Lourdes Orozco is Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the Workshop Theatre, University of Leeds, UK. She co-edited two special issues of Contemporary Theatre Review focussing on Catalan Theatre and Flemish Theatre, and is currently working on an edited collection, Performing Animality: Animals in Performance Practices, with Jennifer Parker-Starbuck.

"Brilliant series...these mini paperbacks each give an insightful, focused overview of a key topic...start collecting now." - Whatsonstage.com "Palgrave Macmillan's excellent new outward-looking, eclectic Theatre & ... series. These short books, written by leading theatre academics, do much to reintroduce some of the brightest names in theatre academia to the general reader. Plus, the matrix of references to bigger books soon builds quite a comprehensive catch-up reading list for those of us who graduated more than a decade ago and are interested in where contemporary thinking is at..." - Guardian Theatre Blog, September 2009 "A thoughtful and very readable introduction to one of the most important topics of the twenty-first century." - Peta Tait, La Trobe University, Australia "This book will enhance the field considerably. The author writes in an accessible and lucid way, opening up frames of thinking and feeling from within and without performance." - Alan Read, Kings College London, UK

• Series Editors' PrefaceIntroduction: A Night in the Theatre1. Theatre and Performance: the 'Odd Fish' within Animal Studies2. Animals in Art, Spectacle and Text: A Brief History3. Animals, Philosophy and Ecology4. Companion Performers and Bio Art: Humans and Animals Share the Stage5. Towards an Ethics of Animals in Performance6. Does the Animal Want to be There?: Agency and Responsibility7. Risks, Accidents and Economics in Animal Performance8. Animals and their Representations in PerformanceFurther ReadingIndex.