Description:
Fluid stages, morphing theatre spaces, ambulant spectators, and occasionally disappearing performers: these are some of the key ingredients of nomadic theatre. They are also theatre's response to life in the 21st century, which is increasingly marked by the mobility of people, information, technologies and services. While examining how contemporary theatre exposes and queries this mobile turn in society, Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink introduces the concept of nomadic theatre as a vital tool for analyzing how movement and mobility affect and implicate the theatre, how this makes way for local operations and lived spaces, and how physical movements are stepping stones for theorizing mobility at large.
This book focuses on ambulatory performances and performative installations, asking how they stage movement and in turn mobilize the stage. By analyzing the work of leading European artists such as Rimini Protokoll, Dries Verhoeven, Ontroerend Goed, and Signa, Nomadic Theatre demonstrates that mobile performances radically rethink the conditions of the stage and alter our understanding of spectatorship. Nomadic Theatre instigates connections across disciplinary fields and feeds dramaturgical analysis with insights derived from media theory, urban philosophy, cartography, architecture, and game studies. It illustrates how theatre, as a material form of thought, creatively and critically engages with mobile existence both on the stage and in society.Brief description: Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink is a Lecturer and Researcher in Theatre Studies at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. Her work has been published in Performance Research and in Mapping Intermediality in Performance (ed. Bay-Cheng et al, 2010) and in Contemporary Theatre Review.
Review Quotes:
"Sets up materials, indicates directions, and outlines what [Groot Nibbelink] describes as a conceptual 'toolbox' for important, necessary further thinking about (especially Northern) dramaturgies in the global present." --Theatre Research International
"Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink argues in her brilliant book Nomadic Theatre: Mobilizing Theory and Practice on the European Stage not only that the spectator becomes mobile, but that the theatre space itself is set in motion by nomadism ... I find the book's concepts and questions eerily relevant to a world at near standstill, caught off guard by the pandemic ... They also inspire (albeit unintentionally) the question of how the conceptual and practical parameters of nomadic theatre could be extended to conditions of socially distanced performance." --Theatre Journal