Ruth Little Dance Umbrella Lecture 2018

Theatre and dance originate in the moving human body; in its capacity for physical and verbal articulation, its ability to motivate, demonstrate and orchestrate change. But as our experiences of the world become increasingly distributed and synthetic, as we move from the rhythmic to the algorithmic, what does performance do, what can it enact, that makes it so necessary to our social health, our common good, and our agency in violently divisive times?

In the 2018 Dance Umbrella Lecture, dramaturg and writer Ruth Little, in conversation with Royal Court artistic director Vicky Featherstone, reflects on the role of live performance as social gesture; a practice of communal movement in the public sphere which is far more than the sum of its (body) parts.