Current issue: Volume 29 Issue 8

In ‘On Exits and Endings’ contributors explore how rituals, performances and other creative acts negotiate, represent and frame exits and endings, especially when emotional attachment and responsibility are involved. They question what it might mean to exit – from a career, a life, a scene, a situation – to cut ties and move on. To walk away. As well as how exits are understood performatively, how they are analysed, responded to or interpreted. Additionally, they reflect on endings. What happens when something ceases to be, what remains and how might those left behind behave in the wake of this changed situation.

 

 READ THE EDITORIAL AND ABSTRACTS ONLINE

 

1 Editorial: Slow Fade to Blackout: Myriad entrances to exits and endings

RICHARD GOUGH

 

41 Feeling and Falling at the End-Times: Rituals of impending collapse

MICHAL GIVONI

 

50 A Bot that Died: Technological obsolescence and thanatopolitics in Can’t Help Myself

BURONG ZENG

 

61 Dramaturgies of Decay: Exits and endings in Sarah Kane’s Blasted, debbie tucker green’s Generations, Caryl Churchill’s Here We Go and Alice Birch’s Anatomy of a Suicide

CHARLOTTE THOMPSON

 

72 Rehearsing Exits: Dancing (at) the end

CHARLIE ASHWELL, EFROSINI PROTOPAPA AND MATTHIAS SPERLING

 

82 ‘Nothing is more tragic than the grotesque’: Dying things and thinging death in Beckett’s Endgame

ISHITA KRISHNA

 

89 Between an Ellipsis and an Ouroboros: Reflections on, and repetitions of, The End

MICHAEL PINCHBECK AND OLLIE SMITH

 

100 The Practice of Endings in a Work that has no End: Marrugeku’s Jurrungu Ngan-ga

HELENA GREHAN AND JO POLLITT

 

108 The Afterlife of Life as Art: Dov Or Ner's conceptual activities and the dissolution of life–death boundaries

DROR HARARI

 

117 Virtually Ever After: The impact of digital spaces on mourning practices and the pursuit of Performative Goodbyes

VASILEIA ANAXAGOROU

 

126 It’s Time: Reckoning and transformation

MICK DOUGLAS

 

132 Vivifying Dead Ends in the Archives: In conversation with Ivetta Sunyoung Kang

DHVANI RAMANUJAM

 

139 Transformative Touch: Navigating life, care, death and memory in mixed reality performance Within Touching Distance

CARLOS EDUARDO PIRES

 

148 On Collapsing Time and Withholding Endings, or Hopeful Failure

HEIDI LUCJA LIEDKE

 

156 The Life and Art of a Death Doula

RENÉE NEWMAN AND VICTORIA SPENCE

 

166 Naming the Unnamed: The role of ritual and performance in marking and grieving pregnancy loss

REBECCA WOODFORD-SMITH

 

176 Performance Encounters with Ana Mendieta: Opacity, siluetas and endings

KATE ANTOSIK - PARSONS

 

186 The Dying Art of Magic: Tommy Cooper, Penn & Teller and the death-defying stunt

AUGUSTO CORRIERI

 

193 On Exits, Endings and Earthquakes: The cautionary tale of Odin Teatret/Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium

PATRICK CAMPBELL AND JANE TURNER

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REVIEWS

203 A Forbidden Sistine Chapel Selfie and Paying Attention to Art Today

NIK WAKEFIELD

 

205 Against Systemic Exclusion in Dance Canons

GABRIELE BRANDSTETTER

 

206 Anatomy of Death – Reminiscences of rebirth

YANA MEERZON

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208 Notes on Contributors