Description: "How do contemporary theatre and performance appear to be possessed by the queer past? This book explores how the queer past is invoked via strategies of channeling and haunting, working through and working out, recollection and replay, commodification and reproduction, occupation and commemoration, intermedial recontextualization and dissemination. It focuses on an eclectic range of case studies including Artangel, Dickie Beau, Jeremy O. Harris, Karen Finley, Milo Rau, Rachel Mars, Split Britches and Travis Alabanza, and practices that encompass digital theatre, experimental performance, installation, live art and site-specific interventions"--
Brief description: Fintan Walsh is Professor of Performing Arts and Humanities and Director of Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre at Birkbeck, University of London, UK. His recent books include the collection Theatres of Contagion: Transmitting Early Modern to Contemporary Performance (Methuen Drama 2020) and the monograph Queer Performance and Contemporary Ireland (2016). He is a former editor of the Theatre Research International, and editor of the book series Contemporary Performance Texts.
Review Quotes:
"Tender and rigorous, this book invites readers to linger with difficult pasts and consider how best to grasp their hauntings, demands and manifestations in the present. In moving with, and through, the rip currents of death, love and queer inheritances, Walsh asks us to reimagine how and why we endure all that was and is yet to come. This is a book about mourning as well as holding, a simultaneous act of exhumation and a laying to rest." --anna six, author of Madness, Art, and Society: Beyond Illness
"This is an extraordinary book, in which queer theatre and performance become sites of celebration and resistance, as well as holding the potential for performers and audiences to work through painfully felt yet difficult to articulate experiences towards feelings of hope. Replete with rigorous, generous and creative readings, it is also a meditation on Walsh's own emotional engagement with queer theatre and performance, and how our cultural attachments can sustain, enliven and contain us." --Noreen Giffney, psychoanalytic psychotherapist and author of The Culture-Breast in Psychoanalysis "Lucid and engaging ... Performing the Queer Past will reward anyone interested in theatre history, performance studies, LGBTQ+ art, or contemporary culture with Walsh's sensitive, compelling readings." --Theatre Survey