Description

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Volume 2 of Identity, Culture, and the Science Performance investigates performances that illuminate the hidden recesses and inscrutable mysteries of the natural and human-made worlds.

While the first volume of this series prioritizes public, outward-facing, and activist work at the intersections of art and science, this volume considers performances of localized, concealed, inexplicable, or intimate phenomena, from the closed-door procedures of biomedical trials to the impacts of climate change.

Interdisciplinary science dialogues have long been shaped by the cultures and identity communities in which they arise and circulate. The essays, interviews, and creative works included here not only expose the historical and contemporary harms created by exclusive and prejudicial processes in art and science, they also contemplate how a diverse, inclusive body of science performers might help deepen how we "see" the unseen forces of our universe, contribute to novel scientific understandings, and disrupt disciplinary hierarchies long dominated by white men of privilege. This collection expands upon extant scholarship on theatre and science by foregrounding identity as a crucial thematic and representational element within past and present performances of science.

Featuring interviews with science-integrative artists such as Lauren Gundersen (The Half-Life of Marie Curie) and Kim TallBear (Native American DNA) as well as creative works by playwrights Chantal Bilodeau and Claudia Barnett, among others, Identity, Culture, and the Science Performance, Volume 2: From the Curious to the Quantum proposes shifts in perspective and procedure necessary to establish and maintain sustainable cultures of science and art.

About the Author

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Meredith Conti is Associate Professor of Theatre at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, USA. She is the author of Playing Sick: Performance of Illness in the Age of Victorian Medicine (2018) and the co-editor (along with Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.) of Theatre and the Macabre (2021). Vivian Appler is Associate Professor of Performance Studies at the University of Georgia, USA. She has published scholarship at the intersection of science and performance in Global Performance Studies, Theatre History Studies, and other journals. She is a former fellow of Fulbright and the Huntington Library.