Tracing the essay in contemporary performing arts

Tracing how the essay appears in the field of performing arts and building on the legacy of the literary essay and its cinematic offspring, this article constructs a modest framework to observe how the essay appears in contemporary performances. What are the interfaces between the essay in performing arts and its literary and cinematic predecessors? Rather than developing a theory of ‘essay theatre’ as such, this article traces and detects how the strategies of the essay are adopted