Singular Plural Ways of Staging Together: Perspectives on Contemporary Dance, Art Performance and Visual Art (Critical Dance Studies)

Focusing on staging processes in contemporary dance and art performance creates new opportunities to study creative participation and co-authorship. To gain these new insights, Iris Julian analyses experimental projects initiated by two groups and a single choreographer: Collect-if by Collect-if, Deufert + Plischke and Xavier Le Roy. By exploring nuances of staging work, the concept of singular plural became the analytical guideline and resulted into three research perspectives: theatre studies, sociology and ontological reading (Jean-Luc Nancy, Michaela Ott, Gerald Raunig). This approach makes it possible to look beyond the importance that is often credited to single authorship in the arts.
With a foreword by Prof. Dr. Gerald Siegmund.

Iris Julian (formerly Gütler), born in 1975, is a cultural scientist who holds a doctorate in philosophy at the Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien and was a member of the research group ""Mediale Teilhabe"" located at Universität Konstanz, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, Zürcher Hochschule der Künste and the Universität Hamburg. Her research scrutinises collaborative working processes in dance and performance.

Gerald Siegmund is Professor of Applied Theatre Studies at the Justus-Liebig University in Giessen, Germany. He studied Theatre, English and French literature at Goethe-University in Frankfurt am Main. From 2005 to 2008 he was assistant professor at the Institute of Theatre Studies in Berne, Switzerland. Among his research interests are theatre and memory, aesthetics, dance, performance and theatre since the beginning of the 20th century. He was head of the DFG-research group »Theatre as Dispositif« where he researched the theatrical dispositifs in Germany since the 1960s. Between 2012 and 2016 Gerald Siegmund was president of the German Association for Theatre Studies (GTW). His most recent publications are »Jérôme Bel. Dance, Theatre, and the Subject« (Palgrave Macmillan 2017) and together with Rebekah Kowal und Randy Martin »The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics« (Oxford University Press 2017).