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: Anja Hartl is Assistant Professor at the Department of English at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. She is the author of Brecht and Post-1990s British Drama: Dialectical Theatre Today and editor of the Methuen Drama Student Edition of The Threepenny Opera. Her research focuses on contemporary British theatre, Victorian fiction and adaptation studies. She co-edits the Methuen Drama Agitations Series.
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