Site-specific performance -- acts of theatre and performative events at landscape locations, in village streets, in urban situations. In houses, chapels, barns, disused factories, railway stations; on hillsides, in forest clearings, underwater. At the scale of civil engineering; as intimate as a guided walk. Leading theatre artist and scholar Mike Pearson draws upon thirty years practical experience, proposing original approaches to the creation and study of performance outside the auditorium. In this book he suggests organizing principles, innovative strategies, methods and exercises for making theatre in a variety of contexts and locations, and through examples, case studies and projects develops distinctive theoretical insights into the relationship of site and performance, scenario and scenography. This book encourages practical initiatives in the conception, devising and staging of performances, while also recommending effective models for its critical appreciation.

The foremost philosopher of art argues for a new politics of looking. The theorists of art and film commonly depict the modern audience as aesthetically and politically passive. In response, both artists and thinkers have sought to transform the spectator into an active agent and the spectacle into a communal performance.

In this follow-up to the acclaimed The Future of the Image, Rancière takes a radically different approach to this attempted emancipation. First asking exactly what we mean by political art or the politics of art, he goes on to look at what the tradition of critical art, and the desire to insert art into life, has achieved. Has the militant critique of the consumption of images and commodities become, ironically, a sad affirmation of its omnipotence?