For as long as humans have written performance, they have written about performance. In this course, we will examine how writers from around the world have theorized the aesthetics, politics, and relevance of live performance, focusing on how these concepts can help us better understand contemporary theater and performance today. We will start with Aristotle’s arguments about the role of tragedy in Greek civic life and will end by asking how new technologies in generative artificial intelligence are changing our understanding of writing and performance today. We will examine contemporary performance, both live and on the screen, and ask how concepts developed by performance theorists, philosophers, and practitioners from the past and the present, both near and far, can help us make sense of why we create live performance today.This course fulfills the theater theory requirement for Theater majors.