The last human venue marks the location and moment of human beings' awareness of their own eventual extinction. Taking this sober end as an affirmative starting point Theatre, Intimacy& Engagement explores ways in which performance operates as an exciter of sentience, kick-starting our sense of being alive, acting as a pleasurable lengthening device to extend our inevitable fate. Humans in this venue distinguish themselves from other animals through their experiencing of an extended childhood, in their ability to sustain a controlled, unbroken outward breath and by their unique capacity to aesthetically disappoint. Theatre companies in this venue, Forced Entertainment, Societas Raffaello Sanzio and Goat Island generate images of epochal endings, profane resistance to sacred separation and the ecological potential of repair. Those who are stage-struck in this venue think through theatre ideas about matters of human animal concern: the politics of nature, the anthropological machine, the distribution of the sensible and the inoperative community. Theatre, Intimacy& Engagement, now available in paperback, continues Alan Read's work on radical inclusion by proposing how a social science of appearance disturbs our assumptions as to what a politics of performance can do when it comes to expanding the collective.