Of Borders and Thresholds: Theatre History, Practice, and Theory.

Publication: Comparative Drama

Publication Date: 22-DEC-00

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Of Borders and Thresholds: Theatre History, Practice, and Theory. Kobialka, Michal, ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Pp. 311. $?

The ten essays in this volume suggest possibilities for making sense of a theatrical landscape whose sands have shifted to the extent that "borders" and "thresholds," demarcations of identity and orientation, have either moved or disappeared altogether. Editor Michal Kobialka and his assembled scholars-all significant observers of this tenuous terrain--reflect "upon the ways that theatre--the practice and the institution--has been defined by the concepts of borders and border crossings." The essays seek both to "signal a shift in current intellectual discourse" and "to reveal how the materiality of borders is produced, fragmented, and multiplied in theatre history/historiography, practice, and theory" (19). The border and the threshold are points of engagement with moving targets; they draw attention simultaneously to phenomena of separation and interconnectedness.

Of Borders and Thresholds may be a model for future theater scholarship: a collection of essays by individual scholars with distinctive points of view whose collective, if not cohesive, endeavors aim to destabilize the reader, leaving it up to him or her to discover new arrangements for theoretical and practical work. It may no longer be possible for a single author with a single point of view to make significant meaning about the history, theory, and practice of theater. Multiplicity may be necessary--especially when focusing attention on things as elusive as borders--to provide for a possible experience of "complex reading."

Historian Rosemarie K. Banks's opening essay, "Meditations Upon Opening and Crossing Over," contains the excellent observation that "intercultural societies can valorize yet seek to destroy that which they take to be most representative of...

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