Biography

Adrian Heathfield (b. 1968) writes on, curates and creates performance. He is the author of Out of Now, a monograph on the artist Tehching Hsieh, editor of Ally and Live: Art and Performance and co-editor of Perform, Repeat, Record. His numerous essays have been translated into ten languages.

He conducted the three year European Union funded creative research project Curating the Ephemeral (2014–2016) on immaterial art and museal practices. He was co-director of Performance Matters, a four-year AHRC funded research project on the cultural value of performance (2009–2013).

He co-curated the Live Culture events at Tate Modern, London (2003) and a number of other performance and durational events in European cities over the last eighteen years. He was curator of Doing Time, the Taiwan Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017), a curatorial adviser and attaché for the 20th Biennale of Sydney (2016) and an artistic director with the collective freethought of the 2016 Bergen Assembly, Norway.

Heathfield has worked with many artists and thinkers on critical and creative collaborations including film dialogues, performance-lectures, dramaturgy, writing and workshop projects. He was President of Performance Studies international (2004–2007) and is Emeritus Professor of Performance and Visual Culture at the University of Roehampton, London.

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After the Fall

An essay on European dance and physical theatre in the eighties and nineties in the light of its figurations of desire and loss. Pina Bausch’s Café Müller and La Ribot’s Panoramix are discussed in terms of their politics of embodiment, sexuality and longing.

Homepage image from essay: Jan Minarik, Malou Airaudo and Dominique Mercy in Pina Bausch’s Café Müller, 1978. © Pina Bausch and Ulli Weiss. Photo: Ulli Weiss.

After the Fall is published in Contemporary Theatres in Europe: A Critical Companion, Eds. Joe Kelleher and Nicholas Ridout, Routledge, 2006.

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