Rowman & Littlefield Publishers / Rowman & Littlefield International
Pages: 264
Trim: 6 x 9
978-1-5381-4428-2 • Hardback • July 2021 • $110.00 • (£85.00)
978-1-5381-4429-9 • Paperback • July 2021 • $40.00 • (£31.00)
978-1-5381-4430-5 • eBook • July 2021 • $38.00 • (£29.00) (coming soon)
Rajni Shah (they/them) is an artist whose practice is focused on listening and gathering as creative and political acts. Key projects—always created alongside and in collaboration with others—include hold each as we fall (1999), The Awkward Position (2003-2004), Mr Quiver (2005-2008), small gifts (2006-2008), Dinner with America (2007-2009), Glorious (2010-2012), Experiments in Listening (2014-2015), Lying Fallow (2014-2015), Song (2016), I don’t know how (to decolonize myself) (2018), Feminist Killjoys Reading Group (2016-2020) and Listening Tables (2019-2020). Archive of works: www.rajnishah.com
They completed a PhD at Lancaster University, which explored the value of listening in theatre and performance.
An Introduction
0.1. Influences
0.2. Contexts and key terms
0.3. How to read this book
Chapter One: Listening
Prelude
1.1. Root structures
1.2. Constructing listening
1.3. Accommodating otherness
Chapter Two: Audience
Prelude
2.1. Doing nothing
2.2. Performing silence
2.3. The choreography of attention
Chapter Three: Gathering
Prelude
3.1. Theatre without a show
3.2. Resisting visibility
3.3. Failing to declare oneself
Chapter Four: Invitation
Prelude
4.1. How we arrive
4.2. The invitational frame
4.3. An appropriate response
Chapter Five: Encounter
Prelude
5.1. Experiments in Listening
5.2. Listening to form
5.3. Being in audience to listening
5.4. Passing as friends
Conclusion
Appendix 1: Lying Fallow
Appendix 2: Experiments in Listening
Bibliography
Index
Experiments in Listening is a critical, caring, poetic and generous gift to scholars invested in epistemic undoings of Euro-colonial conceptualisations of ‘theatre’ and ‘performance’. In this beautifully written book, Shah offers a philosophical recalibration of our fields by enabling readers to enter a mode of listening – an attentiveness to words, worlds and actions – through a ‘commitment to not-knowing’. By compellingly centring hitherto marginalised voices, perspectives and practices, the book demands a recognition of performance-making as a process through which iterative, non-linear and embodied knowledge-systems live and breathe.
— Royona Mitra, reader in dance and performance cultures, Brunel University London