Birth, Copulation and Death: Feminist Theatre and Performance Practice Across Four Decades

Abstract

Anna Furse’s intensely personal autobiographical chapter traces her journey from Royal Ballet student and budding choreographer in the 1960s through her years as a leading player in international avant-garde theatre to her current role as distinguished professor combining practice and research in interdisciplinary fields such as Medical Humanities. Furse recounts her early training in ballet and student days at Bristol University, followed by her apprenticeship with Peter Brook’s Centre International de Recherches Théâtrales in Paris and her participation in Jerzy Grotowski’s ‘paratheatre’ experiments in France and Poland in the early to mid-1970s. Her subsequent work in experimental dance and theatre in the late 1970s and 1980s propelled her to co-found BloodGroup, a company that pioneered visual and physical feminist theatre, which led in turn to a career as a freelance director and then as Artistic Director of the UK ‘new writing’ company Paines Plough. Finally, Furse reflects on her work, post motherhood, in ‘Practice as Research’: since joining Higher Education full-time in 1997, this has gradually taken her to the edges of her discipline and beyond, into interdisciplinary projects, the founding of a new experimental company, Athletes of the Heart, and continuing international commissions.