Thinking Through Theatre Rethinking Roland Barthes Through Performance: A Desire for Neutral Dramaturgy (Paperback)

Through a series of reflections from internationally renowned performance-makers and contextualising essays from leading theatre and performance scholars this is the first book to map the influence of Roland Barthes on performance. The contributions are framed through Barthes s notion of The Neutral - the suspension of binary choice that offers a welcome antidote to the political deadlock of our present moment. They cover the breadth of Barthes s work from Mythologies (1957) to The Death of the Author (1967) A Lover s Discourse (1977) Camera Lucida (1980) to the more recently available lecture courses at the Collège de France. Together they capture and rethink a range of Barthes s preoccupations from his early writing on myths and meaning to personal reflections on love loss and desire and interrogate the intersections between Barthes s work and contemporary theatre and performance. This book invites readers to approach Barthes s writing from a breadth of creative-critical perspectives to become more aware of the importance of his late thought for thinking through a range of dramaturgical forms and to become more familiar with the work of internationally significant performance practitioners.