Flesh and Text Book Launch

BODIES IN FLIGHT make performance where flesh utters and words move, that challenges and re-energizes the conventional relationship between audiences and performers, and audiences and place. They insist on the buzz of ideas, on philosophy and poetry, using words and images, movement and stillness, voices and bodies, in order to move audiences emotionally and intellectually.

Here Bodies in Flight return to the university where Dr Sara Giddens was Professor of Choreographic Practice to mark the publication of their book Flesh and Text that celebrates over 30 years of making performance.

Responding to images and video from their extensive archive, Simon Jones (Director of Bodies in Flight) and performer Graeme Rose (Associate Artist) in conversation with Andrew Quick (intimating the dog & Lancaster University) will reflect on their practice, its beginnings in the early nineties UK experimental performance scene where physical and dance theatre encountered performance and live art; its development through collaborations with sonic and visual media artists, duetting between bodies and technologies, texts and spaces, mixing flesh and text; and their recent work with different communities, some of place, others of skill-sets.

Organized in a highly visual design, Flesh and Text is both a history and a workbook with selections of scripts and archival material from 30 years of making devised theatre and performance in the UK and internationally, plus texts by collaborators, arts professionals and scholars exploring the company’s collaborative working method, contextualizing it in the wider performance ecology and culture. Intended as an inspiration to emerging artists, the volume covers key questions for any maker of contemporary performance: the relationship of choreography and spoken word, the use of new technologies and multi-media, the role of original music and soundscapes, the differences between work presented in a theatre or gallery or sited in non-theatrical places, the persistence of theatre as an art-form in an increasingly digital culture.

Published by Intellect Books (Bristol) March 2025.

The event will be approximately 1 hour 15 minutes, including an In-Conversation discussion and short performance extract/s, followed by drinks and an opportunity to purchase the book.