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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Dramaturgy Without a Dramaturge

A meditation on the practice of dramaturgy and the sensual and epistemological limits of collaborative making. Along the way the essay takes in questions of physical improvisation and narrative in performances of long duration.

Homepage image: Forced Entertainment, And on the Thousandth Night…, 2000. Photo: Hugo Glendinning. © the artists.

Dramaturgy without a Dramaturge was published in Rethinking Dramaturgy: Errancy and Transformation, Centro Parraga & CENDEAC, Murcia (in English & Spanish), 2010.

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Spanish translation

French translation

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Forced Entertainment, And on the Thousandth Night..., 2000. Photo: Hugo Glendinning. © the artists.