Dr Adele Senior

Theatre and Performance scholarship has long been concerned with mortality. Peggy Phelan’s much-cited ontology of performance as ‘becoming itself through disappearance’ (1993) reinforces the priority given to death in theatre and performance studies and has been taken up by others to claim that the ephemeral qualities of performance often signal loss (Schneider 2001). However, an ontology of performance that privileges death, loss and disappearance arguably overlooks the potential of birth, remains and (re)appearance to philosophically reimagine performance’s ontological status. In dialogue with contemporary performance practice in the UK, this paper considers the way in which natality, a concept closely related to birth, invites us to conceive of performance as beginning anew. In particular, I draw on works such as Zoo Indigo’s Under the Covers (2013), and Tim Etchells and Victoria's That Night Follows Day (2014), where the appearance of children onstage resonates with this connection that performance shares with birth. For Hannah Arendt (1958) natality is ‘the new beginning inherent in birth [that] can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting’. Whilst Arendt puts the concept of natality to work in the field of political philosophy, I suggest that her idea of natality can offer a vocabulary for articulating why the appearance of children in contemporary performance practice has the capacity to illuminate performance’s relation to the notion of ‘beginning’ and prompt a rethinking of the ontology of performance beyond its attendant associations with death and mortality.

In her 2012 paper, Marah Gubar coins the term ‘age transvestism’ to discuss the phenomenon of children impersonating adults on the Victorian stage. Gubar employs the term to argue that children dressing and acting as adults signals a ‘category crisis’ and, in doing so, she articulates a position that deviates from the well-established assumption that nineteenth century audiences liked to watch the child performer because their incompetence highlighted the difference between adults and children (Varty 2008: 15). Age transvestism, a term which she inherits from Marjorie Garber’s notion of ‘gender transvestism’, thus becomes ‘a space of possibility’ (Garber 1992: 11) rather than a reinscription of binarised identities between children and adults. Contemporary performance and live art with children has renewed this fascination with children impersonating or being read in relation to adults. As such, contemporary performance practice both intentionally and unintentionally enacts a crisis of the discursive categories of both children and adults. This article examines age transvestism in contemporary performance as a strategy for destabilizing dominant conceptualisations of the child that persist within contemporary discourses of childhood. Focusing on Film with Hope (2016), a collaboration between UK-based artist Grace Surman and her young daughter, the analysis considers how age transvestism challenges historic perceptions of the innocent child, the child in need of protection, and the child as a subject in formation (Kehily 2004). The article proposes that age transvestism – where it is read as a continuum of age-crossing – has the potential to foreground the body of the child in performance as a body that does not necessarily have to be defined by the nostalgic, erotic or judgemental adult gaze. Instead, it proposes that children’s bodies are afforded the poststructural, feminist and queer approaches to reading their bodies that are ordinarily given to adult bodies onstage.

While ‘charisma’ can be found in dramatic and theatrical parlance, the term enjoys only minimal critical attention in theatre and performance studies, with scholarly work on presence and actor training methods taking the lead in defining charisma’s supposed ‘undefinable’ quality. Within this context, the article examines the appearance of the term ‘charismatic space’ in relation to Marina Abramovic’s retrospective The Artist is Present at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2010. Here Abramovic uses this term to describe the shared space in which performer and spectator connect bodily, psychically, and spiritually through a shared sense of presence and energy in the moment of performance. Yet this is a space arguably constituted through a number of dialectical tensions and contradictions which, in dialogue with existing theatre scholarship on charisma, can be further understood by drawing on insights into charismatic leaders and charismatic authority in leadership studies. By examining the performance and its documentary traces in terms of dialectics we consider the political and ethical implications for how we think about power relations between artist/spectator in a neoliberal, market-driven art context. Here an alternative approach to conceiving of and facilitating a charismatic space is proposed which instead foregrounds what Bracha L. Ettinger calls a ‘matrixial encounter-event’: A relation of coexistence and compassion rather than dominance of self over other; performer over spectator; leader over follower. By illustrating the dialectical tensions in The Artist is Present, we consider the potential of the charismatic space not as generated through the seductive power or charm of an individual whose authority is tied to his/her ‘presence’, but as something co-produced within an ethical and relational space of trans-subjectivity.

Bound in a unique thermochromic cover (designed by artist Zane Berzina), this book provides an engaging, critical and thought-provoking approach to how current technologies are changing our perceptions of the body, the self and the ...

This paper examines the complex questions that arise around the appearance of children in contemporary performance. Drawing on performances by Nottingham-based theatre company Zoo Indigo and Tim Etchells and the Flemish theatre company Victoria, I consider the extent to which Hannah Arendt’s theorisation of natality as ‘the new beginning inherent in birth’ that gives rise to the political potential to ‘begin something anew’ can help us to understand the ethico-political dimensions of children’s appearance as natal, biological and relational beings in contemporary performance. In particular, I draw on feminist interpretations of Arendt’s work to articulate the significance of the embodied aspects and ethical quality of children’s relation to adult spectators and performers. I argue that these performances prompt a rethinking of the child’s potential to generate political intervention, which moves beyond Arendt’s gendered account of political agency in a public sphere from which children are excluded.

Drawing on our experiences of parenting during the global COVID‐19 pandemic of 2020, we explore the potential for a feminist parental ethics through which parenting can be rethought, reclaimed, and so brought forth as a vital and valuable assemblage of collective articulation work, shared “motherings,” and embodied interconnectivities of caring for and caring with the other. A feminist parental ethics is particularly important in the neoliberal academic context, where the responsibilities of caregiving that lockdown has thrust upon many workers in higher education have been largely downplayed, dismissed, or even ignored across the sector in the interest of maintaining “business as usual.” In response, we ask: “who is caring for the parents?” and we call for an extended idea of parenting beyond the familial as a means of differently organizing our societies, workplaces, and institutions around a shared locus of care.

On a global platform we are witnessing the increased visibility of the people we call children and teenagers as political activists. Meanwhile, across the contemporary performance landscape, children are participating as performers and collaborators in ways that resonate with this figure of the child activist. Beyond Innocence: Children in Performance proposes that performance has the ability to offer alternatives to hegemonic perceptions of the child as innocent, in need of protection, and apolitical. Through an in-depth analysis of selected performances shown in the UK within the past decade, alongside newly gathered documentation on children’s participation in professional performance in their own words, this book considers how performance might offer more capacious representations of and encounters with children beyond the nostalgic and protective adult gaze elicited within mainstream contexts. Motivated by recent performative attempts to reimagine the figure of the child by working with children on stage, the book offers a new approach to both reading age in performance and also doing research with children rather than on or about them. By redressing the current imbalance between the way we read children and adults’ bodies in performance and taking seriously children’s cultures and experiences, Beyond Innocence asks what strategies contemporary performance has to offer both children and adults in order to foster shared spaces for social and political change. As such, the book develops an approach to analysing performance that not only recognises children as makers of meaning but also as historically, politically, and culturally situated subjects and bodies with lived experiences that far exceed the familiar narratives of innocence and inexperience that children often have to bear.

What can birth tell us about performance in the twenty first century? Specifically, what does rethinking performance through the natal alongside the maternal reveal? This article asks what natality - the overlooked other of performance’s well-theorised relationship to mortality – can offer performance from the perspective of a maternal subject. It does so through an autobiographical account of the birth of the author’s second child and three thematic gestures closely tied to natality: care, responsibility and appearance. The article privileges these natal and maternal themes as provocations for performance’s unanticipated future, particularly in a post-Brexit, post-Trump context. It offers no solutions but instead asks: How can we make careful and responsible work, whilst acknowledging the ethical ambiguities inherent in this motivation? Birth is, therefore, more than a metaphor for performance here. Instead, birth is intimately tied to the maternal and the natal subjects who experience it and so it has the potential to encourage us - as makers, theorists and spectators - to recognise and mobilise the generative potential of the embodied, relational, co-created experience of performance. Rather than using natality to regulate who has the capacity to participate in the political realm (Arendt 1958), the article suggests that we acknowledge the unknown that the newborn brings in birth. In situating natality in the physical act of birth, we can look forward to a natal politics of performance that is still consistent with Arendtian ideals of civic responsibility and action, but that welcomes those othered by her version of natality - newborns, children, mothers and those who literally cannot speak.

This paper responds to ‘Are the Semi-Living semi-good or semi-evil?’ (Technoetic Arts, 2003) in which artists/authors Zurr and Catts state that there is not, as yet, an existing discourse that deals with the Semi-Living – a ‘new’ life form created for the purpose of artistic engagement using the tools of tissue engineering and stem cell technology. As a means to reflect on what a discourse on the Semi-Living might include and exclude and to create the potential to say something different beyond the artists’ own discourse, this paper initiates two approaches. First, it considers that which the ‘Semi-Living’ defers by working from Zurr and Catts’ contribution, which I argue evokes a ‘both/and’ logic that echoes the Derridean deconstructive event. Secondly, it proposes a genealogy of the Semi-Living using a figure of Roman archaic law, homo sacer (sacred man) who shares with the Semi-Living a ‘life exposed to death’ (Agamben 1998). The symbiosis of these two approaches identifies, problematises and ‘contaminates’ the limits of acceptable discourse concerning the Semi-Living, concluding with the proposal of a ‘semi-discourse’. As the transdisciplinarity of bioart increasingly becomes the focus of academic and artistic inquiry, this paper signals towards the importance of critically acknowledging a community of artists writing and working within the academy, stipulating the acceptable discourses of their practice.

Backpages is an opportunity for the academy to engage with theatre and performance practice with immediacy and insight and for theatre workers and performance artists to engage critically and reflectively on their work and the work of their peers. Featuring short, topical articles and debates, polemics where necessary, it’s a place of intellectual intervention and creative reflection. It’s also where we hope to articulate, perhaps for the first time, the work of new and rising theatre artists in an academic forum. This issue of Backpages begins with a special section on Jacques Derrida and considerations of his theories in relationship to live performance co-edited by Rachel Clements and Marilena Zaroulia.

This article draws on Rebecca Schneider's thoughts on performance within archival culture (2001) in order to examine the use of HeLa cells in recent artistic practice. HeLa is one of the most commonly used cell lines in scientific research, renowned for its 'immortality' in vitro. The HeLa cell line originated from cervical cancer cells that were taken from an African American woman named Henrietta Lacks in 1951. Lacks died eight months after the biopsy, but her cells - which were removed without her knowledge and consent - live on and multiply in scientific laboratories worldwide. As artists working in the biological arts attempt to reimagine the controversial narratives surrounding HeLa and Henrietta Lacks, this paper argues that employing biological materials such as HeLa cells in artistic practice often gives rise to a flesh-like 'object' that resists the archive that instead privileges documentary and object remains. In this respect, the use of HeLa cells in some artistic work is reminiscent of performance's challenge to traditional archival logic. Despite disappearing in death, documentation and even in the moment of the live encounter, HeLa and its attendant histories nevertheless remain in material and immaterial acts that these artworks and their documentary texts participate in. Such practices importantly prompt a reconceptualisation of our relationship to the body in light of the potential effects of contemporary biotechnological advancements on archival logic. It is this reconceptualisation which I suggest may be best approached, therefore, in dialogue with performance theory on appearance and disappearance within archival culture. © 2011 Taylor & Francis.

Australia-based art collective Tissue Culture and Art Project (TC&A) use the tools of biotechnology as artistic media to create "Semi- Living" sculptures. These sculptures are exhibited, eaten, and killed in various public contexts and, therefore, raise important ethical questions about the existence of life outside of the body. Departing from dominant concerns within the academy about the ethics of producing biological art, the essay instead focuses on the overlooked ethics of its reception. It addresses the ethics of spectatorship in TC&A's work by arguing three main points: first, its documentary images reference, play with, and are haunted by religious iconography; second, examining the messianic resonances in TC&A's work illuminates an ethics of spectatorship that is closely related to the Derridean ethical experience of otherness; and third, focusing on TC&A's documentary images addresses the potential of bioart documentation to generate affect and engage in ethical relations.

The ‘and’ in Performance and Science has to do a lot of work in this companion. Performance as dealt with across the chapters is capacious. It is a slippery concept. It is a way of looking at the world. It is a diverse set of practices. In the volume, science is no less vast. It is also variously conceived, reflects different perspectives, and encompasses activities by many kinds of people in many places. A key intention in proposing this project was to explore the possibilities of the ‘and’. We wanted to open up an emerging, loosely defined field. This is not a discipline or even a sub-discipline. It is rather a meeting point or set of encounters. These encounters may be between ideas from different disciplines; between performers and scientific researchers; between clinicians or other professionals and researchers from different disciplines; or encounters with or between audiences and communities. There are also encounters between people and things, humans and nonhumans. From atoms, viruses, mirror neurons, electrical charges, and spacecraft to Samuel Pepys’ kidney stones, a complex ecology comes together through science and performance as ways of knowing and interacting.

The Routledge Companion to Performance and Science investigates and illuminates the growing international interest in the intersections and interactions between theatre, drama, performance and the sciences. These disciplines are explored through an extensive range of essays from artists, practitioners, researchers and scholars, many of whom are working in interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary or multidisciplinary contexts. With a largely contemporary focus underpinned by an introductory section that sets out a history of antecedent intersections, the volume offers a diverse range of perspectives on science, scientific methods, and scientific knowledge in dialogue with performance scholarship and practice. Our understanding of ‘practice’ is capacious, from different performance forms to science communication and interpretation, to scientific approaches to performance, to ways of generating and disseminating scientific knowledge. Within this vast scene, a number of key questions and themes emerge: How can scientific knowledge be interrogated by performance practices? How can performance explore the human implications of scientific development? How can scientific practices be understood through performance theories? How are scientists or scientific practices, and ideas represented in performance?. This is a key resource for scholars and upper-level students of performing arts, science communication, medical and health humanities, science and technology studies, and interdisciplinary arts/humanities/sciences projects.