Alan Read (born 21 September 1956) is a writer and professor of theatre at

King's College London King's College London (informally King's or KCL) is a public university, public research university in London, England. King's was established by royal charter in 1829 under the patronage of George IV of the United Kingdom, King George IV ...

. He is recognised as a theatre theorist and cultural activist, with scholarly interests in ethics and the everyday, performed communities, event architecture, and the subjectivities of capitalism. Read's work serves as a critique of modernist theatrical orthodoxy, critically contesting

Peter Brook Peter Stephen Paul Brook (21 March 1925 – 2 July 2022) was an English theatre and film director. He worked first in England, from 1945 at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, from 1947 at the Royal Opera House, and from 1962 for the Royal Shak ...

's idealism of the "empty space"—a tabula rasa awaiting its theatre, where professionals may enter and exit at will. Contrary to this notion, Read argues that theatre has been superseded in that populated place by the quotidian performances of everyday life, which persist for both good and ill. He presented this critique on the stage of the National Theatre in London in 1994, engaging in a public dialogue with Brook's space designer, Jean-Guy Lecat. Read's scepticism regarding the colonial fantasy of theatre's "empty space" aligns with other critics, most notably Rustom Bharucha in ''Theatre & The World'' (1993).

Life

Born in

Southend-on-Sea Southend-on-Sea (), commonly referred to as Southend (), is a coastal city and unitary authorities of England, unitary authority area with Borough status in the United Kingdom, borough status in south-eastern Essex, England. It lies on the nor ...

, Read was the posthumous child of William Alan Read and Veronica Read. He was educated at

Westcliff High School for Boys Westcliff High School for Boys (WHSB) is an 11–18 selective boys Academy (English school), academy grammar school in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, England. In September 2001 the school was awarded ‘Beacon’ status for its breadth of achievements ...

before obtaining a bachelor's degree from the

University of Exeter The University of Exeter is a research university in the West Country of England, with its main campus in Exeter, Devon. Its predecessor institutions, St Luke's College, Exeter School of Science, Exeter School of Art, and the Camborne School of ...

in 1979. Between 1979 and 1981, he pursued a PhD at the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW and informally U-Dub or U Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington, United States. Founded in 1861, the University of Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast of the Uni ...

Seattle Seattle ( ) is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Washington and in the Pacific Northwest region of North America. With a population of 780,995 in 2024, it is the 18th-most populous city in the United States. The city is the cou ...

, and was awarded his doctorate in 1989. During this period, he spent a decade working at the Rotherhithe Theatre Workshop in the Docklands area of South East London. Read is the partner of artist Beryl Robinson. They reside in West London and the commune of Truinas. The couple have two daughters.

Career

Read is the author of ''Theatre & Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance'' (1993), ''Theatre, Intimacy & Engagement: The Last Human Venue'' (2008), ''Theatre in the Expanded Field: Seven Approaches to Performance'' (2014), ''Theatre & Law'' (2016), and ''The Dark Theatre: A Book About Loss'' (2020). During his tenure as director of the Talks programme at the

Institute of Contemporary Arts The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) is an modernism, artistic and cultural centre on The Mall (London), The Mall in London, just off Trafalgar Square. Located within Nash House, part of Carlton House Terrace, near the Duke of York Steps a ...

in London during the "height of theory" in the 1990s, Read edited two volumes: ''The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation'' (1996), which included original artwork by Steve McQueen, and ''Architecturally Speaking: Practices of Art, Architecture and the Everyday'' (2000). Read taught at

Dartington College of Arts Dartington College of Arts was a specialist arts college located at Dartington Hall in the south-west of England, offering courses at degree and postgraduate level together with an arts research programme. It existed for a period of almost 50 ...

in the 1980s, coordinating the

Council of Europe The Council of Europe (CoE; , CdE) is an international organisation with the goal of upholding human rights, democracy and the Law in Europe, rule of law in Europe. Founded in 1949, it is Europe's oldest intergovernmental organisation, represe ...

Workshop on Theatre and Communities with Colette King and Peter Hulton from 1981 to 1983. He also worked at the Rotherhithe Theatre Workshop with David Slater throughout the remainder of the decade. In the early 1990s, he moved to Barcelona, where he wrote about street ceremonies, including

gegants Processional giants are costumed figures in European folklore, particularly present in Belgian, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and English folkloric processions. The main feature of these figures is typically their wooden, papier maché or ...

, castells, and

correfoc ''Correfocs'' (); literally in English language, English "fire-runs") are among the most striking features present in Valencian Community, Valencian and Catalonia, Catalan festivals. In the ''correfoc'', a group of individuals will dress as d ...

(human-dragon fire runners). During this period, he completed the monograph ''Theatre & Everyday Life'' (1993), which documents these ethnographies of the everyday and their relationship to risk and safety. In 1993, Read curated the

London International Festival of Theatre The London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT) is a biennial festival of theatre, performance and cultural events. The organisation also supports year-round activity in London. The organisation was founded by Rose Fenton and Lucy Neal, wi ...

(LIFT) Daily Dialogues, a series of 21 public seminars featuring artists, theorists, and theatre companies participating in the festival programme. He continued this work biennially for successive LIFT festivals over the next decade, culminating in the day-long symposium ''Voice Ruin Play'' (2001), which brought together

Romeo Castellucci Romeo Castellucci (born August 4, 1960) is an Italian theatre director, playwright, artist and designer. Since the 1980s he has been one part of the European theatrical avant-garde. Biography Romeo Castellucci graduated with a degree in painti ...

and Societas Raffaello Sanzio with key figures from the UK theatre community for the first time. Read was appointed Director of Talks at the

(ICA) in the mid-1990s, working alongside Helena Reckitt. Together, they curated and chaired more than 500 public talks over four years, featuring key figures in the cultural field, including philosophers

Jacques Derrida Jacques Derrida (; ; born Jackie Élie Derrida;Peeters (2013), pp. 12–13. See also 15 July 1930 – 9 October 2004) was a French Algerian philosopher. He developed the philosophy of deconstruction, which he utilized in a number of his texts, ...

Jean Baudrillard Jean Baudrillard (, ; ; – 6 March 2007) was a French sociology, sociologist and philosopher with an interest in cultural studies. He is best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication, as well as hi ...

Judith Butler Judith Pamela Butler (born February 24, 1956) is an American feminist philosopher and gender studies scholar whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics, and the fields of third-wave feminism, queer theory, and literary theory. In ...

, and

Alphonso Lingis Alphonso Lingis (November 23, 1933 – May 8, 2025) was an American philosopher, writer and translator, with Lithuanian roots, and professor emeritus of philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. His areas of specialization included phenomeno ...

; race theorists Homi Bhabha,

Bell hooks Gloria Jean Watkins (September 25, 1952 – December 15, 2021), better known by her pen name bell hooks (stylized in lowercase), was an American author, theorist, educator, and social critic who was a Distinguished Professor in Residence at Be ...

, and

Paul Gilroy Paul Gilroy (born 16 February 1956) is an English sociologist and cultural studies scholar who is the founding Director of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Race and Racism at University College London (UCL). Gilroy is the 2019 ...

; musicians

Laurie Anderson Laura Phillips "Laurie" Anderson (born June 5, 1947) is an American avant-garde artist, musician and filmmaker whose work encompasses performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects. Initially trained in violin and sculpting,Amirkhanian, Cha ...

Mark E Smith Mark Edward Smith (5 March 1957 – 24 January 2018) was an English singer-songwriter. He was the lead vocalist, lyricist and only constant member of the post-punk group the Fall. Smith formed the band after attending the June 1976 Sex Pistol ...

, and

Patti Smith Patricia Lee Smith (born December 30, 1946) is an American singer, songwriter, poet, painter, author, and photographer. Her 1975 debut album '' Horses'' made her an influential member of the New York City-based punk rock movement. Smith has fu ...

; novelists

Bret Easton Ellis Bret Easton Ellis (born March 7, 1964) is an American author and screenwriter. Ellis was one of the literary Brat Pack (literary), Brat Pack and is a self-proclaimed satirist whose trademark technique as a writer is the expression of extreme acts ...

Nadine Gordimer Nadine Gordimer (20 November 192313 July 2014) was a South African writer and political activist. She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991, recognised as a writer "who through her magnificent epic writing has ... been of very great ben ...

, SE Hinton, Laurie Moore, and

Tahar Ben Jelloun Tahar Ben Jelloun (; born 1 December 1944) is a Moroccan writer who rose to fame for his 1985 novel ''L'Enfant de sable'' ('' The Sand Child''). All of his work is written in French although his first language is Darija. He has been nominated f ...

; film directors

Alejandro Jodorowsky Alejandro Jodorowsky Prullansky (; born 17 February 1929) is a Chilean and French Experimental film, avant-garde filmmaker. Known for his films ''El Topo'' (1970), ''The Holy Mountain (1973 film), The Holy Mountain'' (1973) and ''Santa Sangre'' ...

, Raul Ruiz, and

Wong Kar-wai Wong Kar-wai (born 17 July 1958) is a Hong Kong film director, screenwriter, and producer. His films are characterised by nonlinear narratives, atmospheric music, and vivid cinematography involving bold, saturated colours. A pivotal figure o ...

; artists Mary Kelly,

Vija Celmins Vija Celmins ( ;Hilarie M. Sheets and Randy Kennedy (September 24, 2015)''New York Times''. ; ; born October 25, 1938) is a Latvian American visual artist best known for photo-realistic paintings and drawings of natural environments and phenomen ...

John Currin John Currin (born 1962) is an American painter based in New York City. He is most recognised for his technically proficient satirical figurative paintings that explore controversial sexual and societal topics. His work shows a wide range of in ...

, and Orlan; cultural theorists Beatriz Colomina,

John Berger John Peter Berger ( ; 5 November 1926 – 2 January 2017) was an English art critic, novelist, painter and poet. His novel '' G.'' won the 1972 Booker Prize, and his essay on art criticism '' Ways of Seeing'', written as an accompaniment to t ...

, and

Sander Gilman Sander L. Gilman, (born February 21, 1944), is an American cultural and literary historian. He is known for his contributions to Jewish studies and the history of medicine. He is the author or editor of over one hundred books. Gilman's focus is ...

; and urban theorists Doreen Massey,

Richard Sennett Richard Sennett (born 1 January 1943) is an American sociologist who is the Centennial Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and former University Professor of the Humanities at New York University. He is currently a Senior F ...

, and

Edward Soja Edward William Soja (; 1940–2015) was an urbanist, a postmodern political geographer and urban theorist. He worked on socio-spatial dialectic and spatial justice. Biography Edward Soja received his Ph.D. degree from Syracuse University. H ...

. The talks series curated during this period, including ''Spaced Out'' (architecture), ''Addressing Dressing'' (fashion), ''Uncanny Encounters'' (psychoanalytic theory), ''The Scapegoat'' (cultural theory), ''Incarcerated with Artaud and Genet'' (theatrical archaeology), and ''Working with Fanon'' (race and radical psychiatry), influenced public engagement with cultural theory throughout the 1990s. This work also contributed to the development of the "talks" industry, later seen in institutions such as Tate Modern, the Institute of Ideas, The School of Life, TED, and Intelligence Squared. In 1997, Read was appointed the first Professor of Theatre at Roehampton Institute (later

Roehampton University The University of Roehampton, London, formerly Roehampton Institute of Higher Education, is a public university in the United Kingdom, situated on three major sites in Roehampton, in the London Borough of Wandsworth. The University traces its r ...

) and, in 2006, became the first Professor of Theatre in the 180-year history of

. At King's College, Read established the Performance Foundation, conceived and developed the Anatomy Theatre & Museum in collaboration with the Centre for e-Research (2010), planned and oversaw the construction of the Inigo Rooms in the East Wing of

Somerset House Somerset House is a large neoclassical architecture, neoclassical building complex situated on the south side of the Strand, London, Strand in central London, overlooking the River Thames, just east of Waterloo Bridge. The Georgian era quadran ...

with the support of King's Business (2012), and initiated King's Cultural Partners, which later became King's Cultural Institute under the directorship of

Deborah Bull Deborah Clare Bull, Baroness Bull, (born 22 March 1963), is an English dancer, writer, and broadcaster, and former creative director of the Royal Opera House. She joined King's College London as Director, Cultural Partnerships in 2012. In 201 ...

(2012). Read was awarded an Honorary Fellowship by

in 2003, an

Arts and Humanities Research Board The arts or creative arts are a vast range of human practices involving creative expression, storytelling, and cultural participation. The arts encompass diverse and plural modes of thought, deeds, and existence in an extensive range of me ...

five-year Major Award (2000–2005), and a

Leverhulme The Leverhulme Trust () is a large national grant-making organisation in the United Kingdom. It was established in 1925 under the will of the 1st Viscount Leverhulme (1851–1925), with the instruction that its resources should be used to cover ...

Major Award (2010–2013). He also mentored the final cohort of AHRC Creative Fellowships alongside Greg Whelan of Lone Twin (2011–2016) and secured an

EPSRC The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is a British Research Council that provides government funding for grants to undertake research and postgraduate degrees in engineering and the physical sciences, mainly to univers ...

three-year Bridging the Gaps Award in collaboration with

Mark Miodownik Mark Andrew Miodownik () is a British materials scientist, engineer, broadcaster and writer at University College London. Previously, he was the head of the Materials Research Group at King's College London, and a co-founder of Materials Libra ...

and the King's Material Library (2011–2014). Read is a Faculty Professor at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

, where he established the annual London Theatre Capital Programme. Since 1991, he has also been an affiliated Professor at

Boston University Boston University (BU) is a Private university, private research university in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. BU was founded in 1839 by a group of Boston Methodism, Methodists with its original campus in Newbury (town), Vermont, Newbur ...

, teaching theatre students across campuses in the United States.

Artistic collaborations

Read has collaborated with theatre companies including Het Werkteater, Societas Raffaello Sanzio,

Forced Entertainment Forced Entertainment is an experimental theatre Experimental theatre (also known as avant-garde theatre), inspired largely by Richard Wagner, Wagner's concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, began in Western theatre in the late 19th century with Alfred J ...

, and Goat Island, as well as organisations such as

Battersea Arts Centre The Battersea Arts Centre ("BAC") is a performance space specialising in Theater, theatre productions. Located near Clapham Junction railway station in Battersea, in the London Borough of Wandsworth, it was formerly Battersea Town Hall. It is a ...

, Forster & Heighes, the curatorial producers

Artangel Artangel is a London-based arts organisation founded in 1985 by Roger Took. Directed since 1991 by James Lingwood and Michael Morris, it has commissioned and produced a string of notable site-specific works, plus several projects for TV, film, r ...

, and the artist-activist collective Platform. These long-term relationships have encompassed advocacy, infrastructural support, advisory roles, curation of talks, and fostering engagement between theatre makers, academia, and the public realm. Read has performed with William Pope.L as part of ''The Frequently Asked'', curated by

Tim Etchells Tim Etchells (born 1962) is an English artist and writer based in Sheffield and London. Etchells is the artistic director of Forced Entertainment, an experimental performance company founded in 1984. He has published several works of fiction, ...

and

Adrian Heathfield Adrian Heathfield is a British writer and curator. Overview Heathfield works on contemporary art practices, particularly those involving live elements such as performance art, experimental theatre and dance. His writing has focused on questions ...

at Tanzquartier Vienna in 2007. He designed the sound work for

Massimo Bartolini Massimo Bartolini (born 1962 in Cecina) is an Italian artist. Bartolini works are mainly installations, but also creates video and photographs. In 2023, he was appointed to represent Italy as unique artist at the national pavilion of the LX Venic ...

's ''The Human Voices'', a site-specific piece in a disused 1939 ENAL pool in Vercelli, Italy, as part of PSi Affective Archives in 2010. Read has also created lecture performances, such as ''The Poor Law'' to mark the centenary of

Daniel Paul Schreber Daniel Paul Schreber (; 25 July 1842 – 14 April 1911) was a German judge who was famous for his personal account of his own experience with schizophrenia. Schreber experienced three distinct periods of acute mental illness. The first of these ...

's death at Castle Sonnenstein on the River Elbe in 2011, and read his unreliable memoir ''The White Estuary: Man with the Reason of History Missing'' over three six-hour sessions as part of PSi 18 in Leeds (2012). He participated in Tuija Kokkonen's all-night performance ''Chronopolitics with Dogs and Trees'' at Stanford University in 2013, and occupied

Tate Modern Tate Modern is an art gallery in London, housing the United Kingdom's national collection of international Modern art, modern and contemporary art (created from or after 1900). It forms part of the Tate group together with Tate Britain, Tate Live ...

with his performance teach-in ''The English Garden Effect'' as part of the climate crisis Deadline Festival in 2015. Further works include exchanging public correspondence with philosopher Cecilia Sjöholm for the TOPublic Festival in 2016, and turning the institution of the lecture inside out for Justyna Scheuring's performance ''The Past Is Ahead of Us'' at

in 2016. In addition to his performances, Read is an essayist and reader for radio broadcasts, including for

BBC Radio 4 BBC Radio 4 is a British national radio station owned and operated by the BBC. The station replaced the BBC Home Service on 30 September 1967 and broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes from the BBC's headquarters at Broadcasti ...

's ''Plato's Cave'' (2012), ''Dreadful Trade'' (2014), and ''Soul Estuary'' (2016), produced by Sarah Blunt with sound by

Chris Watson John Christian Watson (born Johan Cristian Tanck; 9 April 186718 November 1941) was an Australian politician who served as the third prime minister of Australia from April to August 1904. He held office as the inaugural federal leader of the Au ...

. Since 2018, Read has been maintaining a daily chronicle (and critical dialogue with interlocutors) of London's cultural life (and Drôme rural life) in the form of micro-commentaries, initially on Twitter and later on X, accessible at @readalanread.

Influence

In support of radical inclusion in the field, Read's work simultaneously engages theoretical study, performance practices, and pedagogic commitments. Steve Tompkins of the architectural practice

Haworth Tompkins Haworth Tompkins is a British architecture studio, formed in 1991 by architects Graham Haworth (b. 1960) and Steve Tompkins (b. 1959). Based in London, the studio works throughout the public, private and subsidised sectors at a wide spectrum, ...

has recognised the significance of Read's concepts of the everyday, cultural accretion, and event ghosting in their winning submissions for the

Royal Court Theatre The Royal Court Theatre, at different times known as the Court Theatre, the New Chelsea Theatre, and the Belgravia Theatre, is a West End theatre#London's non-commercial theatres, non-commercial theatre in Sloane Square, London, England, opene ...

and

Young Vic Theatre The Young Vic Theatre is a performing arts venue located on The Cut, near the South Bank, in the London Borough of Lambeth. The Young Vic was established by Frank Dunlop in 1970. Nadia Fall has been artistic director since 2025, succeeding ...

in London. Tompkins has written: "Read has been an excellent sounding board, a provocative collaborator, an encouraging enthusiast, and a constructive critic for my work." Indeed, what

Susannah Clapp Susannah Clapp (born 1949) is a British writer, who has been the theatre critic of ''The Observer'' since 1997 and is a contributor to the BBC Radio 3 ''Nightwaves'' programme. Clapp read English at the University of Bristol, where one of her teac ...

of ''The Observer'' has described as "Tompkinsesque" characteristics of theatrical design could be said to share significant features with Read's long-running concerns with the archaeologies of site and the theatre as a memory machine. The Homo Novus Festival in

Riga Riga ( ) is the capital, Primate city, primate, and List of cities and towns in Latvia, largest city of Latvia. Home to 591,882 inhabitants (as of 2025), the city accounts for a third of Latvia's total population. The population of Riga Planni ...

adopted Read's concept of "The Last Human Venue" as an overarching curatorial theme for their 2013 international festival. Artists including Monika Pormale, Nomadi, and Valters Sillis responded to Read's idea of performance at the end of its ecological tether, measuring humanity's distance from inevitable extinction. The Chicago-based company Every House Has A Door adopted Read's concept of Abandoned Practices, which itself draws on the work of

Isabelle Stengers Isabelle Stengers (; ; born 1949) is a Belgian philosopher, noted for her work in the philosophy of science. Trained as a chemist, she has collaborated with Russian-Belgian chemist Ilya Prigogine and French philosopher/sociologist Bruno Latour am ...

on eliminativism, in an annual summer school in Prague and Chicago, as well as a project website, www.abandonedpractices.org. The artist/activist group Platform, as well as filmmakers Desperate Optimists, have both responded to Read's conception of "civility" and the problematic question of the "civic centre," with work across a variety of media, including peripatetic performance and film. Read's work is anthologised and widely referenced, including Lizbeth Goodman's inclusion of ''Theatre & Everyday Life'' in ''The Routledge Reader in Politics and Performance'' (2000), followed by subsequent work on definitions of performance in Adrian Heathfield's ''Live: Art and Performance'' (2004), the miniature and the infra-thin in Richard Gough's ''A Performance Cosmology'' (2006), friendship in Lone Twin's ''Good Luck Everybody'' (2013), vegetal life in Patricia Vieira's ''The Green Thread'' (2015), repetition in Eirini Kartsaki's ''On Repetition'' (2016), and the financialisation of childhood in ''Performance Research: On Childhood'' (2017). Read's work is frequently cited by key figures in the field, who both critique and reference his ideas. Shannon Jackson highlights Read's concepts of "re-association and reassembly" (after Bruno Latour) in ''Social Works'' (2011), while

Nigel Thrift Sir Nigel John Thrift (born 12 October 1949 in Bath) is a British academic and geographer. In 2018 he was appointed as Chair of the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management, a committee that gives independent scientific and technical advice ...

adopts Read's coinage of "showciology" in ''The Transformation of Contemporary Capitalism'' (2009). Joe Kelleher considers Read's conception of politics in ''Theatre & Politics'' (2009), Hansen and Kozel discuss Read's approach to ethics in ''Embodied Imagination'' (2007), and Nicholas Ridout reflects on Read's theory of theatrical failure in ''Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems'' (2006).

Recent work

Read's more recent work on theatrical 'immunity', which reverses the communitarian presumption of performance, might be considered a logical inversion of the tenets of ''Theatre & Everyday Life'' rather than a negation of them. In this work, Read challenges those with investments in the terminologies of social theatre, community theatre, and political theatre to engage with more nuanced distinctions between aesthetic, cultural, and political priorities. Read figures the ‘emaciated spectator' in critical relation to Jacques Rancière's voluntaristic ‘emancipated spectator', measuring their distance from others in the audience and assessing their relations with the immersive event that seeks their submission to its spectacle. This agency of measurement is always operable in relation to an ending: aesthetic (the show always ends) and ecological (human extinction is inevitable). This invites Read to describe the theatre as ‘the last human venue'. Read's gently cynical tone, particularly in his widespread reviewing of the work of leading figures in the field, such as

Richard Schechner Richard Schechner is University Professor Emeritus at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, and editor of ''TDR: The Drama Review''. Biography Richard Schechner received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Cornell University in 1956, ...

and Peggy Phelan, Tracy Davies and Susan Bennett, Ric Knowles, and monumental productions like ''The Sultan's Elephant'' by

Royal de Luxe Royal de Luxe is a French mechanical marionette street theatre company which specialises in giant puppets. They were founded in 1979 in Aix-en-Provence by Jean-Luc Courcoult. After some years based in Toulouse, the company moved to Nantes in 198 ...

, has both teased and challenged those with cultural capital, seeking to uncover the humour in a discipline that has profited greatly from others' labours. These reviews have led the writer

Caridad Svich Caridad Svich ( ; born July 30, 1963) is a playwright, songwriter/lyricist, translator, and editor who was born in the United States to Cuban-Argentine-Spanish-Croatian parents. Biography A member of the New York's New Dramatists, she earned her ...

to describe Read as 'inimitable'. Read has attracted less benign responses for his longstanding polemical critique of

identity politics Identity politics is politics based on a particular identity, such as ethnicity, Race (human categorization), race, nationality, religion, Religious denomination, denomination, gender, sexual orientation, Socioeconomic status, social background ...

that fall short of

intersectional Intersectionality is an analytical framework for understanding how groups' and individuals' social and political identities result in unique combinations of discrimination and privilege. Examples of these intersecting and overlapping factor ...

ambitions. Read maintains that ‘radical particularity' inadvertently obscures the politically inclusive urgency of a ‘general theory' of class disempowerment. Equally, his work on ‘pseudo-action', the deceptive, voluntaristic vocabulary of theatre wish-fulfilling its social and political purpose in place of slower but more honest political agency, has been forcefully countered by several commentators, the most prominent of whom is Janelle Reinelt, in her valedictory lecture to the field at Warwick University in 2015, ‘What I Came to Say' (2015). In turn, Read responds to these claims of political retreat in his keynote at the Performance Philosophy Convention at the Prague Academy in 2017, ‘The Dark Theatre: Ethnographies of the Capitalocene', in which he retraces his steps over three decades of political and theatrical commitment to the neighbourhood and dockland warehouse where his thinking about everyday life and theatre were grounded.

Bibliography

* (1984) ''An Educational Theatre Project: The Shadow of Theatre. Dartington: Theatre Papers/Arts Archives. * (1984) ''Het Werkteater: An Actors' Cooperative''. Dartington: Theatre Papers/Arts Archives * (1993) ''Theatre & Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance''. London: Routledge. * (1994) ''Peter Brook: Platform Papers''. London: National Theatre. * (1996) ''The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation''. Seattle: Bay Press. * (2000) ''Architecturally Speaking: Practices of Art, Architecture and the Everyday''. London: Routledge. * (2000) ''On Animals''. London: Taylor and Francis * (2003) ''Epitaph: Societas Raffaello Sanzio''. Milan: Ubu Libri. * (2004) ''On Civility''. London: Taylor and Francis. * (2008) ''Theatre, Intimacy & Engagement: The Last Human Venue''. Houndmills: Palgrave. * (2014) ''Theatre in the Expanded Field: Seven Approaches to Performance''. London: Bloomsbury. * (2016) ''Theatre & Law''. Houndmills: Palgrave. * (2020) ''The Dark Theatre: A Book About Loss''. Abingdon: Routledge.

References

External links

Alan Read on Childhood, Bodies and Perception at Tate Modern, 2016.

Stage Hands: The Manual Labour of Performance. Inaugural Lecture, King's College London, 2012.

Liverpool Biennial, 2016: Lay Theatre and the Eruption of the Audience: Keynote Talk

Alan Read on the Allied invasion of Iraq, 2003

An Exchange of letters with Cecilia Sjoholm for TO Public, 2016

‘And nothing is, but what is not', Introduction to Chiara Guidi, King's College London, 2014

Homo Novus Festival: 2013, The Last Human Venue

Law and the Curated Body, Osgoode Hall Law School, Toronto, 2015

Hijacking Wonders, Hetveem Theatre, Amsterdam, 2011

Art As Knowing: A Public Conversation about Art, Ideas and Practice. University of Minnesota, Institute for Advanced Study, 2007.

http://ias.umn.edu/2007/03/23/art-as-knowing/

Thinking The City: Multidisciplinary Views on Urban Life and Culture, Chaired by Doreen Massey, Tate Modern, 2001, Part 5, Alan Read
{{DEFAULTSORT:Read, Alan 1956 births Living people 21st-century British male writers Academics of King's College London People from Southend-on-Sea 20th-century British male writers Alumni of the University of Exeter People educated at Westcliff High School for Boys University of Washington alumni Academics of the University of Roehampton

Life

Career

Artistic collaborations

Influence

Recent work

Bibliography

References

Further reading

External links