Since the publication of this book, we have seen the near collapse of the world's financial systems, and the planet's ecological crisis has again become a mere afterthought on the agenda of our political leaders. Small Acts of Repair does not offer any quick fix either, but it does engage with ecology in a very broad – but also more than merely metaphorical – sense. Reflecting on a twenty-odd-year history of performance-making by Chicago-based company Goat Island, the book embraces (with reference to Gregory Bateson) an ‘ecology of the mind’ and uses ecology ‘as a system of enquiry’ (p. 177). This translates into mindfulness towards the complex interactions between performance and its environment, performers and spectators, organizations of space and modes of acting and spectating, bodies and objects, materiality and subject matter, movement and temporality, performance structure and perception, time and process. In addressing these issues, the contributors make fascinating connections between the work of Goat Island and other artistic practices, philosophies and theories: from Rem Koolhaas's design for a ferry port to Aldo van Eyck's designs for playgrounds in the blind spots of Amsterdam's urban map, from Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaux to Goedel's mathematical theory of compactness.

While the celerity of hasty decision-making has in no small measure contributed to the mess we currently find ourselves in, one of the recurrent lessons here could be termed the ‘discovery of slowness’: Goat Island have habitually taken two years to devise their complex, richly layered and highly physical shows. Consequently, the book extols the virtues of slowness and slowing down in multiple manifestations, not only working slowly but ‘slowing down time’ in performance (p. 67), and setting up a ‘space for contemplation’ for the spectator (p. 70). Not least of all, it recommends a slower pace of thinking: ‘Maybe we need new thoughts less than we need to decelerate’, Matthew Goulish proposes, ‘to reduce our thoughts, to refold them into other thoughts, and to recycle them’ (p. 17).

Goat Island have cultivated a generous and generative culture of ‘creative response’ in their performance-making and pedagogy; this dialogic use of response is also embedded in the fabric of this book. Notes, letters and reflections by company members alternate with insightful analytical responses by Stephen Bottoms and excerpts from previously published responses by Sara Jane Bailes, Carol Becker, Adrian Heathfield, Peggy Phelan and Philip Stanier. The book's structure also emulates that of a Goat Island performance: the two middle sections mirror each other and are reversible. Occasional redundancies are part and parcel of the recycling and refolding of thought into other thoughts. Overall, it is a treasure trove of insight for any theatre practitioner engaged in collaborative devised work, as well as anyone interested in the meeting point between aesthetics and ethics of contemporary performance. It will outlast the life of the company itself, which has recently toured its last performance The Lastmaker.