The Scholarly Journal

Western historical method grew up around writing. Documents could be dated, compared, and stored; performances could not. The result was a hierarchy in which written cultures appeared to 'have history' and oral or embodied cultures appeared to have only custom or myth.

Diana Taylor's distinction between archive and repertoire challenges that hierarchy. Dance, ritual, song, and gesture transmit memory through repeated embodied practice. In the colonial Americas, she argues, the repertoire carried knowledge that conquerors' archives distorted or ignored.

The challenge for historians is practical: how do you cite a gesture? Scholars combine ethnography, oral history, community collaboration, and careful critique of colonial texts — and they acknowledge that some knowledge is not theirs to publish.

Many Western theatre history surveys open in Athens. The choice is not inevitable. It reflects the prestige of classical learning in European education, the survival of Greek play texts, and the authority given to Aristotle's Poetics after the Renaissance.

Starting in Greece can make everything else look like a later arrival or a regional variation. The Natyashastra, the Noh treatises of Zeami, and West African traditions of jeliya all represent sophisticated theatrical thought that developed independently of Greece.

Alternatives include thematic organisation, regional parallel narratives, or beginning with the question of what counts as theatre at all. Each solution brings its own distortions.

Ira Aldridge, the African Grove Theatre, and countless women performers survive in fragments: a playbill, a hostile review, a payment entry. Recovery work begins by gathering these traces and reading them critically, often against the intentions of those who wrote them.

Trouillot shows that silences are produced at every stage of history-making, so recovery requires attention at every stage too: finding new sources, reorganising archives, and changing the stories historians tell.

Saidiya Hartman's essay 'Venus in Two Acts' addresses the limits of recovery for enslaved women who appear in the archive only through violence. She proposes 'critical fabulation' — a disciplined, transparent narrative method that exposes the archive's gaps without pretending to fill them with certainty.

Peggy Phelan's Unmarked argues that performance's essence is that it disappears; documentation turns it into something else. On this view, a video of a play is a new object, not the play.

Rebecca Schneider responds in Performing Remains that performance also persists — in bodies, repetition, and re-enactment. Joseph Roach's idea of surrogation describes how cultures fill the gap left by a loss with new performers and performances, often forgetting what was replaced.

Preservation is also political. The confiscation of potlatch regalia preserved masks in museums while the law tried to end the ceremonies they belonged to. Gerald Vizenor's concept of survivance reminds us that Indigenous performance did not vanish; it continued, changed, and resisted.