Performing (for) Survival

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

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2. Introduction — Performing (for) Survival: Frameworks and Mapping

   1. Introduction — Performing (for) Survival: Frameworks and Mapping

      • Patrick Duggan, Lisa Peschel

      Pages 1-13

3. Surviving War and Exile: National and Ethnic Identity in Performance

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 15-15

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   2. Surviving (with) Theatre: A History of the ELF and EPLF Cultural Troupes in the Eritrean War of Independence

      • Christine Matzke

      Pages 17-36

   3. Theatre for Survival: Art of Creation and Protection (Kubunda)

      • Ananda Breed, Alice Mukaka

      Pages 37-56

4. A Space Where Something Might Survive: Theatre in Concentration Camps

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 57-57

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   2. The Cultural Life of the Terezín Ghetto in 1960s Survivor Testimony: Theatre, Trauma and Resilience

      • Lisa Peschel

      Pages 59-77

   3. Imagining Theatre in Auschwitz: Performance, Solidarity and Survival in the Works of Charlotte Delbo

      • Amanda Stuart Fisher

      Pages 78-99

5. Tactics and Strategies: Dissent under Oppressive Regimes

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 101-101

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   2. Swazzles of Subversion: Puppets Under Dictatorship

      • Cariad Astles

      Pages 103-120

   3. Against Order(s): Dictatorship, Absurdism and the Plays of Sony Labou Tansi

      • Macelle Mahala

      Pages 121-140

   4. Surviving Censorship: El-Hakawati’s Mahjoob Mahjoob and the Struggle for the Permission to Perform

      • Samer Al-Saber

      Pages 141-159

6. Coming in from the Outside: Theatre, Community, Crisis

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 161-161

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   2. The Council Estate as Hood: SPID Theatre Company and Grass-roots Arts Practice as Cultural Politics

      • Katie Beswick

      Pages 163-184

   3. The Art of Survival: Social Circus, Youth Regeneration and Projected Community in the North East of Scotland

      • Graham Jeffery, Neill Patton, Kerrie Schaefer, Tom Wakeford

      Pages 185-200

7. Crisis and Extremity as Performance

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 201-201

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   2. The Paradox of Dis/appearance: Hunger Strike in Athens as a Performance of Survival

      • Aylwyn Walsh

      Pages 203-221

   3. ‘Dis-ease’ and the Performance of Radical Resistance in the Maze Prison

      • Patrick Duggan

      Pages 222-240

8. Coda: Picturing Charlie Hebdo

   1. Coda: Picturing Charlie Hebdo

      • Sophie Nield

      Pages 241-247

9. Back Matter

   Pages 248-251

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This volume gathers contributions from a range of international scholars and geopolitical contexts to explore why people organise themselves into performance communities in sites of crisis and how performance – social and aesthetic, sanctioned and underground – is employed as a mechanism for survival. The chapters treat a wide range of what can be considered 'survival', ranging from sheer physical survival, to the survival of a social group with its own unique culture and values, to the survival of the very possibility of agency and dissent. Performance as a form of political resistance and protest plays a large part in many of the essays, but performance does more than that: it enables societies in crisis to continue to define themselves. By maintaining identities that are based on their own chosen affiliations and not defined solely in opposition to their oppressors, individuals and groups prepare themselves for a post-crisis future by keeping alive their own notions of who they are and who they hope to be.

• the holocaust in performance
• performance and crisis
• performance and conflict
• crisis
• dictatorship
• history
• identity
• independence
• living
• performance
• play
• project
• resistance
• Scotland
• theatre

“Patrick Duggan and Lisa Peschel’s Performing (for) Survival is an important contribution to the study of performance as a mechanism for survival. Its uniqueness lies in its choice to expose the internal workings of communities and politically-organised resistance movements in times of extreme crisis.” (Effie Samara, The Kelvingrove Review, Issue 16, June, 2017) 

• University of Surrey, UK

  Patrick Duggan

• department of theatre, film and television, University of York, UK

  Lisa Peschel

Patrick Duggan is Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Surrey, UK. His publications include: Trauma-Tragedy: Symptoms of Contemporary Performance (2012); On Trauma, a special issue of the international journal Performance Research (2011); and Reverberations Across Small-Scale British Theatre: Politics, Aesthetics and Forms (2013).

Lisa Peschel is Lecturer in Theatre at the University of York, UK. Her publications include Performing Captivity, Performing Escape: Cabarets and Plays from the Terezín/Theresienstadt Ghetto (2014). She is a co-investigator on the £1.8 million AHRC-funded project Performing the Jewish Archive.

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