Performance Affects Applied Theatre and the End of Effect [Paperback]

Performance Affects explores performance projects in disaster and war zones to argue that joy, beauty and celebration should be the inspiration for the politics of community-based or participatory performance practice, seeking to realign the field of Applied Theatre away from effects towards an affective role, connected to sensations of pleasure.Contents Acknowledgments PART?I: THE END OF EFFECT Introduction: Hedonism is a Bunker Incidents of Cutting and Chopping The End of the Story? Academic Scriptwriters and Bodily Affects PART?II:?PERFORMANCE AFFECTS Performance Affects:?A Kind of Triumph The Call of Beauty: An Affective Invitation About Face: Disturbing the Fabric of the Sensible Conclusion: Let Them Slide Endnotes Bibliography Index

'Drawing on his own workshops in Sri Lanka in 2000 and research in Rwandan prisons, Thompson builds a moving and often disturbing picture of how theatre can be used for political ends' - What's On Stage.com

'Performance Affects, focusing on the aesthetics and politics of performance in sites of war, disaster, and crisis, will be of immediate interest to academics writing and working in and around those settings and in the applied theatre field. The book provides a rich, complex, and theoretically aligned set of ideas and contributions to discourses of theatre performance in political contexts.' - Sheila Preston, New Theatre Quarterly

'The strength of the study stems from the sensitive, insightful and extremely self-reflexive observations from Thompson's work as a practitioner and participant in applied theatre projects in Sri Lanka and Rwanda... His study is theoretically eclectic, and yet refreshingly non-presumptuous... Thompson makes a consistent, sincere and timely argument.' - Sruti Bala, Theatre Research International

'This book is bold, admirable, moving, lucid and persuasive, and its argument for an affective turn in the practice and scholarship of applied theatrl³-