Rethinking Roland Barthes Through Performance: A Desire for Neutral Dramaturgy

Through a series of reflections from internationally renowned performance-makers and contextualising essays from leading theatre and performance scholars, this is the first book to map the influence of Roland Barthes on performance. The contributions are framed through Barthes’s notion of The Neutral – the suspension of binary choice that offers a welcome antidote to the political deadlock of our present moment. They cover the breadth of Barthes’s work from Mythologies (1957) to ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967), A Lover’s Discourse (1977), Camera Lucida (1980), to the more recently available lecture courses at the Collège de France. Together, they capture and rethink a range of Barthes’s preoccupations, from his early writing on myths and meaning to personal reflections on love, loss and desire, and interrogate the intersections between Barthes’s work and contemporary theatre and performance. This book invites readers to approach Barthes’s writing from a breadth of creative-critical perspectives, to become more aware of the importance of his late thought for thinking through a range of dramaturgical forms, and to become more familiar with the work of internationally significant performance practitioners.

Harry Wilson is Lecturer in Digital Theatre and Performance-Making in the Theatre Department and co-programme director of the MA Immersive Arts at the University of Bristol, UK. He is co-editor of Rethinking Roland Barthes Through Performance (Methuen Drama, 2023). His research focuses on interdisciplinary explorations of live art and performance, photography, documentation, digital art and new media through critical theory and artistic research.

Maaike Bleeker is a Professor and the Chair of Theatre Studies at Utrecht University, Netherlands. She is President of Performance Studies international, a Member of the International Advisory Board of Maska (Ljubljana) and of Inflexions: A Journal of Research-Creation (Montreal). Her publications include: Visuality in the Theatre: The Locus of Looking (2008); Anatomy Live: Performance and the Operating Theatre (2008); BodyCheck: Relocating the Body in Contemporary Performing Arts (with Stephen DeBelder, et al).

Will Daddario is a teacher, scholar, grief worker and itinerant philosopher who currently resides
in Asheville, NC. He co-edits the Performance Philosophy book series and online journal.

Professor Adrian Kear is Programme Development Director, Performance Arts, at Wimbledon College of Arts, University of the Arts London, UK. His books include: Theatre and Event: Staging the European Century (2013); International Politics and Performance: Critical Aesthetics and Creative Practice (with Jenny Edkins) (2013); On Appearance (with Richard Gough) (2008); Psychoanalysis and Performance (with Patrick Campbell)(2001).

Joe Kelleher is Emeritus Professor of Theatre and Performance at Roehampton University, UK.