The Cambridge Companion to Theatre and Science
The Cambridge Companion to Theatre and Science
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Theatre has engaged with science since its beginnings in Ancient Greece. The intersection of the two disciplines has been the focus of increasing interest to scholars and students. The Cambridge Companion to Theatre and Science gives readers a sense of this dynamic field, using detailed analyses of plays and performances covering a wide range of areas including climate change and the environment, technology, animal studies, disease and contagion, mental health, and performance and cognition. Identifying historical tendencies that have dominated theatre's relationship with science, the volume traces many periods of theatre history across a wide geographical range. It follows a simple and clear structure of pairs and triads of chapters that cluster around a given theme so that readers get a clear sense of the current debates and perspectives.
- Provides a broad chronological span, considering theatre and science from their early pre-modern interactions to the present day
- Covers a wide range of topics, including issues such as climate change, animal studies, and cognition
- Brings together examples of performance and texts to highlight the importance of considering both in academic discussion of theatre's interaction with science
Reviews & endorsements
'This is a mind-expanding book. It not only shows that theatre and science have been interacting for centuries but offers a series of pathfinding essays on subjects ranging from mental health to plague and infection. It establishes beyond doubt that theatre and science are indissolubly linked and challenges, informs and stimulates the reader at every turn.' Michael Billington
'The Cambridge Companion to Theatre and Science is a masterpiece of interdisciplinarity, bringing together any number of disciplines perhaps formerly thought to have nothing in common. And no one is currently better situated than Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr to undertake such a project. The choice of essay topics is varied and expansive, and the selected contributors are drawn from an international list of the most exciting thinkers currently pursuing ways to see, understand, and enjoy the rich interplay between theatre and science.' William W. Demastes, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge
'This Companion is a powerful contribution to the field. From experiments to the Anthropocene, bestiaries to bodies, pathogens to meteors to back-stage technologies, it demonstrates the enormous range of contemporary thinking on the connections running between theatre and science - and delivers this in a way that manages to be both invigorating and deeply enjoyable.' Tiffany Watt-Smith, Queen Mary University of London
'… a compact, wide-ranging survey of some of the key issues in this diverse set of interactions … these assured, stimulating essays offer a wide-ranging snapshot of current trends in how science touches theatre and vice versa.' Jonathan W. Marshall, Performance Research
Product details
December 2020Paperback
9781108700986
300 pages
150 × 230 × 15 mm
0.34kg
8 b/w illus.
Available
Table of Contents
- Introduction Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr
- 1. Objectivity & observation Dan Rebellato
- 2. Staging consciousness: Metaphor as thought-experiment in McBurney's staging of beware of pity Jane Goodall
- 3. The experimental/experiential stage: extreme states of being of and knowing in the theatre Carina Bartleet
- 4. A cave, a skull, and a little piece of grit: theatre in the anthropocene Carl Lavery
- 5. The play at the end of the world: deke weaver's unreliable bestiary and the theatre of extinction Una Chaudhuri and Joshua Williams
- 6. Bodies of knowledge: theatre and medical science Stanton B. Garner, Jr
- 7. Pathogenic performativity: urban contagion and fascist affect Fintan Walsh
- 8. Theatres of mental health Jonathan Venn
- 9. Devised theatre and the performance of science Mike Vanden Heuvel
- 10. Theatre and science as social intervention Michael Carklin
- 11. Acting and science Rhonda Blair
- 12. Staging cognition: how performance shows us how we think Amy Cook
- 13. Clouds and meteors: recreating wonder on the early modern stage Frédérique Aït-Touati
- 14. The stage hand's lament”: scenography, technology, and off-stage Labour Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr.
