Thinking Through Theatre and Performance ed. by Maaike Bleeker et al. (review)

What can theatre help us to do? How can performance help us to think in new ways? What are the possibilities that theatre can open up? What can we learn from the performing body? How might theatre function as theory? Thinking Through Theatre and Performance, the first in an announced series of books called “Thinking Through Theatre,” offers twenty-one essays that provide answers, propositions, and provocations in response to these and other queries. The book is edited by Maaike Bleeker, Adrian Kear, Joe Kelleher, and Heike Roms, and it boasts an impressive array of international Anglophone scholars who address a range of questions that are important for any student of theatre and theatre-making practice.

At first glance, the queries that serve as title chapters in Thinking Through Theatre and Performance—for example, “Why Study Drama?” (chapter 1), “What Do Performances Do to Spectators?” (chapter 2), “How Can Performance Disrupt Institutional Spaces?” (chapter 17)—might seem as though they are introductory questions aimed at first-year undergraduates or students only just embarking on a study of theatre and performance. Each essay, however, interrogates its central question so deeply and with such rich results, that the questions feel as though they are asked anew. This is not an Introduction to Theatre textbook; these are inquiries intended for those of us who have been studying theatre already for some time. Better yet, the questions in this book ask us to look again at problems that seem basic to making performance, at assumptions we might have held for a long while, and at ideas we take for granted. The answers are inspiring, designed to push theatre artists in new directions and open up new ways of thinking for artists engaging with politics (chapter 15), accessibility (chapter 3), labor (chapter 11), and many other ideas. Thinking Through Theatre and Performance, then, is a book for upper-level undergraduates, graduate students—especially those in MFA programs—and theatre companies and artists as they make new work. The book operates at a sophisticated level of discourse, and the essays ask and attempt to answer difficult questions related to making and performing theatre.

Perhaps the most extraordinary, and generous, move this book makes is that each of the chapters is a kind of process essay. Rather than directly answering the question(s) posed in their titles, the various authors take us along with them as they think through these questions. In other words, we are not given definitive solutions in this book, but instead asked to follow along with the authors’ thought processes as they work through some of the most complicated and essential issues in theatre practice. This provides for an engagement with difficult problems that suggests new ways of thinking rather than making arguments that prompts theatre artists and theatre companies to use their own work to think through rather than deciding that they already know the answers.

Unlike most edited collections, which can be of uneven quality across the chapters, Thinking Through Theatre and Performance is uniformly thought-provoking and well-written. In an exemplary essay, Broderick Chow asks “How Does the Trained Body Think?” (chapter 10), and through a discussion of the author’s own training in professional wrestling and weightlifting, he offers a series of provocations about how we might think differently about the body that has been disciplined or made docile by training, how we think of the “natural” voice and body, and how actors and other performers might think through the body and not simply get “out of their heads.” Chow’s is an extraordinary essay, one that combines Foucauldian analysis, the Heideggerian distinction between objects and things, and an attention to his personal physical practices in order to challenge many of our assumptions about the differences between training and study, theory and practice.

In another excellent essay, Miguel Escobar Varela asks the question “What Is an Intercultural Exchange?” (chapter 12). He describes his long history...