Recent books
On the Edge of Utopia: Performance and Ritual at Burning Man
In On the Edge of Utopia, Rachel Bowditch— performer, theatre director, scholar, and Burning Man participant—explores the spectrum of performance and ritual practices within Black Rock City from the everyday to spectacle, the profane to the sublime. Bowditch argues that Burning Man can be understood as a contemporary galaxy of happenings, a site for rehearsals of utopia, and a secular pilgrimage. As Burning Man continues to grow, it is creating new paradigms for performance, installation art, community, and invented rituals in the twenty-first century.
Seagull Books/University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Performing Utopia
Performing Utopia, a volume of nine essays edited by Rachel Bowditch and Pegge Vissicaro, expand Jill Dolan's theory of the utopia performative to encompass performance in public life—from diasporic hip-hop battles, Chilean military parades, commemorative processions, Blackfoot powwows, and post-Katrina Mardi Gras to the Philadelphia Mummers Parade, Festas Juninas in Brazil, the Renaissance Fairs in Arizona, and neoburlesque competitions. How do these performances rehearse and enact visions of a utopic world? What can the lens of utopia illuminate about the potential of performing bodies to transform communities, identities, values, and beliefs across time?
Seagull Books/University of Chicago Press, 2018.
Physical Dramaturgy: Perspectives from the Field
Physical Dramaturgy: Perspectives from the Field, an anthology edited by Rachel Bowditch, Jeff Casazza, and Annette Thornton, looks at new ways of approaching a wealth of physical worlds, from the works of Shakespeare and other period playwrights to the processes of Jerzy Grotowski, Lloyd Williamson, Richard Schechner, and Michael Chekhov, and devising original works in a variety of contexts from Pig Iron, Dell’Arte International, Bill Bowers and mime, Tectonic Theater Project, and Liz Lerman’s Dance Exchange, giving dramaturgs, actors, and directors new ways of looking at existing methods and providing examples of how to translate, combine, and adapt them into new explorations for training, rehearsal, or research.
Routledge, 2018.