Performance on the Edge

This text takes the reader on a journey across geographical borders and conceptual boundaries in order to map out the new territory of contemporary theatre, dance, media arts and activism. Working across social, cultural and political fault lines, the book explores performance as both process and contact, as the commitment to political activism and the reconstruction of community, as site-specific intervention into the social and technological structures of abandonment, and as the highly charged embodiments of erotic fantasies. The book addresses the politics of community-oriented and reconstructive art-making in an era marked by the AIDS crisis, cultural and racial polarisation, warfare, separatism and xenophobia. Illustrated with work from North and Central America and eastern and western Europe, the book challenges our assumptions about the relations between media and activism, technological imperatives and social processes, and, bodily identities and virtual communities.