Making Interdisciplinary Performance

Processes and Practices in Collaboration

Making Interdisciplinary Performance cover

Making Interdisciplinary Performance

Processes and Practices in Collaboration

Description

This collection offers an examination of and guide to interdisciplinary collaboration through the working practices of performance makers, exploring its pleasures, problems and pitfalls.

The book 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. Chapters cover areas such as psychology, the environment, physical cultures, the military, healthcare, festivals and communities, architecture, pedagogy and fine dining.

At a time when interdisciplinary practice is actively encouraged in the academy, 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?

Offering examples of unusual collaborations and arranged through 3 key areas of performance-making, this book acknowledges the difficulties of such work and that the aims of interdisciplinarity can fail, while examining how new methods and understandings can shift notions of knowledge.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements

Introduction, Gianna Bouchard and Adam J. Ledger (University of Birmingham, UK)

Part One: Journeys and Permeating

1. Lessons Learned in Other People's Classrooms Alexander Kelly (Leeds School of Arts & Third Angel, UK)
2. What is the Work For?: Complexities, Collaboration and Commodification in Performance-making: Adam J. Ledger (University of Birmingham, UK)
3. Crossing the Bridge: From Artist to Psychologist, Hannah Newman (University of Surrey, UK)

Part Two: Performance and Other Spaces

4. Performance in the Restaurant: Fine Dining and the Confluence of Disciplinary Approaches and Practices, Paul Geary (University of East Anglia, UK)
5. The Productive Ward: Interdisciplinary Collaboration with/in the Disciplined Space, Alex Mermikides (King's College London, UK)
6. Notes from the In Between, Suzy Willson (Clod Ensemble, UK)
7. Chodzenie-Siberia: Undisciplined Encounters on the High Street, Mehrdad Seyf (Public Works / 30 Bird, UK)

Part Three: Performance and Pedagogies

8. Le Laboratoire d'Etude du Mouvement (LEM) – A Space for Interdisciplinarity, Mark Evans (Coventry University, UK), Aurelian Koch (Freelance Theatre Designer, Teacher and Performer) and Amy Russell (Founder and Director of Embodied Poetics)
9. Interdisciplinarity at the Bottom of the World: Designing New Performance-led Curriculum, Kathleen Williams and Meg Keating (University of Tasmania)
10. Interdisciplinary Performance Pedagogy: Undoing Mastery in the Studio, Gianna Bouchard (University of Birmingham, UK)
11. 'When the Students Entered the Stage, they were actors': Students, Educators, Artists and Spectators as Ensemble, Tatiana Chemi & Kristian Firing (Aalborg University, Denmark)

Index

Product details

Explore Methuen Drama
Published May 15 2025
Format Ebook (PDF)
Edition 1st
Extent 288
ISBN 9781350318540
Imprint Methuen Drama
Illustrations 12 bw illus
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Anthology Editor

Gianna Bouchard

Gianna Bouchard is Professor of Contemporary Perfo…

Anthology Editor

Adam J. Ledger

Adam Ledger is Professor of Theatre and Performanc…

ONLINE RESOURCES

Bloomsbury Collections

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