A Theatre of Powerlessness: Acts of Knowledge and the Performance of the Many (Thinking Through Theatre)

Over the course of Edit Kaldor’s Inventory of Powerlessness, developed and performed in four European cities (Amsterdam, Berlin, Poznan, Prague) between 2013-16, a range of situations, states and feelings - from quotidian frustrations to extremes of affliction, disadvantage and oppression - were brought into the collective setting of the theatre as spoken testimony.Meanwhile, a cumulative and archivable database or ‘inventory’ of powerlessness and its contemporary intersections was projected on stage, generated live by the participants at each performance.Thus, individual accounts of powerlessness were placed in relation to others, as acts of living knowledge and as claim upon the shared articulation that theatrical working together can foster. This book, departing from but not confined to the example of Inventory, explores contemporary ways of making and performing that bring marginalised knowledges into appearance and action.The book is not only for students of theatre, performance a