Writing for Performance (Teaching Writing) - Softcover

Anne Harris, PhD, is a senior lecturer at Monash University (Melbourne), and researches in the areas of arts, creativity, performance, and diversity. 
Stacy Holman Jones, PhD, is Professor in the Centre for Theatre and Performance at Monash University (Melbourne) specializing in performance studies, gender and critical theory and critical qualitative methods.

What a welcome, insightful and much-needed book Writing for Performance is. Authors Anne Harris and Stacy Holman Jones bring us to an integrated notion of writing that is embodied, felt, breathed and flung from stage to page and back again. This important book is thrilling in both its theorizing and its usefulness as it sets out potential roadmaps of how we can conjure writing daring to explore the heat and sparks of race, class, sex and gender.  Writing for Performance will become a crucial text for the creation of the performance and theater that the 21st Century will need. 
Tim Miller, artist and author of Body Blows: Six Performances and 1001 Beds: Performances, Essays and Travels 

No prescriptions here. Instead, a thoughtful and pedagogical rumination on the ideas of writing and performance, ideas which often materialize into pleasing products, to be sure, but whose wondrous processes can remain clandestine. In the hands of this creative duo, however, we find a deep and abiding respect for the many creative processes that might fuel writing and performance that matters. From the deep wells of their own experiences, Harris and Holman Jones offer exercises that are not meant to mould the would-be writer, but spur them on to recognize their latent writing/performative selves. 
Kathleen Gallagher, Distinguished Professor of Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning, University of Toronto

Writing for Performance embodies the practicality of craft and possibilities for transcendence necessary in any writing and performance pedagogy.  Replete with clear description and example, Harris and Holman Jones invite the reader/practitioner/performer/scholar into their own abilities to engage word and body for the purpose of meaning making and personal/political transformation.  
Tami Spry, Professor of Performance Studies, St. Cloud State University

Writing for Performance is a much-needed text that synthetically weaves the dynamics of words, bodies, spaces and things in the integrative process of writing in/as performance and performance in/as writing. The authors engage systematically inflected and reflected forms of experience as the source materials (or equipment) in building grammatical aesthetic expressions in theatre and performance studies. It is the textbook that I wanted when I was struggling to find my own writerly voice in the shifting modes of the personal and professional, and in the presumed tensions between the performative and academic zones of my intersectional identities. 
Bryant Keith Alexander, Professor of Communication, Performance, Cultural and Pedagogical Studies and Dean of the College of Communication and Fine Arts, Loyola Marymount University

What's exciting about this book: the bridges it builds between imagining, devising, writing, performing--many bridges for many different purposes. In Writing for Performance, Anne Harris and Stacy Holman Jones, as experienced theatre-makers, practitioners and scholars, provide a personalized blueprint for writing--no easy, one-size-fits-all answers--but instead a rich array of models of practice in which the voice of the writer, in the process of creating the theatre event, can be heard clearly, honestly and provocatively. And, the most important message coming through the exemplars, the theoretical considerations and the exercises for writing: put the words on the page. 
Christine Sinclair, Melbourne Graduate School of Education and Head of Drama Education, The University of Melbourne