A new edited volume has just been published, by Professor Gilli Bush-Bailey (Professor Emerita, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, London) and Dr Kate Flaherty from the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics – Touring Performance and Global Exchange 1850–1960: Making Tracks.

Investigating songlines, spoken drama, opera, circus, dance, and comedy, this new collection examines the transformative effects of mobility on performance and performers crossing the Atlantic and Pacific oceans from 1850 to 1960.

Well known, or obscure, travelling performers faced dangers at sea and hazardous journeys across land. Their tracks, made in pursuit of fortune and fame, intersected with those made by earlier storytellers in search for food. Touring Performance and Global Exchange takes a fresh look at such tracks—the material remains—demonstrating that moving performance does far more than transfer repertoires and people; it transforms them. Touring performance has too often been conceived in diasporic terms, as a fixed product radiating out from a cultural centre. This collection maps different patterns—ones that comprise reversed flows, cross currents, and continually proliferating centres of meaning in complex networks of global exchange.

This volume is now available from Routledge here.