Fluid stages, morphing theatre spaces, ambulant spectators, and occasionally disappearing performers: these are some of the key ingredients of nomadic theatre. They are also theatre's response to life in the 21st century, which is increasingly marked by the mobility of people, information, technologies and services. While examining how contemporary theatre exposes and queries this mobile turn in society, Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink introduces the concept of nomadic theatre as a vital tool for analyzing how movement and mobility affect and implicate the theatre, how this makes way for local operations and lived spaces, and how physical movements are stepping stones for theorizing mobility at large. This book focuses on ambulatory performances and performative installations, asking how they stage movement and in turn mobilize the stage. By analyzing the work of leading European artists such as Rimini Protokoll, Dries Verhoeven, Ontroerend Goed, and Signa, Nomadic Theatre demonstrates that mobile performances radically rethink the conditions of the stage and alter our understanding of spectatorship. Nomadic Theatre instigates connections across disciplinary fields and feeds dramaturgical analysis with insights derived from media theory, urban philosophy, cartography, architecture, and game studies. It illustrates how theatre, as a material form of thought, creatively and critically engages with mobile existence both on the stage and in society.

This study concerns performances that attempt to (physically) mobilise the spectator and rethink the conditions of the stage. Spectators are engaged in promenade performances or walking theatre, for instance, or they traverse the city by bike; they are driven around in wheelchairs or drift across labyrinthine performance installations. Alongside the mobility of the spectator, performers forsake the usual centre-stage position and turn into guides, tour-operators, or voices on an audio-tape. Contrary to the usual conflation with a theatre building, theatre spaces emerge in and as the process of performance, and as temporary situations. This study investigates how ambulatory performances and performative installations stage such movements and in turn mobilise the stage. This leads to enquiring into why some theatre practitioners prefer these mobile forms of theatre making, how these forms address and position the spectators in performance, how mobility is staged and effects the stage, and subsequently, how such movements best can be described.

Thinking Through Theatre and Performance presents a bold and innovative approach to the study of theatre and performance. Instead of topics, genres, histories or theories, the book starts with the questions that theatre and performance are uniquely capable of asking: How does theatre function as a place for seeing and hearing? How do not only bodies and voices but also objects and media perform? How do memories, emotions and ideas continue to do their work when the performance is over? And how can theatre and performance intervene in social, political and environmental structures and frameworks? Written by leading international scholars, each chapter of this volume is built around a key performance example, and detailed discussions introduce the methodologies and theories that help us understand how these performances are practices of enquiry into the world. Thinking through Theatre and Performance is essential for those involved in making, enjoying, critiquing and studying theatre, and will appeal to anyone who is interested in the questions that theatre and performance ask of themselves and of us.

Nan has decided to teach her abusive husband Kyle a lesson. With the help of her friend Simon (acting as her emotional -- and actual -- cheerleader) and a stripper named Sweetheart, she tapes Kyle to a chair and forces him to watch as they reenacts scenes from their painful past. In the piece de resistance, they plan to cover the room in meat and honey so Kyle will be mauled by a bear. Through this night of emotional trials and ridiculous theatrics, Nan and Kyle are both freed from their past in this smart, dark revenge comedy.