Adele Senior – författare

On a global platform we are witnessing the increased visibility of the people we call children and teenagers as political activists.Meanwhile, across the contemporary performance landscape, children are participating as performers and collaborators in ways that resonate with this figure of the child activist. Beyond Innocence: Children in Performance proposes that performance has the ability to offer alternatives to hegemonic perceptions of the child as innocent, in need of protection, and apolitical. Through an in-depth analysis of selected performances shown in the UK within the past decade, alongside newly gathered documentation on children’s participation in professional performance in their own words, this book considers how performance might offer more capacious representations of and encounters with children beyond the nostalgic and protective adult gaze elicited within mainstream contexts. Motivated by recent collaborations with children on stage that reimagine the figure of the child, the book offers a new approach to both reading age in performance and also doing research with children rather than on or about them. By redressing the current imbalance between the way that we read children and adults’ bodies in performance and taking seriously children’s cultures and experiences, Beyond Innocence asks what strategies contemporary performance has to offer both children and adults in order to foster shared spaces for social and political change. As such, the book develops an approach to analysing performance that not only recognises children as makers of meaning but also as historically, politically, and culturally situated subjects and bodies with lived experiences that far exceed the familiar narratives of innocence and inexperience that children often have to bear.

The Routledge Companion to Performance and Science investigates and illuminates the growing international interest in the intersections and interactions between theatre, drama, performance and the sciences.These disciplines are explored through an extensive range of essays from artists, practitioners, researchers and scholars, many of whom are working in interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary or multidisciplinary contexts. With a largely contemporary focus underpinned by an introductory section that sets out a history of antecedent intersections, the volume offers a diverse range of perspectives on science, scientific methods, and scientific knowledge in dialogue with performance scholarship and practice. Our understanding of ‘practice’ is capacious, from different performance forms to science communication and interpretation, to scientific approaches to performance, to ways of generating and disseminating scientific knowledge. Within this vast scene, a number of key questions and themes emerge: How can scientific knowledge be interrogated by performance practices? How can performance explore the human implications of scientific development? How can scientific practices be understood through performance theories? How are scientists or scientific practices, and ideas represented in performance?This is a key resource for scholars and upper-level students of performing arts, science communication, medical and health humanities, science and technology studies, and interdisciplinary arts/humanities/sciences projects.