ABSTRACT

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.

part 1|65 pages

Intimate Conversations

chapter 1|3 pages

Tools for Conviviality

chapter 1|3 pages

Express Trains: Working at CPR

chapter 1|5 pages

A Family Affair

chapter 1|3 pages

Philoxenia: The Host as Parasite

chapter 1|3 pages

Performances of Truth

chapter 1|3 pages

Singing Praise

chapter 1|2 pages

Pro–found and Impossible

chapter 1|2 pages

And before I know it

part 2|176 pages

Testimony from the Future

chapter 2|8 pages

Field Station 1: Rupture

chapter 2|4 pages

Field Station 4: Marking Time

chapter 2|7 pages

Field Station 6: Open Wounds

chapter 2|5 pages

Witnessing the Witness

part 3|46 pages

Evidence of the Past

chapter 3|19 pages

From the Laboratory to the Centre: History, Training, the Academy and the Book

Selected Interviews With Richard Gough 1

chapter 3|17 pages

Perfect Time : Imperfect Tense

An Object Exercise in Conditional Remembrance

chapter 3|6 pages

Bibliophobia : An Oneiric Fable

chapter 3|1 pages

Circumstantial Evidence

A Family Album : 1974-2005