This book engages with the relationship between ruins, dilapidation, and abandonment and cultural events performed within such spaces. Following the authors fieldwork in the UK, Bosnia Herzegovina, Poland, Germany, Greece, and Sicily, chapters describe, investigate, and reflect upon live performance events which have taken place in sites of decay and abandonment. The books main focus is upon modern economic ruins and ruins of warfare. Each chapter provides several case studies based upon the authors own site visits and interviews with actors, directors, producers, curators, writers, and other artists. The book contextualises these events within the wider framework of Ruin Studies and provides brief summaries of how we might understand the ruin in terms of time, politics, culture, and atmospheres. The book is particularly preoccupied with artists reasons and motivations for placing performance events in ruined spaces and how these work dramaturgically.
1. Introduction: Ruining the Project, Subjectivities, Fields and
Methods.- 2. Ruins in Context - Context in Ruins.- 3. Performing the
Antiquary: Classical Ruins in the Greek Imaginary.- 4. Natures
Ruins.- 5. Dissonance and Contestation: Ruining Heritage and its
Alternatives.- 6. Legacies of War: Performing Balkan Ruins.- 7. Ruins of
Capital.- 8. After Communism and the Cold War: a Ruined
Inheritance.- 9. Conclusion: Ruining the Ruin or Pausing at a Partial View.-
Simon Murray teaches Contemporary Theatre and Performance at the University of Glasgow, UK. He has a deep background in Sociology and Cultural Studies and was a professional performer and theatre-maker between 1985 and 1996. Before arriving at Glasgow in 2008 he was Director of Theatre at Dartington College of Arts, UK. He has published widely on physical theatres, Jacques Lecoq, WG Sebald, collaboration, and lightness.
