Thinking Through Theatre and Performance

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.

Maaike Bleeker is a Professor of Theatre Studies at Utrecht University, Netherlands. She has also worked as a dramaturge and costume designer. Her publications include Visuality in the Theatre (2008) and several (co)edited volumes, including Anatomy Live. Performance and the Operating Theatre (2008); Performance & Phenomenology (2015); and Transmission in Motion. The Technologizing of Dance (2016).

Adrian Kear is Director of Programme Development, Performance Arts at the University of the Arts London, UK. His books include: Theatre and Event: Staging the European Century (2013); and the co-edited volumes International Politics and Performance: Critical Aesthetics and Creative Practice (with Jenny Edkins, 2013); On Appearance (with Richard Gough, 2008); and Psychoanalysis and Performance (with Patrick Campbell, 2001).

Joe Kelleher is Professor of Theatre and Performance at Roehampton University, London, UK. His books include: The Illuminated Theatre: Studies on the Suffering of Images (2015); Theatre & Politics (2009); The Theatre of Societas Raffaello Sanzio (co-authored with Claudia and Romeo Castellucci, Chiara Guidi and Nicholas Ridout, 2007); and Contemporary Theatres in Europe: A Critical Companion (co-edited with Nicholas Ridout, 2006).

Heike Roms is Professor in Theatre and Performance at the University of Exeter, UK. Her books include: Silent Explosion (2015) and, co-edited with Jon McKenzie and C.J.W.-L. Wee, Contesting Performance – Global Sites of Research (2010). Her research into the history and historiography of early performance art won the David Bradby TaPRA Award for Outstanding Research in 2011.