This chapter offers a novel theoretical and methodological apparatus to reinterpret rule of law reform. I draw on aesthetic theory to reimagine rule of law reform as an aesthetic practice, in which efforts to build the sublime ‘rule of law’ produce both shadows of the rule of law and the shadowy figure of the rule of law reformer. I go on to argue that this aesthetic remains irreducibly embodied in the body of the reformer and that rule of law reform is, thus, in a very real sense, performance. I turn to performance studies, as well as Stanislavski’s system of training actors, to analyse these performances, and discuss precisely how they complement the methods in the previous chapter. I then put this new method into practice, rewriting my cases as dramatic performances. In doing so, I show how expert ignorance might productively be understood through the dramatic structure of ignorant experts’ action.

Returning to the cases in the previous chapters, this chapter shows that reformers conduct ‘ignorance work’, which destabilises the structures of space, time, and identity that might otherwise encase a rule of law reform. The chapter goes on to show that ignorance work has patterned relationships to ‘implementation work’. For example, experts might base a project on the claim that the very concept of the rule of law is incapable of being known or that the rule of law is too empirically complex to be understood, even while trying to develop global indicators about measuring the rule of law. Turning to their effects, the chapter argues that these patterns are ways by which a rule of law expert produces provisional forms of law and politics in the Global South – for example, through well-funded and continuing pilot projects to implement indicators in various contexts under a rubric of transparency. At the same time, key questions about those forms are repeatedly raised and never resolved – for example, the location of the law/politics divide.

This essay models how scholars of theatrical culture, especially when navigating the textual archive, can use the nineteenth-century repertoire to examine how movement created meaning in the nineteenth-century theater. Using A Glance at New York as a case study, the essay maps the show’s mobile rhythms to examine how they construct a sense of place, class, gender, and racial identities, and affective atmospheres that enable the audience to feel the city that lies beyond the stage.

Chapter 1 situates the reader within the landscape of Blackness in the twenty-first century. In addition to laying out the task at hand (untangling representations of blackness in Greek antiquity), this chapter underlines the dangerous consequences that occur when scholars conflate modern tropes with ancient material.

Although Adès scholarship has made significant inroads towards understanding the analytical and interpretative richness of his music, the actual sound of it, and the range of meanings a performer might tease from it, have barely begun to be addressed. In this chapter I propose ways in which musical structure in Adès’s music might be reconceived in response to performance. Adès’s own analytical and recorded accounts of Janáček’s ‘In memoriam’ are used to provide preliminary theoretical and methodological orientation, after which I examine Adès’s Mazurkas Op. 27 to consider the dynamic interaction between structures, genres and performance traditions in recordings by multiple pianists. Finally, I turn to recordings of Darknesse Visible to consider the role performance can play in rethinking the relationship of expression and structure in Adès’s music. Underpinning both accounts is a sense of how performances can access the temporal experience of how time passes in Adès’s music.

In 2015, Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre staged a highly controversial adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone. The critical reception could not have been more polarised and was seemingly entirely split down gendered lines. This chapter, written by the author of (and an actor in) that adaptation, provides both a personal account and academic theorisation of the production. Analysing the context of the Malthouse Antigone, the chapter explores issues of cultural appropriation, national identity, gender performativity, and creative pragmatism that underpinned the creation of the show and contributed to the controversy surrounding it. The chapter also proposes a pragmatic twist to the tendency of classical reception studies to attribute intentionality to production decisions. Whereas analysis of the finished production can give a false sense of a secure directorial intention, analysis of the process demonstrates that the journey from page to stage is constantly at the mercy of contingencies, collaborations, and compromises.

This chapter turns inward, considering how the performance of vice haunted the early modern child, how the positionality of boyhood or girlhood inflected and shaped the act of performance, and the possible reasons for casting children as rule-breakers, sexual deviants, and seducers in a pedagogical context. Plays and masques with antimasque style roles were performed by schoolgirls and boys, including a boy who played an unruly scholar celebrating truancy in song, young ladies who sang as Furies and witches, and schoolgirl dancers who enacted scenes of murder and violence. Children of both genders also practiced the arts of musical seduction: a boy, Wentworth Randall, sang as Dame Siren in Apollo Shroving (1627), before his costume was violently torn from him, revealing a monstrous fish tail; a girl sang to persuade Paris to choose Venus and pleasure in Beauties Triumph (1676), even as she warned of the dangers of doing so. As these entertainments reveal, the performance of vice was dialectical – the pedagogues who crafted the entertainments claimed they displayed immorality only to uncloak its rottenness. Yet, given early modern pedagogical theories, there was also the very real danger that children might become what they performed – imitatio gone terribly wrong.

Performance studies scholar Joseph Roach has claimed that past performances never fully disappear; the act of performance might erase the distinction between past and present, as “the voices of the dead may speak … through the bodies of the living.” A recent performance of Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (2008) at the Opéra Comique in Paris with stage direction by Deborah Warner and musical direction by William Christie explored this temporal telescoping, as the production brought together Priest’s boarding school and the twenty-first-century professional opera stage through the bodies of young girls dressed in modern school uniforms. The girls did not sing as their forbearers did at Chelsea, but they charged onstage with unbridled energy, danced erratically, cavorted with a sailor, and mocked the main tragic plot. Warner’s stage direction allowed modern spectators to glimpse the spectral outline of early modern pedagogical performance as the children vividly revealed the ways in which singing, dancing, and acting bodies might engage with the text.

The introduction lays out the methodology employed in the study, explaining how insights gleaned from studies of material culture, phenomenology, and performance studies can produce a powerful hermeneutic for understanding early modern pedagogical performance.