Ecologies of Community in Performance: Rewilding the Arts

In their previous book, Economies of Collaboration in Performance, Savage and Symonds explored the economy as a metaphor for understanding collaborative practices in the arts. This book, Ecologies of Community in Performance, continues to explore arts practices, focusing on communities and turning to the language of ecology to understand the complexities and working dynamics of arts communities. The book provides a thoughtful analysis of how communities work as ecologies, offering case studies of community processes by way of illustrating the main discussion. In doing so it reveals how the triangulation of ecology, community, and performance allows for a deeper understanding of dynamic relations in the arts, enabling scholars, practitioners and policy-makers to better conceptualise ecological thinking in relation to 21^st century arts practices.

Karen Savage is Professor of Creative and Collaborative Arts at the University of Lincoln, UK. She is a Climate Reality Project Leader. Publications include Postdigital Performances of Care: Technology and Pandemic (2023), ’TechNO-fixes?: Performances within Ecological Emergencies＂(2022), and Avatars, Activism and Postdigital Performance: Precarious Intermedial Identities (2021), all with Liam Jarvis; and Economies of Collaboration in Performance: More than the Sum of the Parts (2018), with Dominic Symonds.

Dominic Symonds is Professor of Musical Theatre at the University of Lincoln, UK. He was a founding editor of Studies in Musical Theatre, and his publications include We’ll Have Manhattan: The Early Work of Rodgers and Hart (2015), Broadway Rhythm: Imaging the City in Song (2017), and, with Karen Savage, Economies of Collaboration in Performance: More than the Sum of the Parts (2018).