Performance and Participation Practices, Audiences, Politics

by Harpin, Anna; Nicholson, Helen

• ISBN13: 9781137393173
• ISBN10: 1137393173
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2016-10-07
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

The twenty-first century is redefining the political relationship between performance and participation, with profound and sometimes contradictory consequences for theatre-makers and audiences. This edited collection gathers together leading voices in theatre and performance studies to debate the politics of participation across a range of performative forms including community theatre, live art, applied theatre, one-to-one performance and marathon running and to find points of connection between them.
Arranged in three sections, 'Recognising Participation', 'Labours of Participation', and 'Authoring Participation', the book raises productive questions about how and why audiences are encouraged to participate in creating the artistic work. This blurs the boundaries between maker and spectator, promising modes of engagement that are at once political, social and aesthetic.

Author Biography

Anna Harpin is Associate Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Warwick, UK, and is also a theatre maker with her company Idiot Child.

Helen Nicholson is Professor of Theatre and Performance at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK, where she specialises in applied and participatory theatre and contemporary performance.

Table of Contents

1. Performance and Participation; Anna Harpin and Helen Nicholson
PART I: RECOGNISING PARTICIPATION

2. The Cultivation of Entangled Listening: An Ensemble of More-than-Human Participants; Deirdre Heddon
3. Renegotiating Immersive Participation in Analogue's Re-enactments; Liam Jarvis

4. Mute Stages: Performing Silent Lives; Anna Harpin

5. Participation, Recognition and Political Space; Colette Conroy

PART II: LABOURS OF PARTICIPATION

6. Affective Labours of Cultural Participation; Helen Nicholson

7. Sometimes the Quieter the Revolution, the Louder it is Heard: Crafting, Protest and Gender; Dawn Fowler

8. 'Tell no-one': Secret Cinema and the Paradox of Secrecy; Adam Alston
PART III: AUTHORING PARTICIPATION
9. The Agency of Environment: Participation Citizenship and Multi-Story Water; Stephen Bottoms
10. One Step Forward, One Step Back: Resisting the Forensic Turn; James Frieze

11. Authority, Authorisation and Authorship: Participation in Community Plays in Belfast; Alison Jeffers
Bibliography
Index