To All Appearances : Ideology and Performance

First published in 1992, To All Appearances is a book in which ideology and performance shadow each other, in a theoretical inquiry which ranges widely across historical periods and cultures. The author’s concerns―which include the social meaning of illusion and the cultural manifestation of power―take the reader from Jacobean drama to the pageantry of Robert Wilson; from Eleanora Duse to Laurie Anderson; from the puppet theater of Kleist to Kantor’s theater of the dead; and from the Kutiyattam temple dancers in Kerala to Womanhouse in Los Angeles.

A brilliant, uncontainable, and chastening look at the rhetoric of critical theory in relation to performance and ideological practice, this is undoubtedly a book for the twenty-first century. It returns us, through all appearances, to the unavoidable question in art, in politics, in the society of the spectacle: what, after all, is the future of illusion?

Herbert Blau was the most influential theater theorist, practitioner, and educator of his generation. He was Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. After many years in the theater, where he was particularly well known for his innovative work as a director, he also gained an international reputation for his theoretical writings on performance and postmodern culture.