1st Edition

Performance Making a pedagogy for precarious times

By Anna Furse Copyright 2025
198 Pages 15 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

198 Pages 15 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

198 Pages 15 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

Surveying how Performance as a form has evolved as a distinct artistic sector to where it is today, Performance Making: a pedagogy for precarious times provides insight into the impact the artform has had across the creative sector and argues for its defence in higher education today. Drawing on over 40+ years’ worth of experience as artist and academic, Anna Furse interrogates the ways in... Read more

PREFACE                  Eating Shoes - Herzog’s call

INTRODUCTION        Bearings - artists of the future, neoliberalism, cultural industry

CHAPTER 1               Box-ing Clever - ethos, precarity, habitus, obstructions

CHAPTER 2               Body - lived experience, moving, presence

CHAPTER 3               Scenography - writing in space, materiality, aura

CHAPTER 4               Site -city, drifting, transgression

CHAPTER 5               Engineering the Imagination - composition, interdisciplinarity, collaboration

CHAPTER 6               Quality - assessment criteria, critical thinking, de-forming

CHAPTER 7               72 Billionaires - festival, making it happen, worlding, archive, exit

APPENDIX                  Notes on contributors

Biography

Anna Furse is a veteran award-winning theatre artist and writer whose works are commissioned and performed internationally. Artistic Director of the new writing company Paines Plough for 5 years in the 1990s, since 2003 she has been Artistic Director of her own company Athletes of the Heart (www.athletesoftheheart.org), founded from an Impact Award for her sci-art by the Wellcome Trust. An early pioneer of British feminist performance (Bloodgroup 1981–1986), she worked closely with experimental dance as a performer, collective member of New Dance Magazine, and co-founder of Chisenhale Dance Space. Creator and Director of the MA in Performance Making for 20 years until 2022, she is now Professor Emeritus, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. Among her many publications are Theatre in Pieces: Politics, Poetics and Interdisciplinary Collaboration (2011), and Performing Nerves: Four Plays, Four Essays, On Hysteria (2021).