Theater

'Sites of Performance: Of Time and Memory' focuses on the impact of time and memory as they intersect and constitute the varied spaces of theatre, performance and installation art.

Exploring the interfaces between healing and performance in early modern Europe, this study focuses on three physicians, the Swiss Platter brothers and their Austrian colleague Guarinonius. Providing the first English language assessment of their substantial theatrical writings, the volume contextualizes these within an overview of the three physicians' medical practice, careers and publications, and of the role of performance in the early modern healthcare economy. Substantial translations of key passages from these physicians' writings, are considered in the light of a wide selection of early modern images and texts relating to healers and performers, many previously disregarded in this context. This allows the volume to locate these theatrical writings in their rightful place in the mainstream of medical and theatre history, thus broadening our knowledge of the interface between healing and performance.

This collection charts three projects by performance-makers who generate autobiographical writing by taking walks. It includes performance texts and photographs, as well as essays by the artists that discuss processes of development, writing and performance.The Crab Walks and Crab Steps Aside are performances made by Phil Smith based on an initial exploratory walking of an area of South Devon where he was taken for childhood holidays and then on to Munich, Herm and San Gimignano. Both shows were accompanied by the distribution of maps seeking to provoke the audience to make their own exploratory walks. Mourning Walk is a performance that relates to a walk Carl Lavery made to mark the anniversary of his father's death. Lavery shows how a secret can be both shared and hidden through the act of communication as he explores "an ethics of autobiographical performance". In Tree, the result of a multi-disciplinary collaborative process, Dee Heddon occupies a single square foot of soil, and discovers that by standing stationary and looking closely she can travel across continents and centuries, making unexpected connections through an extroverted autobiographical practice.The work of all three artists, taken together and separately, raises important issues about memory, ritual, life writing, textuality, subjectivity, and site in performance.