LAUSR

What happens when the act of running migrates across bodies, situations, and aesthetics? And how is running being mobilized in contemporary theatre and performance? Athletic bodies have long been represented in figurative art, but sustained performative explorations of the act and action of running are a more recent phenomenon. In employing running bodies in and as art, artists have responded to the emergence of recreational endurance running as a global mass participation sport, to its increasing visibility as a body-cultural practice, and to the possibilities running opens up for engaging with the broader ‘sport spectacle’. But how are theatre and performance makers employing running bodies and how might this contribute to emerging interdisciplinary dialogues around running and its cultures? In this essay, I propose the notion of gesture as a lens for investigating how performances of running explore a potent dynamic that exists between the running body as spectacle, the running body as generator of kinaesthetic sensation and the running body as initiator of affective response. Gesture mediates between the biological and the social and between the athletic and the artistic, and offers a way of perceiving the expressive and performative potential of running as art. Exploring how running might operate gesturally is important in articulating what running does in and as performance, while also establishing how performance itself might contribute to the emerging interdisciplinary field of ‘running studies’. In running performances, the artist’s running body, or the act of witnessing running bodies, or the experience of one’s own body in motion, serves as a potent and productive means of intervening in the coupling of running and meaning. As an ordinary mode of embodiment running appears repetitive and instrumental with its expressive and gestural potential constrained. Runners’ 1. See Jennifer Doyle, ‘Dirt off Her Shoulders’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 19, no. 4 (2013): 419–33. Contemporary Theatre Review, 2020 Vol. 30, No. 1, 28–45, https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2019.1696322