A new book by John Keefe and Knut Ove Arntzen suggests a new form of dialogue between work, authors and readers, and draws out threads that extend both into the past and future.
Date: 08 January 2021
A new book from John Keefe, Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Film at London Met, explores how the retrieval, re-approaching and re-framing of material can offer pathways for new work and new thinking.
Co-written with Knut Ove Arntzen, Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Bergen, Staging and Re-cycling: Retrieving, Reflecting and Re-framing the Archive includes a collection of reprinted and first-published textual material interspersed with editorial material - reflective essays from John and Knut on these pieces from the archives and original essays from invited scholars that explore the theme of repetition and re-cycling.
The project has a number of aims: to suggest how the status of ‘new’ with regard to academic and staged dramaturgical materials may be reframed; to re-examine these through certain lenses and concepts (re-cycling; re-working; the spectator; landscape, post- and other dramaturgies); to explore the possibilities of critique offered by particular modes of juxtaposition, dialogue and dialectic; to offer further provocations to received ideas; and to retrieve and re-approach material, once published or presented, that becomes ‘lost’ in archives or on library shelves.
Written for scholars and academics, researchers, undergraduate and postgraduate students, and practitioners working in all forms for theatre and performance, Staging and Re-cycling suggests a new form of dialogue between work, authors and readers, and draws out threads that extend back into the past and potentially forward into the future.
