LISA MORAVEC
Writer, curator, critic, editor, lecturer,
body practitioner
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specialised in the intersections of the performing and visual arts
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Monograph
Moravec, L., Dressaged Animality: Human and Animal Actors in Contemporary Performance, London: Routledge, 2024.
https://www.routledge.com/Dressaged-Animality-Human-and-Animal-Actors-in-Contemporary-Performance/Moravec/p/book/9781032574851?srsltid=AfmBOooBSEU7eb8MBIyCTgcR-8p1HrNWKj5yWTUSoXWaihPOljqEflEX
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Open access (FWF Publication Grant):
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-mono/10.4324/9781003439639/dressaged-animality-lisa-moravec
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The book applies a productive interdisciplinary lens of art history, performance and animal studies for approaching political economy issues, critiquing anthropomorphic worldviews, and provoking thoughts around animal and human nature that spark impulses for an innovative performance aesthetics and ethics.
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It combines Marxist analysis with feminist and posthumanist methodology to analyse the relation between ‘societal dressage’ and ‘bodily animality’ that humans and animals share. Within this original theoretical framework, the book develops the concept of ‘dressaged animality’ as a mode of critique to analyse the social and political function of interdisciplinary forms of ‘contemporary performances.’
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Drawing on archival and primary research, the book theorises and historicises more than 15 performance practices in which animality is allegorically staged through by humans danced, real, or filmically mediated animals. It focuses on Rose English’s pioneering approach to performance-making and analyses overlooked performances by other renown and largely unknown American (Mike Kelley/Kate Foley, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Yvonne Rainer, Diana Thater), British (Mark Wallinger, Rose English), and European artists (Tamara Grcic, Judith Hopf, Joseph Beuys, Bartabas, Anna Källblad/Helena Byström) from the late 1960s until the late 2010s. While various types of artistic practice are framed as forms of critique (for example, protest art, interventionist strategies, institutional critique), the book maps an original performance theory in art which shows that contemporary artistic performances can also take up a critique of societal dressage.
This study will be of great interest to students and scholars in art history, theatre, dance and performance studies, and ecology, as well as to artists and curators working with performance.
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Edited Books
Begin Suddenly in Splendour. Rose English: Performance, Presence, Spectacle, eds. Harald Krejci, Lisa Moravec, and Marijana Schneider, exh. cat. (dt/eng) Museum der Moderne Salzburg/Berlin: Distanz Verlag, August 2024.
With essays by Connie Butler, Nicole Haitzinger, Lisa Moravec, Marijana Schneider, and Amy Tobin; Design by Atelier Anna Liska.
https://www.distanz.de/en/rose-english/ploetzlich-in-pracht-beginnen
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Posthumanist Approaches to a Critique of Political Economy: Dissident Practices, eds. Lisa Moravec and Carmen Lael Hines, with 23 international academics and artists, London: Bloomsbury Press (Posthumanism in Practice Series, peer-reviewed), submitted/forthcoming spring 2026.