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.