In Place of a Show What Happens Inside Theatres When Nothing Is Happening [Hardcover]

In Place of a Showis a compelling account of Western theatre buildings in the 21st century: theatres stripped of their primary purpose, lying empty, preserved as museums, or demolished.

Playfully combining first-person narratives, scholarly research and visual documents, Augusto Corrieri explores the material and imaginative potentials of these places, charting interconnections between humans, birds, vegetation, and the beguiling animations of inanimate things, such as walls, curtains and seats.

Across four chapters we learn of the uncanny dismantling and reconstitution of a German Baroque auditorium during the Second World War; the phantasmal remains of a demolished music hall in London's East End; a Renaissance Italian theatre, fleetingly transformed into an aviary by the appearance of a swallow; and a lavish opera house emerging from the Amazon rainforest. In these pages we are invited to discover theatres as sites of anomalous encounters and surprising coincidences: places that might reveal the performative entanglement of human and nonhuman worlds.

Introduction
Chapter 1. Residenztheater: the dismantled auditorium
Chapter 2. Dalston Theatre: progress report on a demolished building
Chapter 3. Teatro Olimpico: the avian theatre
Chapter 4. Teatro Amazonas: the opera house in the jungle
Afterword
Image Credits
Bibliography
Index

Augusto Corrieriis a London-based artist and writer. First trained as a sleight of hand magician, in 2002 he graduated in Theatre at Dartington College of Arts, and since then has presented numerous live works for theatres and galleries in the UK and across Europe. In his writing he has explored the poetics of performance and the entanglement of human and non-human worlds.Augusto Corrieri demands a critical consideration of dormant, repurposed, and survivingth??tre ? litalienne(or Italianate stage), arguing that the persistence of the spaces invites theatre scholarsl+