Performance Research Volume 14 Issue 1

Performing Literatures

Issue editors: Stephen Bottoms & Richard Gough

ISBN: 978-0-415-55678

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