Abstract/Summary

This article puts into dialogue the field of theatre and the European and North American geographic tradition of ‘commodity trailing’, including its Marxist underpinning. In recent years, a number of performances have emerged that engage with the process and provenance of commodities. Such performances often present their makers on the trail of commodity origins, consumer experiences, and historic routes of trade. This article introduces a framework in which performances that dramaturgically engage with commodities and their trails can be identified and analysed. It commences with an overview of the geographic principles of commodity trailing, and how this approach might be deployed in theatre scholarship. It applies the framework of commodity trailing to two case studies: Sh!t Theatre’s DollyWould (2017) and Selina Thompson Production’s salt. (2017). In analysing these performances against the principles of commodity trailing, this article supports an enhanced understanding of how dramaturgies attend to commodities and, in so doing, contribute to emergent discourses on performance and political economy. Keywords: trail; commodity chain analysis; performance journeysdefetishization; decolonization