Performing Animality ― Animals in Performance Practice

Performing Animality provides theoretical and creative interventions into the presence of the animal and ideas of animality in performance. Animals have always played a part in human performance practices. Maintaining a crucial role in many communities' cultural traditions, animal-human encounters have been key in the development of performance. Similarly, performance including both living animals and/or representations of animals provides the context for encounters in which issues of power, human subjectivity and otherness are explored. Crucially, however, the inclusion of animals in performance also offers an opportunity to investigate ethical and moral assumptions about human and non-human animals. This book offers a historical and theoretical exploration of animal presence in performance by looking at the concept of animality and how it has developed in theatre and performance practices from the eighteenth century to today. Furthermore, it points to shifts in political, cultural, and ethical animal-human relations emerging within the context of animality and performance.

Lourdes Orozco is Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the Workshop Theatre, University of Leeds, UK. Her research interests are in Contemporary Theatre and Performance in Europe. Her recent publications focus largely on contemporary Western European performance practice with special focus on the material conditions of performance and its relationship with politics, ethics and identity.

Her most recent research focuses on the presence of animals and children in theatre and performance contexts. She is the author of Theatre and Animals (Palgrave, 2013), and has published various articles/book chapters on the intersection between Theatre and Performance Studies and Animal Studies.

Jennifer Parker-Starbuck is a Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Roehampton, UK. She is author of Cyborg Theatre: Corporeal/Technological Intersections in Multimedia Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, Paperback 2014) and her essays on bodies, animality, and multimedia have appeared in a variety of books and journals. Her essay 'Animal Ontologies and Media Representations: Robotics, Puppets, and the Real of War Horse' (Theatre Journal, October 2013) received the ATHE 2014 Outstanding Article award. She is an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, a Contributing Editor forPAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, and an Advisory Board member of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture.