"On Repetition: Writing, Performance & Art offers a rich exploration of repetition as a complex and vital device across a range of creative contexts, including theatre, dance, performance art, stand-up comedy, music, film, and poetry....A major strength of this particular collection lies in its multidisciplinarity and its theoretical breadth.... a useful and engaging guidebook to an often under-analyzed and under-considered phenomenon, breathing new life into areas that perhaps have appeared well trodden and overlooked through its careful navigation of the creative possibilities of repetition."

Performance Matters

"Kartsaki elegantly assembles a group of essays that deepen our engagement with the most fundamental aspects of performance and open up new methodologies: a rigorous and thoughtful book that one can read for the sheer pleasure of the ideas. It’s an experience of scholarship that does not repeat often enough."

Theatre Research International

“This is a book full of fascinations. And also of passions, pleasures, novelties, dissatisfactions, and griefs. It is a book about the efforts we make to enact and to understand, to educate and politicize, about how to value that which is perpetually arriving, doing, and undoing itself; and also how to say goodbye. While making its case for the centrality of repetition, as constitutive of a range of art practices—through performance, stand-up comedy, poetry, film, craft work, and much more—On Repetition is no less concerned with those practices of investigation and attention, of critical recall and affective resistance, through which the lessons of art may be turned productively through the fabric of our lives. As such, it is also a book about humanities: making its own multi-voiced but assured case for the humanities, while investigating the ways that ‘our’ humanity is ever getting away from us, into multiplicity and strangeness and the unforeseen of what comes next.”

Joe Kelleher, University of Roehampton, UK

“‘Repetition creates bliss,’ Barthes once argued. In an era in which we hear repetition and think strain, when the repeated gesture is a sign for alienated labor, boredom or the abandonment of thought, this collection of essays shows how repetition can be a figure of creativity—not only in the art forms of visual art, dance, performance, and poetry, which are its subjects, but also in the lived experiences of work, desire, play, and political solidarity. Deeply insightful and more than a little compulsive, these explorations of repetition reveal a tactic and a drive at the heart of art’s relationship to contemporary spaces and bodies.”

Andrea Brady, Queen Mary University of London