Theater/Performance Historiography: A Preamble

The introduction to the issue of Pamiętnik Teatralny which gestures towards current work on theater/performance historiography published in the Anglo-American academe. Reflecting on insights about the complex nature and the mediality of historical knowledge, we would like to offer a collection of essays which, in their singularity, draw attention to internal contradictions prompted by tensions between 1) time, space, and matter, which are used to frame academic practices, and 2) events and objects, which are determined historically not only by past and present imaginations but also by how time, space, and matter function within the field of theater/performance historiography. We ask the following questions: How are we to think about the ways of housing the past (the archive, the event, the object) and the experience of the past (time, space, matter)? How are we to think about historiography in ways that are not only not dualistic (e.g., self and other, mainstream and margin), but that facilitate seeing historical subjects as unsettled by (rather than settled in) time, as riddled with contradictions (rather than reflective of a status quo), and as constructs of meaning (rather than as regulated thought)? And finally, how are we to negotiate the dynamics and the contradictions between multiple temporalities and spatialities housed in one and the same object or event?