Description
The relationship between text and performance has often been seen as pivotal to the notional division between theatre and live art. If theatre is drama is literature, performance is performer is liveness. In the academy, with UK theatre departments emerging historically from literature departments, their propulsion away from over-reliance on text has led logically enough to a preoccupation with the non-text-based. But are any of these distinctions as neat as is often assumed? Non-text-based performance is often heavily reliant on text; while literary drama is frequently more concerned with the live and processual than many would allow. Performing Literatures takes a fresh look at the academic and professional landscape, attempting to reconsider the text/performance dichotomy from a variety of critical perspectives.
Editorial: Performing Literatures
Stephen Bottoms
pp. 1 – 5
Rhetoric in Ruins: Performing literature and performance studies
Shannon Jackson
pp. 6 – 16
When We Talk of Horses: Or, what do we see when we see a play?
Dan Rebellato
pp. 17 – 28
The Stay of Illusion
Andrew Quick
pp. 29 – 36
Is There a Text in This Performance?
Carl Lavery
pp. 37 – 45
The Resistant Text in Postdramatic Theatre: Performing Elfriede Jelinek’s Sprachflächen
Karen Jürs-Munby
pp. 46 – 56
‘And Their Stories Fell Apart Even as I Was Telling Them’ : Poststructuralist performance and the no-longer-dramatic playtext
Liz Tomlin
pp. 57 – 64
Authorizing the Audience: The conceptual drama of Tim Crouch
Stephen Bottoms
pp. 65 – 76
The Ibsen Hut [artists’ pages]
a Smith
pp. 77 – 79
The Strain of the Ordinary: Consideration of one aspect of American writing for the theatre
Matthew Goulish
pp. 80 – 87
Virtuous Errors and the Fortune of Mistakes: A personal account of making and performing text with Forced Entertainment
Terry O’Connor
pp. 88 – 94
Radicalism and the Theatre in Genealogies of Live Art
Beth Hoffmann
pp. 95 – 105
Getting the ‘Now’ into the Written Text (and Vice Versa?): Developing dramaturgies of process
Cathy Turner
pp. 106 – 114
‘Bringing the Story to Life’: Presenting history as text in The World in Pictures
Cormac Power
pp. 115 – 122
The Obtuse Angle: On gentle gradients between literature and performance
Alan Read
pp. 123 – 137
New York Values Penny Arcade and Introduction by Stephen Bottoms
Stephen Bottoms, Penny Arcade
pp. 138 – 156
Notes on Contributors
pp. 157 – 158
