Performing (for) Survival: Theatre, Crisis, Extremity - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1137454261 ISBN 13: 9781137454263

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016

Synopsis

This volume gathers contributions from a range of international scholars and geopolitical contexts to explore why people organise themselves into performance communities in sites of crisis and how performance – social and aesthetic, sanctioned and underground – is employed as a mechanism for survival. The chapters treat a wide range of what can be considered 'survival', ranging from sheer physical survival, to the survival of a social group with its own unique culture and values, to the survival of the very possibility of agency and dissent. Performance as a form of political resistance and protest plays a large part in many of the essays, but performance does more than that: it enables societies in crisis to continue to define themselves. By maintaining identities that are based on their own chosen affiliations and not defined solely in opposition to their oppressors, individuals and groups prepare themselves for a post-crisis future by keeping alive their own notions of who they are and who they hope to be.

About this title

About the Author:

Patrick Duggan is Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Surrey, UK. His publications include: Trauma-Tragedy: Symptoms of Contemporary Performance (2012); On Trauma, a special issue of the international journal Performance Research (2011); and Reverberations Across Small-Scale British Theatre: Politics, Aesthetics and Forms (2013).

Lisa Peschel is Lecturer in Theatre at the University of York, UK. Her publications include Performing Captivity, Performing Escape: Cabarets and Plays from the Terezín/Theresienstadt Ghetto (2014). She is a co-investigator on the £1.8 million AHRC-funded project Performing the Jewish Archive.

Review:

“Patrick Duggan and Lisa Peschel’s Performing (for) Survival is an important contribution to the study of performance as a mechanism for survival. Its uniqueness lies in its choice to expose the internal workings of communities and politically-organised resistance movements in times of extreme crisis.” (Effie Samara, The Kelvingrove Review, Issue 16, June, 2017) 

About this edition

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1137454261
• ISBN 13: 9781137454263
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 262
• Editor: Duggan Patrick, Peschel Lisa