The concept of this book is ‘dance and ageing’ and is driven by the possibility that everybody in the Western dance community, in particular young dance students, but also readers beyond the parameters of dance, will profit if the voices of senior professional practitioners are heard.



It features dancers from USA, Canada, UK, Europe and Australia, all interviewees are practitioners of stature and prominence who continue to contribute, despite ageism, to the dance industry. They are inspiring role models for younger dancers but also for an ageing demographic in society; it is a celebration of the body and the indomitable urge to create and express.

Conversations with twenty senior professional dancers explore how they sustain performing despite the inground ageism that exists through society and is mirrored within the dance world. This cohort of older dancers, aged between 41 and 107, illuminate inspiring life stories that convey their passion to continue performing, while overcoming the prejudices in an artform that champions youth.



Dance practitioners remaining active and relevant throughout the life stages is an area of growing interest, particularly in community dance, health and wellbeing. This would inspire all dancers to follow in their footsteps, to believe that diversity and inclusion would widen the boundaries within Western dance culture and eradicate bias. Further interest from an older demographic who enjoy watching dance or dance themselves, who would appreciate their representation in a book that reveals the positive attributes ageing can bring. It also has the potential to reach an anti-ageing reader as well as a dance reader. The book has a broad appeal not just within Western dance culture but also where ageing/ageism is a prominent concern within Western society.

This book expands on theories of "theatricality" in French and critical studies, adopting a transdisciplinary approach that reaches beyond performance studies into poetry, media technology, translation, and psychoanalytic theory.



Building on Artaud’s concept of theatre as a "plague"—an unpredictable, cataclysmic, and contagious force that disrupts power structures and knowledge—the book challenges Aristotelian norms of theatre as a medium of "healing" and "teaching." Instead, theatricality emerges as a force of radical disruption, what Artaud called "the return of the repressed," demanding openness to otherness.



The chapters present theatricality as primarily aural rather than visual, inciting "paranoiac listening," invoking unretrievable "primal scenes," and allowing unconscious "psychic" contamination. "Theatricality" is explored through works by Artaud, Genet, Novarina, and Koltès, but also Freud, Barthes, Kristeva, Girard, and Derrida. Each writer challenges the premises of their own artistic genres and fields of study, questioning binary systems like artistic production versus theoretical articulation, the technological versus the natural, and art versus life.



As shown, these binaries underpin mechanisms of repression, sacrificial violence, and the exclusion of the voiceless other. The book assigns a generative function to traditionally maligned notions like unintelligibility, madness, marginality, contagion, and criminality.

A review of dance education research methodologies with examples and exemplars from the field and an important resource for dance students, professionals, and advocates.



The editors recognized the need for a book of this type – one that would not only provide examples of a variety of dance education research projects, but also present a broad look at methodologies. In addition, the book would not only focus on Dance Education research in the U.S, but more broadly with examples of dance research from several different countries. The curated book includes the voices of both seasoned professionals and newer scholars in the field, with examples of dance research from a number of different countries. The contributions represent several countries including Korea, South Africa, United States of America, Jamaica, India, United Kingdom, Brazil, and Slovenia, underscore the global relevance and significance of research in dance education.

This book is divided into 5 parts. The first part focuses on dance education research and methodologies and is divided into three sections. With an introduction by Jill Green, the chapters that follow provide an overview of research types including the more traditional, qualitative, quantitative and mixed, and other methods such as portraiture and a/r/tography.



Part II, introduced by Lynnette Young Overby, includes examples of dance education research that incorporate qualitative, quantitative, and/or mixed methods. Three sections covering dance education research applications in the areas of history and culture, dance teaching and choreography, and community based research follow.



Part III of the Handbook of Dance Education Research provides insight into dance education that takes place in several countries. This part is introduced by Peter Cook, Associate Deputy Chancellor, Southern Cross University, Australia. The collection of chapters within this part of the Handbook of Dance Education Research provides snapshots of research practices from contrasting international areas, and with a variety of approaches and paradigms.



The final Part IV includes chapters focused on Social Justice dance education practice and research. This part is introduced by Alfdaniel Mivule Basibye Mabingo, Makerere University, Uganda. These chapters push the boundaries of dance education research to promote meaning and social change. They provide substantive examples of the impact dance education research can have in response to social and cultural issues.



This book will be a key resource for university students, professors, practitioners and policy makers in organizations and in school systems. It will inspire future dance education researchers to conduct research that is collaborative, impactful, inclusive and diverse– research that will solidify the place of dance as an integral part of each person’s education.

A collection of performance texts ranging from orthodox plays to group-devised texts. The book traces from most recent to earliest Schechner's work as a "writer" and a "wrighter" -- the author of plays and the conceptualizer and leader of teams of artists. The book includes several never before published early texts as well as updated versions of well-known productions such as "Dionysus in 69," "YokastaS," "Makbeth," and "Imagining O." The earliest texts are from the 1950s the most recent from 2014.

This book brings together for the first time Richard’s original plays and adaptations: YokastaS Redux, Dionysus 69, Commune, Oresteia, Prometheus Project, Makbeth, Richard’s Leer, Imagining O, Faust/gastronome, Blessing of the Fleet, Briseis and the Sergeant, Lot's Daughters, and The Last Day of FK. The scripts engage with perennial canonic themes, such as Oedipus and Faust, and topical issues of our times. They embody Richard’s world-famous performance approach. The introduction sets the scripts in intellectual and production context. The book complements Schechner’s other works, Performance Studies (now in its 3rd ed.), Performance Theory, The Grotowski Sourcebook, The Future of Ritual, and his new A New Third World of Performance.

BODIES IN FLIGHT make performance where flesh utters and words move, challenging and re-energizing the relationship between audiences and performers, and audiences and place.



Emerging from rigorous interdisciplinary and collaborative methods, often with new technologies in cutting-edge venues, we insist on the buzz of ideas, on philosophy and poetry, using words and images, movement and stillness, voices and bodies, through which they aim to move audiences emotionally and spiritually. Organized in a highly visual design, this volume is both a history and a workbook with selections of scripts and archival material from 30 years of making devised theatre and performance in the UK and internationally, plus texts by collaborators, arts professionals and scholars exploring the company’s collaborative working method, contextualizing it in the wider performance ecology and culture.



Intended as an inspiration to emerging artists, the volume covers key questions for any maker of contemporary performance: the relationship of choreography and spoken word, the use of new technologies and multi-media, the role of original music and soundscapes, the differences between work presented in a theatre or gallery or sited in non-theatrical places, the persistence of theatre as an art-form in an increasingly digital culture.

In this interview with art historian Maria Elena Buszek, American photographer Kate Simon (b. 1953) discusses her work as a photojournalist documenting the nascent punk and reggae scenes of the 1970s. Simon shares the ‘punky-reggae’, art and literary connections in her long and storied career, and her perspectives on the gender politics that met the growing numbers of women photojournalists and writers who came out of the 1970s music scene.

In this interview with Los Angeles performance artist Johanna Went, the artist talks with art historian Maria Elena Buszek about her path towards both performance art and the punk scene in the 1970s. They discuss the genesis of Went’s often gruesome, largely improvisational performances and lovingly crafted, sculptural costumes that were exhibited in the 2020 exhibition Passion Container at LA gallery The Box, feminist politics and what Went calls the ‘bloodlines’ of the LA punk scene.

This study explored the impact of a fifteen-week course in modern band practice on developing music teachers’ identities as creative music-makers. Modern band is a growing area of the research literature in music education. Composition, improvisation and popular music-making experiences constitute current band activity. The creative identity measure (CIM-measure) evaluates self-perceptions of abilities in these areas. The measure has been used and adopted in various research studies over the past decade. For this study, twelve pre-service music teachers enrolled in the course ‘Creative Performance Chamber Ensemble I’ at School of Music, University of South Florida, USA were assessed on their perceptions of their abilities associated with various creative musical activities. The CIM-in music was used as a pre-and post-assessment of modern band experiences at the beginning and the end of the fifteen-week class. There were significant positive changes between the pre- and post-assessments. Open-ended response items were also collected. Findings suggest that pre-service music teachers increased their confidence levels associated with their abilities to compose, improvise, be involved in ‘new’ music ensembles, and be involved with popular music ensembles as a result of taking this course. They are more likely to plan on teaching their students to do these musical activities in the future as a result of these experiences.

The goal of this research is to determine what activities young actors in the punk scene view as forms of politicality that they either practise themselves or see among other actors in the punk scene in Zagreb. This research focuses on young people because of the marginalized position older people have put them in. Likewise, the attitudes of young people towards politics are sometimes seen as ‘apolitical’, describing mistrust towards politicians or dislike of political parties. Regardless of these (un)conscious barriers that are often placed before young people, we can see their different reactions: from accepting the political disinterest others expect of them to resisting their imposed marginal social status. Accordingly, we were interested in often unrecognized, alternative forms of politicality among young people. We focus on punk as an example of a subculture that revives political activity among young people. Analysing the collected data, we obtained descriptions of 39 practices, activities and political ideas – organized into seven categories – through which participants described their politicality or the politicality of that of other actors in the punk scene in Zagreb. This article will introduce the results of ethnographic research, during which 28 interviews were conducted with participants between 20 and 36 years of age. The field part of this research was conducted in fifteen months.

Review of: If Colors Could Be Heard: Narratives About Racial Identity in Music Education, C. Cayari, J. D. Thompson and R. S. Rajan (eds) (2025)

Bristol: Intellect, 288 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-83595-167-5, h/bk, $124.95

This article addresses the concept of performance opera by artist duo VestAndPage, aiming to investigate how the corporeal and sonic can generate space–time alternatives through unconventional modes of performance-making. They describe performance operas as collaborative, site-specific works that are unrepeatable. To produce them, VestAndPage organized experiential co-creation artist-in-residences to encourage community-building among the performers they invite to collaborate on an opera. During production, body-based performance actions and the sounds of various elements (from everyday noises to sophisticated electronic experimentation) allow aesthetic pitfalls and ruptures to emerge, shaping a performance opera’s immediate experience and contributing to reshaping what might otherwise be considered ‘normal’ reality.

The goal of this article is to provide an account of the difficulty, in the present, of reconstructing a punk event that took place 40 years ago. I will use this undertaking as the basis for reflecting on the larger conceptual stakes (ideas and concepts) that are illustrated by this specific event from the past, the Brockwell Park Festival, London. I played bass at this event in Strawberry Switchblade, a female-led cult post-punk band. A cold case is used here as a metaphor for this reconstruction; the larger conceptual stakes are the ‘mystery’ to be investigated. This in turn enables me to frame my account of that day from the past in terms of how it functions within punk and post-punk culture and scholarship. There was a lot of fun, energy and some ‘aggro’ (i.e. violent or threatening behaviour) at this event. I present an autoethnography, reviews from the time and various first-hand accounts of this particularly tense punk and post-punk event, i.e. my cold case, so that I can examine the significance and the importance of returning to the past and unpicking the memories and myths of subcultural experience. This is followed by a discussion of the larger conceptual stakes: memory, subcultural memory and myth; ‘tribes’; discomfort and uncertainty.

Contextualizing the process behind the making of Jess Dobkin's Wetrospective as a dramaturgy of “curating in the continuous present,” exhibition curator Emelie Chhangur discusses the innovations and stagings of this project as both a performative exhibition and an exhibition that performed the work of the artist. The paper includes curatorial texts, an exhibition walkthrough and a personal account of the almost 4 year journey, what the writer also refers as a durational 1:1 performance with the artist, Jess Dobkin.

In contributing to the audio descriptions for Jess Dobkin's Wetrospective, I approached each artwork with a deep sense of intimacy and creative exploration. Rather than adhering strictly to visual accuracy, I chose to interpret and describe the pieces through the impressions they left on me—emphasizing mood, emotion, and the sensory experience of encountering the works. Inspired by creative writing and poetic practices, this experimental approach allowed me to provide affect-based, intuitive narrations that invite listeners to engage with the artwork on a deeper, more personal level.

This essay examines a drawing by performance artist Jess Dobkin. Created for her 2021 Wetrospective at the Art Gallery of York University, the drawing depicts a female-body-shaped Venn Diagram that contains all the names of the people, artists, places, and groups that Jess has collaborated with in her art practice since 1991. The drawing has a notable crossover of two circles that form a bright pink, pointy-ended oval. This is the vaginal portal of the “Venn woman” at the center of the drawing. Through an analysis of this drawing, this essay considers the nature of collaboration and community-building in both art-making practices, and in life.

The entrance lobby of Jess Dobkin's Wetrospective is riddled with clues to the magical and performative world on the other side. This essay discusses these clues in an attempt to exploring the hospitality and generosity of the artist's practice.

Ah, the pink reminds me of my first favourite colour. Soft and bright as I got excited to meet Jess, an extraterrestrial from the space. Shiny suit as the whimsical energy radiated from the alien. We made a deal, we are going to have a fun party in the archive room with floating objects.

This chapter reflects on the author's relationship to Jess Dobkin and Jess Dobkin's work

In ‘How Many Performance Artists Does It Take to Change a Light Bulb (for Martha Wilson),’ Jess Dobkin refuses the linearity prescribed by straight heteronormative time and instead leans into a collectively constructed archive of a past and future in the making, inviting us as an audience, as participants, as time keepers to collaborate in a story that is multidirectional and multiple. As the durational performance unfolds, time stands still, never stops, changes pace, and always comes back to itself, never quite ending as it takes and changes shape through its archive. This chapter considers how the queer temporal logic of How Many Performance Artists actively disrupts the compartmentalizing of past, present, and future, layering subjective truths upon themselves, always in a state of shuffle.

Music In Eight Parts is a text piece that accompanies and outlines the sound installation by Zealley for Jess Dobkin's Wetrospective. Using documentary sounds from Dobkin's performance works and musics that echo Dobkin's past and present-future.

This essay discusses the archival boxes in Jess Dobkin's Wetrospective as a version of what Cvetkovich calls “an archive of feelings” and explores the magic powers of the material artifact and its storage systems. The contribution also includes a transcription of a conversation between Cvetkovich and Dobkin about the relation between the magic boxes and healing from trauma.

This chapter reflects on Jess Dobkin's Wetrospective through an examination of the archive as lived, embodied, and relational. Grounded in my friendship with Jess and our experiences in co-creating and performing archives, I attend to the archival trace as both a methodology and a materiality of sorts, a means of honoring queerness and other excesses not contained within traditional archives.

Taking as its starting point the first-ever retrospective exhibition (2021) of performance art icon Jess Dobkin, the book reflects on the internationally acclaimed artist’s playful and provocative practice as performer, activist, curator, and community leader. At the same time, it grapples with a question that is vital for art and performance studies: How do archives perform?



More than a discrete showing of a single artist’s work, the exhibition, including its new staging in book form, is a large-scale research experiment in performance curation, investigating what it might mean for art institutions to take seriously the embodied and communal nature of performance art in their practices of archiving and museological display.



In Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective, a cast of renowned international performance theorists and artists dive into this exploration alongside Dobkin, curator Emelie Chhangur, and performance theorist and dramaturg Laura Levin. These contributions appear alongside a riot of full colour photographs, providing access to Dobkin’s celebrated artistic productions from the last 30 years.

This chapter is a conversation between Annie Sprinkle, Beth Stephens, and Marisa Carnesky. They reflect on the relationship between the show, activism, and ritual. They also imagine Sprinkle and Stephens' ecosexual ritual in a war-torn landscape if given the possibility. They introduce the idea of earth as a genderqueer Showwoman.

The Department of Feminist Conversations is a collective exploring feminist modes of gathering and exchange. In this chapter we approach Marissa Carnesky's ‘Live Archive’ as a creative inspiration for writing about the politics of memory, loss, identity, migration, gender, and belonging.

This chapter is about Marisa Carnesky's performance Penny Slot Somnambulist (2000–03). It was selected by Ron Athey and Vaginal Davis for their co-curation of the first UK Visions of Excess festival (2003). In this chapter, a comparison is made between Carnesky's performance and ORLAN's Le Baiser de L'Artiste (The Kiss of the Artist, 1977). Penny Slot Somnambulist binds the histories of fairground and performance art together to invite the audience to interact with the art.

This chapter is a conversation between Tai Shani, Geneva Foster Gluck, and Marisa Carnesky. They discuss their creative process and their artistic visions. They talk about rituals, political work, and how their heritage influences their art. They also reflect on being showwomen and the complex politics of showwomanry.

This chapter positions Carnesky's performances to date, as she suggests, as ‘work’ at the intersection of aesthetic show-making and commercial show-business, in order to explore what it is that she is attempting to present and make present, how she does so, and why it matters. According to Carnesky, they ‘are always in the same vein but with a different emphasis: cultural identity as it lives in the unconscious, folklore, ritual, sexual performance and the politics that surround women's bodies as entertainment’ (Carnesky 2012). Similarly, she has been consistently fascinated by a particular aspect of ‘Showwomanry’: that which uses ‘the abject, the taboo and the forbidden to create spectacle and magic’ (Carnesky 2015).

In 2020, a group of emerging artists joined Carnesky's Radical Cabaret School; it was the peak of lockdown, when Covid had dominated our lives. Similar to processes and principles Carnesky employs in her own performance work, this course encouraged artists to create and develop work that sought to engage with contemporary politics whilst finding power in ones' identity. In particular, Carnesky's teachings and methodology of ‘finding power in pathos’ became a tool for understanding performance's impact and how its radical nature can foster shared identification, political transformation and community.

Weird women, this chapter proposes, are artists who challenge boundaries and are uneasy within neat, already existing categories of art, sex, identity, and desire. Their existence is emphatic; yet the categories we already have cannot account for the complexity of who they are. Weird women seem to suggest that a new language is necessary, one that will point towards our unnamed desires, blind spots, and unknowns. The weird not only points to something we do not yet have the language for but also demands a reconsideration of its articulation. The weird could be thought of as another category, but more accurately as a fascination with the uncategorized.

This chapter charts Carnesky's key ‘performance-rituals of passage’ through Jewess Tattooess (1998-2001), Carnesky's Ghost Train (2004; 2008-2011) to Dr. Carnesky's Incredible Bleeding Woman (2017-2018). The visceral aesthetics of Carnesky's showwomanry - magic, marvels, illusion, horror, and the persistent presence of blood – pervade Dr. Carnesky's Incredible Bleeding Woman to offer alternative visions of womanhood. Through sensational performance rituals, Carnesky's ensemble demonstrates a revolutionary position to ideology, power and politics. In examining this work, the chapter considers how Carnesky's showwomen are vital to a broader feminist performance practice; one that celebrates the dawning of a new (r)age of the menopausal woman, in bloody spectacular ways.

This chapter is a reflection of Empress Stah's career so far. She discusses meeting Marisa Carnesky and how this further informed her art. She reflects back on her youth in a rural town and how she never fit the stereotype of what aerial artists looked or acted like. The chapter continues with a callback to one of her shows called Empress Stah in Space for which she did a lot of research into spacecraft and ended up with a laser beam coming from between her buttocks.

This chapter is a conversation between Rhyannon Styles, Livia Kojo Alour, Veronica Thompson, and Marisa Carnesky where Carnesky asks the other artists about their experience working on the show Dr Carnesky's Incredible Bleeding Women. They discuss their involvement, what it means to be a showwoman means and navigating the life of showwomanry.

In this chapter, Marawa reflects on her career, her meeting with Marisa Carnesky and how this changed her as an artist and person. Carnesky showed her it is possible to be an artist as well as a businesswoman. They have a shared interest in mysterious showwomen of the past and together they studied artists like Koringa. In her reflection, Marawa also discusses her performances as Josephine Baker among other milestones, such as being inducted into the Guinness World Record Hall of Fame 2022.

Explores ‘showwomanry’ tracing a trajectory of incredible, weird women at work: women who were stone eaters, fire walkers, women who hypnotized alligators, or presented crucifixion shows; women in entertainment who worked for themselves; women that were often referred to as showgirls, despite their extraordinary skill and artistry.

Carnesky continues an important lineage of performing women with bombastic theatrical flair and an extraordinary skill that ‘do not work for the management or the man. Showwomen work for themselves and other people work for them”. Carnesky has been a central figure in performance and live art during the last thirty years; her practice as a showwoman promotes alternative visions of matriarchal entertainment utopias and a new relationship to women’s position to power and politics.

The term showwoman introduces a new identity, a new kind of performer who does not control or exploit others, but opens up a possibility for collaboration that enables ‘shared experiences of visceral euphoria, applause, loss, shape, abjection, hustle and struggle, marginalisation and the fight against patriarchal injustices’ (Carnesky,

2019, 53). The book will use Carnesky’s work to showcase women working in radical ways, treading the margins of cabaret and live art, disrupting normative ideologies through the spectacular and opening new lines of feminist enquiry through weirdness, absurdity, provocation in live art and popular culture.