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Performance in a Militarized Culture
by Sara Brady Lindsey MantoanThe long cultural moment that arose in the wake of 9/11 and the conflict in the Middle East has fostered a global wave of surveillance and counterinsurgency. Performance in a Militarized Culture explores the ways in which we experience this new status quo. Addressing the most commonplace of everyday interactions, from mobile phone calls to traffic cameras, this edited collection considers: How militarization appropriates and deploys performance techniques How performing arts practices can confront militarization The long and complex history of militarization How the war on terror has transformed into a values system that prioritizes the military The ways in which performance can be used to secure and maintain power across social strata Performance in a Militarized Culture draws on performances from North, Central, and South America; Europe; the Middle East; and Asia to chronicle a range of experience: from those who live under a daily threat of terrorism, to others who live with a distant, imagined fear of such danger.
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 a Time of Terror: Five Sinhala Plays from Sri Lanka
by Ranjini Obeyesekere Kanchuka DharmasiriThis volume is a collection of five Sinhala plays, translated into English, which were written and performed during the most violent phase of modern Sri Lankan history. Ranjini Obeyesekere’s translation of these five well-known and celebrated plays by K. B. Herath, Prasannajith Abeysuriya, Dhananjaya Karunarathne, Prasanna Jayakody and Rajitha Dissanayake highlights and explores the dynamic period of Sri Lankan theater and performance arts in the 1980s and 1990s. The plays in this collection offered a political space for criticism, introspection, discussion and protest during a time of suppression of voices, political violence and terror. Audiences flocked to the theater to watch plays produced by talented dramatists and artists who were experimenting with forms and themes under extremely challenging circumstances, shoe-string budgets and strict censorship. Kanchuka Dharmasiri’s introduction to the volume further details the history and socio-political contexts of the theater of this period, discussing themes such as dissent, identity and the brutal power of the state. She also looks at the unique formal elements employed in these plays as well as their influence and reach. This volume is a significant addition to the growing corpus of Sinhala literature in translation. It will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of literature, performance studies, cultural studies, and the politics and history of Sri Lanka.
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 Popular Culture
by Sharon MazerPerformance in Popular Culture reveals the intricate relationship between performance and popular culture by exploring how theatrical conventions and dramaturgical tropes have informed the way the social is constructed for popular consumption. Staged as a series of case studies, this book considers the diverse ways the social is imagined and produced in live and mediated performances, in images and texts, in interactive experiences and in cultural institutions. By looking at performance in popular culture, the world we live in becomes more visible, open to investigation and (perhaps) to change. Performance in Popular Culture engages a wide range of disciplines and theoretical frameworks: performance, theatre and cultural studies; comparative literature and media studies; gender and sexuality, critical race and post-colonial theories. Designed for accessibility at an undergraduate level, the case studies make use of visual materials, moving images and texts that are readily available to lecturers and students, to scholars and to the general public.
Performance in the Field: Interdisciplinary Practice-as-Research
by David OverendThis book makes a compelling case for ‘performance fieldwork’ as a vital new approach to interdisciplinary collaboration. Refocussing the histories and practices of field research, it shows how creative methods and artistic processes can contribute to an embodied and situated knowledge of complex landscapes and environments. The book brings together case studies of innovative research in the fields of ecology, clubbing, heritage, mobility and deep time, which took place in the United Kingdom between 2009 and 2021. These accessible and engaging field notes connect to international and intercultural contexts, with attention to alternative experiences and perspectives throughout. Together, they provide a critically informed ‘toolbox’ of playful and exploratory strategies for working with a diverse range of urban and rural sites – including a river, a museum, a nightclub, a motorway and a cave. This is a timely methodology that reaches across disciplines to demonstrate how performance continually plays out ‘in the field’.
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, Madness and Psychiatry
by Anna Harpin Juliet FosterThis exciting collection of essays explores the complex area of madness and performance. The book spans from the 18th century to the present and unearths the overlooked history of theatre and performance in, and about, psychiatric asylums and hospitals. The book will appeal to historians, social scientists, theatre scholars, and artists alike.
Performance Making: a pedagogy for precarious times
by Anna FurseSurveying how Performance as a form has evolved as a distinct artistic sector to where it is today, Performance Making: a pedagogy for precarious times provides insight into the impact the artform has had across the creative sector and argues for its defence in higher education today.Drawing on over 40+ years’ worth of experience as artist and academic, Anna Furse interrogates the ways in which the practice of Performance is truly interdisciplinary, offering a specific creative and critical practice approach. Chapters address the neo-liberal turn and its effect on culture; the history of the emergence of the genre within Performance Studies; the underlying political and cultural message of Performance as independent and necessary; wider philosophical and critical theoretical thinking that can support innovation within the field; and the key principles in the creation of live work such as space, site, scenography, the body, collaboration, and composition. Each chapter includes an essay, case studies, and exercises, empowering students to apply critical thinking to their own work.Focusing on developing creative-critical methodologies in Performance Making at postgraduate level for international cohorts, this textbook will equip students, instructors, and practitioners to contextualise and enrich their Performance practice and leadership.
Performance Making and the Archive
by Ashutosh Potdar Sharmistha SahaThis book investigates theories and practices shaped by a performance’s relationship to the archive. The contributions in the volume examine how the changing nature of performance practices has made it imperative to understand how the archive and archival practices could add to the performance work. They explore a variety of themes, including artistic engagement with the archive in both conceptual and material terms; physical, virtual and digital forms; publicly and privately collected; oral, written and digital ways; or organized and unorganized collections. Finally, the volume examines how archives are modelled on existing structure and the ways in which they can be brought into discourses and practices of performance making through engagement and contestation. A novel approach to performance theory, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of performance studies, media and culture studies, studies of technology and art as also literature and literary criticism.
Performance, Masculinity, and Self-Injury (Routledge Research in Gender and Art)
by Lucy WeirThis book is an ambitious and expansive examination of the visual language of self-injury in performance art from the 1960s to the present.Inspired by the gendered nature of discussion around self-harm, the book challenges established readings of risk-taking and self-injury in global performance practice. The interdisciplinary methodology draws from art history and sociology to provide a new critical analysis of the relationship between masculinity and self-inflicted injury. Based upon interviews with a range of artists around the world, it offers an innovative understanding of the diverse meanings behind self-injury in performance, and delves into the gendered coding of self-harming bodies. Individual chapters examine the work of Ron Athey, Günter Brus, Wafaa Bilal, Franko B, André Stitt, Pyotr Pavlensky, and Yang Zhichao, offering a new perspective on the forms and functions of self-injury in performance art.The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, performance studies, gender studies, and cultural studies.
Performance, Modernity and the Plays of J. M. Synge
by Helene LecossoisIrish Revivalist playwright J. M. Synge is often regarded as a realist. Yet what happens when his work is analysed through wider performance studies and situated alongside less familiar historical contexts? By addressing this question, Hélène Lecossois offers new and valuable perspectives on Synge's plays while at the same time engaging with the complexity of his treatment of a range of performance practices – from keening at rural funerals to the performances of 'native villagers' in the entertainment section of International Exhibitions. What emerges from her study is a dramatist acutely aware of the ability of theatre in performance to counteract relentless forward-moving narratives of modernity. Through detailed, contextualized case studies, the book simultaneously makes meaningful contributions to performance studies and opens up theoretical questions of performance relating to the status of the object on stage, the body on stage and theatrical time.
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.
The Performance of Religion: Seeing the sacred in the theatre
by Cia SautterThe performing arts are uniquely capable of translating a vision of an ideal or sacred reality into lived practice, allowing an audience to confront deeply held values and beliefs as they observe a performance. However, there is often a reluctance to approach distinctly religious topics from a performance studies perspective. This book addresses this issue by exploring how religious values are acted out and reflected on in classic Western theatre, with a particular emphasis on the plays put on during the Globe Theatre‘s yearlong season of 'Shakespeare and the Bible'. Looking at plays such as Much Ado About Nothing, Dr. Faustus and Macbeth, each chapter includes ethnographic overviews of the performance of these plays as well as historical and theological perspectives on the issues they address. The author also utilizes scholarship from other academics, such as Paul Tillich and Martin Buber, in examining the relationship between art and culture. This helps readers of this book to look at religion in culture, and raise questions and explore ideas about how people appraise their religious values through an encounter with a performance. The Performance of Religion: Seeing the sacred in the theatre treads new ground in bringing performance and religious studies scholarship into direct conversation with one another. As such, it is essential reading for any academic with an interest in theology, religion and ethics and their expression in culture through the performing arts.
Performance Phenomenology: To The Thing Itself (Performance Philosophy)
by Stuart Grant Jodie McNeilly-Renaudie Matthew WagnerThis collection of essays addresses emergent trends in the meeting of the disciplines of phenomenology and performance. It brings together major scholars in the field, dealing with phenomenological approaches to dance, theatre, performance, embodiment, audience, and everyday performance of self. It argues that despite the wide variety of philosophical, ontological, epistemological, historical and methodological differences across the field of phenomenology, certain tendencies and impulses are required for an investigation to stand as truly phenomenological. These include: description of experience; a move towards fundamental conditions or underlying essences; and an examination of taken-for-granted presuppositions. The book is aimed at scholars and practitioners of performance looking to deepen their understanding of phenomenological concepts and methods, and philosophers concerned with issues of embodiment, performativity and enaction.
Performance, Politics and Activism
by Peter Lichtenfels John RouseThis collection of essays on politics, the performing arts, and various forms of activist performance uses the framework of performance studies to explore the engagements of political resistance, public practice and performance media. It places these engagements on various scales of performance production within local, national and transnational structures of neoliberal and liberal government and power. Performance has always been a way of articulating the conditions of contemporary society, and of pointing through the body of the performance to ways of defining, understanding and changing those conditions. Throughout these essays performance takes place in the environments of heightened everyday action, the aesthetic and cultural activity of the performing arts, and in the activist performance of political commitment. These trajectories in performance studies delineate the way people identify themselves and communicate with one another, both in attempts to change the structures of governance they experience, and vitally, alongside those structures.
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, Space, Utopia
by Silvija JestrovicThe war in the Balkans that took place between 1991-1995 forms the context of this book. It has been variously viewed as ethnic strife, religious conflict, or civil war but seldom has it been described as a war against cities. Belgrade and Sarajevo offer a fascinating comparative case study, not only because the two cities belong to the same historical narrative of the breakdown of Yugoslavia, but because of the ways in which their various performances both complement and contradict one another. This book examines how performance and theatricality became modes of being and acting in the city, even strategies of physical and ethical survival; yet so often it is exile, both as marginalisation within and exodus from the city, that emerges as the defining consequence of living in Sarajevo or Belgrade in the 1990s.
Performance Studies
by Richard SchechnerThe publication of Performance Studies: An Introduction was a defining moment for the field. Richard Schechner's pioneering textbook provides a lively and accessible overview of the full range of performance for undergraduates at all levels and beginning graduate students in performance studies, theatre, performing arts, and cultural studies. Among the topics discussed are the performing arts and popular entertainments, rituals, play and games, and the performances of everyday life. Supporting examples and ideas are drawn from the social sciences, performing arts, poststructuralism, ritual theory, ethology, philosophy, and aesthetics. This third edition is accompanied by an all-new companion website curated by a dedicated media editor, with the following resources for instructors and students: Interactive glossary Multiple choice questions Powerpoint Slides. Videos Website links for further study Tutorials on specific skills within Performance Studies Sample Discussion Questions Exercises and Activities Sample Syllabi The book itself has also been revised, with 25 new extracts and biographies, up-to-date coverage of global and intercultural performances, and further exploration of the growing international presence of Performance Studies as a discipline. Performance Studies is the definitive overview for undergraduates, with primary extracts, student activities, key biographies and over 200 images of global performance.
Performance Studies: An Introduction
by Richard SchechnerRichard Schechner's pioneering textbook is a lively, accessible overview of the full range of performance, with primary extracts, student activities, key biographies, and over 200 images of global performance. The publication of Performance Studies: An Introduction was a defining moment for the field. This fourth edition has been revised with two new chapters, up-to-date coverage of global and intercultural performances, and an in-depth exploration of the growing international importance of Performance Studies. Among the book’s topics are the performing arts and popular entertainments, rituals, play and games, social media, the performances of the paleolithic period, and the performances of everyday life. Supporting examples and ideas are drawn from the social sciences, performing arts, poststructuralism, ritual theory, ethology, philosophy, and aesthetics. Performance Studies: An Introduction features the broadest and most in-depth analysis possible. Performance Studies: An Introduction is the definitive overview for undergraduates at all levels and beginning graduate students in performance studies, the performing arts, and cultural studies. This new edition is also supported by a fully updated companion website, offering a variety of interactive resources, teaching tools, and research links.
Performance Studies: The Basics (The Basics)
by Andreea S. MicuPerformance Studies: The Basics offers an overview of the multiple, often overlapping definitions of performance, from performance art, performance as everyday life, and rituals, to the performative dimensions of identity, such as gender, race and sexuality. This book defines the interdisciplinary field of performance studies as it has evolved over the past four decades at the intersection of academic scholarship and artistic and activist practices. It discusses performance as an important means of communicating and of understanding the world, highlighting its intersections with critical theory and arguing for the importance of performance in the study of human behaviour and social practices. Complete with a helpful glossary and bibliography, as well as suggestions for further reading, this book is an ideal starting point for those studying performance studies as well as for general readers with an interest in the subject.
The Performance Studies Reader
by Henry Bial Sara BradySince its first publication in 2004, The Performance Studies Reader has become the leading anthology of key writings on performance studies. Now in its fourth edition, it continues to offer an unparalleled selection of work by the foremost scholars in this continually evolving field, offering a stimulating introduction to the crucial debates of Performance Studies. These critical and theoretical contributions are joined in this edition by 26 new chapters, bringing the collection up to date with current discourse and ideas, and significantly expanding the range of subjects and authors represented. Each essay includes contextual headnotes from the editors, to introduce students to the writer and their impact on the field. Newly added to this edition are contributions from Swati Arora; Sara Ahmed; Sarah Bay-Cheng; Claire Bishop; Felipe Cervera, Theron Schmidt, and Hannah Schwadron; Anita E. Cherian and Gargi Bharadwaj; Thomas F. DeFrantz/SLIPPAGE; Soyica Diggs Colbert; Tracy C. Davis; Saidiya V. Hartman; Travis Jackson; Branislav Jakovljević; Ailton Krenak; André Lepecki; Fred Moten; José Esteban Muñoz; Tavia Nyong'o; Tamara Searle; Stephanie Nohelani Teves; and McKenzie Wark.This new edition of The Performance Studies Reader provides an overview of the full range of performance theory for undergraduates at all levels, and beginning graduate students in Performance Studies, theatre, performing arts, and cultural studies.
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.
Performance Success: Performing Your Best Under Pressure
by Don GreenePerformance Success teaches a set of skills so that a musician can be ready to go out and sing or play at his or her highest level, working with energies that might otherwise be wasted in unproductive ways. This is a book of skills and exercises, prepared by a master teacher.
Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure
by Sara Jane BailesWhat does it mean to "fail" in performance? How might staging failure reveal theatre’s potential to expand our understanding of social, political and everyday reality? What can we learn from performances that expose and then celebrate their ability to fail? In Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure, Sara Jane Bailes begins with Samuel Beckett and considers failure in performance as a hopeful strategy. She examines the work of internationally acclaimed UK and US experimental theatre companies Forced Entertainment, Goat Island and Elevator Repair Service, addressing accepted narratives about artistic and cultural value in contemporary theatre-making. Her discussion draws on examples where misfire, the accidental and the intentionally amateur challenge our perception of skill and virtuosity in such diverse modes of performance as slapstick and punk. Detailed rehearsal and performance analysis are used to engage theory and contextualise practice, extending the dialogue between theatre arts, live art and postmodern dance. The result is a critical account of performance theatre that offers essential reading for practitioners, scholars and students of Performance, Theatre and Dance Studies.