How do ideas take shape? How do concepts emerge into form? This book argues that they take shape quite literally in the human body, often appearing on stage in new styles of performance. Focusing on the historical period of modernity, Performance and Modernity: Enacting Change on the Globalizing Stage demonstrates how the unforeseen impact of economic, industrial, political, social, and psychological change was registered in bodily metaphors that took shape on stage. In new styles of performance-acting, dance, music, pageantry, avant-garde provocations, film, video and networked media-this book finds fresh evidence for how modernity has been understood and lived, both by stage actors, who, in modelling new habits, gave emerging experiences an epistemological shape, and by their audiences, who, in borrowing the strategies performers enacted, learned to adapt to a modernizing world.

• Offers a resolution to long-standing debates about the “ontology of performance,” proposing that it lies in the shifting material contours of bodies set in motion
• Pioneers an original approach to the study of modernism, focusing on performance as an art form attuned to capturing the experience of 'the new' as one of temporal change
• Reframes theatre history by shifting focus from individual actors to period styles that reflect emerging cultural concerns across broad geographical and historical spectra