Making Interdisciplinary Performance: Processes and Practices in Collaboration

This collection offers an examination of and guide to interdisciplinary collaboration through the working practices of performance makers, exploring its pleasures, problems and pitfalls. The book explores contemporary working practices at the interfaces between performance and other disciplines. Focusing on collaborations between theatre makers and these ‘others’, it investigates the processes and conditions involved in the interdisciplinary. Chapters cover areas such as psychology, the environment, physical cultures, the military, healthcare, festivals and communities, architecture, pedagogy and fine dining. At a time when interdisciplinary practice is actively encouraged in the academy, this book asks what it means in practical terms to engage with artists and scholars outside of our home territories. Where does the interdisciplinary exist and what does it rely on? How do theatre makers approach and sustain these projects? What is the nature of the journey? Offering examples of unusual collaborations and arranged through 3 key areas of performance-making, this book acknowledges the difficulties of such work and that the aims of interdisciplinarity can fail, while examining how new methods and understandings can shift notions of knowledge.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction, Gianna Bouchard and Adam J. Ledger (University of Birmingham, UK) Part One: Journeys and Permeating 1. Lessons Learned in Other People’s Classrooms Alexander Kelly (Leeds School of Arts & Third Angel, UK) 2. What is the Work For?: Complexities, Collaboration and Commodification in Performance-making: Adam J. Ledger (University of Birmingham, UK) 3. Crossing the Bridge: From Artist to Psychologist, Hannah Newman (University of Surrey, UK) Part Two: Performance and Other Spaces 4. Performance in the Restaurant: Fine Dining and the Confluence of Disciplinary Approaches and Practices, Paul Geary (University of East Anglia, UK) 5. The Productive Ward: Interdisciplinary Collaboration with/in the Disciplined Space, Alex Mermikides (King’s College London, UK) 6. Notes from the In Between, Suzy Willson (Clod Ensemble, UK) 7. Chodzenie-Siberia: Undisciplined Encounters on the High Street, Mehrdad Seyf (Public Works / 30 Bird, UK) Part Three: Performance and Pedagogies 8. Le Laboratoire d’Etude du Mouvement (LEM) – A Space for Interdisciplinarity, Mark Evans (Coventry University, UK), Aurelian Koch (Freelance Theatre Designer, Teacher and Performer) and Amy Russell (Founder and Director of Embodied Poetics) 9. Interdisciplinarity at the Bottom of the World: Designing New Performance-led Curriculum, Kathleen Williams and Meg Keating (University of Tasmania) 10. Interdisciplinary Performance Pedagogy: Undoing Mastery in the Studio, Gianna Bouchard (University of Birmingham, UK) 11. ‘When the Students Entered the Stage, they were actors’: Students, Educators, Artists and Spectators as Ensemble, Tatiana Chemi & Kristian Firing (Aalborg University, Denmark) Index