Interest in performance movement, and specifically 'physical theatre', has never been greater, within the classroom, academy and theatre. But there is a remarkable absence of texts that subject the moving body to a fully analytical gaze.


Tales of the Flesh, by Colin Counsell, represents a much-needed analytical survey of a range of movement-based practitioners in theatre and dance, looking at Laban, Meyerhold, the Bauhaus, Martha Graham and Jacques Lecoq. In it he considers how performance movement generates meaning, whilst placing these artists within their socio-historical context.


Counsell is renowned for his work in semiotics and performance, and here he draws on that to provide the first coherant theoretical position of movement performance in the modernist period. The result is a crucial scholarly intervention with implications for the study of theatrical history and the theatrical present.