Staging Myth: Performance, Adaptation, and Cultural Memory


Deadline for Submissions- 30th October 2026
Full Name / Name of Organization:
Prof. Shuchi Sharma
Ms. Aayushi Tripathi
Contact Email:
stagingmyth@gmail.com
Call for Book Chapters for Edited Volume

Staging Myth: Performance, Adaptation, and Cultural Memory

Deadline for Abstract Submissions: 30th October 2026
“The true purpose of the theater is to create Myths, to express life in its immense, universal aspect.” (Artaud, 1958, p. 116)
Myth occupies a crucial place in the imagination, narrative traditions, and structure of society. Civilizations have told, written, and performed myths since the earliest recorded history, and myth subsequently forms the substratum from which religion and social order emerge. Myth travels, mutates and gets adapted: carried across centuries and cultures, it is reshaped with each retelling, so that no staging of a myth simply repeats the one before it.
In theatre, myth carries particular significance, from Kalidasa's Abhijnanashakuntalam to Sophocles's Oedipus Rex. Mythic narratives have found dramatic expression across proscenium and folk traditions alike, from antiquity to the present. Richard Schechner argues that performance restores behavior that is never enacted for the first time, always already ‘twice-behaved’ (Schechner, 1985, p.36), reframing myth on stage not as a fixed text awaiting illustration but as a living repertoire of gesture, ritual, and embodied action that each production reconstitutes, contests, or invents anew. Myth doesn't sit still on a page; it gets built and rebuilt each time a director, dancer, or puppeteer puts it in front of an audience. Performance names that act. Adaptation is what happens in the process, since no staging is a pure repeat of the last one. Cultural memory is the result: what a community carries forward, and reshapes, through repeated acts of restaging. This volume takes that claim as its premise: performance is where adaptation happens and where cultural memory is made, not merely stored. Myth persists as something performance does, not merely something performance represents.
Peter Brook's landmark Mahabharata (1985) brought Sanskrit epic into cross-cultural, ritual theatre; Kneehigh Theatre has built an international reputation reworking myth and folk tale for the contemporary stage; Anaïs Mitchell's Hadestown carried the Orpheus myth to Broadway and a Tony Award; Julie Taymor's puppetry, from The Lion King to her operatic Grendel, has given myth new bodies and new material forms; and Bread and Puppet Theater has used giant, mythic, and allegorical figures as a tool of protest for six decades.
This volume takes performance and theatre, rather than literary or cinematic adaptation alone, as its organizing lens on contemporary myth-making. The volume follows Richard Schechner's argument that myth in performance functions as restored behavior: not a fixed text to be illustrated on stage, but a living repertoire of gesture, ritual, and embodied action that each production reconstitutes, contests, and sometimes invents. This claim extends a longer lineage of ritual and cruelty-based theatre running through Antonin Artaud and Jerzy Grotowski, and is read alongside Victor Turner's work on liminality and social drama, Diana Taylor's distinction between the archive and the repertoire, Joseph Roach's theory of surrogation and cultural memory, Peggy Phelan's account of performance's liveness and disappearance, Marvin Carlson's account of theatre as haunted repetition, and Rebecca Schneider's writing on reenactment. Together, these theorists ground the volume's working claim: performance is myth's most active contemporary laboratory, and cultural memory is made and remade, not merely stored, each time a myth is staged.
The volume is explicitly international and cross-formal in scope. Chapters must engage myth as it is staged, embodied, or enacted; in theatre, puppetry, ritual, immersive and site-specific performance, opera and musical theatre, applied and community performance, protest performance, or digital and live-streamed performance; purely literary or filmic adaptation, without engagement with staging, embodiment, or liveness, falls outside the volume's remit. Chapters may address any performance tradition or practice, singly or comparatively, primarily from contemporary practice (broadly post-1970) read alongside landmark earlier productions where relevant, and the editors are curating for balance across traditions and forms rather than depth in any one. The volume welcomes work grounded in performance theory: Artaud, Grotowski, Schechner, Turner, Taylor, Roach, Phelan, Carlson, Schneider, Fischer-Lichte, and Boal, among others, as well as feminist, queer, and postcolonial theories of revisionist myth-making (Rich, Cixous, Ostriker, and related theorists), which are especially welcomed for chapters engaging identity and reclamation. Chapters offering plot summary or purely textual analysis without engagement with performance or embodiment, and studies confined to a single national tradition without an explicit comparative or theoretical rationale, fall outside scope.
Suggested Topics
Original and unpublished research articles are invited (but certainly not restricted to) the following areas:
• Postdramatic and devised theatre's engagement with myth
• Puppetry, mask, and object theatre (Bunraku, wayang, and contemporary puppet companies)
• Musical theatre and opera as sites of mythic adaptation
• Immersive and site-specific performance staged at or as mythic space
• Digital, VR, and motion-capture performance mythologies
• Indigenous and decolonial performance reclaiming cosmology
• Diaspora theatre companies and inherited myth
• Ritual theatre and performance anthropology
• Regional epic and folk performance revival and innovation
• Protest theatre and myth as political allegory
• Applied and community theatre using myth for social intervention
• Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA) and myth pedagogy
• Myth and collective trauma in post-conflict performance
• Feminist revisionist mythmaking in theatre
• Queer and camp reappropriations of myth
• Racial and ethnic reclamation of myth on stage
• Devised and collectively created original myths for the stage
• Climate-crisis, techno-futurist, and pandemic-era myth creation
• Staged parody of corporate and celebrity mythologizing
Interdisciplinary contributions from theatre and performance studies, dance studies, ritual studies, applied theatre, media and digital performance studies, anthropology, folklore, gender studies, and related fields are warmly welcome.
Submission Guidelines:
• Articles should strictly follow APA 7 style guidelines.
• The proposals should contain an abstract within 500 words, a maximum of five keywords, and a brief bio-note of the author within 150 words.
• The abstract, keywords, bio-note, and other credentials should be sent in a separate MS Word file.
• The last date for submission of abstracts is 30th October 2026, and they must be sent to stagingmyth@gmail.com .
• Selected contributors of abstracts will be notified by 30th November 2026.
• The full papers (expected by Feburary 2027) should be approximately 5000 to 7500 words in length, including notes and bibliography.
You may also submit through Google Form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSek6v82oxzAceqpVgcKHf1rXQWr_dDMu_xLOjZYetVice1KnQ/viewform?usp=publish-editor
Contact Information
stagingmyth@gmail.com
Prof. Shuchi Sharma- shuchi.sharma@ipu.ac.in
Ms. Aayushi Tripathi- aayushi.09021690024@std.ggsipu.ac.in



References
Artaud, A. (1958). The theatre and its double (M. C. Richards, Trans.). Grove Press. (Original work published 1938)
Boal, A. (1979). Theatre of the oppressed (C. A. McBride & M.-O. L. McBride, Trans.). Urizen Books.
Carlson, M. (2001). The haunted stage: The theatre as memory machine. University of Michigan Press.
Cixous, H. (1976). The laugh of the Medusa (K. Cohen & P. Cohen, Trans.). Signs, 1(4), 875–893.
Fischer-Lichte, E. (2008). The transformative power of performance: A new aesthetics (S. I. Jain, Trans.). Routledge.
Grotowski, J. (1968). Towards a poor theatre. Simon and Schuster.
Ostriker, A. (1982). The thieves of language: Women poets and revisionist mythmaking. Signs, 8(1), 68–90.
Phelan, P. (1993). Unmarked: The politics of performance. Routledge.
Rich, A. (1972). When we dead awaken: Writing as re-vision. College English, 34(1), 18–30.
Roach, J. (1996). Cities of the dead: Circum-Atlantic performance. Columbia University Press.
Schechner, R. (1985). Between theater and anthropology. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Schneider, R. (2011). Performing remains: Art and war in times of theatrical reenactment. Routledge.
Taylor, D. (2003). The archive and the repertoire: Performing cultural memory in the Americas. Duke University Press.
Turner, V. (1969). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. Aldine Publishing.