Discusses gender, race, age and body type as a criteria for playing a character or dancing role. American theatre and dance have two kinds of performing arts in regard to gender, race, age and body type. In mainstream theatres and dance companies a nominal open casting policy is enunciated, but practice actually conforms to prevailing social values. The second kind of casting and company-making is particularist. Groups are formed according to gender or race of social class or disability or ideology or age. Casting against gender, race, body type and age has a history in European and American theatre and dance. The American theatre reserves the majority of its best roles for white males, not because these are the best performers available but because the characters to be presented are white males. As for dance, youthful, slim body types prevail, and most companies are predominantly white. In terms of performance, the naturalistic bias trains spectators to desire a neat fit of who the performer is to what the performer represents. In Western theatre there are no codes or performative behavior distinctly separable from the codes of behavior prevalent in everyday life. Actor training is under the aegis of the Stanislavski system which is based on the construction of a psychology of everyday life. However in Western classical and modern dance there are codes of performative behavior as rigorous as any found in Asia. The nature/nurture or biologically determined/socially constructed debate is a classically irresolvable conflict. Categories of race, gender, body type and age are in fact social categories constructed from the interpretations of biological data, but the biological data themselves are always changing in terms of social constructions and interpretations.