Decomposition

The fluid nature of performance studies and the widening embrace of the idea of performativity has produced in "Decomposition: Post-Disciplinary Performance", a collection of great interest that crosses disciplinary lines of academic work. The essays move from the local to the global, from history to sport, from body parts to stage productions, and from race relations to global politics. In the title essay, Elizabeth Wood writes with eloquence about a basic human relation cast around the question of performance and triangulated by the role a great performer took within it. In this unnatural act of somatic and sonic decomposition of the maternal body's "soundscape", she seeks to liberate herself and us from the last refuge of patriarchal order and compulsory heterosexuality, the subordinating myth of maternal omnipotence. The decomposition of such myths is a binding force in this volume. Together these essays pursue critical understandings of performance in our postmodern world, embodying perspectives that help us understand the historical and cultural issues that underpin it.