Books and Publications

Edited by Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca and Luke Pell
Celebrating more than twenty-five years of the work of Fevered Sleep, the UK-based performance company founded and led by co-artistic directors Sam Butler and David Harradine. The organization creates projects for adults and children that manifest in multiple forms and are as likely to be located in a gallery, a care home or a shopping centre as in a theatre. Nothing that Fevered Sleep does is ever just one thing: what might start out as an installation by day turns to a performance at night – a live event then remembered in another form, like a book. An improvised dance, over many hours, creates a photographic exhibition. A theatre work is re-imagined for screen. The book brings together a range of different voices that draw upon distinct memories, moments and projects to explore core themes that have continued to run through Fevered Sleep’s work over time: On Place, On Young People and Children, On Animals, On Care, On Being Together and On Love and Not Knowing. The result is a constellation of diverse voices, practices and experiences that illuminate the deeply researchful – and deeply felt – nature of the company’s work.
ISBN 978-1-906499-20-4

Edited by Adi Chawin and Richard Gough
In Praise of Sideways is the first comprehensive attempt to present the virtuoso performance practices of the Ruth Kanner Theatre Group. Throughout twenty-five years of innovative work, RKTG – based in Tel Aviv but also performing all over Israel and internationally – has perfected a unique form of storytelling theatre. Their theatre practice, rehearsed in dark times, carries traces of the catastrophic political situation that surrounds it. And yet, it also holds on, against the odds, to hope – a hope that endures in elements of the present that cannot be reduced to sense and meaning and therefore, as gestures in the sense of Kafka and Benjamin, point to a different future. Nikolaus Müller-Schöll, Professor and Chair, Department of Theatre, Film and Media Studies, Goethe-University in Frankfurt/Main, Germany Ruth Kanner explores a wide variety of texts in incredible detail. It is a process of trial and error, where languages, histories and identities are stretched and challenged, resulting in work that speaks to a time of violent conflict. This book illuminates those processes and chronicles their triumphs and tribulations. Misako Ueda, Artistic Director, Theater X (Cai), Tokyo, Japan
ISBN: 978-1-906499-14-3

Edited by Charlene Rajendran and Richard Gough
This book examines how Drama Box negotiates the changing dynamics of space and place to produce art that is responsive to people’s needs and reflective of socio-political issues. Working at the intimate level of community and neighbourhood engagement, this Singapore-based company makes work that is challenging, uncompromising and provocative while being empathetic, supportive and inspiring. Through the application of highly developed and attuned strategies of theatre-making, the company casts a light on difficult and often uncomfortable issues of life in contemporary Singapore. The chapters in this volume focus on key projects since the early 2010s, and how the company’s social and political sensitivities are expanded and sharpened when it responds critically and empathetically to structural and physical changes.
ISBN 978-1-906499-11-2

Edited by Peter Eckersall, Barbara Geilhorn, Andreas Regelsberger and Cody Poulton
Playwright, novelist and theatre director Okada Toshiki is one of the most important voices of the current generation of Japanese contemporary theatre makers. This book explores Okada’s work and its importance to the development of contemporary performance in Japan and around the world. Gathered here for the first time in English is a comprehensive selection of essays, interviews and translations of three of Okada’s plays by leading scholars and translators. Okada’s writing on theatre is also included, accompanied by an extensive array of images from his performances.
ISBN 978-1-906499-12-9

Edited by Helen Gilbert, Dalisa Pigram & Rachael Swain
Telling That Story details twenty-five years of intercultural performance-making by renowned Australian dance company Marrugeku, whose restlessly inventive work reaches from remote Indigenous communities in northern Australia to international audiences around the world. This work began in the small Kunwinjku community of Kunbarlanja in Arnhem Land and now continues in Yawuru Country in the Western Australian coastal town of Broome and in the urban centre of Gadigal lands in Sydney.
ISBN 978-1-906499-09-9

Edited by Peter Eckersall & Kristof van Baarle
How to make work today? Kris Verdonck does so through an ongoing investigation into the relation between subjects and objects. From different perspectives (performer, costume designer, director, dramaturg, spectator, scholar), this book approaches the question of how objects perform beyond their category and how human performers approach a more ‘object-like’ state of being on stage. Verdonck’s co-creative method (with both human and non-human elements) implies a fundamental questioning of the medium in which the work is developed.
ISBN 978-1-906499-07-5

Edited by Jean Graham-Jones
Lola Arias (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1976) is one of the leading artists working in international theatre today. This book provides a documentary overview of her many productions, gathering together scripts, photographs, and rehearsal and post-production notes, as well as artistic and critical reflections from collaborators and scholars.
ISBN 978-1-906499-05-1

Edited by Helena Grehan & Peter Eckersall
This book documents and responds to the work of Back to Back Theatre by providing artistic and critical viewpoints on one of the leading theatre companies of our times.
Back to Back Theatre has transformed contemporary theatre in Australia and internationally with their unique theatricality and imagination. Based in Geelong, in regional Australia, the company is driven by an ensemble of actors perceived to have intellectual disabilities. Their work is inspired by a need to communicate the intrinsic experience of being alive. Back to Back’s theatre is multi-layered, visual, expressive and sensory. The brilliance of their multi-award winning work is matched by its human scale and its respect for others. Hence, their awesome, confronting theatricality is also prosaic. As the company says, ‘We’re people who do shows.’
ISBN 978-1-906499-03-7

Edited by David Williams & Carl Lavery
This is the first book-length collection to focus on the performance and theatre work of Lone Twin – Gregg Whelan and Gary Winters – a duo recognised internationally as one of the UK’s most inventive performance collaborations.
Over the past decade they have made over thirty projects located at the cusp of live art, theatre, and performance writing, travelling the world with theatre shows, collaborative public projects, durational events and a six-year cycle of performances about bodies, water, journeys, and chance encounters.
ISBN 978-1-906499-02-0

Edited by Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca and Florence Fitzgerald-Allsopp
Interspecies Performance brings together artists and scholars from across the disciplines to interrogate the rich terrain of contemporary interspecies performance practice – specifically in relation to nonhuman animals. The book foregrounds an intersectional and ethically oriented approach that centres care, empathy and collaboration, and considers the deep entanglement of contemporary oppressions.
ISBN 978-1-906499-19-8

Edited by Dariusz Kosiński
The Lexicon presents different aspects of the theatre avant-garde programmes, projects and achievements that took place between the two World Wars in a region of Europe that, squeezed between the two mighty powers of Germany and Russia, experienced similar historical dangers of marginalization and (in many cases literal) colonization and conquest. The book uses the idea of a lexicon in an unexpected way, as a tool to establish something that has not previously been clearly recognized as being separate, specific or autonomous, to constitute a specific historical phenomenon. Thus the lexicon is not a dictionary – it is a performance.
ISBN 978-1-906499-16-7

Edited by Ric Allsopp and Karen Kipphoff
The blind spot is a natural phenomenon at the origin of sight and a metaphor for forms of cultural, psychological, social and environmental blindness. This collection of original essays, artworks, writings and resources responds to a wider Blind Spot artistic research project (2016-2020) initiated at the Norwegian Theatre Academy. It features contributions from Ric Allsopp, Irving Finkel, Karen Kipphoff, Kiran Kumar, Ageliki Lefkaditou, Nigel Llewellyn, Kevin Mount, Alice Oswald, Theron Schmidt, Sophie Sleigh-Johnson, Henrik Treimo and Britta Wirthmüller.
978-1-906499-08-2

by Dariusz Kosiński
Performing Poland is a fascinating synthesis of the history of Polish theatre from the tenth century to the present day. In a lavishly illustrated book, the author not only takes a look at theatrical texts and works, but also describes a culture of the performative that includes ritual, ceremony and public manifestation.
In five parallel stories the book celebrates a colourful and multi-faceted depiction of Polish national culture and identity: ‘The Theatre of Festivities’ describes folk, religious and contemporary public holidays that are inscribed into the lives of individuals and society; ‘A Theatre of Fundamental Questions’ reconstructs the special Polish tradition of ‘sacred theatre’; ‘National Theatre’ recounts the story of national identity, which in Poland is strongly influenced by theatre; the relationship between theatre, politics and power is discussed in ‘Political Theatre: Between ceremony and protest’; and the conclusion, ‘The Theatre of the Cultural Metropolis’, comprises urban scenes and the history of artistic theatre from the ‘salon culture’ of the nineteenth century to the present ‘theatre of crisis’.
ISBN 978-1-906499-06-8

by Valentina Valentini. Translated by Tomas Haskell Simpson
What myths nourish today’s theatre? What imaginary worlds does it evoke? What are its recurring stories? What are its visions of the world?
In this study of late-twentieth-century theatre in Europe and the Americas, Valentina Valentini analyses the changed relations between theatre and contemporary reality, between actors and their characters, and examines new roles demanded of both producers and audiences in the realization of theatrical art. In particular she identifies and traces the decisive influence of visual arts and new media on today’s performance scene, a confluence of artistic practices that, Valentini argues, restores theatre to a privileged space in the panorama of contemporary art and aesthetic reflection.
ISBN 978-1-906499-04-4

by Paul Carter
Absolute Rhythm collects, introduces and presents ten scripts generated in a period of remarkable political and institutional creativity in Australia.
Situated at the crossroads of an immensely fertile exchange between the European Ars Acustica tradition and the emergent environmental sound art movement in Australia, the scripts filter themes of exilic memory, cross-cultural encounter, sexual politics and political betrayal through the experience of migration whose discursive and poetic signature is, according to Carter, echoic mimicry, a sense of psychological and environmental self-doubling that shadows every aspect of colonial history and postcolonial conscience.
Absolute Rhythm comes with access to the original productions : a double archive, in this sense, of a disappeared scene of production, its object is entirely forward-looking, to supply the groundwork for new forms of concomitant production. An acoustic archaeology, it serves, like Ezra Pound’s notion of ‘absolute rhythm’, to preserve ‘the main form of the work’ from ‘the vicissitudes and calamities’ of historical circumstance and repressive cultural politics.
ISBN 978-1-906499-10-5

Peter Lichtenfels
Director Peter Lichtenfels was born in Germany in 1949 and educated in Canada in the mid-1950s before relocating to the UK in the early 1970s where he contributed substantially to the UK theatre ecology, including during his tenures as Artistic Director of the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh and Haymarket Theatre, Leicester, before moving on to the United States and other international work. Peter’s work has focused on exploring the links between making and writing, between process and product, during a journey that took him from directing into producing, to writing about performance and to dramaturgy and editing (both plays and books).. This collection of Peter’s essays sits side by side with reflections and tributes by a selection of Peter’s co-labourers. His writing reveals an approach to directing embedded in international engagement. He wrote essays on directors he admired, from Peter Sellars to Tadeusz Kantor. Other essays feature his fascination with craft, technique and preparation and the ways in which he engaged with the craft of directing. This volume is for any collaborator in theatre work, the actor, the director, the theatre maker and the audience member or critic.
ISBN 978-1-906499-17-4

UK Performance Design 2019-2023
Editors: Kathrine Sandys & Lucy Thornett
hello stranger: National exhibition of performance design 2019–2023 is about welcoming designers, makers and audiences back as the performance sector recovers from the instability brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. In the wake of a turbulent few years, the project emphasizes opportunities to gather together and share experiences. This catalogue is part one of a three-part series mapping the hello stranger project, through national and regional events in spring 2023 and concluding with international events as the UK representation at the Prague Quadrennial 2023. The work in the catalogue is the result of an open call to designers. It has been curated to chronicle the diverse ways in which performance design has been realised in and beyond the UK from 2019 to 2023.
ISBN 978-1-906499-13-6

UK Performance Design 2019-2023
Editors: Kathrine Sandys & Lucy Thornett
hello stranger: the festival captures the activity from the UK Festival of Performance Design, taking place across thirteen regions and countries of the UK and online in spring 2023. The festival centres the voice of designers and emphasizes opportunities for gathering, sharing and socializing. It is led by a network of UK-based performance designers, curating public facing events, hosted by venue partners, with support from higher education collaborators. This publication is part two in a three-part series documenting the project hello stranger: national exhibition of performance design 2019–23. Part two documents the activity of each region and country through images, curatorial concepts and reflections from some of the designer-curators. The festival has included workshops, round-table discussions, exhibitions of artefacts, displays of design process, parades, design jamming, interventions, networking events, panel discussions, Q&A sessions and tea drinking. It is very much a live and generative festival – an evolving network, still in progress.
ISBN 978-1-906499-13-6