Making Interdisciplinary Performance: Processes and Practices in Collaboration

This collection offers an examination of and guide to interdisciplinary collaboration through the working practices of performance makers, exploring its pleasures, problems and pitfalls. The book explores contemporary working practices at the interfaces between performance and other disciplines. Focusing on collaborations between theatre makers and these ‘others’, it investigates the processes and conditions involved in the interdisciplinary. Chapters cover areas such as psychology, the environment, physical cultures, the military, healthcare, festivals and communities, architecture, pedagogy and fine dining. At a time when interdisciplinary practice is actively encouraged in the academy, this book asks what it means in practical terms to engage with artists and scholars outside of our home territories. Where does the interdisciplinary exist and what does it rely on? How do theatre makers approach and sustain these projects? What is the nature of the journey? Offering examples of unusual collaborations and arranged through 3 key areas of performance-making, this book acknowledges the difficulties of such work and that the aims of interdisciplinarity can fail, while examining how new methods and understandings can shift notions of knowledge.

Gianna Bouchard is Professor of Contemporary Performance at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her interdisciplinary research explores the interface between medicine and performance. She is the author of Performing Specimens: Biomedical Display in Contemporary Performance (Methuen Drama, 2020).

Adam Ledger is Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Birmingham, UK. He has published widely on performance practices, including The Director and Directing: Craft, Process and Aesthetic in Contemporary Theatre and on Eugenio Barba for the Great European Stage Directors series (Methuen Drama, 2018).