A collection of 14 essays by international scholars and practitioners from across the disciplines of Philosophy, Literature and Theatre and Performance Studies, addressing the nature of the relationship between philosophy and performance.
Investigates an array of staged situations, from choreographed exhibitions, immaterial museums, theatres of negotiation, and discursive marathons, to street carnivals and subversive public-art projects, and asks how ‘theatre-like’ strategies and techniques can in fact enable ‘reality making’ situations in art, and how, as a consequence, curating itself becomes staged, dramatised, choreographed, and composed.
In this invitation to reflect on the power of performance, Diana Taylor explores many of the ‘performance’ uses and iterations: artistic, economic, sexual, political, and technological performance; the performance of everyday life; and the gendered, sexed, and racialized performance of bodies. Images and texts interact to show how performance is at once a creative act, a means to comprehend power, a method of transmitting memory and identity, and a way of understanding the world.