The Only Way Home is Through the Show

Performance Work of Lois Weaver

Jen Harvie editor Lois Weaver editor

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Intellect Books

Published:15th Jan '16

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

The Only Way Home is Through the Show cover

Lois Weaver is one of the world's leading figures in feminist and lesbian performance, a true pioneer in the growing field. This book offers the first book-length assessment of her career and work, tracing its history, aesthetics, principles, inspirations, innovations and more. Contributors include Weaver's most important collaborators from throughout her career, as well as many of the leading feminist theorists, journalists, and performers of the past forty years. The book also includes interviews not just with Weaver, but also with her partner, in life and performance, Peggy Shaw, and groundbreaking theatre maker Muriel Miguel. The result is a book that is truly unprecedented, a lavishly illustrated and expertly curated celebration of an incredible career.

'It is only fitting that the book that chronicles the career of pioneering feminist, lesbian performance artist, Lois Weaver is exceptional in its own right. This volume is a work of love with contributions from many of Lois’s collaborators, feminist theorists and writers.'

-- Morgan Gwenwald, GLBT Reviews

'Arguably, overall and above all, this volume helps to fill what has always been, and still is, a lamentable gap in terms of the documentation of feminist performance practices. Just as Lois expresses her debt to Muriel Miguel of Spiderwoman Theater for equipping her with the ‘tools’ that made it possible to make her own work and in turn hand these on to others (67), this book is a valuable means of communicating genealogies and legacies that are vital to sustaining and enhancing feminist performance cultures. In short, this is essential reading for all those makers, academics or theatre enthusiasts who share in Lois’s passionately held belief that ‘if you can imagine it you can make it.'

-- Elaine Aston, Studies in Theatre and Performance

'...The Only Way Home weaves (a word that Weaver’s collaborator Stacy Makishi uses to draw a relation between Weaver’s work and her last name) together visuals with words, at times even presenting Weaver’s production notes and her drafts of performance creation as visuals (149). From these carefully laid out depictions, we grow to understand the work and the woman behind it.' 

-- Megan Shea, The Drama Re

ISBN: 9781783205349

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

248 pages