Making Interdisciplinary Performance: Processes and Practices in Collaboration

(Hardback)

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This edited collection offers an examination of and guide to interdisciplinary collaboration through the working practices of performance makers, exploring its pleasures, problems and pitfalls. At a time when interdisciplinary practice is actively encouraged in the academy, through strategic priorities, policy and funding, this book asks what it means in practical terms to engage with artists and scholars outside of our home territories. Where does the interdisciplinary exist and what does it rely on How do theatre makers approach and sustain these projects What is the nature of the journey This edited collection explores contemporary working practices at the interfaces between performance and other disciplines. Focusing on collaborations between theatre makers and these others, it investigates the processes and conditions involved in the interdisciplinary, and develops the notion of journeying beyond conventional boundaries. The book includes chapters covering areas such as psychology, the environment, physical cultures, the military, healthcare, festivals and communities, architecture, pedagogy and fine dining. Offering examples of unusual collaborations and arranged through three key areas of performance-making as journey and permeation, a negotiation with other spaces, and as pedagogy, this book offers a contemplation of the challenges and pleasures of material circumstances in interdisciplinary projects. While acknowledging the difficulties of such work and that the aims of interdisciplinarity can fail, it also examines how new methods and understandings can shift notions of knowledge.

Author Bio

Gianna Bouchard is Professor of Contemporary Performance at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her interdisciplinary research explores the interface between medicine and performance. She is the author of Performing Specimens: Biomedical Display in Contemporary Performance (Methuen Drama, 2020). Adam Ledger is Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Birmingham, UK. He has published widely on performance practices, including The Director and Directing: Craft, Process and Aesthetic in Contemporary Theatre and on Eugenio Barba for the Great European Stage Directors series (Methuen Drama, 2018).