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Dancing the Afrofuture: Hula, Hip-Hop, and the Dunham Legacy
by Halifu Osumare<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height: normal;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family: "Times New Roman",serif">A Black dancer chronicles her career as a scholar writing the stories of global hip-hop and Black culture <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height: normal;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height: normal;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none">Dancing the Afrofuture is the story of a dancer with a long career of artistry and activism who transitioned from performing Black dance to writing it into history as a Black studies scholar. Following the personal journey of her artistic development told in Dancing in Blackness, Halifu Osumare now reflects on how that first career—which began during the 1960s Black Arts Movement—has influenced her growth as an academic, tracing her teaching and research against a political and cultural backdrop that extends to the twenty-first century with Black Lives Matter and a potent speculative Afrofuture. <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent: .5in;line-height:normal">Osumare describes her decision to step away from full-time involvement in dance and community activism to earn a doctorate in American studies from the University of Hawai‘i. She emulated the model of her mentor Katherine Dunham by studying and performing hula, and her research on hip-hop youth culture took her from Hawai‘i to Africa, Europe, and South America as a professor at the University of California, Davis. Throughout her scholarly career, Osumare has illuminated the resilience of African-descendant peoples through a focus on performance and the lens of Afrofuturism. <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent: .5in;line-height:normal">Respected for her work as both professional dancer and trailblazing academic, Osumare shares experiences from her second career that show the potential of scholarship in revealing and documenting underrecognized stories of Black dance and global pop culture. In this memoir, Osumare dances across several fields of study while ruminating on how the Black past reveals itself in the Afro-present that is transforming into the Afrofuture. <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height: normal"> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height: normal">Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a University of California, Davis Edward A. Dickson Emeriti Professorship Award.
Dancing with Georges Perec: Embodying Oulipo (ISSN)
by Leslie SatinThis book explores the relationship of the life and work of the remarkable Parisian-Jewish writer Georges Perec (1936–1983) to dance."Dancing" addresses art-making parallels and their personal and sociocultural contexts, including Perec’s childhood loss of his parents in the Holocaust and its repercussions in the significance of the body, everydayness, space, and attention permeating his work. This book, emerging from the author Leslie Satin’s perspective as a dancer and scholar, links Perec’s concerns with those of dance and demonstrates that Perec’s work has implications for dance and how we think about it. Moreover, it is framed as a performative autobiographical enactment of the author's relationship to Perec, periodically linking their written, danced, and imagined lives.This exploration will be of great interest to dancers, dance scholars, and dance students interested in contemporary experimental dance and contemporary dance.
Darcy Lange, Videography as Social Practice (Experimental Film and Artists’ Moving Image)
by Mercedes VicenteThe Videography of Darcy Lange is a critical monograph of a pivotal figure in early analogue video. Trained as a sculptor at the Royal College of Art, Lange developed a socially engaged video practice with remarkable studies of people at work in industrial, farming, and teaching contexts that drew from conceptual art, social documentary and structuralist filmmaking. Lange saw in portable video a democratic tool for communication and social transformation, continuing the legacy of the revolutionary avant-garde projects that merged art with social life and turned audiences into producers. This book follows Lange's trajectory from his early observational studies to the crisis of representation and socially engaged video and activism, as it is shaped by, and resists, the artistic, cultural and political preoccupations of the 1970s and 1980s. It strikes a balance between being a monographic account providing a close analysis of Lange's oeuvre and drawing from unpublished archival materials—a sort of catalogue raisonné—whilst maintaining a breadth with theoretical discourses around the themes of labour and class, education, and indigenous struggles central to his work. The book's frameworks of Conceptual Art, structuralist and ethnographic film theory, social documentary and the critique of representation, video as social practice and the notion of 'feedback', participatory socially engaged art and postcolonial and indigenous theory,—expand our understanding of video outside the predominant structuralist tendencies. Lange's transnational and nomadic career introduces notions of alterity and challenges nationalistic accounts that excluded him in the past.
David Lynch: Sonic Style (Filmmakers and Their Soundtracks)
by Reba WissnerDirector David Lynch is best known for films that channel the uncanny and the weird into a distinct "Lynchian" aesthetic, in which sound and music play a key role: Lynch not only writes his intended sounds into the script but also often takes on the role of creating the sounds himself. This concise study explores what makes Lynch’s sonic imprint distinct, breaking down three different sound styles that create Lynch’s sound aesthetic across his films. Showing how sound offers new insights into the aesthetic and narrative work of Lynch’s filmmaking, this book highlights new dimensions in the work of a key American auteur and deconstructs the process of building a unique sound world.
Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema (Film and Culture Series)
by Maggie HennefeldCan you really die from laughing too hard? Between 1870 and 1920, hundreds of women suffered such a fate—or so a slew of sensationalist obituaries would have us believe. How could laughter be fatal, and what do these reports of women’s risible deaths tell us about the politics of female joy?Maggie Hennefeld reveals the forgotten histories of “hysterical laughter,” exploring how women’s amusement has been theorized and demonized, suppressed and exploited. In nineteenth-century medicine and culture, hysteria was an ailment that afflicted unruly women on the cusp of emotional or nervous breakdown. Cinema, Hennefeld argues, made it possible for women to laugh outrageously as never before, with irreversible social and political consequences. As female enjoyment became a surefire promise of profitability, alarmist tales of women laughing themselves to death epitomized the tension between subversive pleasure and its violent repression.Hennefeld traces the social politics of women’s laughter from the heyday of nineteenth-century sentimentalism to the collective euphoria of early film spectatorship, traversing contagious dancing outbreaks, hysteria photography, madwomen’s cackling, cinematic close-ups, and screenings of slapstick movies in mental asylums. Placing little-known silent films and an archive of remarkable, often unusual texts in conversation with affect theory, comedy studies, and feminist film theory, this book makes a timely case for the power of hysterical laughter to change the world.
Decolonial Imaginaries in Palestinian Experimental Film and Video: Postnational and Feminist Aesthetics (Routledge Focus on Film Studies)
by Kristin Lené HoleDecolonial Imaginaries in Palestinian Experimental Film and Video focuses on an underexamined group of female Palestinian filmmakers, highlighting their relevance for thinking through a diverse set of issues relating to decolonial aesthetics, post-nationalism and gender, non-Western ecologies, trauma and memory, diasporic experiences of space, biopolitics, feminist historiography and decolonial temporalities.Positing that these filmmaker-artists radically counter dominant media images of Palestinians, deessentializing Palestinian identity while opening up history and the present to new potentialities and ways of imagining Palestinian futures, Decolonial Imaginaries in Palestinian Experimental Film and Video argues that Palestinian experience is urgently relevant to all of us. As the works address issues of food availability and land use, environmental collapse and forced displacement, Hole explores how such films generate hope, imagine impossible possibilities and offer inspiration and wisdom when it comes to losing and rebuilding.Addressing a fundamentally transnational and understudied area, this book will resonate with readers working in the areas of film and media studies, Palestinian cultural studies, historiography, Middle East studies and experimental film.
Desert Song
by Laekan Zea KempA family joins the music of the Texas desert night in this tale of tradition and memory from Pura Belpré Honor author Laekan Zea Kemp.It starts with a soft tapping,Uncle Eduardo drumming hishands against his dusty jeans.As the blush of sunset gives way to night in the desert, coyotes, cicadas, and barn owls emerge, each calling out to the moon. Watching from their porch, the family joins the song. One by one, each relative offers their drums, flute, maracas, strings, and voices. They sing with the insects, birds, snakes and toads; and they sing with their ancestors, an audience glittering in the stars overhead. With each strum of passed-down instruments, memories renew, and those gone are alive and near again.Desert Song hums and chimes with all the music a front porch and the desert beyond can hold. Pura Belpré Honor author Laekan Zea Kemp&’s masterfully stirring text dances through Beatriz Gutierrez Hernandez&’s enchanting and dynamic artwork. Readers will be left with the soothing sense that when creativity flourishes, the past is never out of reach, and the bonds that matter never break.Simultaneously published in Spanish as Canción del desierto.
The Different Faces of Politics in the Visual and Performative Arts
by Mario Thomas Vassallo André P. DeBattistaThis book highlights the linkages between politics and governance and the arts. The essays in the volume show how visual and performative arts have challenged those in power — or conversely patronised by them — been used for propaganda, stir up national fervour and found themselves at the receiving end of political censure. They focus on the tension and symbiosis between the politician and the artist foregrounding how they have always tried to influence, challenge, and, in some cases, undermine one another. This volume will serve as an indispensable source for researchers and academics in political science, the humanities and performing arts.
Difficult Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture
by Sharon Coleclough Bethan Michael-Fox Renske VisserThis book responds to a growing interest in death, dying and the dead within and beyond the field of death studies. The collection defines an understanding of ‘difficult death’ and examines the differences between death, dying and the dead, as well as exploring the ethical challenges of researching death in mediated form. The collection is attendant to the ways in which difficult deaths are imbricated in power structures both before and after they become mediatised in culture. As such, the work navigates the many political and social complexities and inequalities – what might be deemed the difficulties – of death, dying and the dead. The book seeks to expand understandings of the difficulty of death in media and culture through a wide range of chapters from different contexts focused on literature, film, television, and in online environments, as well as several chapters examining news reportage of difficult deaths.
Digital Compositing for Film and Video: Production Workflows and Techniques
by Steve WrightWritten by senior compositor, technical director, and master trainer Steve Wright, this book condenses years of production experience into an easy-to-read and highly informative guide suitable for both working and aspiring visual effects artists. This updated edition of Digital Compositing for Film and Video addresses the problems and difficult choices that professional compositors face daily with an elegant blend of theory, practical production techniques, and workflows. It is written to be software-agnostic, so it applies to any brand of software. It features many step-by-step workflows, powerful new keying techniques, and updates on the latest tech in the visual effects industry with all-new content on artificial intelligence (AI) for visual effects (VFX), Universal Scene Description (USD), Virtual Production, and Cryptomattes. A companion website offers images from the examples discussed in the book allowing readers to experiment with the material first-hand. This edition also adds Nuke workflows to the companion website for the first time.
Digital Transformation in The Recording Industry: Evolution of Power: From The Turntable To Blockchain (Routledge Research in the Creative and Cultural Industries)
by Anna Anetta JanowskaThe recording industry has famously been transformed by technology throughout its entire history.The book presents an analysis of these changes using Porter's five forces model. The author highlights the evolution of buyers' and suppliers' power, the emergence of new competitors, product innovation and rivalry between companies in the industry driven by economic, political, social and legal factors.As an early mover in the social diffusion of copyright-sensitive content, the recording industry reflected in this book serves as an important reference for the analysis of other cultural and creative sectors.
Digital Transformation in the Recording Industry: Evolution of Power: From The Turntable To Blockchain (Routledge Research in the Creative and Cultural Industries)
by Anna Anetta JanowskaThe recording industry has famously been transformed by technology throughout its entire history. The book presents an analysis of these changes using Porter's five forces model. The author highlights the evolution of buyers' and suppliers' power, the emergence of new competitors, product innovation and rivalry between companies in the industry driven by economic, political, social and legal factors. As an early mover in the social diffusion of copyright-sensitive content, the recording industry reflected in this book serves as an important reference for the analysis of other cultural and creative sectors.
Directed by Yasujiro Ozu
by Shiguéhiko HasumiFirst published in 1983, Shiguéhiko Hasumi's Directed by Yasujirō Ozu has become one of the most influential books on cinema written in Japanese. This pioneering translation brings Hasumi's landmark work to an English-speaking public for the first time, inviting a new readership to engage with this astutely observed, deeply moving meditation on the oeuvre of one of the giants of world cinema. Complemented by a critical introduction from acclaimed film scholar Aaron Gerow and rendered fluidly in Ryan Cook's agile translation, this volume will grace the shelves of cinephiles for many years to come.
Directing Game Animation: Building a Vision and a Team with Intent
by Mike JungbluthThe best character animation has a strong creative intent, driving a compelling performance. With the addition of interactivity, game animation adds complexity to the craft of how best to balance art, design and technology to realize a character’s performance. As a director, you are responsible for not only defining a vision for how those should balance but also being a leader, mentor and advocate for your team. But in a field of rapid iteration of ideas and techniques, that strong creative intent can be easily lost or sacrificed if not properly fostered and defined.Directing Game Animation: Building a Vision and a Team with Intent breaks down the process of creating an intentional animation vision that can be both unique and flexible. From defining the high-level experience to breaking down tech needs, projecting a team size and empowering everyone to work together, this book will help you to wrap your mind around a project’s animation needs.Animation, like every part of a game, cannot succeed—let alone function—in a vacuum. This book looks to foster a discussion around the process, needs and benefits of an empowered animation team and its vision as a universal benefit for the entire industry.This book is a guide to answer some of the most common questions people encounter when engaging with the overlap between creative and project leadership. What is your role? Learn how to establish expectations and needs specific to the project and team. How do you establish a vision? Learn how to better define and communicate creative topics such as a cohesive character performance and animation style. How do you build a team? Learn how to establish early on the team structure, skills and workflows needed to deliver on the needs of the project. How do you balance creative and production needs? Learn how to define quality, reviews and approvals in a way that empowers creativity and decision-making.
Disability Identity in Simulation Narratives (Literary Disability Studies)
by Anelise HaukaasDisability Identity in Simulation Narratives considers the relationship between disability identity and simulation activities (ranging from traditional gameplay to more revolutionary technology) in contemporary science fiction. Anelise Haukaas applies posthumanist theory to an examination of disability identity in a variety of science fiction texts: adult novels, young adult literature and comics, as well as ethnographic research with gamers. Haukaas argues that instead of being a means of escapism, simulated experiences are a valuable tool for cultivating self-acceptance and promoting empathy. Through increasingly accessible technology and innovative gameplay, traditional hierarchies are dismantled, and different ways of being are both explored and validated. Ultimately, the book aims to expand our understandings of disability, performance, and self-creation in significant ways by exploring the boundless selves that the simulated environments in these texts allow.
Disabled People Transforming Media Culture for a More Inclusive World (Routledge Research in Disability and Media Studies)
by Beth A. HallerThis book tells the stories of disabled people who have been influential in creating modern mass media. Through the voices of key disabled media makers and collaborators, the author highlights the ways in which their contributions are changing society’s understanding of disability and shaping mass media and culture. Spanning a range of media formats – television/streaming productions, performances, podcasts, TED Talks, films, reality TV, graphic novels, and social media channels – the book illustrates how disabled people are confronting the marginalization they have faced in mass media for decades. Modern disabled media creators are leveraging new media platforms to recognize the lived experiences of disability and their authentic place in media culture. This innovative and thought-provoking volume will be an important read for scholars, disability advocates, and students of Disability Studies, Mass Communication/Media Studies, as well as mass media production faculty, disabled people, and their allies The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
Diversity and Inclusion: Target Setting in the Screen Industries (Routledge Research in the Creative and Cultural Industries)
by Doris Ruth EikhofThis book provides the first compact knowledge base on diversity & inclusion (D&I) targets in the UK screen industries. Drawing on new, in-depth industry research and progressive theoretical voices, the book will help readers understand what D&I targets are and what they could be in the future. The book explains different types of D&I targets, how D&I targets are currently used and how they might be developed to strategically drive inclusion. D&I targets are an increasingly common feature of the screen industries, but there is little evidence and guidance on how to use them well. This book addresses that gap. The book offers, for the first time, a unifying terminology for D&I target setting in the UK screen industries, including for transorganisational D&I targets (targets set by one organisation for another). It is based on a cross-industry review of D&I target setting in the UK screen industries, using evidence from industry and academic research. Providing a unique knowledge base on diversity & inclusion targets in the UK screen industries, this book will be of value to researchers, industry experts, practitioners, policy makers, campaigners and anyone who needs to understand D&I targets – to advise on them, to set and achieve them and to advocate for their effective, inclusive use.
DK Super Readers Level 3 Marvel Captain America Meet Sam Wilson! (DK Super Readers)
by DKSam Wilson is Captain America!Join him as he takes up the legacy of Captain America's shield and fights as the new Sentinel of Liberty against enemies of peace and justice!Learn to read and join in the action as this brave hero and his allies save the world!Step into this amazing world in this thrilling Level 3 DK Reader. Exciting images, simple vocabulary, and a fun quiz will engage young Superhero fans and help them build confidence in reading.
The Documentary Filmmaker's Intuition: Creating Ethical and Impactful Non-fiction Films
by Shannon WalshThis book is an introduction to the art and craft of documentary filmmaking with a focus on ethics and impact from development through distribution. Author Shannon Walsh explores point-of-view storytelling, writing for nonfiction, and the art of social change documentary. Offering an overview of the documentary filmmaking process – from idea to pitch to a final film and impact campaign – this book provides nonfiction filmmakers with the methods required to find a voice, style, and cinematic approach to documentary filmmaking. Key areas covered include definition of styles and genres of documentary film; project development and proposal writing; basic elements of documentary storytelling such as interview techniques, vérité filming, use of archives, stills, and point of view; the process of preparing and delivering a project pitch; pre-production; and finding the necessary elements to tell a story cinematically. With a specific focus on ethics and character-driven storytelling, Walsh shares her own personal insights on talking to strangers and the importance of empathetic listening skills and intuition and provides useful worksheets that filmmakers can use for their own projects. This book is ideal for both students of documentary filmmaking and aspiring documentary filmmakers who are interested in creating ethical and impactful films.
Documentary Vision: Notes from Behind the Camera
by Richard ChisolmThis book is a collection of personal essays that address critical elements involved in the production of nonfiction films. Written by an experienced documentary filmmaker and cinematographer, the book draws upon practical wisdom to explore the nuances and challenges faced by filmmakers and viewers alike. Included in the text are rarely discussed ethical issues, best practices in the field, filmmaker etiquette, and a detailed analysis of interview techniques. The book also provides a candid view of how decisions are made in production that are consequential to a finished film’s meaning and fidelity. Drawing on a wide range of subject matter, it will enhance the reader's understanding of the tremendous power and potential of the documentary medium. The book offers an invaluable insight into documentary filmmaking for professionals who work in the medium and students who are learning the trade and honing their skills.
Dogland: Passion, Glory, and Lots of Slobber at the Westminster Dog Show
by Tommy Tomlinson&“Extraordinary...Tomlinson&’s book is a gem.&” —Minneapolis Star Tribune * &“Delightful.&” —Town & Country * &“This book wants to lick your face. Let it.&” —Kirkus Reviews From Pulitzer Prize finalist Tommy Tomlinson comes an inside account of the Westminster Dog Show that follows one dog on his quest to become a champion—and explores the bond between dogs and their people.Tommy Tomlinson was watching a dog show on television a few years ago when he had a sudden thought: Are those dogs happy? How about pet dogs—are they happy? Those questions sparked a quest to venture inside the dog-show world, in search of a deeper understanding of the relationship between dogs and humans that has endured for thousands of years. Dogland shares his surprising, entertaining, and moving adventures. Tomlinson spends three years on the road and goes behind the scenes at more than one hundred competitions across the country, from Midwestern fairgrounds to Madison Square Garden. Along the way he is licked, sniffed, and rubbed up against by dogs of nearly every size, shape, and breed. Like a real-life version of the classic mockumentary Best in Show, Dogland follows one champion show dog—a Samoyed named Striker—as well as his handler, Laura King, and his devoted entourage of breeders and owners as he competes in the 2022 Westminster Dog Show. Striker&’s whole career has been leading up to this moment. As Tomlinson writes, picking a top show dog is like drafting an NFL quarterback when they&’re still in elementary school. Now Striker has made it to the Super Bowl. Tomlinson takes readers on the long road to glory, bringing the dog-show circuit to life as he witnesses teams scrambling from town to town in search of championship points and large, colorful ribbons. (Striker and his crew travel in a custom-built RV named after Betty White.) Tomlinson&’s limitless curiosity about people and dogs reaches far beyond the show tents and into the ordinary lives of dogs. We hear from experts who have discovered new insights into how dogs and humans formed their bond—and how that bond has changed over the centuries. We discover the fascinating origins of different dog breeds, learn about the elaborate breed standards that determine an ideal show dog, and consider the health issues that can arise in purebred dogs. We also meet dog lovers who applaud every dog, regardless of breed, simply for being themselves, such as WeRateDogs, the social media phenomenon with millions of followers, all for posts celebrating the day-to-day goofiness in most dog owners&’ lives. Engaging, charming, and insightful, Dogland is an irresistibly appealing read that invites us on a rollicking backstage tour through the rituals, tricks, and wonders of the dog-show world—and reveals what matters most for the happiness of dogs and dog lovers everywhere.
Dorothy Arzner: Interviews (Conversations with Filmmakers Series)
by Martin F. NordenThrough dozens of interviews, a detailed chronology and filmography, and a selection of Dorothy Arzner’s own writings—including her unfinished autobiography—Dorothy Arzner: Interviews offers major insights into and an in-depth examination of the life and career of one of the few women to direct films during Hollywood’s Golden Age. A key figure in Hollywood for decades, she directed more studio films than any other woman in history. Her movies often focused on courageous women who must make difficult decisions to remain true to themselves—women not unlike Arzner herself, who once said that “all we can ever do in our work is write our own biography.”Dorothy Arzner (1897–1979) began her film career in 1919 as a script typist for the Famous Players-Lasky company, which later became Paramount Pictures. She quickly rose through the ranks to become a script supervisor, screenwriter, and editor before directing her first film, Fashions for Women, in 1927. After the release of her final Hollywood film, First Comes Courage, in 1943, Arzner changed directions in her professional life. She made several training films for the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps during World War II and directed many television commercials for Pepsi-Cola in the 1950s. She concluded her career by serving as a filmmaking instructor at the Pasadena Playhouse College of Theatre Arts and UCLA, where she helped launch the first wave of college-trained moviemakers.
Down with the System: A Memoir (of Sorts)
by Serj TankianAn exhilarating, thoughtful, and beautifully written memoir by musician, songwriter, and lead singer-lyricist of Grammy award-winning metal band, System Of A Down, Serj Tankian. <P><P> Serj Tankian will be the first to admit that his band, System Of A Down, was “unlikely a chart-topper as had ever existed in modern music history: a band of Armenian-Americans playing a practically unclassifiable clash of wildly aggressive metal riffs, unconventional tempo-twisting rhythms, and Armenian folk melodies, with me alternately growling, screaming, and crooning lyrics that could pivot from avant-garde silliness to raging socio-political rants in the space of a single line.” After all, as Serj concedes, “it’s not easy listening.” <P><P> Even so, there’s no doubt that System’s music had struck a chord with millions of listeners across the globe ever since they burst on the scene in the mid-1990s. With nearly 40 million album sales, three albums topping the Billboard charts, and a devoted legion of fans, the band dominated the alt-rock and metal scenes just as the world hurtled into a new millennium, redefining the very idea of what rockstars could and couldn’t talk about, could and couldn’t do, could and couldn’t represent. <P><P> In DOWN WITH THE SYSTEM, Serj presents readers with a memoir that is far more than just a rock 'n' roll fable. It's an immigrant's tale, it’s an activist's awakening, and it's a spiritual journey from darkness toward light. And all of this comes down to the fact that Serj himself has had the chance to live an extraordinary life—thanks to a combination of luck, circumstance, struggle, talent, and spiritual awakening. Born to Armenian parents in Beirut, Serj grows up hearing bombs drop outside his childhood home during the country’s civil war, before moving to Los Angeles at the age of seven. As a young man, he is immersed in the SoCal community of “Little Armenia,” learning more and more about the brutal genocide faced by his ancestors while helping his parents adapt to the constraints and contradictions of the American Dream. Then, during a pivotal drive home from an LSAT class, Serj decides to turn away from a promising future in business and law to make music instead—a decision that leads him to touring five continents as the lead singer of a hugely popular rock band, hitting number #1 on the Billboard album charts the morning of 9/11, and then having the hit single from the same album banned from radio two days later. In the years that follow, his uniquely singular story continues, as he evades glass bottles hurled at a cancelled show by angry Slayer fans, teams up with Tom Morello to push social justice causes on unsuspecting metalheads, argues with LAPD officers over the best way to quell rioting fans, and defines new sounds and singing tactics with Rick Rubin. <P><P> Braiding together Serj’s thought-provoking insight with heartfelt and poetic prose, DOWN WITH THE SYSTEM retraces Serj’s remarkable and unlikely journey, and explores what it’s taught him—about music, about art, about activism, and about himself. It’s an unforgettable ride that will leave you breathless—and an absolute delight for new fans and old ones alike. <p> <b>New York Times Bestseller</b>
Dramaturgy of Sex on Stage in Contemporary Theatre (Focus on Dramaturgy)
by Kate MulleyDramaturgy of Sex on Stage in Contemporary Theatre explores the dramaturgy of sex in contemporary works for the stage in the social, cultural and historical context of the time and place during which they were written and performed. Comprising chapters by writers from across North America and Europe, the book covers an expansive range of plays, musicals and dance performances, from Broadway to the Fringe, from post-AIDS epidemic to post-COVID-19 pandemic. Analysing these intimate moments—both textually and as staged—through an intersectional and critical lens illuminates the way power structures are maintained and codified, and how they can be queered and dismantled onstage and off. This examination of depictions of sex on stage attempts to understand from a dramaturgical and sociological perspective how these depictions have developed over time, and how the rise of intimacy directors has responded to the changes within the contemporary theatrical landscape and in the world at large. This is an essential companion for any scholar or practitioner looking to stage, discuss or understand intimacy in performance.
Dramaturgy to Make Visible: The Legacies of New Dramaturgy for Politics and Performance in Our Times (ISSN)
by Peter EckersallThis book argues that dramaturgy makes things visible and does so in two distinct and interrelating ways: creative processes and formal elements of performance are rendered visible and readable; and performance dramaturgy becomes an expanded practice in which performance is a locus for creating wide-ranging events and activities.This exploration defines dramaturgy as a perceptibly transforming agency in the construction, presentation and reception of contemporary performance; and it shows how contemporary performance has an intrinsic dramaturgical aspect whose proliferation of dramaturgical practices has led to a far-reaching reinvention of what contemporary theatre is. In doing so, this book deals with a careful selection of performance practices, including theatrical adaptations, new media dramaturgy, contemporary dance, installation-performance, postdramatic theatre, visionary works by auteurs, and revivals of well-known stage shows.This study will be of great interest to students and scholars in theater studies, performance studies, cultural studies, curating, and dance scholarship.