Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship in a Global Age

This book takes performance studies in exciting new directions, exploring the ways in which ethics can be used to understand the complex questions facing contemporary spectators. Engaging with five key performances, the book reflects on the emotional and intellectual impacts of politically inflected performance on spectators, critics and theorists.

Joint winner of the Australasian Drama Studies Association Rob Jordan Award 2010.

'With this book, Helena Grehan makes a dynamic contribution to a new generation of scholarship that is driven by a deep sense of ethical concern and an engagement with the major human issues of our times. Her focus on theatrical renditions of difficult and urgent themes is vivid and lucid, and creates a study that will be of wide interest in all disciplines of the humanities.'

- Jane Goodall, Professor with the Writing and Society Research Group, The University of Western Sydney, Australia, and author of Stage Presence: The Actor as Mesmerist

'What Grehan is advancing here is not only a theory of spectatorship but also a methodology of spectatorship...Each chapter is richly - but never exclusively - descriptive, always carefully theorising the spectator's experiential trajectory as keyed to the micro-level of performance (set elements, costume, gesture, scenic discourse) and the meta-level of theory. For readers who might have witnessed these performances, the discussion illuminates and amplifies one's memory in ways that initiate - or re-initiate - the kind of ethical response Grehan is arguing for; for those who have not, it offers a vivid account of both content and context, the latter including both the critic's and the culture's preoccupations, investments, and limitations. Performance, Ethics, and Spectatorship in a Global Age is a work of original, generous,and - above all - responsible theatre theory.' - Una Chaudhuri, Collegiate Professor and Professor of English and Drama at New York University, Performance Paradigm

HELENA GREHAN is a Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Arts at Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia. She is the author of Mapping Cultural Identity in Contemporary Australian Performance, as well as many scholarly articles on performance, representation and interculturalism.