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Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin: Out of the Natural Order
by Jane GoodallPerformance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin reveals the ways in which the major themes of evolution were taken up in the performing arts during Darwin's adult lifetime and in the generation after his death. The period 1830-1900 was the formative period for evolutionary ideas. While scientists and theorists investigated the law and order of nature, show business was more concerned with what was out of the natural order. Missing links and throwbacks, freak taxonomies and exotic races were favourite subject matter for the burgeoning variety theatre movement. Focusing on popular theatre forms in London, New York and Paris, Jane Goodall shows how they were interwoven with the developing debate about human evolution. With this book, Goodall contributes an important new angle to the debates surrounding the history of evolution. She reveals that, far from creating widespread culture shock, Darwinian theory tapped into some of the long-standing themes of popular performance and was a source for diverse and sometimes hilarious explorations.
Performance and Identity in Irish Stand-Up Comedy
by Susanne CollearyPerformance and Identity in Irish Stand-Up Comedy examines the comic tradition of stand-up in and from modern-day Ireland. Using critical analyses of comedians including Tommy Tiernan, Dylan Moran and Maeve Higgins, Susanne Colleary's engaging new book explores the role of stand-up in contemporary culture and examines the role of the staged comic self in performance. This book is suitable for students and scholars of international performance, and general readers interested in the interplay between comedy and society in contemporary cultural thought.
Performance and Identity in Irish Stand-Up Comedy: The Comic 'i'
by S. CollearyOne of the cultural phenomena to occur in Ireland in the last two decades has been the highly successful growth of stand-up comedy as a popular entertainment genre. This book examines stand-up comedy from the perspective of the narrated self, through the prism of the fabricated comedy persona, including Tommy Tiernan, Dylan Moran and Maeve Higgins.
Performance and Identity in the Classical World
by Anne DuncanActors in the classical world were often viewed as frauds and impostors, capable of deliberately fabricating their identities. Conversely, they were sometimes viewed as possessed by the characters that they played, or as merely playing themselves onstage. Numerous sources reveal an uneasy fascination with actors and acting, from the writings of elite intellectuals (philosophers, orators, biographers, historians) to the abundant theatrical anecdotes that can be read as a body of "popular performance theory. " This study examines these sources, along with dramatic texts and addresses the issue of impersonation, from the late fifth century BCE to the early Roman Empire.
Performance and Migration (4x45)
by Emma CoxThis third volume in the 4x45 series addresses some of the most current and urgent performance work in contemporary theatre practice. As people from all backgrounds and cultures criss-cross the globe with an ever-growing series of pushes and pulls guiding their movements, this book explores contemporary artists who have responded to various forms of migration in their theatre, performance and multimedia work. The volume comprises two lectures and two curated conversations with theatre-makers and artists. Danish scholar of contemporary visual culture, Anne Ring Petersen, brings artistic and political aspects of ‘postmigration’ to the fore in an essay on the innovations of Shermin Langhoff at Berlin’s Ballhaus Naunynstraße, and the decolonial work of Danish-Trinidadian artist Jeannette Ehlers. The racialised and gendered exclusions associated with navigating ‘the industry’ for non-white female and non-white non-binary artists are interrogated in Melbourne-based theatre scholar Paul Rae’s interview with two Australian performers of Indian heritage, Sonya Suares and Raina Peterson. UK playwrights Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson of Good Chance Theatre discuss their work in dialogue, and with their colleague, Iranian animator and illustrator Majid Adin. Emma Cox’s essay on Irish artist Richard Mosse’s video installation, Incoming, discusses thermographic ‘heat signatures’ as a means of seeing migrants and the imperative of envisioning global climate change. An accessible and forward-thinking exploration of one of contemporary performance’s most pressing influences, 4x45 | Performance and Migration is a unique resource for scholars, students and practitioners of Theatre Studies, Performance Studies and Human Geography.
Performance and Posthumanism: Staging Prototypes of Composite Bodies
by Christel Stalpaert Kristof Van Baarle Laura KarremanRecent technological and scientific developments have demonstrated a condition that has already long been upon us. We have entered a posthuman era, an assertion shared by an increasing number of thinkers such as N. Katherine Hayles, Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Richard Grusin, and Bernard Stiegler. The performing arts have reacted to these developments by increasingly opening up their traditionally ‘human’ domain to non-human others. Both philosophy and performing arts thus question what it means to be human from a posthumanist point of view and how the agency of non-humans – be they technology, objects, animals, or other forms of being – ‘works’ on both an ontological and performative level. The contributions in this volume brings together scholars, dramaturgs, and artists, uniting their reflections on the consequences of the posthuman condition for creative practices, spectatorship, and knowledge.
Performance and Professional Wrestling
by Claire Warden Broderick Chow Eero LainePerformance and Professional Wrestling is the first edited volume to consider professional wrestling explicitly from the vantage point of theatre and performance studies. Moving beyond simply noting its performative qualities or reading it via other performance genres, this collection of essays offers a complete critical reassessment of the popular sport.Topics such as the suspension of disbelief, simulation, silence and speech, physical culture, and the performance of pain within the squared circle are explored in relation to professional wrestling, with work by both scholars and practitioners grouped into seven short sections: Audience Circulation Lucha Gender Queerness Bodies Race A significant re-reading of wrestling as a performing art, Performance and Professional Wrestling makes essential reading for scholars and students intrigued by this uniquely theatrical sport.
Performance and Spectatorship in Edwardian Art Writing (Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries)
by Sophie HatchwellThis book explores how Edwardian art writing shaped and narrated embodied, performative forms of aesthetic spectatorship. It argues that we need to expand the range of texts we think of as art writing, and features a diverse array of critical and fictional works, often including texts that are otherwise absent from art-historical study. Multi-disciplinary in scope, this book proposes a methodology for analyzing the aesthetic encounter within and through art writing, adapting and reworking a form of phenomenological-semiotic analysis found conventionally in performance studies. It focuses on moments where theories of spectatorship meet practice, moving between the varied spaces of Edwardian art viewing, from the critical text, to the lecture hall, the West End theatre and gallery, middle-class home, and fictional novel. It contributes to a rethinking of Edwardian culture by exploring the intriguing heterogeneity and self-consciousness of viewing practices in a period more commonly associated with the emergence of formalism.
Performance and Technology: Practices of Virtual Embodiment and Interactivity (Palgrave Studies In Performance And Technology Ser.)
by Susan Broadhurst Josephine MachonThis collection interrogates the interaction between new technologies and performance practice, linking the sensuous contact that must exist between the physical and virtual, together with the resultant corporeal transformation. It features writings from international contributors who specialize in digital art and performance practices.
Performance and Temporalisation: Time Happens (Performance Philosophy)
by Jodie McNeilly Maeva VeerapenPerformance and Temporalisation features a collection of scholars and artists writing about the coming forth of time as human experience. Whether drawing, designing, watching performance, being baptised, playing cricket, dancing, eating, walking or looking at caves, each explores the making of time through their art, scholarship and everyday lives.
Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice (Theater: Theory/Text/Performance)
by Catherine ColeIn the aftermath of state-perpetrated injustice, a façade of peace can suddenly give way, and in South Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo, post-apartheid and postcolonial framings of change have exceeded their limits. Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice reveals how the voices and visions of artists can help us see what otherwise evades perception. Embodied performance in South Africa has particular potency because apartheid was so centrally focused on the body: classifying bodies into racial categories, legislating where certain bodies could move and which bathrooms and drinking fountains certain bodies could use, and how different bodies carried meaning. The book considers key works by contemporary performing artists Brett Bailey, Faustin Linyekula, Gregory Maqoma, Mamela Nyamza, Robyn Orlin, Jay Pather, and Sello Pesa, artists imagining new forms and helping audiences see the contemporary moment as it is: an important intervention in countries long predicated on denial. They are also helping to conjure, anticipate, and dream a world that is otherwise. The book will be of particular interest to scholars of African studies, black performance, dance studies, transitional justice, as well as theater and performance studies.
Performance and the Culture of Nationalism: Tracing Rhizomatic Lived Experiences of South, Central and Southeast Asia
by Sarvani Gooptu and Mimasha PanditThis book studies the intersection of performance and nationalism in South Asia.It traces the emergence of the culture of nationalism from the late nineteenth century through to contemporary times. Drawing on various theatrical performance texts, it looks at the ways in which performative narratives have reflected the national narrative and analyses the role performance has played in engendering nationhood. The volume discusses themes such as political martyrdom as performative nationalism, the revitalisation of nationalism through new media, the sanitisation of physical gestures in dance, the performance of nationhood through violence in Tajiki films, as well as K-Pop and the new northeastern identity in India. A unique contribution to the study of nationalism, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers of history, theatre and performance studies, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, modern India, Asian studies, political studies, social anthropology and sociology.
Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience: The Tourist as Actor
by Jennifer A. Kokai Tom RobsonThis book addresses Disney parks using performance theory. Few to no scholars have done this to date—an enormous oversight given the Disney parks’ similarities to immersive theatre, interpolation of guests, and dramaturgical construction of attractions. Most scholars and critics deny agency to the tourist in their engagement with the Disney theme park experience. The vast body of research and journalism on the Disney “Imagineers”—the designers and storytellers who construct the park experience—leads to the misconception that these exceptional artists puppeteer every aspect of the guest’s experience. Contrary to this assumption, Disney park guests find a range of possible reading strategies when they enter the space. Certainly Disney presents a primary reading, but generations of critical theory have established the variety of reading strategies that interpreters can employ to read against the text. This volume of twelve essays re-centers the park experience around its protagonist: the tourist.
Performance at the Urban Periphery: Insights from South India (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)
by Anindya Sinha Sharada Srinivasan Jerri Daboo Cathy TurnerThis edited volume considers performance in its engagement with expanding Indian cities, with a particular focus on festivals and performances in Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. The editors ask how performance practices are affected by urbanisation, the effects of such changes on their cultural economy, and the environmental impacts of performance itself. This project also considers how performance responds to its context, and the potential for performance to be critical of the city’s development, and of its own compromises. Bringing together perspectives from the humanities, natural and social sciences, the book takes a multi-faceted analytical view of live performance, connecting contemporary with heritage forms, and human with more-than-human actors. The three sections, themed around heritage, everyday life, and future ecologies, will be of great interest to students and scholars in performance, heritage studies, ecology and art history.
Performance in America: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the Performing Arts
by David RománPerformance in America demonstrates the vital importance of the performing arts to contemporary U. S. culture. Looking at a series of specific performances mounted between 1994 and 2004, well-known performance studies scholar David Romn challenges the belief that theatre, dance, and live music are marginal art forms in the United States. He describes the crucial role that the performing arts play in local, regional, and national communities, emphasizing the power of live performance, particularly its immediacy and capacity to create a dialogue between artists and audiences. Romn draws attention to the ways that the performing arts provide unique perspectives on many of the most pressing concerns within American studies: questions about history and politics, citizenship and society, and culture and nation. The performances that Romn analyzes range from localized community-based arts events to full-scale Broadway productions and from the controversial works of established artists such as Tony Kushner to those of emerging artists. Romn considers dances produced by the choreographers Bill T. Jones and Neil Greenberg in the mid-1990s as new aids treatments became available and the aids crisis was reconfigured; a production of the Asian American playwright Chay Yew's A Beautiful Country in a high-school auditorium in Los Angeles's Chinatown; and Latino performer John Leguizamo's one-man Broadway show Freak. He examines the revival of theatrical legacies by female impersonators and the resurgence of cabaret in New York City. Romn also looks at how the performing arts have responded to 9/11, the U. S. invasion of Afghanistan, and the second war in Iraq. Including more than eighty illustrations, Performance in America highlights the dynamic relationships among performance, history, and contemporary culture through which the past is revisited and the future reimagined.
Performance in Bali
by Leon Rubin I. Nyoman SedanaLeon Rubin and I Nyoman Sedana, both international theatre professionals as well as scholars, collaborate to give an understanding of performance culture in Bali from inside and out. The book describes four specific forms of contemporary performance that are unique to Bali: Wayang shadow-puppet theatre Sanghyang ritual trance performance Gambuh classical dance-drama the virtuoso art of Topeng masked theatre. These culturally unique and beautiful theatrical events are contextualised within religious, intellectual and social backgrounds to give unparalleled insight into the mind and world of the Balinese performer.
Performance in a Pandemic
by Laura BissellThis edited collection gathers UK and international artists, academics, practitioners, and researchers in the fields of contemporary performance, dance, and live art to offer creative-critical responses to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on their work. Themes addressed in these case studies include the ways in which liveness functions across digital platforms, the new demands on audiences and performance-makers, and the impact on international festivals as the digital removes geographical and locational restrictions. Brought together, these examples capture the creative activity and output that this unexpected cultural moment has provoked. Creative-critical responses interrogate what the global pandemic has taught us about what it is to make live work during lockdown and explore what the future of performance-making in a post-COVID world might look like. For all scholars and performance-makers whose work brings them into the sphere of contemporary art and culture, this is an essential and stimulating account of practice at the beginning of the 2020s.
Performance in the Twenty-First Century: Theatres of Engagement
by Andy LavenderPerformance in the Twenty-First Century: Theatres of Engagement addresses the reshaping of theatre and performance after postmodernism. Andy Lavender argues provocatively that after the ‘classic’ postmodern tropes of detachment, irony, and contingency, performance in the twenty-first century engages more overtly with meaning, politics and society. It involves a newly pronounced form of personal experience, often implicating the body and/or one’s sense of self. This volume examines a range of performance events, including work by both emergent and internationally significant companies and artists such as Rimini Protokoll, Blast Theory, dreamthinkspeak, Zecora Ura, Punchdrunk, Ontroerend Goed, Kris Verdonck, Dries Verhoeven, Rabih Mroué, Derren Brown and David Blaine. It also considers a wider range of cultural phenomena such as online social networking, sports events, installations, games-based work and theme parks, where principles of performance are in play. Performance in the Twenty-First Century is a compelling and provocative resource for anybody interested in discovering how performance theory can be applied to cutting-edge culture, and indeed the world around them.
Performance in the Zócalo: Constructing History, Race, and Identity in Mexico's Central Square from the Colonial Era to the Present
by Ana MartínezFor more than five centuries, the Plaza Mayor (or Zócalo) in Mexico City has been the site of performances for a public spectatorship. During the period of colonial rule, performances designed to ensure loyalty to the Spanish monarchy were staged there, but over time, these displays gave way to staged demonstrations of resistance. Today, the Zócalo is a site for both official government-sponsored celebrations and performances that challenge the state. Performance in the Zócalo examines the ways that this city square has achieved symbolic significance over the centuries, and how national, ethnic, and racial identity has been performed there. A saying in Mexico City is “quien domina el centro, domina el país” (whoever dominates the center, dominates the country) as the Zócalo continues to act as the performative embodiment of Mexican society. This book highlights how particular performances build upon each other by recycling past architectures and performative practices for new purposes. Ana Martínez discusses the singular role of collective memory in creating meaning through space and landmarks, providing a new perspective and further insight into the problem of Mexico’s relationship with its own past. Rather than merely describe the commemorations, she traces the relationship between space and the invention of a Mexican imaginary. She also explores how indigenous communities, Mexico’s alienated subalterns, performed as exploited objects, exotic characters, and subjects with agency. The book’s dual purposes are to examine the Zócalo as Mexico’s central site of performance and to unmask, without homogenizing, the official discourse regarding Mexico’s natives. This book will be of interest for students and scholars in theater studies, Mexican Studies, Cultural Geography, Latinx and Latin American Studies.
Performance of Absence in Theatre, Performance and Visual Art (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)
by Sylwia DobkowskaThis research project investigates the concepts of absence across the disciplines of visual art, theatre, and performance. Absence in the centre of an ideology frees the reader from the dominant meaning. The book encourages active engagement with theatre theory and performances. Reconsideration of theories and experiences changes the way we engage with performances, as well as social relations and traditions outside of theatre. Sylwia Dobkowska examines and theorises absence and presence through theatre, performance, and visual arts practices. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre, visual art and philosophy.
Performance, Feminism and Affect in Neoliberal Times (Contemporary Performance InterActions)
by Elin Diamond Denise Varney Candice AmichThis book is a provocative new study of global feminist activism that opposes neoliberal regimes across several sites including Asia, Australia, Canada, Europe, Latin America and the United States. The feminist performative acts featured in the book contest the aggressive unravelling of collectively won gains in gender, sexual and racial equality, the appearance of new planes of discrimination, and the social consequences of political economies based on free market ideology. The investigations of affect theory follow the circulation of intensities – of political impingements on bodies, subjective and symbolic violence, and the shock of dispossession – within and beyond individuals to the social and political sphere. Affect is a helpful matrix for discussing the volatile interactivity between performer and spectator, whether live or technologically mediated. Contending that there is no activism without affect, the collection brings back to the table the activist and hopeful potential of feminism.
Performance, Identity, and the Neo-Political Subject (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies #28)
by Matthew Causey Fintan WalshThis book stages a timely discussion about the centrality of identity politics to theatre and performance studies. It acknowledges the important close relationship between the discourses and practices historically while maintaining that theatre and performance can enlighten ways of being with others that are not limited by conventional identitarian languages. The essays engage contemporary theatre and performance practices that pose challenging questions about identity, as well as subjectivity, relationality, and the politics of aesthetics, responding to neo-liberal constructions and exploitations of identity by seeking to discern, describe, or imagine a new political subject. Chapters by leading international scholars look to visual arts practice, digital culture, music, public events, experimental theatre, and performance to investigate questions about representation, metaphysics, and politics. The collections seeks to foreground shared, universalist connections that unite rather than divide, visiting metaphysical questions of being and becoming, and the possibilities of producing alternate realities and relationalities. The book asks what is at stake in thinking about a subject, a time, a place, and a performing arts practice that would come ‘after’ identity, and explores how theatre and performance pose and interrogate these questions.
Performance, Popular Culture, and Piety in Muslim Southeast Asia
by Timothy P. DanielsThe Muslim-majority nations of Malaysia and Indonesia are known for their extraordinary arts and Islamic revival movements. This collection provides an extensive view of dance, music, television series, and film in rural, urban, and mass-mediated contexts and how pious Islamic discourses are encoded and embodied in these public cultural forms.
Performance, Resistance and Refugees (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)
by Suzanne Little Samid Suliman Caroline WakeThis book offers a unique Australian perspective on the global crisis in refugee protection. Using performance as both an object and a lens, this volume explores the politics and aesthetics of migration control, border security and refugee resistance. The first half of the book, titled On Stage, examines performance objects such as verbatim and documentary plays, children’s theatre, immersive performance, slam poetry, video art and feature films. Specifically, it considers how refugees, and their artistic collaborators, assert their individuality, agency and authority as well as their resistance to cruel policies like offshore processing through performance. The second half of the book, titled Off Stage, employs performance as a lens to analyse the wider field of refugee politics, including the relationship between forced migrants and the forced displacement of First Nations peoples that underpins the settler-colonial state, philosophies of cosmopolitanism, the role of the canon in art history and the spectacle of bordering practices. In doing so, it illuminates the strategic performativity—and nonperformativity—of the law, philosophy, the state and the academy more broadly in the exclusion and control of refugees. Taken together, the chapters in this volume draw on, and contribute to, a wide range of disciplines including theatre and performance studies, cultural studies, border studies and forced migration studies, and will be of great interest to students and scholars in all four fields.
Performance, Subjectivity, Cosmopolitanism
by Yana MeerzonThis book looks at the connection between contemporary theatre practices and cosmopolitanism, a philosophical condition of social behaviour based on our responsibility, respect, and healthy curiosity to the other. Advocating for cosmopolitanism has become a necessity in a world defined by global wars, mass migration, and rise of nationalism. Using empathy, affect, and telling personal stories of displacement through embodied encounter between the actor and their audience, performance arts can serve as a training ground for this social behavior. In the centre of this encounter is a new cosmopolitan: a person of divided origins and cultural heritage, someone who speaks many languages and claims different countries as their place of belonging. The book examines how European and North American theatres stage this divided subjectivity: both from within, the way we tell stories about ourselves to others, and from without, through the stories the others tell about us.