Opening Acts offers new, rigorous ways to analyze communication and culture through performance. It offers cutting edge readings of everyday life, space, history, and intersections of all three, using a critical performance-based approach. Key features: - familiarizes readers with the core elements and commitments of performance-based analysis; - links performance-based analysis to theoretical and analytical perspectives in communication and cultural studies; - provides engaging examples of how to use performance as a critical tool to open up communication and culture; - combines the best features of two classroom formats. Like a reader, it offers a menu of diverse approaches to performance-based analysis. Like a monograph, these approaches are organized into a coherent conceptual and pedagogical frame; - explicitly links developments in performance theory and methodology to current theories and methodologies in communication and cultural studies; - a topical organization mirrors those theoretical and methodological concerns most likely to engage students and scholars: how to analyze practices of everyday life, history, space, and intersections of all three.