Theatre and the Threshold of Death

On the eve of a global pandemic, a theatre professor becomes immersed in the lives of five artist-mystics, each of whom is a "first" in her field: Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), the first known musical composer, Eleanora Duse (1858-1924), the first modern actor in the Western world, Simone Weil (1909-1943), philosopher, activist and mystic, who Albert Camus called "the only great spirit of our time," Marina Abramovic (b. 1946), "the grandmother of performance art," and Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), the first known (and belatedly acknowledged) abstract painter. Each time Gough crosses a threshold into their world she is compelled to attend courses, seminars, and workshops that are simultaneously about dying and about healing.
Curious to learn more about the relationships between art practice, dying, and healing, Gough imagines the five artists as Wisdom teachers in a mystery school. In a series of eight lectures, she turns to performance theory to provide a framework for exploring our relationship to the unknown world. Theatre and the Threshold of Death makes a persuasive argument for relational thinking as an alternative approach to engaging the complexities of a polarized world.