Staging Decadence - (Methuen Drama Engage) by Adam Alston (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Winner of the 2024 TaPRA David Bradby Monograph Prize

How is decadence being staged today - as a practice, issue, pejorative, and as a site of pleasure? Where might we find it, why might we look for it, and who is decadence for?

This book is the first monographic study of decadence in theatre and performance. Adam Alston makes a passionate case for the contemporary relevance of decadence in the thick of a resurgent culture war by focusing on its antithetical relationship to capitalist-led growth, progress, and intensified productivity. He argues that the qualities used to disparage the study and practice of theatre and performance are the very things we should embrace in celebrating their value - namely, their spectacular uselessness, wastefulness, outmodedness, and abundant potential for producing forms of creativity that flow away from the ends and excesses of capitalism.

Alston covers an eclectic range of examples by Julia Bardsley (UK), Hasard Le Sin (Finland), jaamil olawale kosoko (USA), Toco Nikaido (Japan), Martin O'Brien (UK), Toshiki Okada (Japan), Marcel-lí Antúnez Roca (Spain), Normandy Sherwood (USA), The Uhuruverse (USA), Nia O. Witherspoon (USA), and Wunderbaum (Netherlands). Expect ruminations on monstrous scenographies, catatonic choreographies, turbo-charged freneticism, visions of the apocalypse - and what might lie in its wake.

Review Quotes

"Staging Decadence convincingly illustrates how, amid the frenzy, stagnation, and relentless productivism of present-day capitalism, artists and performers take pleasure in the ruin and waste and, far from escaping the material conditions of the modern world, imagine their way to alternatives. Alston vividly demonstrates how decadence is embodied--exuberantly, lavishly, grotesquely, wastefully, weirdly, queerly -- on the stage, in live performance, and in the work of a kaleidoscopic array of artists. No work of scholarship better demonstrates the urgency of contemporary decadence studies and will speak to multiple audiences in theatre, performance, disability studies, literature and art. Alston shows us what it is to live and breathe along with the artists whose work he so carefully illuminates. As it explores the counter-pleasures offered by contemporary decadent performance, Staging Decadence is as pleasurable and exciting to read as it is intelligent in its critique of twenty-first century capital." --Robert Stilling, author of Beginning at the End: Decadence, Modernism, and Postcolonial Poetry

About the Author

Adam Alston is Reader in Modern and Contemporary Theatre at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. He is the co-editor of Decadent Plays, 1890-1930 (Bloomsbury, 2024), co-editor of a special issue of Volupté Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies on 'Decadence and Performance' (Winter 2021), and he runs the AHRC-funded Staging Decadence project. He has also published extensively on immersive theatre.