Performance and the Performing Arts

Rogers, A; Veal, C

doi:10.4324/9780429265853-30

Performance and the Performing Arts

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Charlotte Veal ORCiD

Downloads

Accepted version [.pdf]

Licence

This is the authors' accepted manuscript of a book chapter that has been published in its final definitive form by Routledge, 2024.

For re-use rights please refer to the publisher's terms and conditions.

Abstract

Geographers’ interest in performance is both theoretical and empirical. Theoretically, ideas of performance challenge approaches that try to quantitatively capture a supposedly 'objective world' or that attempt to explain social and cultural phenomena through underlying structures or relations. In contrast, performance helps us to think about geographical worlds in the making - worlds that are processual and always changing, being made and remade through bodily practices. Empirically, it moves us away from forms of knowledge that foreground numerics and statistics to instead make space for other ways of knowing, doing and being. This has value for opening geographers up to alternative narratives and scales of thinking, and for engaging with multi-sensual, affective and embodied realms. These theoretical and empirical transformations have informed a growing interest in performing arts-led methods (including dance, theatre and sound), enlivening geographers' research toolkits (see McCormack 2014; Raynor 2019; Sachs Olsen and Hawkins 2016; Veal 2016).