As Maaike Bleeker, Jon Foley Sherman, and Eirini Nedelkopoulou point out in their important new collection Performance and Phenomenology: Traditions and Transformations, the twenty-first century has seen a flourishing interest in phenomenological approaches to performance. This interest has proceeded from, and in tandem with, the performative, corporeal, and experiential turns in theory and practice of the arts, and it has been inspired by experimental forms of technologically mediated, immersive, and participatory performance. Exploring new ways of thinking about experience, subjectivity, and the body, the thirteen scholars assembled in this collection offer an engaging variety of responses to these shifts and developments. Their essays richly support the claim that “performance can be a privileged object of phenomenological investigation as well as a means of developing phenomenological practice” (1).

An affinity for performance and the structures of theatre lies deep within the phenomenological tradition. In a detailed examination of Edmund Husserl's notes written during the years 1905–18, Pannill Camp demonstrates the importance of theatre to the philosopher's thinking, particularly his theories of image-consciousness and phenomenological reduction (or epoché). The remaining essays establish the vitality of this tradition—particularly its development in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and later phenomenological philosophers—to contemporary theory and practice. Combining the notion of reversibility from Merleau-Ponty's unfinished late treatise The Visible and the Invisible with insights from new materialist theory, Joslin McKinney analyzes the scenographic interaction between humans and things. Jon Foley Sherman draws upon and supplements Merleau-Ponty in a discussion of time in neofuturist performance, arguing (among other things) that time is a shared, rather than individual, accomplishment. Shirley Tate draws upon Merleau-Ponty, Frantz Fanon, and Judith Butler in order to analyze the disruptive force of transracial intimacy and race performativity on the racial contract of postwar Britain. Gayle Salamon uses the notion of performativity inherited from the phenomenological tradition in a different context. Through a nuanced reading of Erwin Straus's 1952 essay “The Upright Posture” and a 1964 Life magazine article entitled “Homosexuality in America,” she examines the legal defense's claim in a 2011 trial that a middle-school boy accused of killing his gender-transgressive classmate was provoked by the perceived aggressiveness of his victim's feminized walk.

Some of the collection's most engaging essays explore the question of how one practices, or does, phenomenology. Susan Kozel utilizes the framework of process philosophy in order to discuss the early stages of the phenomenological process, in which raw experience identifies itself and begins to formulate itself in writing. Attending to these early stages, she argues, opens phenomenology to subtle levels of affect and somatic awareness. Combining phenomenological methods with the cognitive science approach known as “embodied dynamicism,” Phillip Zarrilli describes a system of actor training based on the practice of embodied visualization. Sigrid Merx is one of several contributors who explore intermedial performance making as a form of phenomenological investigation. Merx discusses the Belgian technotheatre company CREW's performance ‘W’ (Double U), in which two participant-immersants trade visual fields using “head-swap” technology. This experiment, which attempted to enact the idea of seeing the world through another's eyes, constituted a laboratory for investigating the parameters and limits of empathy.

In fact, as this collection demonstrates, all performance can be seen as a conscious or implicit phenomenological investigation. In Peta Tait's contribution to this collection, the presence of dead animals in performances by Jill Orr and Nikki Heywood troubles the boundaries between human and animal. In their visceral meditations on liveness, movement, and death, they offer a phenomenologically grounded path to “forging responsibility not simply to other living animals, but also to animals in all states of life and death” (118). Maaike Bleeker analyzes Yvonne Rainer's dance performances of the 1960s as phenomenological experiments on movement perception and what philosopher Brian Massumi calls “lived abstraction” (36). Bleeker links the performance of abstraction in Rainer's work to the editing of movement in film. Eirini Nedelkopoulou discusses Congregation, an interactive kinetic light installation mounted in a number of cities by the UK media performance group KMA. Noting the performance's phenomenological implications, Nedelkopoulou considers the modes of participation that KMA illuminates in the context of Jean-Luc Nancy's notion of “being-in-common.”

By placing phenomenology in dialogue with contemporary performance practices and other theoretical points of view, the essays in this collection critique its traditional assumptions and explore potential limits to its historical aspirations. Employing Merleau-Ponty's notion of motor intentionality and Friedrich Nietzsche's idea of overcoming (as expanded on by Gilles Deleuze), Philipa Rothfield looks at the Alexander Technique as a practice that aims to displace subjectivity and enable the body to perform beyond its habitual repertoire. Though she makes a strong argument for the relevance of a Merleau-Pontian approach, she counters this with the Nietzschean thought that “the lure of the phenomenological project is testimony to our incapacity to experience the world beyond the gamut of our own subjectivity” (103). In a provocative essay on media artist Jordan Crandall's 2011 performance piece Gatherings, Mark B. N. Hansen offers a more trenchant challenge to the phenomenological notion of subjectivity. Because Gatherings presents the body in a technologically engineered, data-saturated performance field that operates outside the performer's perceptual registers, it foregrounds both “the particular marginalization of the human subject that occurs as human bodyminds are implicated within twenty-first-century media networks” and “the continued, if repositioned, centrality of human witnessing that alone can make this implication … apparent to and meaningful for human experience” (239, italics in original). According to Hansen, Gatherings points the way to a radicalized, nonanthropocentric phenomenology of worldly sensibility.

A review this short cannot do justice to the intricacies of Hansen's argument or to the nuances and insights that characterize the other essays in this impressive collection. Individually and together, they make a sizable contribution to our understanding of performance. Performance and Phenomenology utilizes the experiential insights that mark the phenomenological tradition, and it engages and revises this tradition in light of performance, media, and other developments. In so doing, it provides a wealth of critical and experiential frameworks for understanding the relationships among subjectivity, corporeality, perception, and world.