Annotation - Christopher Balme - The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Studies - Warwick 1A

Balme broadly categorizes the known theatrical practices and briefly elaborates on each form; namely the dramatic, music, dance, and puppet and shadow theatre. Due to cross pollination of genres, he further states that “a growing number of such works require from scholars at least a working knowledge of all major theatre genres” (p.4). Balme briefly touches on the move from theatre studies to performance studies in the academic setting and the way in which “the two disciplines are merging and intermingling in many ways” (p.12). Because of the ephemeral nature of performance, he outlines the modes of analyzing these forms, to which he states, “the object of analysis is therefore, in the first instance, an aesthetic product resulting from an intentional organization of signs” (p.133). He continues by presenting the tools by which they may be analyzed, the goal of such an analysis and finally surveys the various known methods and models for the same.