Postdramatic theatre is an essential category of performance that challenges classical elements of drama, including the centrality of plot and character. Tracking key developments in contemporary European and North American performance, this collection redirects ongoing debates about postdramatic theatre, turning attention to the overlooked issue on which they hinge: form.
Contributors draw on literary studies, film studies and critical theory to reimagine the formal aspects of theatre, such as space, media and text. The volume expands how scholars think of theatrical form, insisting that formalist analysis can be useful for studying the ways theatre is produced and consumed, and how theatre makers engage with other forms like dance and visual art. Chapters focus on a range of interdisciplinary artists including Tadeusz Kantor, Ann Liv Young and Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch, as well as theatre's enmeshment within institutional formations like funding agencies, festivals, real estate and healthcare.
A timely investigation of the aesthetic structures and material conditions of contemporary performance, this collection refines what we mean, and what we don't, when we speak of postdramatic theatre.
Michael Shane Boyle works as a Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at Queen Mary University of London, UK.
Matt Cornish is Assistant Professor of Theater History at Ohio University.
Brandon Woolf is a theatre artist and a visiting assistant professor of theatre and drama at New York University, USA.
Enoch Brater is the Kenneth T. Rowe Collegiate Professor of Dramatic Literature, Professor of English and Theater at the University of Michigan and the series editor of Methuen Drama's Miller scholarly editions. He has written extensively on the work of Samuel Beckett and Arthur Miller.
Enoch Brater is the Kenneth T. Rowe Collegiate Professor of Dramatic Literature, Professor of English and Theater at the University of Michigan. He is series editor of Methuen Drama's Arthur Miller scholarly editions, and with Mark Taylor-Batty of Methuen Drama's Engage series. He has written extensively on the work of Samuel Beckett and Arthur Miller.
Mark Taylor-Batty is Associate Professor of Theatre Studies and Deputy Head of School in the School of English at the University of Leeds, UK. His previous publications include
The Theatre of Harold Pinter (Bloomsbury, 2014),
About Pinter: The Playwright and the Work (Faber and Faber, 2005),
Roger Blin: Collaborations and Methodologies (Peter Lang, 2007) and, he co-authored with his wife, Juliette Taylor-Batty,
Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (Continuum, 2009).
