Introduction: Vanishing Acts and Making Tracks

Abstract

This collection began to take shape at a conference hosted by the Australian National University in February 2019. A group of invited academic researchers interested in theatre, performance history, and migrations, gathered to share their research, and to discuss and expand their understanding of nineteenth-century theatrical touring. Academic travel to perform research is in itself a kind of global exchange—in some ways like the itineracy of the theatrical performer, but in others, like the prospecting ventures of gold miners in the nineteenth century. From the United States, Canada, Germany, Britain, New Zealand, and other parts of Australia, they came to Canberra, to the ancestral home of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples, bearing stories of performance which had also traversed the continents of Africa and Asia.