Rethinking Roland Barthes Through Performance: A Desire for Neutral Dramaturgy

Through a series of reflections from internationally renowned performance-makers and contextualising essays from leading theatre and performance scholars, this is the first book to map the influence of Roland Barthes on performance.
The contributions are framed through Barthes’s notion of The Neutral - the suspension of binary choice that offers a welcome antidote to the political deadlock of our present moment. They cover the breadth of Barthes’s work from Mythologies (1957) to ’The Death of the Author’ (1967), A Lover’s Discourse (1977), Camera Lucida (1980), to the more recently available lecture courses at the Collège de France.
Together, they capture and rethink a range of Barthes’s preoccupations, from his early writing on myths and meaning to personal reflections on love, loss and desire, and interrogate the intersections between Barthes’s work and contemporary theatre and performance.
This book invites readers to approach Barthes’s writing from a breadth of creative-critical perspectives, to become more aware of the importance of his late thought for thinking through a range of dramaturgical forms, and to become more familiar with the work of internationally significant performance practitioners.

Harry Robert Wilson is an artist and researcher based in Dundee, UK. He was recently awarded the Digital Thinker in Residence award at the National Theatre of Scotland, UK (2018-19). He has a PhD from the University of Glasgow, UK, in which he explored performance and photography through his own creative practice.

Will Daddario is a teacher, scholar, grief worker and itinerant philosopher who currently resides
in Asheville, USA. He co-edits the Performance Philosophy book series and online journal.