On Fire

Gough, Richard (2013) On Fire. UNSPECIFIED.

Abstract / Summary

This special issue of the journal Performance Research - On Fire is one theme within a quartet: Fire, Ice, Hunger and Thirst (Roman punishments) scheduled for 2013- 15., As General Editor of Performance Research, Gough has had overall responsibility for all 32 issues of the journal published in this REF period (the journal now comprises six issues per volume together with a an annual PR book equivalent to another three issues) and has co-edited issues annually and contributed to several. However, the issues On Fire and On Ice are solo edited and contain extended editorials together with a substantive framing introductory article. The themes are testament to a curatorial vision of the journal that pushes boundaries of the discipline and create opportunities for interdisciplinary research, thinking (and writing) outside convention, collaboration between academic enquiry and artistic research, and the generation of new knowledge., Fire is apprehended in various ways in this issue and through a variety of scholarly and artistic strategies; theatre’s enduring assignation with fire – to be reduced to ashes is recurrent through the issue and yet fire’s transformational quality is equally evoked., Gough’s own article was first presented as Guest of Honour at the international conference Transformative Power of Performance in Tangiers, Morocco, June 2012; he was subsequently invited to present an expanded version of the paper at the International Research Centre of the Frei Universitat, Berlin. Responding to the underlying theme of transformation and the Arab Spring at the Tangier conference, the paper began with an analysis and reflection of Mohamed Bouazizi’s self immolation as ignition to revolution across North Africa but through various iterations of the paper the article developed to consider fire as spectacle, terrifying and awesome, analyzing the transformative power but also the act of transmutation and the performers skill to contain fire within.

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