The Twenty-First Century Performance Reader
- Submitting institution
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Leeds Beckett University
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 39
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
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10.4324/9780429283956
- Publisher
- Routledge
- ISBN
- 9780429283956
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2019
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This edited book is the follow-on text from The Twentieth-Century Performance Reader (Routledge, 2013) which Brayshaw and Witts also co-edited. Brayshaw curated the ‘In Their Own Words’ introductory chapter and co- wrote the introduction, as well as curating contributions from 73 international practitioners, companies and collectives (dance, theatre, music, live/performance art, activism).
The Reader addresses the following research questions: How might the practice of contemporary performance makers across the world at the beginning of this century be viewed as a single performance culture? What are the recurring themes, insights, working-practices, and contexts that contribute to the development of said culture? What are the common languages/vocabularies/rhetorics of those artists making and writing about their practice?
Dissemination of the Reader was supported by a live, durational performance: In Their Own Words, which offered a different ‘practice’ of reading whereby the editors read, played, interviewed, debated, and engaged in dialogue/conversation with each other, some of the artists represented in the book and audience members.
The performance further elucidated key themes in the Reader such as: In writing about their practice, how do artists engage in dialogic speech to represent a multiplicity of voices/variety of perspectives on their own work? How might a durational performance practice of reading further extend dialogic speech and contribute to shared understandings of a contemporary performance culture?
The Reader produced increased knowledge and insights of common and unique working practices and performance languages of performance artists/makers at the beginning of the 21st Century. The innovative durational performance practice further interrogated the languages of writing and reading. Together they posit dialogism as the central artistic strategy of writing, making, performing and reading in contemporary performance practice.
Performances included the Edinburgh Festival (21-24 August, 2019, Summerhall),
Esmae, Porto (12 January, 2020), and the ACT Festival, Bilbao (November 2020).
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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