Performance and Phenomenology

This book offers a timely discussion of the interventions and tensions between two contentious fields, performance and phenomenology. Acknowledging the history and critical polemics against phenomenological methodology and against performance as a field of study and category of artistic production, Performance and Phenomenology provides an introduction to core thinkers and an expansion on their ideas in a wide range of international case studies that map an emerging 21st century terrain of critical and performance practice. Each chapter explores a world comprised of embodied action and thought, addressing the use of dead animals in performance, actor training, the legal implications of thinking phenomenologically about how we walk, and the intertwining of digital and analog perception.

The scholars contributing to the volume develop insights central to the phenomenological tradition while expanding on the work of contemporary theorists and performers. In asking why performance and phenomenology belong in conversation together, the book suggests how they can transform each other in the process and what is at stake in this transformation.