Dorita Hannah – författare

Perform Design Act is a groundbreaking reflection on two decades of Performance Design as a transformative interdisciplinary field, challenging conventional approaches to creative practice and event-making.

This illuminating collection examines the evolution and impact of Performance Design since its establishment as a university subject twenty years ago. The authors, pioneers in this interdisciplinary domain, present provocative insights gained through extensive collaboration with thinkers, artists, and institutions across music, theatre, dance, architecture, and design. Employing critical analysis and innovative expressions, the book explores how Performance Design has developed its theoretical foundations while emerging as a significant art form in its own right. Readers will discover how this field has reshaped approaches to event creation, spatial relationships, and worldbuilding through its unique integration of diverse creative disciplines.

This book will appeal to artists, researchers, educators, and students in spatial, visual, and performing arts programs, as well as those engaged with social and cultural humanities who seek to understand how creative practices intersect with broader societal contexts.

As the symbolists, constructivists and surrealists of the historical avant-garde began to abandon traditional theatre spaces and embrace the more contingent locations of the theatrical and political ‘event’, the built environment of a performance became not only part of the event, but an event in and of itself.

Event-Space radically re-evaluates the avant garde’s championing of nonrepresentational spaces, drawing on the specific fields of performance studies and architectural studies to establish a theory of ‘performative architecture’.

‘Event’ was of immense significance to modernism’s revolutionary agenda, resisting realism and naturalism – and, simultaneously, the monumentality of architecture itself. Event-Space analyzes a number of spatiotemporal models central to that revolution, both illuminating the history of avant-garde performance and inspiring contemporary approaches to performance space.