In Place of a Show is a compelling account of Western theatre buildings in the 21st century: theatres stripped of their primary purpose; lying empty; preserved as museums; or demolished. Playfully combining first-person narratives; scholarly research and visual documents; Augusto Corrieri explores the material and imaginative potentials of these places; charting interconnections between humans; birds; vegetation; and the beguiling animations of inanimate things; such as walls; curtains and seats. Across four chapters we learn of the uncanny dismantling and reconstitution of a German Baroque auditorium during the Second World War; the phantasmal remains of a demolished music hall in Londons East End; a Renaissance Italian theatre; fleetingly transformed into an aviary by the appearance of a swallow; and a lavish opera house emerging from the Amazon rainforest. In these pages we are invited to discover theatres as sites of anomalous encounters and surprising coincidences: places that might reveal the performative entanglement of human and nonhuman worlds.
2016-03-03 2016-03-03File Name: B01CIKO2QC
Review
