Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: caring performance, performing care / Amanda Stuart Fisher -- Part I. Performing interrelatedness. 1 Care ethics and improvisation: can performance care? / Maurice Hamington ; 2 Towards an aesthetics of care / James Thompson ; 3 Performing tenderness: fluidity and reciprocity in the performance of caring in Fevered Sleep's Men and Girls Dance / Amanda Stuart Fisher -- Part II. Care-filled performance. 4 Caring beyond illness: an examination of Godder's socially engaged art and participatory dance for Parkinson's work / Sara Houston ; 5 Convivial theatre: care and debility in collaborations between non-disabled and learning disabled theatre makers / Dave Calvert ; 6 Road care / Jen Archer-Martin and Julieanna Preston -- Part III. Care deficits. 7 Clean Break: a practical politics of care / Caoimhe McAvinchey ; 8 Performing a museum of living memories: beholding young people's experiences and expressions of care through oral history performance / Kathleen Gallagher and Rachel Turner-King ; 9 'Still Lives': Syrian displacement and care in contemporary Beirut / Ella Parry-Davies -- Part IV. Care as performance. 10 Verbatim practice as research with care-experienced young people: an 'aesthetics of care' through aural attention / Sylvan Baker and Maggie Inchley ; 11 Acts of care: applied drama, 'sympathetic presence' and person-centred nursing / Matt Jennings, Pat Deeny and Karl Tizzard-Kleister ; 12 Taking care of the laundry in care homes / Jayne Lloyd ; 13 Performing the 'aesthetics of care'/ James Thompson.

"This edited collection brings together essays presenting an interdisciplinary dialogue between theatre and performance and the fields of care ethics, care studies, health and social care. The book advances our understanding of performance as a mode of care, challenging existing debates in this area by re-thinking the caring encounter as a performed, embodied experience and interrogating the boundaries between care practice and performance. Through an examination of a wide range of different care performances drawn from interdisciplinary and international settings, the book interrogates how performance might be understood as caring or uncaring, careless or careful, and correlatively how care can be conceptualised as artful, aesthetic, authentic or even 'fake' and 'staged'. Drawing on interdisciplinary debates and discussion, the book considers how the field of performance and the aesthetic and ethico-political structures that determine its relationship with the social might be challenged by an examination of inter-human care. By placing socially-engaged performance in dialogue with theories and practices of care, the contributors consider how performance operates as a mode of caring for others and how debates between the theory and practice of care and performance making might foster a greater understanding of how the caring encounter is embodied and experienced."--Publisher's description.

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Open Access EbpS