In Memoriam: Professor Mike Pearson, 1949–2022

Abstract

Mike Pearson, who has died aged 72, was a world-renowned theatre-maker and academic, whose work transformed the landscape of contemporary theatre and performance. Over the course of a remarkably generative and influential career, Mike made a leading contribution to the development of a range of intersecting fields: the creation of laboratory theatre practices; site-specific performance; the interrogation of the relationship between theatre and archaeology, performance and place; the advancement of performance design; and the establishment of performance studies. With typical humility and generosity, Mike would have downplayed the authorial logic of these claims, highlighting instead the importance of collaboration and dialogical exchange in the development of his creative practice and critical thinking. For Mike, collaboration was not only central to making theatre happen, it was the essential fabric of performance and the very stuff of everyday life: here we are together, so let’s make this interesting (where interesse precisely invokes the time and place of being-together). Mike always made things seem interesting and important. He had a great feeling for the contemporary as the space of our being together, and of our coexistence in and with time; and for the trace of the historical as the marking of time. Archaeologist Michael Shanks, one of his key co-authors and co-creators, has noted that the recognition of ‘our collaborative, collective capacity to make a Mike Pearson 1949–2022. Photo: Heike Roms