Performance Making: A Pedagogy for Precarious Times

Surveying how Performance as a form has evolved as a distinct artistic sector to where it is today, Performance Making: a pedagogy for precarious times provides insight into the impact the artform has had across the creative sector and argues for its defence in higher education today.

Drawing on over 40+ years’ worth of experience as artist and academic, Anna Furse interrogates the ways in which the practice of Performance is truly interdisciplinary, offering a specific creative and critical practice approach. Chapters address the neo-liberal turn and its effect on culture; the history of the emergence of the genre within Performance Studies; the underlying political and cultural message of Performance as independent and necessary; wider philosophical and critical theoretical thinking that can support innovation within the field; and the key principles in the creation of live work such as space, site, scenography, the body, collaboration, and composition. Each chapter includes an essay, case studies, and exercises, empowering students to apply critical thinking to their own work.

Focusing on developing creative-critical methodologies in Performance Making at postgraduate level for international cohorts, this textbook will equip students, instructors, and practitioners to contextualise and enrich their Performance practice and leadership.

Anna Furse is a veteran award-winning theatre artist and writer whose works are commissioned and performed internationally. Artistic Director of the new writing company Paines Plough for 5 years in the 1990s, since 2003 she has been Artistic Director of her own company Athletes of the Heart (www.athletesoftheheart.org), founded from an Impact Award for her sci-art by the Wellcome Trust. An early pioneer of British feminist performance (Bloodgroup 1981 - 1986), she also worked closely with experimental dance as a performer, collective member of New Dance Magazine and co-founder of Chisenhale Dance Space. Creator and Director of the MA in Performance Making for twenty years until 2022, she is now Professor Emeritus, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. Her previous book for Routledge Performing Nerves, Four Plays, Four Essays, On Hysteria was published in 2021.