Alan Read (born 21 September 1956) is a writer and professor of theatre at

King's College London King's College London (informally King's or KCL) is a public research university located in London, England. King's was established by royal charter in 1829 under the patronage of King George IV and the Duke of Wellington. In 1836, King's ...

. Read is known as a theatre theorist and cultural activist, with scholarly interests in ethics and the everyday, performed communities, event architecture, and subjectivities of capitalism. Read's work stands as a critique of modernist theatrical orthodoxy critically contesting Peter Brook's idealism of the ‘empty space' awaiting its theatre, a tabula rasa for professionals to enter and exit at will. Read counter intuitively perceives theatre to have been superseded in that populated place by the quotidian performances of everyday life, those that remain for good and ill. Read took up this provocative critique on the National Theatre stage in London in 1994 in public dialogue with Brook's space-designer Jean-Guy Lecat, and joins others in his scepticism of the colonial fantasy of theatre's ‘empty space', including most assertively Rustom Bharucha in ''Theatre & The World'' (1993).

Life

Born in

Southend-on-Sea Southend-on-Sea (), commonly referred to as Southend (), is a coastal city and unitary authority area with borough status in southeastern Essex, England. It lies on the north side of the Thames Estuary, east of central London. It is bordered ...

, the posthumous child of William Alan Read, and Veronica Read, he was educated at Westcliff High School. He obtained his bachelor's degree from

University of Exeter The University of Exeter is a public university , public research university in Exeter, Devon, England, United Kingdom. Its predecessor institutions, St Luke's College, Exeter School of Science, Exeter School of Art, and the Camborne School of Min ...

in 1979. He took his PhD at the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seattle a ...

Seattle Seattle ( ) is a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the seat of King County, Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in both the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest regio ...

between 1979 and 1981, and was awarded his doctorate in 1989, following a decade working at the Rotherhithe Theatre Workshop in the Docklands area of South East London. Read is the partner of the artist Beryl Robinson. They live in West London and the Commune of

Truinas Truinas is a commune in the Drôme department in southeastern France. Population See also *Communes of the Drôme department The following is a list of the 363 communes of the Drôme department of France. The communes cooperate in the fol ...

. They have two daughters Florence who is a writer, and Hermione a fashion designer.

Career

Read is the author of ''Theatre & Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance'' (1993), ''Theatre, Intimacy & Engagement: The Last Human Venue'' (2008), ''Theatre in the Expanded Field: Seven Approaches to Performance'' (2014), ''Theatre & Law'' (2016). and ''The Dark Theatre: A Book About Loss'' (2020). During a period of directing the Talks programme at the

Institute of Contemporary Arts The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) is an artistic and cultural centre on The Mall in London, just off Trafalgar Square. Located within Nash House, part of Carlton House Terrace, near the Duke of York Steps and Admiralty Arch, the ICA c ...

in London at the ‘height of the theory' in the 1990s, Read edited two volumes: ''The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation'', with original artwork by Steve McQueen (1996), and ''Architecturally Speaking: Practices of Art, Architecture and the Everyday'' (2000). Read taught at

Dartington College of Arts Dartington College of Arts was a specialist arts college located at Dartington Hall in the south-west of England, offering courses at degree and postgraduate level together with an arts research programme. It existed for a period of almost 50 ...

in the 1980s, coordinating the

Council of Europe The Council of Europe (CoE; french: Conseil de l'Europe, ) is an international organisation founded in the wake of World War II to uphold European Convention on Human Rights, human rights, democracy and the Law in Europe, rule of law in Europe. ...

Workshop on Theatre and Communities with Colette King and Peter Hulton in 1981–1983, and working at the Rotherhithe Theatre Workshop with David Slater through the rest of the decade. In the early 1990s he moved to Barcelona writing on street ceremony, gegants, castells and corre foc (human-dragon fire runners), completing the monograph ''Theatre & Everyday Life'' (1993) documenting these ethnographies of the everyday and their relations to risk and safety. In 1993 Read curated the

London International Festival of Theatre The London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT) is a biennial festival of theatre, performance and cultural events. The organisation also supports year-round activity in London. The organisation was founded by Rose Fenton and Lucy Neal, ...

Daily Dialogues, a sequence of 21 daily public seminars with artists, theorists and theatre companies engaged in the LIFT programme. Read reprised the work biennially for successive LIFT festivals over the next decade, concluding notably with the day-long symposium ‘Voice Ruin Play' (2001) that brought together for the first time Romeo Castellucci and Societas Raffaello Sanzio with key figures in the UK theatre community. Read was appointed Director of Talks at the

(ICA) in the mid 1990s working alongside Helena Reckitt. Together they were responsible for curating and chairing more than 500 public talks over four years, with key figures in the cultural field, including philosophers

Jacques Derrida Jacques Derrida (; ; born Jackie Élie Derrida; See also . 15 July 1930 – 9 October 2004) was an Algerian-born French philosopher. He developed the philosophy of deconstruction, which he utilized in numerous texts, and which was developed t ...

Jean Baudrillard Jean Baudrillard ( , , ; 27 July 1929 – 6 March 2007) was a French sociologist, philosopher and poet with interest in cultural studies. He is best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication, as w ...

Judith Butler Judith Pamela Butler (born February 24, 1956) is an American philosopher and gender theorist whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics, and the fields of third-wave feminism, queer theory, and literary theory. In 1993, Butler ...

Alphonso Lingis Alphonso Lingis (born November 23, 1933) is an American philosopher, writer and translator, with Lithuanian roots, currently Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. His areas of specialization include phenomenology, e ...

, race theorists Homi Bhabha,

bell hooks Gloria Jean Watkins (September 25, 1952December 15, 2021), better known by her pen name bell hooks, was an American author and social activist who was Distinguished Professor in Residence at Berea College. She is best known for her writings on ...

, Paul Gilroy, musicians Laurie Anderson,

Mark E Smith Mark Edward Smith (5 March 1957 – 24 January 2018) was an English singer, who was the lead singer, lyricist and only constant member of the post-punk group the Fall. Smith formed the band after attending the June 1976 Sex Pistols gig at th ...

, Patti Smith, novelists

Bret Easton Ellis Bret Easton Ellis (born March 7, 1964) is an American author, screenwriter, short-story writer, and director. Ellis was first regarded as one of the so-called literary Brat Pack and is a self-proclaimed satirist whose trademark technique, as a w ...

Nadine Gordimer Nadine Gordimer (20 November 192313 July 2014) was a South African writer and political activist. She received the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature, Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991, recognized as a writer "who through her magnificent epic writin ...

, SE Hinton, Laurie Moore,

Tahar Ben Jelloun Tahar Ben Jelloun ( ar, الطاهر بن جلون; born in Fes, Morocco, 1 December 1944) is a Moroccan writer. All of his work is written in French although his first language is Darija. He became known for his 1985 novel ''L’Enfant de Sab ...

, film directors Alejandro Jodorowsky, Raul Ruiz, Wong Kar-wai, artists Mary Kelly, Vija Celmins, John Currin,

Orlan orlan is an internationally recognized French artist. She is not tied to any one material, technology, or artistic practice. She uses sculpture, photography, performance, video, 3D, video games, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and ro ...

, cultural theorists Beatriz Colomina, John Berger, Sander Gilman, and space makers Doreen Massey, Richard Sennett and

Edward Soja Edward William Soja (; 1940–2015) was a self-described urbanist, a noted postmodern political geographer and urban theorist on the planning faculty at UCLA, where he was Distinguished Professor of Urban Planning, and the London School of Ec ...

. Talks series such as Spaced Out (Architecture), Addressing Dressing (Fashion), Uncanny Encounters (Psychoanalytic theory), The Scapegoat (Cultural theory), Incarcerated with Artaud and Genet (Theatrical archaeology), Working With Fanon (Race and radical psychiatry), influenced the way cultural theory was publicly addressed through the 1990s and the ‘talks' industry that was to follow at Tate Modern, The Institute of Ideas, The School of Life, TED and Intelligence Squared. In 1997 Read was appointed the first Professor of Theatre at Roehampton Institute (subsequently Roehampton University) and then in 2006 the first Professor of Theatre in the 180-year history of

. At King's College, Read established the Performance Foundation, conceived and built the Anatomy Theatre & Museum in collaboration with the Centre for e Research (2010), planned and built the Inigo Rooms in the East Wing of

Somerset House Somerset House is a large Neoclassical complex situated on the south side of the Strand in central London, overlooking the River Thames, just east of Waterloo Bridge. The Georgian era quadrangle was built on the site of a Tudor palace ("O ...

with the support of King's Business (2012), and initiated King's Cultural Partners, latterly Kings Cultural Institute under the directorship of

Deborah Bull Deborah Bull, Baroness Bull, CBE (born 22 March 1963) is an English dancer, writer, and broadcaster and former creative director of the Royal Opera House. She joined King's College London as Director, Cultural Partnerships in 2012. In 2015 she w ...

(2012). Read was awarded an Honorary Fellowship by

in 2003, an

Arts and Humanities Research Board The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), formerly Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB), is a British research council, established in 1998, supporting research and postgraduate study in the arts and humanities. History The Arts an ...

five-year Major Award (2000–2005), a Leverhulme Major Award (2010–2013), mentored the last of the AHRC Creative Fellowships with Greg Whelan of Lone Twin (2011–2016), and secured an EPSRC three-year Bridging the Gaps Award with

Mark Miodownik Mark Andrew Miodownik () is a British materials scientist, engineer, broadcaster and writer at University College London. Previously, he was the head of the Materials Research Group at King's College London, and a co-founder of Materials Libr ...

and the King's Material Library, (2011–2014). Read is Faculty Professor of the

University of California Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant univ ...

, for whom he established the annual London Theatre Capital Programme, and since 1991 has been an affiliated Professor of

Boston University Boston University (BU) is a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. The university is nonsectarian, but has a historical affiliation with the United Methodist Church. It was founded in 1839 by Methodists with its original campu ...

teaching theatre students from coast to coast US campuses.

Artistic collaborations

Read's collaborations with the theatre companies Het Werkteater, Societas Raffaello Sanzio

Forced Entertainment Forced Entertainment is an experimental theatre company based in Sheffield, England, founded by Tim Etchells in 1984. Details and history Forced Entertainment originally focused on making and touring theatre performances before expanding to lon ...

, Goat Island,

Battersea Arts Centre The Battersea Arts Centre ("BAC") is a performance space specialising in theatre productions. Located near Clapham Junction railway station in Battersea, in the London Borough of Wandsworth, it was formerly Battersea Town Hall. It is a Grade ...

, Forster & Heighes, the curatorial producers Artangel, and the artist-activists Platform, have been long-term relations that took the form of advocacy, infrastructural support, advisory roles, talks-curation and engagement between theatre makers, the academy and the public realm. Read has performed with William Pope. L as part of ‘The Frequently Asked' curated by

Tim Etchells Tim Etchells (born 1962) is an English artist and writer based in Sheffield and London. Etchells is the artistic director of Forced Entertainment, an experimental performance company founded in 1984. He has published several works of fiction, ...

and

Adrian Heathfield Adrian Heathfield is a British writer and curator. Overview Heathfield works on contemporary art practices, particularly those involving live elements such as performance art, experimental theatre and dance. His writing has focused on questions ...

at Tanzquartier Vienna in 2007, designed sound work for

Massimo Bartolini Massimo Bartolini (born 1962 in Cecina Cecina may refer to: * Cecina (meat), a Spanish and Mexican culinary specialty made of beef * ''Cecina'' (gastropod), a genus of freshwater snails in the family Pomatiopsidae * Cecina, Tuscany, Italy * Caeci ...

's ‘The Human Voices', a site specific work in a disused 1939 ENAL pool in Vercelli, Italy, as part of PSi ‘Affective Archives', 2010, created lecture performances such as ‘The Poor Law' to mark the centenary of Daniel Paul Schreber's death, at Castle Sonnenstein on the River Elbe 2011, read his unreliable memoir ''The White Estuary: Man with the Reason of History Missing'' over three six-hour sessions as part of PSi 18 Leeds (2012), participated in Tuija Kokkonen's all-night performance ‘Chronopolitics with Dogs and Trees' at Stanford University (2013), occupied

Tate Modern Tate Modern is an art gallery located in London. It houses the United Kingdom's national collection of international modern and contemporary art, and forms part of the Tate group together with Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. It is ...

with his performance teach-in ‘The English Garden Effect' as part of the climate crisis Deadline Festival 2015, exchanged public correspondence with the philosopher Cecilia Sjoholm for the TOPublic Festival (2016) , and turned the institution of the lecture inside out for Justyna Scheuring's performance ‘The Past Is Ahead of Us' at

in 2016. Read is an essayist and reader for radio broadcast including for

BBC Radio 4 BBC Radio 4 is a British national radio station owned and operated by the BBC that replaced the BBC Home Service in 1967. It broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes, including news, drama, comedy, science and history from the BBC' ...

, Plato's Cave (2012), Dreadful Trade (2014), and Soul Estuary (2016), produced by Sarah Blunt with sound by

Chris Watson John Christian Watson (born Johan Cristian Tanck; 9 April 186718 November 1941) was an Australian politician who served as the third prime minister of Australia, in office from 27 April to 18 August 1904. He served as the inaugural federal lead ...

Influence

In support of radical inclusion in the field Read's work simultaneously engages theoretical study, performance practices and pedagogic commitments. Steve Tompkins of the architectural practice

Haworth Tompkins Haworth Tompkins is a British architecture studio, formed in 1991 by architects Graham Haworth (b. 1960) and Steve Tompkins (b. 1959). Based in London, the studio works throughout the public, private and subsidised sectors at a wide spectrum, f ...

, has recognised the significance of Read's concepts of the everyday, cultural accretion, and event ghosting in their winning submissions for the Royal Court Theatre and

Young Vic Theatre The Young Vic Theatre is a performing arts venue located on The Cut, near the South Bank, in the London Borough of Lambeth. The Young Vic was established by Frank Dunlop in 1970. Kwame Kwei-Armah has been Artistic Director since February 2018 ...

in London. Tompkins has written: “Read has been an excellent sounding board, a provocative collaborator, an encouraging enthusiast and a constructive critic for my work.” Indeed, what

Susannah Clapp Susannah Clapp (born 1949) is a British writer, who has been the theatre critic of ''The Observer'' since 1997 and is a contributor to the BBC Radio 3 ''Nightwaves'' programme. Clapp read English at the University of Bristol, where one of her teac ...

of ''The Observer'' has described as ‘Tompkinsesque' characteristics of theatrical design, could be said to share significant features with Read's long running concerns for archaeologies of site and the theatre as memory machine. The Homo Novus Festival in

Riga Riga (; lv, Rīga , liv, Rīgõ) is the capital and largest city of Latvia and is home to 605,802 inhabitants which is a third of Latvia's population. The city lies on the Gulf of Riga at the mouth of the Daugava river where it meets the Ba ...

took up Read's concept of ‘The Last Human Venue' as an overarching curatorial umbrella for their 2013 international festival with artists including Monika Pormale, Nomadi and Valters Sillis responding to Read's idea of performance at the end of its ecological tether measuring the humans' distance from their inevitable extinction. The Chicago-based Every House Has A Door adopted Read's concept of Abandoned Practices, itself following the work of Isabelle Stengers on eliminativism in an annual summer school in Prague/Chicago and a project web site www.abandonedpractices.org. The Artist/Activist group Platform, and filmmakers Desperate Optimists, have both responded to Read's conception of ‘civility' and the problematic question of the ‘civic centre' with work in a variety of media including peripatetic performance and film. Read's work is anthologised and widely referenced including Lizbeth Goodman's featuring of ''Theatre & Everyday Life'' in ''The Routledge Reader in Politics and Performance'' (2000), with subsequent work on definitions of performance in Adrian Heathfield's ''Live: Art and Performance'' (2004), the miniature and the infra-thin in Richard Gough's ''A Performance Cosmology'' (2006), friendship in Lone Twin's ''Good Luck Everybody'' (2013), vegetal life in Patricia Vieira's ''The Green Thread'' (2015), repetition in Eirini Kartsaki's ''On Repetition'' (2016), and the financialisation of childhood in ''Performance Research'' ‘On Childhood' (2017). Read's work is frequently cited with key figures in the field both critiquing and referencing his ideas: Shannon Jackson singling out Read's concepts of ‘re-association and reassembly' (after Bruno Latour) in ''Social Works'' (2011), Nigel Thrift adopting Read's origination of ‘showciology' in ‘The Transformation of Contemporary Capitalism' (2009), Joe Kelleher's consideration of Read's conception of politics in ''Theatre & Politics'' (2009), Hansen and Kozel on Read's figuring of ethics in ‘Embodied Imagination' (2007), and Nicholas Ridout's reflections on Read's theory of theatrical failure in ''Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems'' (2006).

Recent work

Read's more recent work on theatrical ‘immunity', reversing the communitarian presumption of performance, might be considered a logical inversion of the tenets of ''Theatre & Everyday Life'' rather than a negation of them. In this work Read has challenged those with investments in terminologies of social theatre, community theatre and political theatre to act upon more nuanced distinctions between aesthetic, cultural and political priorities. Read figures the ‘emaciated spectator', in critical relation to Jacques Ranciere's voluntaristic ‘emancipated spectator', measuring their distance from others in the audience and gauging their relations with the immersive event that seeks their submission to its spectacle. This agency of measurement is always operable in relation to an ending, aesthetic (the show always ends), and ecological (human extinction is inevitable), that invites Read to name the theatre ‘the last human venue'. Read's gently cynical tone, especially in his widespread reviewing of the work of leading figures in the disciplinary field, such as Richard Schechner and

Peggy Phelan Peggy Phelan (born April 23, 1959) is an American feminist scholar. She is one of the founders of Performance Studies International, the former chair of New York University's Department of Performance Studies from 1993 to 1996, Stanford's Theatre ...

, Tracy Davies and Susan Bennett, Ric Knowles, and monumental productions such as ''The Sultan's Elephant'' by Royal de Luxe, has teased and challenged those with cultural capital, seeking the funny bone of a discipline that has made so much currency from others' labours. The same reviews encourage the writer Caridad Svich to describe Read as ‘inimitable'. Read has attracted less benign responses for his longstanding polemical critique of identity politics that fall short of

intersectional Intersectionality is an analytical framework for understanding how aspects of a person's social and political identities combine to create different modes of discrimination and privilege. Intersectionality identifies multiple factors of adva ...

ambitions, Read maintaining that ‘radical particularity' inadvertently obscures the politically inclusive urgency of a ‘general theory' of class disempowerment. Equally his work on ‘pseudo action', the deceptive, voluntaristic vocabulary of a theatre wish-fulfilling its social and political purpose in the place of a slower but more honest political agency, has been forcefully countered by a number of commentators, the most prominent of whom has been Janelle Reinelt in her valedictory lecture to the field at Warwick University in 2015, ‘What I Came to Say' (2015). Read in turn responds to these claims of political retreat in his keynote to the Performance Philosophy Convention at the

Prague Academy The Academy of Fine Arts, Prague ( cs, Akademie výtvarných umění v Praze; AVU) is an art college in Prague, Czech Republic. Founded in 1799, it is the oldest art college in the country. The school offers twelve master's degree programs and one ...

in 2017, ‘The Dark Theatre: Ethnographies of the Capitalocene' in which he retraces his steps over three decades of political and theatrical commitment to the neighbourhood and dockland warehouse in which his thinking about everyday life and theatre were grounded.

Bibliography

* (1984) ''An Educational Theatre Project: The Shadow of Theatre. Dartington: Theatre Papers/Arts Archives. * (1984) ''Het Werkteater: An Actors' Cooperative''. Dartington: Theatre Papers/Arts Archives * (1993) ''Theatre & Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance''. London: Routledge. * (1994) ''Peter Brook: Platform Papers''. London: National Theatre. * (1996) ''The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation''. Seattle: Bay Press. * (2000) ''Architecturally Speaking: Practices of Art, Architecture and the Everyday''. London: Routledge. * (2000) ''On Animals''. London: Taylor and Francis * (2003) ''Epitaph: Societas Raffaello Sanzio''. Milan: Ubu Libri. * (2004) ''On Civility''. London: Taylor and Francis. * (2008) ''Theatre, Intimacy & Engagement: The Last Human Venue''. Houndmills: Palgrave. * (2014) ''Theatre in the Expanded Field: Seven Approaches to Performance''. London: Bloomsbury. * (2016) ''Theatre & Law''. Houndmills: Palgrave. * (2020) ''The Dark Theatre: A Book About Loss''. Abingdon: Routledge.

References

External links

Alan Read on Childhood, Bodies and Perception at Tate Modern, 2016.

Stage Hands: The Manual Labour of Performance. Inaugural Lecture, King's College London, 2012.

Liverpool Biennial, 2016: Lay Theatre and the Eruption of the Audience: Keynote Talk

Alan Read on the Allied invasion of Iraq, 2003

An Exchange of letters with Cecilia Sjoholm for TO Public, 2016

‘And nothing is, but what is not', Introduction to Chiara Guidi, King's College London, 2014

Homo Novus Festival: 2013, The Last Human Venue

Law and the Curated Body, Osgoode Hall Law School, Toronto, 2015

Hijacking Wonders, Hetveem Theatre, Amsterdam, 2011

Art As Knowing: A Public Conversation about Art, Ideas and Practice. University of Minnesota, Institute for Advanced Study, 2007.

http://ias.umn.edu/2007/03/23/art-as-knowing/

Thinking The City: Multidisciplinary Views on Urban Life and Culture, Chaired by Doreen Massey, Tate Modern, 2001, Part 5, Alan Read
{{DEFAULTSORT:Read, Alan 1956 births Living people 21st-century British male writers Academics of King's College London People from Southend-on-Sea 20th-century British male writers Alumni of the University of Exeter People educated at Westcliff High School for Boys University of Washington alumni Academics of the University of Roehampton