Performing Architectures: Projects, Practices, Pedagogies

Description

Performing Architectures offers a coherent introduction to the fields of performance and contemporary architecture, exploring the significance of architecture for performance theory and theatre and performance practice. It maps the diverse relations that exist between these disciplines and demonstrates how their aims, concerns and practices overlap through shared interests in space, action and event. Through a wide range of international examples and contributions from scholars and practitioners, it offers readers an analytical survey of current practices and equips them with the tools for analyzing site-specific and immersive theatre and performance. The essays in this volume, contributed by leading theorists and practitioners from both disciplines, focus on three key sites of encounter: * Projects: examines recent trends in architecture for performance; * Practices: looks at cross-currents in artistic practice, including spatial dramaturgies, performance architectonics and performative architectures; and * Pedagogies: considers the uses of performance in architectural education and architecture in teaching performance. The volume provides an essential introduction to the ways in which performance and architecture, as socio-spatial processes and as things made or constructed, operate as generating, shaping and steering forces in understanding and performing the other.

Andrew Filmer is Lecturer in Drama, Theatre and Performance at the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies, Aberystwyth University, UK. Juliet Rufford is Lecturer in Drama, Theatre and Performance at the Department of Drama, Queen Mary, University of London, UK.

A lively collection of accessible and engaging essays from artists, theorists, and teachers ... In the area of theatre and performance, this book will be a valuable addition and complement to existing publications on theatre architecture ... [the book] has much to offer all scholars and teachers who concern themselves with the ways that performance operates in and through space. * New Theatre Quarterly * An important collection of essays on the relationship between architecture and performance as it has been developing during a series of recent interdisciplinary practical experiments and theoretical studies ... Each of the thirteen essays contributes information and ideas which are of great interest. * Skene Journal of Theatre and Drama Studies * If the editors "hope that this book contributes to pushing these disciplines closer together and serves to encourage further explorations of the rich and productive spaces between them" (16), they can rest assured that the anthology succeeds on both counts. The assembled essays will be of interest to students and teachers of theatre architecture, dramaturgy, scenography, devising, and postdramatic theatre, particularly when assigned in conjunction with other introductory texts. * Theatre Journal *