It is with a very heavy heart that I am writing to let our community know that Baz Kershaw died on 31st March.
Baz was a pioneer in theatre and performance studies, whose research was unfailingly innovative and forward-thinking. He led the way through his research into community theatre, the politics of performance and performance ecologies. Many of us will have benefitted from his scholarship, generous collaboration and friendship over the years.
Prior to his retirement, Baz Kershaw was Professor in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick and formerly held the Foundation Chair of Drama at the University of Bristol, where he was also Director of the five-year research project PARIP. He trained and worked as an electro-mechanical design engineer before reading English and Philosophy at Manchester University and gaining higher degrees from the Universities of Hawaii (MA English) and Exeter (PhD Drama). He taught in several colleges and universities representing a wide spectrum of UK higher education, whilst combining that with professional theatre/performance work plus scholarly research and writing projects.
He gained extensive experience in experimental, radical and community-based theatre/performance, having written, directed and co-devised over 40 professional productions and projects, and founded the first Rural Touring Community Arts Group (Medium Fair C. A. 1976) and first Reminiscence Theatre Company (Fair Old Times 1978). High-profile events included shows at the legendary Drury Lane Arts Lab in London, community plays with Ann Jellicoe’s Colway Theatre Trust in Dorset and site-specific/celebratory spectacles with Welfare State International in various venues. He produced eco-events on the Bristol heritage ship the SS Great Britain and at Bristol Zoological Gardens before setting-up the Devonshire-based Earthrise Repair Shop, an experiment in performance diversity and conservation for mending broken imaginings of Earth.
He was author of The Politics of Performance (Routledge 1992), The Radical in Performance (Routledge 1999) and Theatre Ecology (Cambridge University Press 2007), editor of The Cambridge History of British Theatre, Vol 3 – Since 1895 and co-editor of Engineers of the Imagination (Methuen 1983, 2nd ed. 1990), Practice-as-Research in Performance and Screen (Palgrave 2009) and Research Methods in Theatre and Performance (Edinburgh University Press 2011). He published many articles in international journals and essays in edited books, as well as entries in reference texts such as the Dictionary of Literary Biography and Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance. His writings have also been republished in several international Readers and translated into Spanish, German, Chinese, Indonesian, Arabic and Turkish.
Baz presented over 100 papers and 40 workshops at research and pedagogical events in more than 25 countries on five continents. He co-founded the Practice as Research Working Group of the International Federation of Theatre Research and was co-initiator and founder member of TaPRA, serving on the Executive Committee as first co-Convenor of Working Groups. In 2011 he was awarded Lifetime Membership of TaPRA in recognition of outstanding contributions to theatre and performance research internationally. He received similar honours from the Irish Society of Research and the Egyptian Ministry of Culture/Cairo International Festival of Experimental Theatre.
He was a gentle soul, but a towering presence in our discipline who will be greatly missed.
Nadine Holdsworth