Repetition in Performance: Returns and Invisible Forces - Hardcover

Kartsaki, Eirini

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1137430532 ISBN 13: 9781137430533

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

Synopsis

This book explores repetition in contemporary performance and spectatorship. It offers an impassioned account of the ways in which speech, movement and structures repeat in performances by Pina Bausch, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Lone Twin Theatre, Haranczak/Navarre and Marco Berrettini. It addresses repetition in relation to processes of desire and draws attention to the forces that repetition captures and makes visible. What is it in performances of repetition that persuades us to return to them again and again? How might we unpack their complexities and come to terms with their demands upon us? While considering repetition in relation to the difficult pleasures we derive from the theatre, this book explores ways of accounting for such experiences of theatre in memory and writing.

About this title

About the Author

Eirini Kartsaki is Teaching Fellow in Drama and Performance Studies at Queen Mary University of London, as well as a writer and performance practitioner. Her practice has been presented nationally and internationally, including at Sadler’s Wells, Palais de Tokyo, and Arnolfini. She has published her research in journals Performing Ethos, Choreographic Practices and Performance Research.

Review

“Beautifully written, this book lingers, leans in, and takes its time.  Brimming with deep and precise probing, Kartsaki compels us to think again about what happens in the interval of a minor gesture, repeated. Back and forth, to the side and among media -- painting, performance, installation, dance, writing -- this book charts ricochet and makes a sustained critical and experiential contribution to the scholarly exploration of repetition essential to theatre and performance studies.  For Kartsaki, repetition’s force is the force of desire, and she rides that desire through a rigorously visceral engagement with art, performance, and philosophy. As she says: “This discourse is personal, performative and wants stuff.” Fair enough. It gets the stuff that it wants. And we, as readers, find ourselves wanting more. If you like this book, as I do, read it twice. In her words, this time, “linger, lean in, take your time.” (Professor Rebecca Schneider, Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, Professor of History of Art and Architecture, Brown University)

“Eirini Kartsaki’s book, Repetition in Performance: Returns and Invisible Forces, offers the reader a passionate, critical and intimate excavation of the structure and force of experience revealed by repetition in performance. Whether new to repetition as a structure that produces and perpetuates desire (‘what we really want is to keep wanting’) or returning to remind oneself of the insistent ‘lean in’ that repetition activates, Kartsaki’s book offers the reader an original intervention in this critical area of performance analysis through its engagement with a diverse and relevant range of practices, artists and theories in order to reconsider (again and again) the pleasures of performance, of reading and spectating, and the radical force of time made present through repetition.” (Dr Sara Jane Bailes, Reader in Theatre & Performance Studies (English), University of Sussex)

“Persuasively weaving together practitioner, spectator and writerly strategies and experiences, Kartsaki’s book is as elegant and lucid a guide to performed repetition – and the pleasures of performance more generally – as we could wish for.” (Joe Kelleher, Professor of Theatre and Performance, University of Roehampton, UK)

Edition details

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1137430532
• ISBN 13: 9781137430533
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 181