“The Joint Venture of Tim Crouch’s Performance between Visual Art, Theatre and Education”

The paper focuses on the experimental work by one of the most promising figures of contemporary British drama, Tim Crouch, highlighting the intriguing and playful interrogation of the audience’s role (or better agency) within the ‘empty’, de-materialized space of theatre in comparison and interplay with different contexts/locations of aesthetic experience and arts consumption that constitutes the main focus of all his plays. His own formation confirms both his vocation as “theatre maker” – rather than merely as playwright – and his constant fascination with the world of contemporary visual art: at the beginning as an actor of performance art installations, and then gradually as actor and co-founder of Public Parts Theatre, and as teacher, writer and leading member of the “News from Nowhere” company, a company “whose aim is to explore the borders between theatre, education and visual arts through performance, teaching and commissioning”. The paper discusses how such an ambitious and ambiguous project – both theatrical, educational and institutional – is translated into the three works that have already established Crouch’s world-wide reputation: My Arm (2003), where the story of an empty gesture (a narrative drive derived from a clear theatrical tradition) is mythologised into an icon of contemporary art scene; An Oak Tree (2005) inspired to the homonymic work of Michael Craig-Martin, considered the manifesto of conceptual art; and England (2007), where the theme of a heart transplant becomes the pretext for a multi-layered exploration of ‘Englishness’ in terms of cultural transmigrations and translations through the trade routes of art and human beings – thus staging a tour through space and across borders which, among many other things, also obliquely refers to the disruptive modernity of Hogarth’s own ventures for theatricality, visual education and self-promotion.