Thinking Through Theatre – serie

Fluid stages, morphing theatre spaces, ambulant spectators, and occasionally disappearing performers: these are some of the key ingredients of nomadic theatre. They are also theatre’s response to life in the 21st century, which is increasingly marked by the mobility of people, information, technologies and services. While examining how contemporary theatre exposes and queries this mobile turn in society, Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink introduces the concept of nomadic theatre as a vital tool for analyzing how movement and mobility affect and implicate the theatre, how this makes way for local operations and lived spaces, and how physical movements are stepping stones for theorizing mobility at large.This book focuses on ambulatory performances and performative installations, asking how they stage movement and in turn mobilize the stage. By analyzing the work of leading European artists such as Rimini Protokoll, Dries Verhoeven, Ontroerend Goed, and Signa, Nomadic Theatre demonstrates that mobile performances radically rethink the conditions of the stage and alter our understanding of spectatorship. Nomadic Theatre instigates connections across disciplinary fields and feeds dramaturgical analysis with insights derived from media theory, urban philosophy, cartography, architecture, and game studies. It illustrates how theatre, as a material form of thought, creatively and critically engages with mobile existence both on the stage and in society.

Fluid stages, morphing theatre spaces, ambulant spectators, and occasionally disappearing performers: these are some of the key ingredients of nomadic theatre. They are also theatre’s response to life in the 21st century, which is increasingly marked by the mobility of people, information, technologies and services. While examining how contemporary theatre exposes and queries this mobile turn in society, Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink introduces the concept of nomadic theatre as a vital tool for analyzing how movement and mobility affect and implicate the theatre, how this makes way for local operations and lived spaces, and how physical movements are stepping stones for theorizing mobility at large.Now available in paperback, this book focuses on ambulatory performances and performative installations, asking how they stage movement and in turn mobilize the stage. By analyzing the work of leading European artists such as Rimini Protokoll, Dries Verhoeven, Ontroerend Goed, and Signa, Nomadic Theatre demonstrates that mobile performances radically rethink the conditions of the stage and alter our understanding of spectatorship. Nomadic Theatre instigates connections across disciplinary fields and feeds dramaturgical analysis with insights derived from media theory, urban philosophy, cartography, architecture, and game studies. It illustrates how theatre, as a material form of thought, creatively and critically engages with mobile existence both on the stage and in society.

Published Open Access, Nonconforming Criticism examines forms of thinking at the borderlands of performance that defy, dispute and resist the category of criticism. Against the backdrop of forms of governance and regulation of thought under late liberalism, this book looks to those who refuse to reproduce colonial logics in criticism by investing in unruly experiments in thinking from, and through, performance. Focusing on the period between the early noughties and early twenty-twenties, the book analyses critical practices such as live writing, artist-led publications, zines, gatherings and experiments with video, sound and publishing from cultural workers and thinkers migrating across borders, knowledges and contexts. These practices are often peripheralized from established forms of criticism, yet they shape criticality as a form of political imagination.Unpacking the logics that shape professionalised criticism, and in dialogue with decolonial, abolitionist and feminist theorisations of politics and knowledge, the book focuses on nonconforming criticism as a practice of unlearning. Structured into three parts, the book constitutes a partial lexicon of Borders, Experiments and Practices. It moves through forms of thinking-in-public that reconfigure relations of sensing and meaning between criticism, performance and political life, against the imperial and separatist logics of criticism and its entanglements.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

Over the course of Edit Kaldor’s Inventory of Powerlessness, developed and performed in four European cities (Amsterdam, Berlin, Poznan, Prague) between 2013-16, a range of situations, states and feelings – from quotidian frustrations to extremes of affliction, disadvantage and oppression – were brought into the collective setting of the theatre as spoken testimony. Meanwhile, a cumulative and archivable database or ‘inventory’ of powerlessness and its contemporary intersections was projected on stage, generated live by the participants at each performance. Thus, individual accounts of powerlessness were placed in relation to others, as acts of living knowledge and as claim upon the shared articulation that theatrical working together can foster.This book, departing from but not confined to the example of Inventory, explores contemporary ways of making and performing that bring marginalised knowledges into appearance and action. The book is not only for students of theatre, performance and art, but for anyone looking to develop ways of processing their experiences of affliction, injustice and violence in a collective setting. The book begins with an in-depth account of the Inventory of Powerlessness theatre project. Analysis of its production processes and dramaturgical strategies is set alongside the voices of several of the participants as well as other collaborators and people associated with the project, focusing on the ‘acts of knowledge’ that are performed as connections are made and shared – in the contingency of live performance – between diverse life-affecting experiences. A section of commissioned essays explores the knowledge-generating potential of the contemporary stage through the same optic of powerlessness and marginalised experience worked through an international range of examples.

Over the course of Edit Kaldor’s Inventory of Powerlessness, developed and performed in four European cities (Amsterdam, Berlin, Poznan, Prague) between 2013-16, a range of situations, states and feelings – from quotidian frustrations to extremes of affliction, disadvantage and oppression – were brought into the collective setting of the theatre as spoken testimony. Meanwhile, a cumulative and archivable database or ‘inventory’ of powerlessness and its contemporary intersections was projected on stage, generated live by the participants at each performance. Thus, individual accounts of powerlessness were placed in relation to others, as acts of living knowledge and as claim upon the shared articulation that theatrical working together can foster.This book, departing from but not confined to the example of Inventory, explores contemporary ways of making and performing that bring marginalised knowledges into appearance and action. The book is not only for students of theatre, performance and art, but for anyone looking to develop ways of processing their experiences of affliction, injustice and violence in a collective setting. The book begins with an in-depth account of the Inventory of Powerlessness theatre project. Analysis of its production processes and dramaturgical strategies is set alongside the voices of several of the participants as well as other collaborators and people associated with the project, focusing on the ‘acts of knowledge’ that are performed as connections are made and shared – in the contingency of live performance – between diverse life-affecting experiences. A section of commissioned essays explores the knowledge-generating potential of the contemporary stage through the same optic of powerlessness and marginalised experience worked through an international range of examples.

Available in English for the first time, The Bodies of Others investigates, through a series of close readings of several theatrical and film productions in Europe and South America, the relationship between “representation” (including theatrical representation) and ethics (defined as an ongoing relational negotiation, as opposed to a set of universal moral laws).The main concepts are exposed through a comparative analysis of historical processes, political actions and artistic works from different periods. Thus, the dialogue between the film La carrose d'or by Jean Renoir (1952) and Rosa Cuchillo by Yuyachkani (2006) serves to address the problem of the multiple meanings of representation. The dialogue between the play El Señor Galíndez by Eduardo Pavlovsky (1973), the performance The Conquest of America by Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis (1989) and the novel 2666 (2004) by Roberto Bolaño allows the concept of an ‘ethic of the body’ to be addressed. Other key concepts such as identity, care, cruelty, violence, memory and testimony are considered through investigation of work such as Angelica Liddel’s theatre pieces, Rabih Mroué and Lina Majdalanie’s performances, Albertina Carri, Basilio Martín Patino and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s films, and Mapa Teatro’s trans-disciplinary creations.

Available in English for the first time, The Bodies of Others investigates, through a series of close readings of several theatrical and film productions in Europe and South America, the relationship between “representation” (including theatrical representation) and ethics (defined as an ongoing relational negotiation, as opposed to a set of universal moral laws).The main concepts are exposed through a comparative analysis of historical processes, political actions and artistic works from different periods. Thus, the dialogue between the film La carrose d'or by Jean Renoir (1952) and Rosa Cuchillo by Yuyachkani (2006) serves to address the problem of the multiple meanings of representation. The dialogue between the play El Señor Galíndez by Eduardo Pavlovsky (1973), the performance The Conquest of America by Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis (1989) and the novel 2666 (2004) by Roberto Bolaño allows the concept of an ‘ethic of the body’ to be addressed. Other key concepts such as identity, care, cruelty, violence, memory and testimony are considered through investigation of work such as Angelica Liddel’s theatre pieces, Rabih Mroué and Lina Majdalanie’s performances, Albertina Carri, Basilio Martín Patino and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s films, and Mapa Teatro’s trans-disciplinary creations.

Through a series of reflections from internationally renowned performance-makers and contextualising essays from leading theatre and performance scholars, this is the first book to map the influence of Roland Barthes on performance. The contributions are framed through Barthes’s notion of The Neutral – the suspension of binary choice that offers a welcome antidote to the political deadlock of our present moment. They cover the breadth of Barthes’s work from Mythologies (1957) to ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967), A Lover’s Discourse (1977), Camera Lucida (1980), to the more recently available lecture courses at the Collège de France. Together, they capture and rethink a range of Barthes’s preoccupations, from his early writing on myths and meaning to personal reflections on love, loss and desire, and interrogate the intersections between Barthes’s work and contemporary theatre and performance. This book invites readers to approach Barthes’s writing from a breadth of creative-critical perspectives, to become more aware of the importance of his late thought for thinking through a range of dramaturgical forms, and to become more familiar with the work of internationally significant performance practitioners.

Through a series of reflections from internationally renowned performance-makers and contextualising essays from leading theatre and performance scholars, this is the first book to map the influence of Roland Barthes on performance. The contributions are framed through Barthes’s notion of The Neutral – the suspension of binary choice that offers a welcome antidote to the political deadlock of our present moment. They cover the breadth of Barthes’s work from Mythologies (1957) to ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967), A Lover’s Discourse (1977), Camera Lucida (1980), to the more recently available lecture courses at the Collège de France. Together, they capture and rethink a range of Barthes’s preoccupations, from his early writing on myths and meaning to personal reflections on love, loss and desire, and interrogate the intersections between Barthes’s work and contemporary theatre and performance. This book invites readers to approach Barthes’s writing from a breadth of creative-critical perspectives, to become more aware of the importance of his late thought for thinking through a range of dramaturgical forms, and to become more familiar with the work of internationally significant performance practitioners.

This book analyses how artists work through and reflect upon processes that together form a posthumanist condition. It critically revises the figure of the "cyborg", central to posthumanist thinking and performance, and proposes an alternative figure through which to think about and create with technology: the "apparatus". It draws on the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, Donna Haraway and other contemporary thinkers of ecology and technology; recent philosophical theories, such as speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, dark ecology and new materialism; as well as the work of leading contemporary performance makers, such as Kris Verdonck, Mette Ingvartsen, Guemhyung Jeong, Romeo Castellucci and Okada Toshiki. Through doing so, the book captures an important shift away from anthropocentrism and the consequences for the dramaturgies that subsequently unfold.

On the eve of a global pandemic, Kathleen Gough, a theatre professor, becomes immersed in the lives of five artist-mystics, each of whom is a pioneer in her field: Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), the first known musical composer; Eleanora Duse (1858-1924), the first modern actor in the Western world; Simone Weil (1909-1943), philosopher, activist, and mystic, whom Albert Camus called “the only great spirit of our time”; Marina Abramovic (b. 1946), “the grandmother of performance art”; and Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), the first known (and belatedly acknowledged) abstract painter. Each time Gough crosses a threshold into their world, she is compelled to attend courses, seminars and workshops that are simultaneously about dying and healing.Curious to learn more about the relationships between art practice, dying, and healing, Gough imagines the five artists as wisdom teachers in a mystery school. In a series of eight lectures, she turns to performance theory to provide a framework for engaging with the unknown world. In Theatre and the Threshold of Death, Gough makes a persuasive argument for the world-making power of relational thinking in our increasingly polarized age.

On the eve of a global pandemic, Kathleen Gough, a theatre professor, becomes immersed in the lives of five artist-mystics, each of whom is a pioneer in her field: Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), the first known musical composer; Eleanora Duse (1858-1924), the first modern actor in the Western world; Simone Weil (1909-1943), philosopher, activist, and mystic, whom Albert Camus called “the only great spirit of our time”; Marina Abramovic (b. 1946), “the grandmother of performance art”; and Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), the first known (and belatedly acknowledged) abstract painter. Each time Gough crosses a threshold into their world, she is compelled to attend courses, seminars and workshops that are simultaneously about dying and healing.Curious to learn more about the relationships between art practice, dying, and healing, Gough imagines the five artists as wisdom teachers in a mystery school. In a series of eight lectures, she turns to performance theory to provide a framework for engaging with the unknown world. In Theatre and the Threshold of Death, Gough makes a persuasive argument for the world-making power of relational thinking in our increasingly polarized age.

What is the relation between performance and pedagogy? What does the teaching of performance offer to other kinds of knowledge encounters and exchanges in our pluriversal world?These questions are urgent in the light of profound changes in higher education and the place performance has in that setting and its peripheries. This open access book spanning diverse educational and research contexts takes up the task of engaging performance pedagogy in the precarities of the now, by tending anew to the relation between learning, doing, and thinking. The collection unfolds as a collaborative inquiry into performance pedagogy encompassing both the study of aesthetic events called ‘performances’, and an expanded notion of performance as pedagogy. In this dual approach, to teach and learn performance is to teach and learn how to do things with our words and actions, and also to teach and learn what things do to others and to the world. Performance pedagogy opens performance to the world, and invites the world to performance. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY NC-ND-4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

Thinking Through Theatre and Performance presents a bold and innovative approach to the study of theatre and performance. Instead of topics, genres, histories or theories, the book starts with the questions that theatre and performance are uniquely capable of asking: How does theatre function as a place for seeing and hearing? How do not only bodies and voices but also objects and media perform? How do memories, emotions and ideas continue to do their work when the performance is over? And how can theatre and performance intervene in social, political and environmental structures and frameworks?Written by leading international scholars, each chapter of this volume is built around a key performance example, and detailed discussions introduce the methodologies and theories that help us understand how these performances are practices of enquiry into the world. Thinking through Theatre and Performance is essential for those involved in making, enjoying, critiquing and studying theatre, and will appeal to anyone who is interested in the questions that theatre and performance ask of themselves and of us.