s Body. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP; 1999.

Pollock, Della. “Performing Writing.” The Ends of Performance. Ed. Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane. New York: New York UP, 1998. 73-103.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Teaching ‘Experimental Critical Writing.’” The Ends of Performance. Ed. Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane. New York: New York UP, 1998. 104-15.