Blue Sky Body

Blue Sky Body: Thresholds for Embodied Research is the follow-up to Ben Spatz’s 2015 book What a Body Can Do, charting a course through more than twenty years of embodied, artistic, and scholarly research.

Emerging from the confluence of theory and practice, this book combines full-length critical essays with a kaleidoscopic selection of fragments from journal entries, performance texts, and other unpublished materials to offer a series of entry points organized by seven keywords: city, song, movement, theater, sex, document, politics. Brimming with thoughtful and sometimes provocative takes on embodiment, technology, decoloniality, the university, and the politics of knowledge, the work shared here models the integration of artistic and embodied research with critical thought, opening new avenues for transformative action and experimentation.

Invaluable to scholars and practitioners working through and beyond performance, Blue Sky Body is both an unconventional introduction to embodied research and a methodological intervention at the edges of contemporary theory.

Author Biography

Ben Spatz is Senior Lecturer in Drama, Theatre, and Performance at the University of Huddersfield, UK. They are the author of What a Body Can Do: Technique as Knowledge, Practice as Research (2015), the founder and editor of the videographic Journal of Embodied Research, published by Open Library of Humanities, and an internationally recognized speaker on embodied research methods. For more information, please visit www.urbanresearchtheater.com.