The Routledge Performance Archive is a developing resource produced in partnership with Digital Theatre, providing unique access to an unprecedented range of audio-visual material from past and present practitioners of performance. This ground-breaking and constantly growing online collection delivers essential resources direct to the classroom, lecture theatre and library. The video material spans more than fifty years of documented work direct from renowned practitioners and specialists, and ranges across the entire spectrum of theatre topics.
Practitioners
Browse the Archive through our list of practitioners, ranging from legendary figures to contemporary pioneers. Trace connections between individuals and entire movements, via specially commissioned biographies and peer-reviewed cross-referencing. All biographical information and video descriptions come direct from the practitioners themselves, unless otherwise stated.
Subjects
Explore content thematically through our carefully structured taxonomy, and reflect on fascinating new relationships between concept and content. All entries have been taken from Paul Allain’s and Jen Harvie’s Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance (Routledge: London, 2006), and are edited by Maggie B. Gale, unless otherwise indicated.
Body Art
Body art is radical live art that uses the artist’s own body to comment visually, sensually and often viscerally on identity and to enact the body’s social meanings and expressive possibilities.
Staniewski, Wlodzimierz, and Gardzienice
The Centre for Theatre Practices ‘Gardzienice’ was founded in 1977 in south-east Poland, taking its name from the tiny village where the company was, and still is, based.
Gómez-Peña, Guillermo and La Pocha Nostra
Guillermo Gómez-Peña is a performance artist, writer, activist, radical pedagogue and director of performance troupe La Pocha Nostra. His work has been presented internationally at over 800 venues.
Zinder, David
David Zinder was born in Jerusalem, and completed his Ph.D. at the University of California. He is a founding member of the Michael Chekhov Association and member of the Michael Chekhov Europe board.
Postmodernism & Performance
Challenging ideas of coherent identity, universal value and truth as not only impossible but also duplicitous, postmodernism explores how meaning is always multiple and contingent on contexts.
Droznin, Andrei
Andrei Droznin was born in 1938 in Lvov. He is a movement specialist who teaches mainly at the Shchukin Academy, Moscow, where he is Head of the Stage Movement Department.
Molik, Zygmunt
Zygmunt Molik (1930–2010) was for twenty-five years an actor of Jerzy Grotowski’s Teatr Laboratorium. He was a co-founder and leading actor in Grotowski’s company, appearing in all its productions.
Kwei-Armah, Kwame
Kwame Kwei-Armah was born in London in 1967 as Ian Roberts. Aged 19 he changed his name after tracing his family history back to Ghana via the slave trade.
Environmental Theatre
Environmental theatre aims explicitly to alter the conventional spatial practices of performance and to enhance the performance’s engagement with its space and site of production.
Alfreds, Mike
Mike Alfreds has run theatre companies in the US, Israel and the UK as well as freelancing as a theatre director and teacher around the world.
Animals
The behaviour of animals on stage is unpredictable and difficult to control. Yet animals have often been used by groups and artists, exploiting these very qualities of surprise and unpredictability.
Seyferth, Katharina
Katharina Seyferth worked with Grotowski during the “Paratheatre” and “Theatre of Sources” periods. She is Director of the International Centre for Theatrical Research and Training of Las Téoulères.
Text Analysis
The detail contained in the black-and-white print requires a certain forensic analysis to transform the page into flesh-and-blood character.
