Staging Loss: Performance as Commemoration

This book locates and critically theorises an emerging field of twenty-first century theatre practice concerned, either thematically, methodologically, or formally, with acts of commemoration and the commemorative. With notions of memorial, celebration, temporality and remembrance at its heart, and as a timely topic for debate, this book asks how theatre and performance intersects with commemorative acts or rituals in contemporary theatre and performance practice. It considers the (re)performance of history, commemoration as a form of, or performance of, ritual, performance as memorial, performance as eulogy and eulogy as performance. It asks where personal acts of remembrance merge with public or political acts of remembrance, where the boundary between the commemorative and the performative might lie, and how it might be blurred, broken or questioned. It explores how we might remake the past in the present, to consider not just how performance commemorates but how commemoration performs.

Michael Pinchbeck is MA Theatre Programme leader and Principal Lecturer (Professional Practice) in Drama at the University of Lincoln, UK. He completed a PhD at Loughborough University exploring the role of the dramaturg in contemporary performance. As a writer and theatre-maker, he was commissioned by Nottingham Playhouse to write The White Album (2006), The Ashes (2011) and Bolero (2014), which toured Bosnia & Herzegovina and Kosovo supported by the British Council.

Andrew Westerside is Senior Lecturer in Drama & Theatre at the University of Lincoln’s School of Fine and Performing Arts, UK, and Co-Artistic Director of Proto-type Theater. Andrew is a performer, writer, director and academic. He has performed and toured nationally and internationally and directed work including: The Good, the God and the Guillotine (2013), A Machine they’re Secretly Building (2016), Fallen (2016) and The Audit(2018).