Risk, Participation, and Performance Practice

Critical Vulnerabilities in a Precarious World

Alice O'Grady

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9783319632414
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319632421
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

This book explores a range of contemporary performance practices that engage spectators physically and emotionally through active engagement and critical involvement. It considers how risk has been re-configured, re-presented and re-packaged for new audiences with a thirst for performances that promote, encourage and embrace risky encounters in a variety of forms. The collection brings together established voices on performance and risk research and draws them into conversation with next generation academic-practitioners in a dynamic reappraisal of what it means to risk oneself through the act of making and participating in performance practice. It takes into account the work of other performance scholars for whom risk and precarity are central concerns, but seeks to move the debate forwards in response to a rapidly changing world where risk is higher on the political, economic and cultural agenda than ever before.

Table of contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Editor and Contributors
• List of Figures
• Introduction: Risky Aesthetics, Critical Vulnerabilities, and Edgeplay: Tactical Performances of the Unknown
• Part I The Ethics of Risky Aesthetics: Moral Codes, Being Decent, and Doing it Right
• Theatre in the Age of Uncertainty: Memory, Technology, and Risk in Simon McBurney’s The Encounter and Robert Lepage’s 887
• Putting Prejudices on the Spot and in the Spotlight: The Risks of Politically Motivated Public Space Performance Practices
• The Drama Spiral: A Decision-Making Model for Safe, Ethical, and Flexible Practice when Incorporating Personal Stories in Applied Theatre and Performance
• Part II Performing Intimacies: Flirting, Whispering, and Sharing Stories in the Dark
• Dance with a Stranger: Torque Show’s Intimacy (2014) and the Experience of Vulnerability in Performance and Spectatorship
• Risking Intimacy: Strategies of Vulnerability in Vertical City’s All Good Things and Trace
• Collect Yourselves!: Risk, Intimacy, and Dissonance in Intermedial Performance
• Part III Risking the Self: Identities, Playing with Risk, and Encountering the Edge
• At the Risk of Being Sincere: Participation and Delegation in South African Contemporary Live Art
• Upon Awakening: Addiction, Performance, and Aesthetics of Authenticity
• Risk in Theatrical Performances in the City: Creating Impact and Identities
• Index