ABSTRACT
The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics is a volume of critical essays, provocations, and interventions on the most important questions faced by today’s writers, critics, audiences, and theatre and performance makers. Featuring texts written by scholars and artists who are diversely situated (geographically, culturally, politically, and institutionally), its multiple perspectives broadly address the question "How can we be political now?"
To respond to this question, Peter Eckersall and Helena Grehan have created eight galvanising themes as frameworks or rubrics to rethink the critical, creative, and activist perspectives on questions of politics and theatre. Each theme is linked to a set of guiding keywords:
- Post (post consensus, post-Brexit, post-Fukushima, post-neoliberalism, post-humanism, post-global financial crisis, post-acting, the real)
- Assembly (assemblage, disappearance, permission, community, citizen, protest, refugee)
- Gap (who is in and out, what can be seen/heard/funded/allowed)
- Institution (visibility/darkness, inclusion, rules)
- Machine (biodata, surveillance economy, mediatisation)
- Message (performance and conviction, didacticism, propaganda)
- End (suffering, stasis, collapse, entropy)
- Re. (reset, rescale, reanimate, reimagine, replay: how to bring complexity back into the public arena, how art can help to do this).
These themes were developed in conversation with key thinkers and artists in the field, and the resulting texts engage with artistic works across a range of modes including traditional theatre, contemporary performance, public protest events, activism, and community and participatory theatre.
Suitable for academics, performance makers, and students, The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics explores questions of how to be political in the early 21st century, by exploring how theatre and performance might provoke, unsettle, reinforce, or productively destabilise the status quo.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part |57 pages
Post
chapter |4 pages
Reflections upon the ‘post’
chapter |4 pages
Post-dictatorship Chilean theatre and the political imperative
chapter |4 pages
Post-’98 Indonesian theatre and performance
part |48 pages
Assembly
chapter |4 pages
Assembly as community
part |47 pages
Gap
chapter |4 pages
The construction of material referentiality in Chilean theatre
chapter |4 pages
‘It’s just not right’
part |40 pages
Institution
part |35 pages
Machine
chapter |4 pages
Maria Lucia Cruz Correia’s Urban Action Clinic GARDEN
part |38 pages
Message
chapter |4 pages
The hopeless courage of confronting contemporary realities
chapter |3 pages
A theatre of the middle way
chapter |4 pages
Contemporary Chilean political theatre between opacity and propaganda
part |36 pages
End
chapter |3 pages
Against staging apocalyptic disasters with Butoh dance
chapter |4 pages
Holstein’s hair
part |43 pages
Re.