Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
A Theatre of Powerlessness: Acts of Knowledge and the Performance of the Many

A Theatre of Powerlessness: Acts of Knowledge and the Performance of the Many

Bleeker, Maaike
Kear, Adrian
Kaldor, Edit

Paperback

Series: Thinking Through Theatre

Theater History

PREORDER - Expected ship date November 26, 2026

ISBN10: 1350233625
ISBN13: 9781350233621
Publisher: Methuen Drama
Published: Nov 26 2026
Pages: 256
Weight: 1.00
Height: 1.00 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

Over the course of Edit Kaldor's Inventory of Powerlessness, developed and performed in four European cities (Amsterdam, Berlin, Poznan, Prague) between 2013-16, a range of situations, states and feelings - from quotidian frustrations to extremes of affliction, disadvantage and oppression - were brought into the collective setting of the theatre as spoken testimony. Meanwhile, a cumulative and archivable database or 'inventory' of powerlessness and its contemporary intersections was projected on stage, generated live by the participants at each performance. Thus, individual accounts of powerlessness were placed in relation to others, as acts of living knowledge and as claim upon the shared articulation that theatrical working together can foster.

This book, departing from but not confined to the example of Inventory, explores contemporary ways of making and performing that bring marginalised knowledges into appearance and action. The book is not only for students of theatre, performance and art, but for anyone looking to develop ways of processing their experiences of affliction, injustice and violence in a collective setting.

The book begins with an in-depth account of the Inventory of Powerlessness theatre project. Analysis of its production processes and dramaturgical strategies is set alongside the voices of several of the participants as well as other collaborators and people associated with the project, focusing on the 'acts of knowledge' that are performed as connections are made and shared - in the contingency of live performance - between diverse life-affecting experiences. A section of commissioned essays explores the knowledge-generating potential of the contemporary stage through the same optic of powerlessness and marginalised experience worked through an international range of examples.

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