Rethinking Roland Barthes Through Performance

Harry Robert Wilson is an artist and researcher based in Dundee, UK. He was recently awarded the Digital Thinker in Residence award at the National Theatre of Scotland, UK (2018-19). He has a PhD from the University of Glasgow, UK, in which he explored performance and photography through his own creative practice.Will Daddario is a teacher, scholar, grief worker and itinerant philosopher who currently residesin Asheville, USA. He co-edits the Performance Philosophy book series and online journal.

Through a series of reflections from internationally renowned performance-makers and contextualising essays from leading theatre and performance scholars, this is the first book to map the influence of Roland Barthes on performance.The contributions are framed through Barthes's notion of The Neutral - the suspension of binary choice that offers a welcome antidote to the political deadlock of our present moment. They cover the breadth of Barthes's work from Mythologies (1957) to 'The Death of the Author' (1967), A Lover's Discourse (1977), Camera Lucida (1980), to the more recently available lecture courses at the Collège de France.Together, they capture and rethink a range of Barthes's preoccupations, from his early writing on myths and meaning to personal reflections on love, loss and desire, and interrogate the intersections between Barthes's work and contemporary theatre and performance.This book invites readers to approach Barthes's writing from a breadth of creative-critical perspectives, to become more aware of the importance of his late thought for thinking through a range of dramaturgical forms, and to become more familiar with the work of internationally significant performance practitioners.

List of FiguresNotes on ContributorsAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Contemporary Performance After Roland Barthes - Harry Robert WilsonPart 1 - A Dictionary of Twinklings1. 5 Theses for a Dramaturgy of Performance - Matthew Goulish and Lin Hixson2. Ceaselessly Positing and Evaporating Meaning: A Performance Score - Pablo Pakula3. Looking Through Old Photographs - Andy Field and Deborah Pearson4. Recipes / Addendums / Souvenirs - greenandowens (Katheryn Owens and Chris Green)5. Ways to Submit - Ira Brand6. All the Sense of Real: A World of Wrestling - Simon Bayly7. Practising Neutral Dramaturgy(ies) - Will Daddario and Harry Robert WilsonPart 2 - Rethinking Roland Barthes, Theatre, Performance8. We've never met but we may have fought - Simon Bayly and Ira Brand9. For the Lover(s) of Dramaturgy: on Roland Barthes' Amateur - Swen Steinhäuser10. The Disturbance of One System by Another - Claudia Kappenberg11. Baffling Dramaturgy: Between the Obvious and Obtuse - Mischa Twitchin12. Choreography, Capturing and Barthes' Notion of the Punctum - Sandra Parker13. Body and Mask: Dramaturgies of the Face in Roland Barthes - Michael Bachmann14. Tracing Barthes' Eastern Theatres: Empire of Signs and the Staging of Individual Cultural Interpretation - Pamela Genova15. Unraveling Textual Soundscapes: Reading Barthes' 'The Grain of the Voice' through Söderberg's Entangled Phrases and Linehan's Body of Work - Rosa Lambert