Performing Ruins

This book engages with the relationship between ruins, dilapidation, and abandonment and cultural events performed within such spaces. Following the author’s fieldwork in the UK, Bosnia Herzegovina, Poland, Germany, Greece, and Sicily, chapters describe, investigate, and reflect upon live performance events which have taken place in sites of decay and abandonment. The book’s main focus is upon modern economic ruins and ruins of warfare. Each chapter provides several case studies based upon the author’s own site visits and interviews with actors, directors, producers, curators, writers, and other artists. The book contextualises these events within the wider framework of Ruin Studies and provides brief summaries of how we might understand the ruin in terms of time, politics, culture, and atmospheres. The book is particularly preoccupied with artists’ reasons and motivations for placing performance events in ruined spaces and how these work dramaturgically.

Simon Murray teaches Contemporary Theatre and Performance at the University of Glasgow, UK. He has a deep background in Sociology and Cultural Studies and was a professional performer and theatre-maker between 1985 and 1996. Before arriving at Glasgow in 2008 he was Director of Theatre at Dartington College of Arts, UK. He has published widely on physical theatres, Jacques Lecoq, WG Sebald, collaboration, and lightness.