Books
What Moves Them: A Global History of Modern Dance (Allen Lane, forthcoming 2025)
Performance, Masculinity, and Self-Injury (Routledge, 2024)
This book challenges established readings of risk-taking and self-injury in global performance practice, and is based upon interviews with artists around the world. The interdisciplinary methodology draws from art history and sociology to provide a new critical analysis of the relationship between masculinity and self-inflicted injury. Individual chapters examine the work of Günter Brus, André Stitt, Ron Athey, Yang Zhichao, Wafaa Bilal, Pyotr Pavlensky, and Franko B, offering a new perspective on the forms and functions of self-injury in performance art.
Pina Bausch’s Dance Theatre: Tracing the Evolution of Tanztheater (Edinburgh University Press, 2018)
Nominated for the 2019 Kurt Weill Book Prize
This book presents a new reading of Pina Bausch’s dance theatre, orienting it within an international legacy of performance practice. It considers not only the influence of German and American modern dance on Bausch’s work but also interrogates parallels with modernist and postdramatic theatre, including Antonin Artaud, Samuel Beckett, Jerzy Grotowski, and Robert Wilson. It is the first book on Bausch’s work to be translated into Romanian – available here.
Performance in a Pandemic (Routledge, 2022)
This essay collection, edited with Laura Bissell, gathers UK and international artists, academics, practitioners, and researchers in the fields of contemporary performance, dance, and live art to offer creative-critical responses to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on their work.
Reviews of the collection by Nenad Jovanović and Laura González.
Essays
The Cross-Africa Dance Company Bringing New Life to Pina Bausch’s Rite of Spring, The Conversation (September 2023)
Academic Bodies in Quarantine: Dance Writers as Dancing Bodies, co-authored with Lito Tsitsou, The Sociological Review (May 2021)
The Gendered Spectacle of Suffering, The Polyphony (July 2020)
Mythology, Performativity, and Moral Panic: The Case of Norwegian Black Metal, The Sociological Review (June 2019)
Bodies of Work: Pina Bausch’s Legacy, Orlando (May 2019)
Journal articles
Abject Modernism: Interpreting the Postwar Male Body in the Works of Tatsumi Hijikata, Günter Brus and Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Tate Papers, no. 23 (Spring 2015)
Audience Manipulation? Subverting the Fourth Wall in Pina Bausch’s Kontakthof (1978) and Nelken (1982), The Scottish Journal of Performance, vol. 1, issue 2 (June 2014)
Primitive Rituals, Contemporary Aftershocks: Evocations of the Orientalist “Other” in Four Productions of Le Sacre du printemps, AVANT, vol. 4, no. 3 (December 2013)
Re-reading Mary Wigman’s Hexentanz II, co-authored with Lito Tsitsou, The Scottish Journal of Performance, vol. 1, issue 1 (December 2013)
Book chapters
Not So Black and White: Frederick Ashton’s “Outsider” Ballet, in Allmer and Sears [eds], 4 Saints in 3 Acts: A Snapshot of the American Avant-Garde in the 1930s (Manchester University Press, 2017)
Reviews
Book review: Yetta Howard [ed.], Rated RX: Sheree Rose With and After Bob Flanagan (Ohio State University Press, 2020), in The Polyphony (December 2021)
Book review: Eirini Kartsaki, Repetition in Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) in Dance Research Journal, vol. 50, no. 2 (August 2018), pp. 93-95
Exhibition review: Jo Longhurst, ‘New Order, Other Spaces’ MAP Magazine, no. 46 (August 2018)
Exhibition review: Ulay, ‘So You See Me’ MAP Magazine, no. 42 (December 2017)
Lucy Weir 