Performing Stories:Narrative as Performance

By Nina Tecklenburg

Translated by William Locke Wheeler

Published by Seagull Books

ISBN: 9780857428462

Format: Paperback

Pages: 440

Publication Year: November 2021

₹799.00 $45 £34.99

Retelling performances, collecting things, reading traces, mapping memories, gaming autobiographies: in European and Anglo-American theatre since the turn of the millennium, a range of new nonliterary narrative practices such as these have taken root. Unable to be subsumed under a well-established narratological, dramatic or postdramatic perspective, they call for a reexamination of the relationship between performance and narration. Performing Stories seeks to reconceptualize narrative against the backdrop of innovative theater formats such as collective storytelling games, theater installations, extensive autobiographical performances, immersive role-playing, and audio-video walks.

Nina Tecklenburg’s focus lies on narration less as literary composition than as sensate, embodied cultural practice—a participatory and open process that fosters social relationships. She gives central importance to the forces of narration that create and undo culture and politics. A foundational new book, Performing Stories presents a groundbreaking transdisciplinary perspective through new approaches that are stimulating to performance studies, narrative and cultural theory, literary criticism, and game and video studies.