Contemporary academic discourse is filled with the word "perform." Nestled among a variety of prefixes and suffixes (re-, post-, -ance, -ivity?), the term functions as a vehicle for a host of inquiries. This development is intriguing and complex for students, artists, and scholars of performance and theater. By examining the history of theater studies and related institutions and comparing the very different disciplinary interpretations and developments that led to this engagement, this study offers ways of placing performance theory and performance studies in context.

1. Discipline and performance: genealogy and discontinuity; 2. Institutions and performance: professing performance in the early twentieth century; 3. Culture and Performance: structures of dramatic feeling; 4. Practice and performance: modernist paradoxes and literalist legacies; 5. History and performance: blurred genres and the particularising of the past; 6. Identity and performance: racial performativity and anti-racist theatre.