The Encyclopedia

African Grove Theatre

c. 1821 – c. 1823

Black-run theatre company in Manhattan founded by William Alexander Brown, among the first of its kind in the United States.

Archive and Repertoire

Diana Taylor's distinction between enduring materials (archive) and embodied, transmitted practice (repertoire).

Aristotle's Poetics

c. 335 BCE

The earliest surviving Western treatise on drama, later turned into a rulebook and a starting point for theatre history.

Colonial Records of Performance

Accounts of Indigenous and colonised peoples' performances written by missionaries, officials, and travellers.

Digital Archives

Digitised collections, recordings, and born-digital materials that widen access while creating new gaps.

Eurocentrism in Theatre History

The tendency to treat European forms as the norm and other traditions as derivative, exotic, or 'pre-theatrical'.

Griot / Jeli

Hereditary verbal artists — historians, genealogists, musicians, and praise-singers — of West African societies.

Historiography

The study of how history is written: its methods, sources, assumptions, and the people who produce it.

Ira Aldridge

1807 – 1867

African American tragedian who built an international career in Britain and Europe and was long marginalised in theatre histories.

Natyashastra

variously dated c. 200 BCE – 200 CE

Sanskrit treatise on drama, dance, and music attributed to the sage Bharata, as old as or older than many Greek theoretical texts studied in the West.

Oral Tradition

Knowledge, history, and art transmitted through speech, song, and performance rather than writing.

Performance as Disappearance

Peggy Phelan's influential argument that performance exists only in the present and is changed by being recorded.

Primary vs. Secondary Sources

Primary sources come from the period studied; secondary sources interpret them later.

Reconstruction and Re-enactment

Attempts to rebuild historical performances, spaces, or practices from surviving evidence.

Silencing the Past

1995

Michel-Rolph Trouillot's study of how power enters history at every stage, from the making of sources to the telling of narratives.

Survivance

Gerald Vizenor's term for an active Native presence that refuses narratives of disappearance and victimry.

The Archive

Institutions and collections that preserve documents and objects — and, by selection, decide what counts as evidence.

The Canon

The set of works and artists treated as essential, taught repeatedly, and used to define a field.

The Florentine Codex

completed c. 1577

Encyclopedic manuscript on Nahua life compiled under the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún with Nahua scholars and artists.

The Potlatch Ban

1884 – 1951

Canadian law prohibiting the potlatch and related ceremonies of First Nations peoples.

The Sunjata Epic

events c. 13th century; transmitted orally

Epic narrative of Sunjata Keita, founder of the Mali Empire, performed by jeliw in many versions.

Women in the Archive

Why women performers and writers are under-recorded, and how scholars recover them.

Zeami and the Noh Treatises

c. 1363 – c. 1443

Actor, playwright, and theorist who shaped Noh and wrote treatises transmitted secretly within acting lineages.