Opening Acts offers new, rigorous ways to analyze communication and culture through performance. It offers cutting edge readings of everyday life, space, history, and intersections of all three, using a critical performance-based approach.

Introduction: Opening Opening Acts - Judith HameraSection 1: Engaging the EverydayIntroduction - Judith Hamera1. Becoming Other-Wise: Conversational Performance and the Politics of Experience - Leonard Clyde Hawes2. Telling Twisted Tales: Owning Place, Owning Culture in Ethnographic Research - Bryant Keith AlexanderSection 2: Animating LocationsIntroduction - Judtih Hamera3. Bridging Haunted Places: Performance and the Production of Mostar - Sonja Arsham Kuftinec4. Looking for Stonewall's Arm: Tourist Performance as Research Method - Michael S. BowmanSection 3: Interrogating HistoriesIntroduction - Judith Hamera5. Rethinking Elocution: The Trope of the Talking Book and Other Figures of Speech - Dwight Conquergood6. Diverging Paths in Performance Genealogies - Ruth Laurion BowmanSection 4: Synthesizing ScholarshipIntroduction - Judith Hamera7. The Mechanical Bride of Yonville-l'Abbaye (Batteries Not Included): Remapping the Canonical Landmark - Paul EdwardsSection 5: Embracing PerformancesIntroduction - Judith Hamera8. Performing Theory/Embodied Writing - D. Soyini MadisonAbout the EditorAbout the ContributorsIndex