Performing Care

This edited collection brings together essays presenting an interdisciplinary dialogue between theatre and performance and the fields of care ethics, care studies, health and social care.

The book advances our understanding of performance as a mode of care, challenging existing debates in this area by re-thinking the caring encounter as a performed, embodied experience and interrogating the boundaries between care practice and performance. Through an examination of a wide range of different care performances drawn from interdisciplinary and international settings, the book interrogates how performance might be understood as caring or uncaring, careless or careful, and correlatively how care can be conceptualised as artful, aesthetic, authentic or even ‘fake’ and ‘staged’.

‘This book is an invaluable addition to the relevance of our modality and contains many crossovers with which our practice is affiliated… The global COVID-19 pandemic witnessed the power that the arts hold in keeping people creative, playful and, most importantly, connected. Care is ultimately about our relationship with others. This book is tantamount for exploring how and why it is so important to enmesh the arts within the caring professions.’ – Dramatherapy

Author Biography

Amanda Stuart Fisher is Reader in Contemporary Theatre and Performance at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

James Thompson is Professor of Applied Theatre at the University of Manchester.