Exploring thirty years of work by The Centre for Performance Research (CPR), A Performance Cosmology explores the future challenges of performance and theatre through a diverse and fascinating series of interviews, testimonies and perspectives from leading international theatre practitioners and academics.
Contributors include: Philip Auslander, Rustom Bharucha, Tim Etchells, Jane Goodall, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Jon Mckenzie, Claire MacDonald, Susan Melrose, Alphonso Lingis, Richard Schechner, Rebecca Schneider, Edward Scheer, and Freddie Rokem.
A Performance Cosmology is structured as a travelogue through a matrix of strategic, imaginary, interdisciplinary field stations. This innovative framework enables readings which disrupt linearity and afford different forms of thematic engagement. The resulting volume opens entirely new vistas on the old, new, and as yet unimagined, worlds of performance.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS /JUDIE CHRISTIE, RICHARD GOUGH, DANIEL WATT - Introduction: Plotting a Course, or Impossible Beginnings -- 1. Intimate Conversations -- Ways of working with the Centre for Performance Research /JUDIE CHRISTIE - On Ways of Working: A View from the Bridge /Claire Macdonald - Tools for Conviviality /ANNA FENEMORE - Ways of Working: Eight things I know now that I didn't know before /HEIKE ROMS - Eye and Ear, Foot and Mouth: Mapping performance in three journeys and one withdrawal /RICALLSOPP - Express Trains: Working at CPR /JOAN MILLS - A Family Affair /PAULALLAIN - The Nature and Culture of Performance /DANIEL WATT - Philoxenia: The Host as Parasite /HELENIBALL - A Little Big Boots: On participating in Summer Shift 2004 /SIBYLLE PETERS - Performances of Truth /FRANKIE ARMSTRONG - Singing Praise /AILSA RICHARDSON - Pro-found and Impossible /JILL GREENHALGH - And before I know it /FRANC CHAMBERLAIN - Ways of Working: Ten Fragments from Sixteen Years of Interaction -- SELECTED INTERVIEWS WITH RICHARD GOUGH - The Courage to Create: Food, Alchemy, Objects and Performance -- 2. Testimony from the Future -- Field Station dispatches and soundings Towards Tomorrow -- The Field Stations: Ways of Reading /ENZO COZZI - A River of Senses and a Touch of Otherness /GUILLERMO GOMEZ-PENA - Declaration of Poetic Disobedience /AMELIA JONES - Rupture /JOHANNES BIRRINGER - Interactive Environments and Digital Perception /PHILIP AUSLANDER - AnimalCam: Ocularcentrism and Non-Human Performance /JON MCKENZIE - Global Feeling: (Almost] All You Need Is Love /DAVID WILLIAMS - Writing (After) the Event: Notes on Appearance, Passage and Hope /MATTHEW GOULISH - The Scribes of Merlin (An obscure lecture) /REBECCA SCHNEIDER - What I Can't Recall /JANE GOODALL - Stones in the Mind /MIKE PEARSON - Marking Time /CHRISTOPHER BALME - Aporias of Ekphrasis: The Performance Archive -Archiving the Performance /JOE KELLEHER - Legwork - Thinking Showing Doing /SUSAN MELROSE - Who Knows - and who cares - about performance mastery (?) /TIM ETCHELLS - Incomplete Alphabet uo /DRAGAN KLAIC - Hounded Buildings: Site, performance and traumatic memory U5 /ADRIAN KEAR - The Memory of Promise: Theatre and the Ethic of the Future U8 /ALPHONSO LINGIS - Open Wounds /MICK WALLIS - Ramblers Associations Witness / scopophilia / aprosexia / sight /LAURIE BETH CLARK - Dear Friends and Family /FREDDIE ROKEM - Witnessing the Witness /PATRICE PAVIS - The Effect Produced /ADRIAN HEATHFIELD - Writing of the Event /MICHAEL PETERSON - an untenable identity formation: Eleutheria in eight parts /EDWARD SCHEER - Eleutheromania: Performance Art and the War on Terror /MICHAL KOBIALKA - Deleria/Nostalgia; Time, Space, Topography /ALAN READ - Arrested Life: A Sadness Without an Object /PAUL CARTER - Delirium: Nostalgia, Theatre and Public Space /PAUL RAE - Why there is Wind: Power, Trees, Performance -- Towards Tomorrow: Forward /RUSTOM BHARUCHA - Towards Tomorrow? Processing the Limits of Performance into the Real of Time /RICHARD SCHECHNER - Towards Tomorrow? Restoring Disciplinary Limits and Rehearsals in Time? -- 3. Evidence of the Past -- For the record, ancfwith the benefit of hindsight -- SELECTED INTERVIEWS WITH RICHARD GOUGH - From the Laboratory to the Centre: History, Training, the Academy and the Book /RICHARD GOUGH - Perfect Time : Imperfect Tense /D P WOVEWEFT - Bibliophobia : An Oneiric Fable -- A FAMILY ALBUM :1974-2005 - Circumstantial Evidence -- NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS -- PHOTOGRAPHY ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND ILLUSTRATION SOURCES.
