Summer Contemporary Performance Reading List

Summer is a great time to catch up on reading and we love to share what we are into at the moment. Some of these books are older so you have probably read them. What books are we missing? Post them to the comments below.

Contemporary Performance Books
(Links go to Amazon. Also, check your local library too. Many of these are in circulation. If you can buy these, please do and support your local book store and more importantly, our field’s tireless writers who are putting these books out into the world!)

• Postdramatic Theatre
  (If you haven’t read…) This is a link to a free PDF.
• Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible  (Also in Representation and Authenticity in Performance Section) Great resource on performance of race and gender by a member of My Barbarian
• Reading Contemporary Performance
  Great resource for all the terms and methodologies in Contemporary Performance (this is one you can bounce around– not a cover to cover read)
• Performance: A Critical Introduction by Marvin Carlson
  Only buy the kindle version as it has been updated in 2013 – the book is from 2003
• Multimedia Performance ← Also this book has an amazing bibliography in the back.
• Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance by Chris Salter 
• Liz Lerman’s critical response process: A method for getting useful feedback on anything you make
• Postdramatic Theatre and the Political: International Perspectives on Contemporary Performance  ed. Karen Jurs-Munby

Directors Working With Actors Resources

• The Director’s Craft: A Handbook for the Theatre by Katie Mitchell
  A Director’s Guide to Stanislavsky’s Active Analysis by Maria Knebel
• A Sense of Direction by William Ball (Link to resource folder in our google drive)
  This has a really great chapter on objectives
• Backwards and Forwards: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays by David Ball
• Notes on Directing by Frank Hauser & Russel Reich
• How to Read a Play: Script Analysis for Directors
• What’s Gonna Happen by Taylor Mac
• Actor’s Thesaurus
  (A great handbook for talking about action with actors)
• The Viewpoints Book
• A Director Prepares: Seven Essays on Art and Theatre by Anne Bogart
• The Empty Space: A Book About the Theatre: Deadly, Holy, Rough, Immediate by Peter Brook
• Theater Games for Rehearsal: A Director’s Handbook by Viola Spolin
• On Directing by Harold Clurman

Representation and Authenticity in Performance

• Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible by Malik Gaines
• Decolonization is Not a Metaphor by Eve Tuck
• Ethno-Techno: Writings on Performance by Guillermo Gómez-Peña
• Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the Twenty-first Century by Nato Thompson
• Performing Worlds into Being: Native American Women’s Theater Ed. by Armstrong, Johnson and Wortman
• African American Theater: A Cultural Companion by Glenda Dickerson  
• Stages of Conflict: A Critical Anthology of Latin American Theater and Performance Ed. Diana

Engaging With The World

• Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
  A perspective on race.
• Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
  A perspective on gender.
• We Should All Be Feminists
  Yes, we really should.
• Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity
  Queerness as “not quite here but always in process, always becoming, emerging in difference”
• Education for Socially Engaged Art
  Recommended for its simple break down of the tools, concepts, and artists in the Socially Engaged Art Field
• Thinking in Systems
  A great primer for how systems (groups, institutions, theaters, corporations) work.

Professional Development (Or how to meet people, talk about your work, and remember to be an artist/human)

• Your Art Will Save Your Life
  Tips on making it though
• How to Talk to Anyone: 92 Little Tricks for Big Success in Relationships by Leil Lowndes (Very gendered but weed through it for some good insight)