This book locates and critically theorises an emerging field of twenty-first century theatre
practice concerned either thematically methodologically or formally with acts of
commemoration and the commemorative. With notions of memorial celebration temporality and
remembrance at its heart and as a timely topic for debate this book asks how theatre and
performance intersects with commemorative acts or rituals in contemporary theatre and
performance practice. It considers the (re)performance of history commemoration as a form of
or performance of ritual performance as memorial performance as eulogy and eulogy as
performance. It asks where personal acts of remembrance merge with public or political acts of
remembrance where the boundary between the commemorative and the performative might lie and
how it might be blurred broken or questioned. It explores how we might remake the past in the
present to consider not just how performance commemorates but how commemoration performs.
