Performing Arts
Talking to Tremors: Somatics in Dance, Dialogics, and Silence
As an author in the field of phenomenology I have wondered how its insights might be applied to individualized hands-on somatics practices. The following is the result. It draws upon work I did a few years ago with Alice in which she learns to talk to her tremors making friends with them and moving past fears. She gave me permission to write about this and is identified anonymously. I explain our work together through notes I took at the time which I also discussed with Alice. In application of phenomenology I contextualize our somatic process using Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogics as a recurring conceptual ground bass. In light of Bakhtin's work the present essay explores dialogic extralinguistic states of silence and utterance as stepping-stones towards healing – also employing the neuroscience of Antonio Damasio and Eugene Gendlin's somatic focusing process – further delineating changes towards feeling better and becoming well. My background as a Feldenkrais and Shin Somatics practitioner aid this study as also my studies and teaching of dance.
Walking Well: A Play of Touch and Restoration in Three Acts
A somatic movement detective accepts that there is more than meets the eye in movement even in walking. Walking is fundamental to humans. We all do it but for the most part we don’t give much attention to it unless we consider what walking holds in its power to reveal individuality and personality or that postural balance in walking can deteriorate quickly when any part of the foot loses feeling or function especially the big toe. The play we enter here includes my detective work in movement and touch with a client I call ‘Amy’. Parts of the play might be read as a case study in a somatic process focusing on the whole person through the feet and big toes. My case study with Amy is embedded in matters of body image approaches to touch instances of attunement and matching and the consciousness of the teacher/practitioner.
Phenomenologies in The Flowing Live Present
Phenomenology is a popular qualitative method of enquiry but not all phenomenology is the same. There are basic differences and at the same time common threads that define an approach as phenomenological. Outgrowths of phenomenology are rooted in Edmund Husserl's philosophy now differentiated and widely applied in the arts social science psychology somatic fields of enquiry and religious studies. Husserl's foundational ideas return throughout this essay. In Part 2 I engage connections between phenomenology spirituality and dance. My hope is that practitioners and scholars of dance who are drawn to phenomenology will find themselves somewhere in this study.
Ethical world gaze
Earth spinning in space grounds our world-sense of belonging as do our spinning dances. This article explores self-world-earth relationships particularly how direction of attention (intentionality) becomes formative in dancing. More widely it develops a philosophy of an ethical world gaze promising to enliven the senses. Somewhere between untenable extremes of optimism and pessimism actions born of joy and hope draw me towards this possibility. Earth world and nature entwine in language and perception but they also have divergent aspects to be theorized. These imprecise terms become increasingly more discrete in the course of this article textured through perspectives of Buddhism eco-phenomenology and butoh. Examinations of ethics in dance and attendant relationships of morality build from there. I explore all of this in four sections of this work: Stargazing Faces of joy and evanescence Texturing world and nature and As the moth.
On Dance and Phenomenology: Interview with Sondra Fraleigh
In this extended essay interview with Sondra Fraleigh I ask about her paving-the-way research in dance and phenomenology and how the traditions of phenomenology historically and theoretically intersect within dance research paradigms. Together we cover questions and areas such as how and when phenomenological traditions started to integrate into Dance Studies phenomenological approaches relative to somatics and the ethical ramifications for students when phenomenology is taught and becomes a central research paradigm for dance studies students. Sondra shares her academic experience within these intersecting fields and personal journeys and reflections within the intricacies and intimacies of phenomenological traditions.
Somatics in Dance, Ecology, and Ethics
This book of highly original essays addresses the field of movement-based and dance somatics through lenses of ethics and ecology. It is based in methods of phenomenology.
A new collection of essays previously published with Intellect as journal articles with the addition of new essays and editorial material. The text considers body-based somatic education relative to values virtues gender fluidity lived experience environmental awareness fairness and collective well-being. In delineating interdependent values of soma ecology and human movement that are newly in progress the collection conceives links between personal development of subjective knowledge and cultural critical and environmental positionality.
The text raises questions about defining somatics and self gender dynamics movement preferences normative body conceptions attention to feelings inclusiveness ethics of touch and emotional intelligence in somatics contexts. I include these crucial concerns of somatics and ethics as relational globally complex and ongoing.
Like much of Sondra Fraleigh’s writing these essays utilize phenomenology as a method to investigate embodied relationships—often through lenses of ethics and aesthetics. In providing some examples the text explores specific values of gratitude listening and emotional intelligence in somatic bodywork and learning environments.
Somatic Movement Dance Therapy
This book focuses on Somatic Movement Dance Therapy and the importance of self-regulation and co-regulation. The chapters attend to self-regulating different tissues through movement breath sound and the imagination.
Throughout the book the author shares processes and practices that support participants to balance their living tissues moving from sympathetic arousal into parasympathetic ease and release. The study of the autonomic nervous system and how to innervate the parasympathetic through breath awareness heart-sensing and intero-ception is the central through-line in the book.
Uniquely Williamson attends to the anatomical and physiological complexity underlying the apparent simplicity of somatic movement dance practice. How to sense-perceive and move with attuned awareness of specific body tissues such the skeletal-muscular and craniosacral system invites the reader into a deep anatomical and physiological excavation of self-regulation. The interconnectivity of fascia and the importance of cardio-ception breath awareness and gravity lie at the heart of this book. Sensory-perceptual awareness of the heart is foregrounded as the most important ingredient in the efficacy of practice as well as gravi-ception soft-tissue-rolling and fascial unwinding.
Includes a collective foreword from Sarah Whatley Daniel Deslauriers Celeste Snowber and Karin Rugman
This is a must-read practice-as-research book for under- and postgraduate students researchers and educators and especially important for practitioners who feel the weight and condescension of the mechanistic paradigm.
Performing Temporality in Contemporary European Dance
Performing Temporality in Contemporary European Dance: Unbecoming Rhythms develops a new framework to understand how temporality is performed in contemporary dance. It combines an in-depth analysis of the choreographic practices of Jonathan Burrows & Matteo Fargion Ivana Müller Mette Edvardsen and Mårten Spångberg with a close study of the philosophical work of Bergson Deleuze and Bachelard.
In the field of dance and performance studies the notion of ‘unbecoming rhythms’ will stand out and spark the interest of a wide readership. Dance is still mostly associated with notions of flow and continuity. Dancers are supposed to create a continuous rhythm in which the different movements melt together. They should create the feeling of spontaneous renewal or becoming. Recently however several choreographers have experimented with rhythms that create an experience of temporal unbecoming a feeling of being stuck in time. This is the first book to develop an in-depth analysis of these rhythms and the unsettling temporal regimes they produce.
The book situates itself at the intersection of dance and philosophy. Its focus on temporality and its innovative methodological approach it will also prove to be an important contribution to the field and will be a significant resource for students scholars and practitioners.
Off Book
In the theatre world ‘off book’ signifies a deadline in the creative process: the date by which performers are to have memorised their lines and will no longer be allowed to carry their play script – the ‘book’ – on stage. As such Off Book makes a strangely appropriate title for a book about devised performance in higher education. In its usual context ‘off book’ captures the tension between ephemeral live performance and durable author-ized literature: in one sense the book – the written play – is the essential core the seed that gives the performance life and meaning. Yet the opposite could be equally true: an ‘on book’ performance would not really be a play at all and an actor reciting lines out of a script in hand is not really acting. A play is only realised in or through a performance. We cannot really learn or play our part until we can put the book down and enter the stage without it.
Devised performance might be described as ‘theatre without the book.’ Yet devisors also often use books – books like this one practical guidebooks and how-to manuals as well as a myriad of literature outside the discipline mined for inspiration. This is particularly manifest when devising in the context of higher education - a milieu like theatre wherein books traditionally signify authority status and meaning. So to the extent that theatres and campuses are places where one expects everything to be done ‘by the book’ devising on campuses is rebellious even sacrilegious. But on the other hand both the theatre and the university are expected to challenge tradition defy expectations and conduct experiments.
The book is presented in four sections reflecting the range of roles devising plays in higher education. The first section Devising Pedagogy: Teaching Transferable Tools examines how and why practitioners educators and programs conceptualise and plan for devising with adult learners in a range of higher education contexts. The second Devising Friction: Ensembles Individuals and the Institution shifts the discussion to the classroom where abstract pedagogical rubber meets the road of concrete reality. The third Devising (by) Degrees Practice-led postgraduate devising projects features contributions by emerging scholar-practitioners who engage with devising as both an object and method of creative scholarship. Finally the chapters in Devising Bridges: University-Community Engagement explore how devising connects higher education institutions with the public they are intended to serve — particularly in populations and communities that are marginalised within or even explicitly excluded from participating in higher education such as children and people with intellectual disabilities.
A valuable and unique resource for drama educators in universities university students in education drama and arts managements graduate students conducting research theatre historians practicing devised theatre artists.
Re-Choreographing Cortical & Cartographic Maps
A transdisciplinary approach to practice-as-research complete with its own elaborate theory of practice and a set of four multi-year-performance research projects through which the theory plays out. Its methodology is at times ethnographic as Henry Daniel deftly inserts himself and his Caribbean West African ancestry into a series of complex cortical and geographic maps which become choreographic in every sense of the term.
The central argument in the book is based on a claim that human beings are cognitively embodied through their own lived experiences of movement through space and time; the spaces we inhabit and the practices we engage in are documented through cortical and cartographic maps. In short as we inhabit and move through spaces our brains organise our experiences into unique cortical and spatial maps which eventually determine how we see and deal with i.e. ‘become’ subjects in a world that we also help create. The argument is that through performance as a re-cognising and re-membering of these movements we can claim the knowledge that is in the body as well as in the spaces through which it travels.
To demonstrate how the brain organises our experiences of the world according to cartographic (graphically mapping procedures) and cortical (motor sensory and visual functions) mapping and exploring the impact of this mapping to choreographic practice considering how maps might be disrupted or altered by change of circumstances. This is illustrated through scientific creative and reflective approaches to exploring neurological process of embodied experiences as well as the analysis of projects that have utilized this practice thus far.
Audience will include Dance and Performance Studies Scholars; Dancers and Choreographers; Undergraduate and Advanced Students; Researchers
Gender, Sex, and Sexuality in Musical Theatre
Critics and fans alike often mistake theatrical song and dance as evoking a sweeping sense of simplicity heteronormativity and traditionalism. Nothing drove home this cultural misunderstanding for Kelly Kessler as when a relative insisted she watch the Clint Eastwood-Lee Marvin cinematic transfer of Paddy Chayefsky’s Paint Your Wagon (1969) with a young niece and nephew because it was a ‘sweet movie.’ In the relative’s memory good old-fashioned singing and dancing—matched with the power of an assumed hegemonic embrace of social norms—far outweighed the whoremongering alcoholism wife-selling and what appears to be narratively sanctioned polyamory.
This collection seeks to trouble such an over-idealized impression of musical theatre. Tackling Rockettes divas and chorus boys; hit shows such as Hamilton and Spring Awakening; and lesser-known but ground-breaking gems like Erin Markey’s A Ride on The Irish Cream and Kirsten Childs’s Bella: An American Tall Tale.
Gender Sex and Sexuality in Musical Theatre: He/She/They Could Have Danced All Night takes a broad look at musical theatre across a range of intersecting lenses such as race nation form dance casting marketing pedagogy industry platform-specificity stardom politics and so on. This collection assembles an amazing group of established and emergent musical theatre scholars to wrestle with the complexities of the gendered and sexualized musical theatre form. Gender and desire have long been at the heart of the musical whether because ‘birds and bees’ (and educated fleas’) were doing it a farm girl simply couldn’t ‘say no’ or one’s ‘tits and ass’ were preventing them from landing the part.
An exciting and vibrant collection of articles from the archives of Studies in Musical Theatre with contributions from Ryan Donovan Michele Dvoskin Sherrill Gow Jiyoon Jung David Haldane Lawrence Stephanie Lim Dustyn Martinich Adrienne Gibbons Oehlers Deborah Paredez Alejandro Postigo George Rodosthenous Janet Werther Stacy Wolf Elizabeth L. Wollman Bryan Vandevender and Kelly Kessler brought together with a newly commissioned piece by Jordan Ealey. All set against the backdrop of Kelly Kessler’s scene-setting introduction.
Excellent potential for classroom and course use on undergraduate and graduate courses in theatre studies musical studies women’s and gender studies.
Performing Collaboration in Solo Performance
The book provides an investigation grounded in creative writing and practice-as-research methodology and explores the issues of authorship and collaborative labour in contemporary performance. This investigation is set in the context of a world more and more characterized by fragmentation displacement and virtual communication and relationships. It addresses and playfully engages with the following questions: what is a collaborative body? Can a sole performer carry out a collaborative practice ? Can we stand in for others? What forms of “coming-together” might take place when distance remains between those who perform and those who spectate?
The book contains the full-length version of the score from A Duet Without You an original performance piece created between 2013 and 2015 by Chloé Déchery in collaboration with a range of artistic collaborators working inter- and cross-disciplinary including Karen Christopher Pedro Iñes Simone Kenyon Marty Langthorne Tom Parkinson Michael Pinchbeck and Deborah Pearson.
Alongside the playtext the book entails a collection of essays written by independent writers artists and academics and dedicated to the politics of collaboration ranging from performative responses and co-authored articles to in-depth theoretical essays.
Primary readership will be those teaching researching or studying in theatre and performance studies visual arts fine arts art history creative writing poetry philosophy or French literature. Will also be of interest to art school students and those with an interest in theatre.
Storying the Self
The chapters in this collection explore the constellation of points where stories of individual experience and experiences are in dialogue with political cultural and social narratives.
Encompassing themes of individual and social identities and relationships (un)belonging motherhood academic lives and what it means to be an arts practitioner these stories and accounts continue and expand the ongoing conversations of how practitioners and academics do their work. They show the ongoing need to rethink and re-examine how to do critical and engaging scholarly work. Life stories are necessarily messy complex personal and often deal with experiences that have been challenging for the author in some way.
Contributions from Ross Adamson Suzy Bamblett Emily Bell Jenni Cresswell Hannah Davita Ludikhuijze Sandra Lyndon Vanessa Marr Jess Moriarty Éva Mikuska Holly Stewart Deirdre Russell Louise Spiers Lucianna Whittle.
This is the first book in a new series. The Performance and Communities Book Series celebrates challenges and researches performance in the real world. The series will consider how contemporary performance can engage build and learn from previous existing evolving and new communities of people – practitioners academics students audiences.
The Performing Observer
The Performing Observer is a collection of short critical writings on contemporary art performance and photography written over the course of the past two decades. These texts were originally published in a variety of settings including art magazines and exhibition catalogues online journals and websites.
A wide range of global practitioners are analysed from emerging to established artists. As the title suggests Patrick feels that he is simultaneously performing a role while observing and writing about the field. The intention is to present a well-informed but jargon free survey of many significant developments in contemporary art and culture. Among the artists discussed are: Francis Alÿs Laurie Anderson Chris Burden William Eggleston Cindy Sherman and Andy Warhol.
The book examines an important series of interconnected contemporary art practices. Layering writings on performance-based work material forms and photography it positions performance within a larger context. The artists selected are genuinely international with a strong focus on the southern hemisphere and are grouped together in sections Patrick calls Performance Photography Publicness Video Books and Exhibitions.
It aims to make sense of a specific modality of art making with an interesting - and to a degree unspoken - interest in art writing itself. Both elements are compelling separately but especially so together.
Accessibly written and especially approachable for a range of interested readers. It offers scholarly and critical depth while retaining a writing style that will appeal beyond a strictly scholarly audience. It will appeal to readers closely involved in contemporary art theory and practice whether students artists academics or simply curious to know more.
Leaping into Dance Literacy through the Language of Dance®
The main aim of this book is to present the theory and purpose underpinning the approaches to dance literacy as explored by the Language of Dance® community in the USA and UK. Through their teacher training programs they are changing the face of dance-based dance literacy using motif notation.
Through their teacher training programs they are changing the face of dance-based dance literacy using motif notation. This book reveals how dance notation literacy has changed due to practices being focused on constructivist and constructionist pedagogy. Based on work by dance educator Ann Hutchinson Guest and expanded upon by her protégés this is the first book of its kind to bring together theory praxis original research outcomes taxonomies model lesson plans learning domain taxonomies of dance and voices of dance teachers who have explored using dance notation literacy. We are in a new era for educating with dance notation focusing on learners’ engagement by making connections between the learning domains using constructivist and constructionist learning approaches.
Arts-literate dancers can deepen their dance craft and transfer their arts knowledge capacities and skills to lifelong learning. Dance-based dance literacy practices using notation enhance learners’ flexibility adaptability self-direction initiative productivity responsibility leadership and cross-cultural skills.
The book will appeal to dance educators focusing on cognitive and metacognitive learning in dance using communication problem-solving and critical thinking.
Useful for preschool and primary teachers aiming to integrate dance into classroom experiences and for secondary teachers teaching dance and looking to upgrade their approach to dance literacy so students are able to achieve higher level cognitive learning problem solving and social skills in dance classrooms.
Choreographers and dance teachers will find new approaches to dance making and to expressing their craft using a system that is well codified and now augmented with examples to guide them with making their own projects and processes.
Anyone with an interest in the idea of dance literacy will find concrete examples of how to put their knowledge into practice to advance their teaching and dance making.
Performing Institutions
Performing Institutions: Contested Sites and Structures of Care builds upon scholarly work rooted in the social and cultural histories of education self-organization activist practices performance design and artistic research (at)tending to the ways that institutions are necessarily political and performed.
By evoking the idea of Performing Institutions it foregrounds all kinds of ‘actors’ that engage with (re)imagining creative practices - social artistic and pedagogical - that critically interact with institutional frameworks and the broader local and global society of which these institutions are part.
With case studies and critical reflections from Denmark Ireland Finland the UK Canada the USA Chile Asia and Australasia contributors show how they envision or pursue performing artistic cultural social and educational practices as caring engagements with contested sites addressing the following questions. How do current institutions perform – academically spatially custodially and structurally? How might we stay engaged with the ways that institutions are inherently contested sites and what role do care and counter-hegemonic practices play in rearticulating other ways of performing institutions and how they perform on us?
These are the questions central to this book as it stages a productive tension between two main themes: structures of care (instituting otherwise) and sites of contestations (desiring change).
Some of the texts in this collection stage a productive tension between ideas about caring contestations and contestation as a caring engagement in practice with a view towards institutional transformation. Other contributors investigate the idea of caring contestations as a critical concept that draws attention to questions of power and to the exclusions produced and reproduced in and through specific institutional practices. As such this collection of writing puts forward caring contestations as a critical mode for (re)enacting institutional engagements. This also brings forward questions of agency and how for those of us who perform within institutional structures we care to engage and/or contest those institutional engagements.
It is primarily aimed at scholars educators research-practitioners and postgraduate students in the fields of performance studies theory creation and design those working at art institutions and art schools Also relevant to researchers working across various fields of organizational as well as educational approaches to performance culture.
Performance Generating Systems in Dance
Performance generating systems are systematic and task-based dramaturgies that generate performance for or with an audience. In dance such systems differ in ways that matter from more closed choreographed scores and more open forms of structured improvisation. Dancers performing within these systems draw on predefined and limited sources while working on specific tasks within constraining rules. The generating components of the systems provide boundaries that enable the performance to self-organize into iteratively shifting patterns instead of becoming repetitive or chaotic.
This book identifies the generating components and dynamics of these works and the kinds of dramaturgical agency they enable. It explains how the systems of these creations affect the perception cognition and learning of dancers and why that is a central part of how they work. It also examines how the combined dramaturgical and psychological effects of the systems performatively address individual and social conditions of trauma that otherwise tend to remain unchangeable and negatively impact the human capacity to learn relate and adapt. The book provides analytical frameworks and practical insights for those who wish to study or apply performance generating systems in dance within the fields of choreography and dance dramaturgy dance education community dance or dance psychology.
Featured cases offer unique insight into systems created by Deborah Hay and Christopher House William Forsythe Ame Henderson Karen Kaeja and Lee Su-Feh.
Re-Choreographing Cortical & Cartographic Maps
A transdisciplinary approach to practice-as-research complete with its own elaborate theory of practice and a set of four multi-year-performance research projects through which the theory plays out. Its methodology is at times ethnographic as Henry Daniel deftly inserts himself and his Caribbean West African ancestry into a series of complex cortical and geographic maps which become choreographic in every sense of the term.
The central argument in the book is based on a claim that human beings are cognitively embodied through their own lived experiences of movement through space and time; the spaces we inhabit and the practices we engage in are documented through cortical and cartographic maps. In short as we inhabit and move through spaces our brains organise our experiences into unique cortical and spatial maps which eventually determine how we see and deal with i.e. ‘become’ subjects in a world that we also help create. The argument is that through performance as a re-cognising and re-membering of these movements we can claim the knowledge that is in the body as well as in the spaces through which it travels.
To demonstrate how the brain organises our experiences of the world according to cartographic (graphically mapping procedures) and cortical (motor sensory and visual functions) mapping and exploring the impact of this mapping to choreographic practice considering how maps might be disrupted or altered by change of circumstances. This is illustrated through scientific creative and reflective approaches to exploring neurological process of embodied experiences as well as the analysis of projects that have utilized this practice thus far.
Audience will include Dance and Performance Studies Scholars; Dancers and Choreographers; Undergraduate and Advanced Students; Researchers
Applied Arts and Health
This collection documents diverse approaches in creative arts engagement building metaphoric bridges across the field with an emphasis on creativity and well-being in education and community development.
Focussing on applied arts and health practice research scholarship expressive arts therapy community and education the book advances integrative and multimodal art-based processes. This book aims to give prominence to art-based research and provides useful support to those working and researching across applied arts and health education and community contexts. The book brings together a collection of world-leading authors in the field spanning a range of cultures documenting projects and significantly adding to cohesive research in the field.
In continuing to advance applied arts and health whilst furthering a commitment to art-based research this new book places emphasis upon the artistic research methodology underlining that art (performing art and visual art) is the evidence. It offers the field an integral vision for the arts both theoretically and practically. Further the book breaks down the silos of practice that have been unhelpful in their development.
The audience for this book will include art-based researchers expressive arts practitioners and scholars arts educators and those interested in bridging the gap between arts and health practice. Masters and doctoral level students in art-based research participatory research and qualitative research with an arts-focus are another audience for the book. All applied arts and health practitioners and academics arts educators art therapists and university PaR programmes. Whilst of particular use to postgraduate students this text will also be useful to final year undergraduate students in assisting them with creative practice-based dissertations and projects. Also useful to researchers practitioners and a range of research degree programmes in applied arts and health education and community engagement.
Theatre for Lifelong Learning
Theatre for Lifelong Learning is a step-by-step guide for anyone interested in teaching theatre courses and creating theatre with older adults.
This book provides instructors with syllabi discussion questions classroom management strategies resource lists and activities to teach courses from beginning to end. Special topics include Playwriting Play Development Storytelling Theatre Appreciation Theatre Criticism Theatre History and Theatre Theory.
This book helps readers become confident informed instructors of older adult learners. Theatre for Lifelong Learning is a tool for anyone who wants to build theatrical communities and support the emotional well-being of older adults through education practice and experimentation while also having fun.
Theatre for Lifelong Learning is a complete guide to navigate the theatre classroom from beginning to end. Anyone can become a theatre expert and educator with practice. If you already have a background in performing arts this book provides strategies that are useful for you as well. If you have experience as an educator this book will enrich your current skill set with interdisciplinary approaches. Tips and examples throughout assist you in creating and maintaining an accessible environment and making courses your own.
So how can teaching and learning about theatre help us live in the moment? When we are not engaged it’s easy to forget that we are capable curious creative people who can expand our knowledge and experiences every day. Theatre encourages finding meaning in small things chance encounters and the tapestry of life. All the material provided in this book will motivate instructors and students to get involved.
It will be most useful for arts practitioners participatory practitioners institutional educators and community outreach officers independent theatre instructors. Of potential interest to scholars and researchers in age studies or in teaching and learning. May also be useful for community arts organizations regional theatres and non-profit organizations working with older adults.
Bergson and Durational Performance
Humans have always marked time whether by using the earth's natural rhythms or with the clock. Unlike pre- industrial people living in an age of social acceleration is dominated by clock-time and network time presenting many more options than can possibly be achieved in a human lifespan.
This book explores the possibility of an alternative experience of time one that is closer to the pure duration described by philosopher Henri Bergson. The discussions in this book contribute to contemporary performance analysis philosophy and Bergson studies as well as exploring aspects of immersive and participatory performance walking practices ritual and online performance.
Using durational performances as case studies the author demonstrates new insights into Bergson’s philosophy alongside key theorists in psychology and anthropology. Through a series of performance analyses Bergson's philosophy of duration is coupled with ideas from Maslow Csikszentmihalyi and Victor Turner to speculate on the possibilities available in challenging an experience of the world in which time is short but the possibility of experience is abundant.
The main audience is an academic and student market. Undergraduate and postgraduate students of theatre studies performance and the performing arts doctoral researchers researchers interested in time and performance the relationship between performance and philosophy those with an interest in philosophy sociology anthropology and psychology will all find much of interest.
Potential wider readership in those who are interested in the phenomenon of social acceleration in performance philosophy as well in Bergson’s philosophy.
Dance and Ethics
Dance and Ethics: Moving Towards a More Humane Culture is an introductory study of ethical issues as applied to the history and field of Western theatrical dance. It is the first sustained work of its kind inspired by the belief that there are serious issues to be illuminated by examining dance in relation to ethics and to the changing values in the dance world itself especially as faced by young dancers entering the profession.
Since the 1960s and gathering momentum with the #metoo movement scholars and practitioners especially from the fields of dance education somatics and the realms of postmodern dance and ballet have increasingly believed that attitudes and practices involving psychological physical and sexual mistreatment of students and dancers must be challenged. Dance and Ethics examines key ethical issues related to the dance field primarily within the United States and how those directly impact different aspects of the lives of dance artists over the span of their careers. The issues discussed include the basic ethical choices facing a dance artist in terms of whether to care about ethics or separate art from morality; ethical issues involved in student–teacher and dancer–choreographer relationships; how ethical concerns relate to the creation and reception of choreographic work; ethical aspects of the critical assessment of dance and dancers; and ethical issues related to presenting systems and institutional infrastructures within the dance field.
While there is a clear bias towards greater humanism within the dance field Naomi Jackson is sensitive to the variety of moral stances available in any given situation. Readers are invited to consider that ethical options exist other than those that are usually promoted that while sometimes there are no clear right and wrong answers there are better and worse positions to be explored and defended and that it is important for the dance field and broader culture to consciously address ethical issues in relation to dance in a sustained thoughtful and creative manner.
The book focuses on theatrical dance forms of ballet modern/postmodern dance and theatrical jazz but also extends to commercial dance dance for the camera/internet and social/vernacular/folk dance when relevant to the main argument.
Dance and Ethics will appeal primarily to educators and students as well as young professional dancers. It is designed for undergraduate and graduate students in dance studies American studies performance studies and cultural studies. It will be useful for undergraduate and graduate dance courses focused on pedagogy choreography criticism community engagement politics and aesthetics.
An Introduction to the Phenomenology of Performance Art
This original and unique new book takes an integrated approach to interrogating the experience and location of the self/s within the context of performance art practice. In its framing and execution of practical exercises and focused snapshots of internationally recognized performance practice Bacon situates their argument within the boundaries of specialism in the critical curation of performance art praxis as well as contemporary phenomenological scholarship.
Introducing the study and application of performance art through phenomenology for radical artists educators and practitioner-researchers; this exciting new book invites readers to take part explore contemporary performance art and activate their own practices.
Applying a queer phenomenology to unpack the importance of a multiplicity of Self/s the book guides readers to be academically rigorous when capturing embodied experiences featuring exercises to activate their practices and clear introductory definitions to key phenomenological terms. Includes interviews and insights from some of the best examples of transgressive performance art practice of this century help to help unpack the application of phenomenology as Bacon calls for a queer reimagining of Heidegger’s ‘The Origin of the Work of Art.’
This is an important contribution to the field and will be welcomed by performance artists and academics interested in performance. It may also appeal to those teaching concepts of phenomenology.
It will be relevant to students of performance as well as to artists audiences and museum goers. The approachable layout and clear authorial voice will add to the appeal for students early career researchers and mean that it has strong potential for inclusion in undergraduate and postgraduate syllabi within the field.
Lightwork
This volume brings together performance texts from nine productions by the experimental theatre company Lightwork and one playtext from Lightwork’s precursor company Academy Productions presented between 1997 and 2011.
Lightwork specialized in collaboratively created and multimedia performance. The company also experimented with several performance forms that emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century including verbatim and site-specific approaches. Because of this the texts cover a range of forms and formats – scripted plays such as Here’s What I Did With My Body One Day by Dan Rebellato and Blavatsky by Clare Bayley; multimedia adaptations of classical myths such as Back At You (based on the story of Echo and Narcissus) and Once I was Dead (based on the story of Daedalus and Icarus); site-specific experiments such as The Good Actor which took place in various spaces across Hoxton Hall a Victorian theatre in London’s East End; and the use of verbatim witness testimony from the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina War Crimes section in Sarajevo Story.
The defining aspect of the Lightwork aesthetic is that multimedia and scenographic experimentation does not come at the expense of the mainstays of dramatic theatre: character story and emotional resonance. What lies at the heart of the Lightwork shows you will encounter here are human-scale stories: relationships between lovers or family members confrontations with the past (both as personal and as cultural history) and in many cases matters of life or death that entail wrestling with causality consequence and fate.
The twelve-year span covered by this work reflects a period in British performance practice when the interrelation of page and stage process and production text and ‘non-text’ were being radically rethought. In the collaborative and processual theatre making that Lightwork exemplifies the text may be one element among many and is more likely to be the outcome of the process than its precursor.
How do such playtexts (or performance texts) differ from those that are conceived and scripted by a single desk-based playwright in advance of the rehearsal? What gaps are left when the work of many hands is channelled through the pen (or keyboard) of one among them? The texts featured in this volume represent a number of answers to these questions about the nature of writing for the stage.
The performance texts are each preceded (and sometime followed) by short essays written by some of the many people who have been involved in productions by Lightwork including established academics and theatre practitioners: David Annen Clare Bayley Gregg Fisher Sarah Gorman Andy Lavender Aneta Mancewicz Bella Merlin Alex Mermikides Jo Parker Dan Rebellato and Ayse Tashkiran. Their contributions reflect the collaborative nature of the company and the respect that it accorded the various disciplinary perspectives that make up a theatre company.
There are sections on scenography sound design and technical operation as well as on those crafts that might more usually draw attention: directing writing and acting. These contributions offer an insight into the collaborative multi-layered and sometimes messy business of their creation from an individual maker’s or spectator’s point of view.
This book will be invaluable for those who are making studying or researching performance in the twenty-first century and an essential resource for the rehearsal room.
Primary readership will include researchers educators students and practitioners interested in creative practice theatre-making integrated design and performance and contemporary theatre.
It will be an important resource for those on theatre and performance courses at all levels as well as acting theatre and performance design dramaturgy and direction courses creative writing courses and media arts programmes.
It will have appeal for general readers interested in new texts and processes in theatre and performance and individual texts are likely to be of interest to specialist researchers working in related fields – for example performance and the occult (Blavatsky) performance and conflict (Sarajevo Story).
Dance Studies in China
Dance Studies in China is a collection of articles selected from issues of the Journal of Beijing Dance Academy translated for an English-speaking audience. Beijing Dance Academy is a full-time institution of higher learning with commitment to developing excellent professional dancers choreographers and dance researchers. This collection includes an interview with Shen Wei the Chinese-American choreographer painter and director living in New York City USA.
Founded in 1954 the former Beijing Dance School was the first professional dance school ever established since the founding of People’s Republic of China. Beijing Dance Academy (BDA) officially established in 1978 it provides BA and MA degrees and has become the only institution of higher learning for professional dance education in China as well as the largest prestigious dance school with comprehensive concentrations in the world.
In recent years BDA has committed to develop its research profile specialising in dance the Journal of Beijing Dance Academy is one of such outcomes. The Academy is also actively engaging with international collaboration.
The Intellect China Library is a series of new English translations of the latest scholarship in Chinese that have not previously been available. Subjects covered include visual arts performing arts popular culture media and the broader creative industries. The series aims to foster intellectual debate and to promote closer cross-cultural knowledge exchange by introducing unique Chinese scholarship and ideas to our readers.
PUNK! Las Américas Edition
What does a hemispheric Americas look like when done through the lens of punk music visuals and literature? That is the core premise of this book presented through a collage of analytical aesthetic and experiential takes on punk across the continent.
This book challenges the dominant vision of punk – particularly its white masculine protagonists and deep Anglocentrism – by analysing punk as a critical lens into the disputed territories of 'America' a term that hides the heterogeneous struggles global histories hopes and despairs of late twentieth and early twenty-first century experience. Compiling academic essays and punk paraphernalia (interviews zines poetry and visual segments) into a single volume the book seeks to explore punk life through its multiple registers through vivid musical dialogues excessive visual displays and underground literary expression.
The kaleidoscopic accounts include everything from sustained academic inquiry and photo portraits to anarchist manifestos and interview excerpts with notable punk figures. The result is a radically heterogenous mixture that seeks to reposition punk and las Américas as intrinsically bound up in each other’s history: for better and for worse. Out of critical pasts within an urgent present and toward many different possible futures.
This volume critically refashions punk to suggest it emerges from within the long-term historical experience of las Américas in all their plurality and is useful as a mode of critique towards the hegemonic dimensions of America in its imperial singularity. The book is rooted in a theory of 'radical heterogeneity' and thus represents a collage-like juxtaposition of punk perspectives from across the entire hemisphere and via divergent contributions: academic experiential and aesthetic.
Readership for this collection will include both academic and general readers.
Primary readership will be academic. It will appeal to researchers scholars educators and students in the following fields: American studies Latin American studies media and communication cultural studies sociology history music ethnomusicology anthropology art literature.
General readership will be among those interested in the following areas - anarchism music subculture literature independent publishing photography.