The book applies a productive interdisciplinary lens of art history, performance, and animal
studies for approaching political economy issues, critiquing anthropomorphic worldviews, and
provoking thoughts around animal and human nature that spark impulses for an innovative
performance aesthetics and ethics.
It combines Marxist analysis with feminist and posthumanist methodology to analyse the
relation between societal dressage and bodily animality that humans and animals share.
Within this original theoretical framework, the book develops the concept of dressaged
animality as a mode of critique to analyse the social and political function of interdisciplinary
forms of contemporary performances.
Drawing on archival and primary research, the book theorises and historicises more than 15
performance practices in which animality is allegorically staged through by humans danced,
real, or filmically mediated animals. It focuses on Rose Englishs pioneering approach to
performance-making as well as on overlooked performances by other renown and largely
unknown American (Mike Kelley/Kate Foley, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Yvonne Rainer,
Diana Thater), British (Mark Wallinger, Rose English), and European artists (Tamara Grcic,
Judith Hopf, Joseph Beuys, Bartabas) from the late 1960s until the late 2010s. While various
types of artistic practice are framed as forms of critique (for example, protest art, interventionist
strategies, institutional critique), the book maps an original performance theory in art which
shows that contemporary artistic performances can also take up a critique of societal
dressage.
This study will be of great interest to students and scholars in art history, theatre, dance and
performance studies, and ecology, as well as to artists and curators working with performance.