I write this review from Dublin in September 2016, days after the fifth March for Choice has taken place in the Irish capital and simultaneously in cities around the world. The annual demonstration demands that the Irish government call a referendum to repeal the eighth amendment to the country's Constitution, which since 1983 has featured a ban on abortion, equating the life of the foetus (regardless of viability) with the life of the mother.

I mention the ongoing ‘Repeal the 8th’ campaign because at the heart of Phillips's edited collection is a clear sense that (a) performance art in Ireland, from its origins in the 1970s, has always been concerned with exploring the body as a site of conflict, an agent of meaning, and a catalyst for performance; and (b) women practitioners have always been leading figures in Irish performance art. These two points are inextricably linked: as Phillips puts it, ‘[f]eminist artists embraced performance art . . . to speak what was before unspeakable and do what was unthinkable for women in this conservative society . . . Performance became an artistic strategy enacting social change both in terms of sexual politics, [and] social justice’ (p. 8). Women's names, voices and bodies rise loudly from the pages, in resistance and opposition to dominant social and legal norms. Thick description and political analysis of performance pieces by Amanda Coogan, Mary Duffy, Alanna O'Kelly, Kira O'Reilly, Anne Seagrave and many others reveal a constant, urgent problematizing of the complex relationship between Ireland's patriarchal, Catholic heritage and the work of its women artists.

Of course, the work of hugely influential artists such as Alistair MacLennan, Nigel Rolfe, André Stitt and many other men populate Phillips's collection with creative precision, political power and embodied resonance. Crucially, the arrivals from the UK of MacLennan and Rolfe to the north and south of Ireland respectively are seen as a definitive moment of origin in the history of performance art in the country. Indeed, the collection's subtitle, ‘A History’, invokes a number of ways of thinking about what a history might be and do, and for whom it might be written. Phillips includes chronicle-style histories of performance art through the lenses of particular cities (Stitt's discussion of Belfast, Mags Morley and Danny McCarthy's of Cork), periods of time (Coogan explores the years between 1970 and 1990, Cliodhna Shaffrey the 2000s and beyond), companies (Karine Talec shows us the work of Bbeyond, Fergus Byrne recalls Performance Collective), and analyses of genres (El Putnam on sound art, Helena Walsh and Kate Antosik-Parsons on feminist performance art). There are snapshots of particular moments (Anthony Sheehan's 1984 article for High Performance about Irish performance south of the border) and wide-ranging descriptions of Irish performance artists’ practices abroad (Phillips's own chapter).

The volume's ability to comfortably and skilfully rove from the broad contextual brushstrokes to the tiny, sensory pinpricks is, in many ways, its greatest strength. In interview with Morley, McCarthy recalls the smell of rotting fish after a performance by MacLennan in the basement of Cork's Triskel Arts Centre in the early 1970s (p. 124). Walsh provides an extraordinarily thoughtful analysis of the term ‘post-conflict’ in an Irish performance context, deftly traversing fifty years of political struggles and negotiations from ‘the Troubles’ in Northern Ireland to the investigations of clerical sexual abuse across the country (pp. 211–14). These are just two examples of the sense the book provokes that the vibrant, churning, frequently invisible history of performance art in Ireland is very much worth investigating. I fervently hope that Phillips's volume and the names and works it brings to a wider audience for the first time pave the way for further exploration and analysis of these artists and their performance practices.