Theatre and the Threshold of Death: Lectures on the Dying Arts

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On the eve of a global pandemic, a theatre professor becomes immersed in the lives of five artist-mystics, each of whom is a first in her field: Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), the first known musical composer, Eleanora Duse (1858-1924), the first modern actor in the Western world, Simone Weil (1909-1943), philosopher, activist and mystic, who Albert Camus called the only great spirit of our time, Marina Abramovic (b. 1946), the grandmother of performance art, and Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), the first known (and belatedly acknowledged) abstract painter. Each time Gough crosses a threshold into their world she is compelled to attend courses, seminars, and workshops that are simultaneously about dying and about healing. What does it mean to follow artists to practices where being in a healing relationship to other bodies is a fundamental requirement Imagining these five artists as Wisdom teachers in a mystery school, Gough creates a series of lectures that move in that liminal space between skepticism and knowledge to ask questions about subjectivity, personhood, and the necessity of staying in relationship with the unknown world. Like the serial method in art practice, Goughs lecture series makes a persuasive argument for relational thinking, and the urgency of keeping open the questions that implore us to stay in a fully embodied relationship with our collective present-tense.

Author Bio

Kathleen M. Gough is an Associate Professor of Theatre at the University of Vermont, USA. She is also the author of Kinship and Performance in the Black and Green Atlantic (Routledge 2013), winner of the 2014 Errol Hill Award from ASTR. She received the 2017 Oscar G. Brockett Essay Prize from ASTR for The Art of the Loop: Analogy, Aurality, History, Performance (TDR 2016).