Review of Performance and Cosmopolitics: Cross-Cultural Transactions in Australasia by Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo, and Unsettling Space: Contestations in Contemporary Australian Theatre by Joanne Tompkins

Abstract

The recently instigated series 'Studies in International Performance' from Palgrave Macmillan is currently providing some of the most interesting, thought provoking, and indeed necessary research in the field of comparative performance studies. As well as the two texts reviewed here, we should note Judith Hamera's Dancing Communities: Performance, Difference and Connection in the Global City and Christopher Balme's Pacific Performances: Theatricality and Cross-Cultural Encounter in the South Seas. The guiding motivation behind this series, born out of the aspirations and culture of the International Federation for Theatre Research, is made clear by an introductory preface from its overseeing editors, Janelle Reinelt and Brian Singleton. The series has been deemed timely and necessary, as they put it, because 'it has become increasingly urgent for performance scholars to expand their disciplinary horizons to include the comparative study of performances across national, cultural, social and political borders'.