This book explores repetition in contemporary performance and spectatorship. It offers an impassioned account of the ways in which speech, movement and structures repeat in performances by Pina Bausch, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Lone Twin Theatre, Haranczak/Navarre and Marco Berrettini. It addresses repetition in relation to processes of desire and draws attention to the forces that repetition captures and makes visible. What is it in performances of repetition that persuades us to return to them again and again? How might we unpack their complexities and come to terms with their demands upon us? While considering repetition in relation to the difficult pleasures we derive from the theatre, this book explores ways of accounting for such experiences of theatre in memory and writing.

On Repetition aims to unpack the different uses and functions of repetition within contemporary performance, dance practices, craft and writing. The collection, edited by Eirini Kartsaki, explores repetition in relation to intimacy, laughter, technology, familiarity and fear - proposing a new vocabulary for understanding what is at stake in works that repeat. Drawing on psychoanalysis, philosophy, linguistics, sociology and performance studies - and employing case studies from a range of practices - the essays presented here combine to form a unique interdisciplinary exploration of the functions of repetition in contemporary culture.