Performance Practices and Process: Contemporary (Women) Practitioners

Drawing on hands-on experience from workshops and interviews, Performance Practice and Process explores the work of eight gender aware theater and performance artists and companies; Bobby Baker, Curious, SuAndi, Sarah Daniels, Split Britches, Rebecca Prichard, Vayu Naidu, and Jenny Eclair. Aston and Harris offer rare insights into the processes, as well as the practice, of these internationally renowned artists and employ an inside, practical approach to understanding their ground-breaking and politically radical theater and performance work.

ELAINE ASTON is Professor of Contemporary Performance at Lancaster University, UK where she teaches and researches feminist theatre, theory and performance, a field in which she is widely published. Her authored studies include An Introduction to Feminism and Theatre (1994); Caryl Churchill (1997/ 2001); Feminist Theatre Practice (1999) and Feminist Views on the English Stage (2003). She has co-edited four volumes of plays by women and, with Janelle Reinelt, co-edited The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights (2000). GERALDINE HARRIS is a senior lecturer in Theatre Studies at Lancaster University, where she teaches and researches on gender and identity in performance. She has just finished writing a book entitled Beyond Representation, Aesthetics and Politics in Television Drama for Manchester University Press. She has also published numerous articles and book chapters on the work of female performance practitioners and a monograph Staging Femininities (Manchester University Press, 1999). Since the 1980s she has also been closely engaged with the practice of devising and wth writing texts for performance, both with students and with professional companies such as Insomniac and Third Angel.