Performing Care: New Perspectives on Socially Engaged Performance

This edited collection brings together essays presenting an interdisciplinary dialogue between theatre and performance and the fields of care ethics, care studies, health and social care. Advancing our understanding of performance as a mode of care, this book challenges us to rethink the caring encounter as a performed, embodied experience and interrogate the boundaries between care practice and performance. Through an examination of a wide range of different care performances drawn from international settings, the book interrogates how performance might be understood as caring or uncaring, careless or careful, and correlatively how care can be conceptualised as artful, aesthetic, authentic or even 'fake' and 'staged'.Drawing on interdisciplinary debates and discussion, the contributors consider how the field of performance, the aesthetic and ethico-political structures might be challenged by an examination of inter-human care. By placing socially-engaged performance in dialogue with theories and practices of care, the contributors not only consider how performance operates as a mode of caring for others, but how debates between the theory and practice of care and performance making might foster a greater understanding of how the caring encounter is embodied and experienced.