Flesh and Text

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.