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.

Part of the Living and Sustaining a Creative Life series Artists as Writers joins the tradition of writing books designed or intended to inspire would-be writers to write but distinguishes itself by offering succinct first-person narratives by writers of varied genres about the day-to-day life of writing for a living.  

Artists as Writers offers accounts of the journeys that thirty three writers have taken to becoming a real writer what decisions were made which paths were taken rejected charted and why. It answers the question: What magic keeps a writer writing?

Writers from Ethiopia Guatemala Nigeria Palestine Poland and Sweden as well as several who live throughout the United States: California Colorado Georgia Louisiana Pennsylvania Texas and Washington contribute their stories.  They each provide vividly detailed accounts of the circuitous roads that each individual took to earn the title “writer.” These are richly descriptive stories from writers who write consistently relating how they came to the writing life who helped them get there and what sustains them as writers.

What can a fold be? Virtually anything and everything.

For centuries folds/folding has captured the world’s imagination. Folds readily appear in revivals of the ancient craft of origamithe simplest acts of pedestrian life in art design architecture performing arts linguistics the philosophical turnings of the mind and last but not the least in the many ingenious computations of (bio)engineering and technology. What awaits our understanding is how deeply the fold roots into embodiment into our very impulse to create.

This book is about folding as a vibrant stimulus for trans-disciplinary artistic research – whether for the performative for product realization or simply to enliven body mind and spirit. Conceived as art-made-differently Susan and Glenna share the abundance of their decade-long collaboration in developing their approach to practice research in the fold. In addition to their own insights they invite eight of their collaborators to contribute each a veteran artist. The fold is destined for artmaking – for making any art. Etching into the very fabric of embodiment the fold practice reaches outside the constraints of disciplinary silos into niche areas that embrace the unknown with all its underlying tensions and ambiguities.

Reflecting on a current and unique somatic oriented arts research practice and pedagogy with an intriguing blend of interdisciplinary concern and theory practice and includes a wide variety of practice samples and images. 

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.

This book explores consent as a foundational principle to guide practices and policies in university level performing arts education. It includes descriptions of the structural power dynamics present in educational spaces as well as tools for defusing them. It adapts the consent-forward protocols that are foundational to intimacy training in order to apply them to classroom and rehearsal spaces across performing arts disciplines.



This includes opening lines of communication actively discussing personal boundaries and modeling behavior that respects those boundaries. Additionally the book uses experiential reflections to address the real-world challenges that teachers face as they work to reshape their teaching habits and processes to include consent practices.