Performing Arts
Insights in Applied Theatre
Much more than an archive these are the vivid still pertinent voices and messages of the pioneers worldwide.
The nineteen articles chosen by the editors of Applied Theatre Research represent key themes and elements from the early days of applied theatre that are still – and indeed now more than ever – relevant. They are all high-quality articles some of which were highly influential in their own time. All of them still have plenty to say to today’s applied theatre both in their own terms and sometimes in terms of how their publication influenced the development at the time of this still-expanding field or refracted it in ways that give us new insights with hindsight.
They have been arranged in sections according to some of the key themes – and problematic issues – that were discovered thought out and sometimes stumbled across by the pioneer writers in the collection. Each section is preceded by a critical editorial commentary on those themes besides thorough introductions to all the articles and in some cases re-evaluations. The editors have added substantial additional new material to the collection and in doing so bring their own applied theatre experience to bear on these themes as they raise general questions that are wide-ranging contemporary and urgent: from the vital and contested issues of power partnerships and the giving of voice through theatre to applied theatre’s proactive response to COVID-19 to the need to identify take account of and address the needs of all stakeholders in any applied theatre project.
The articles are grouped in six sections covering areas such as diversity of geography community contexts forms of applied theatre and organizational factors that characterize applied theatre; the definition and nature of applied theatre; how the best intentioned projects could be compromised by any of the many opportunities for applied theatre to go wrong; opportunities for change it can offer and the incorporation of new media technologies and ethnographic performance two factors that have now become major preoccupations for our field particularly in the years since the articles were written. The final section recognizes that applied theatre has been around not for 30 years but for thousands and in countless cultures.
The editorial chapters have strong connections with the rest of the book but are written with the editors’ deep insights into the field and are sharp in their focus and context. The book offers useful insights into the start of applied theatre and its development as an area of practice and research. The chapter collection is relevant and includes influential names in the field who have contributed significantly to the development of applied theatre over time.
The primary market will be academics and advanced practitioners in applied theatre drama education and theatre studies – including the expanding fields of drama therapy theatre and health etc. It will also be useful for educators exploring creative pedagogy and drama in education strategies across the curriculum.
It will be valuable introductory background reading for advanced undergraduate and post-graduate students in drama theatre studies and theatre arts performance studies and community theatre.
Entanglements of Two: A Series of Duets
Drawing out the particularities of working in twos with a focus on collaborative performance making this book considers the duet as a particular configuration in which to think the duo a microcosm of humankind and presents everyday entanglement of form and practice seen through the lens of the smallest multiple unit.
This book explores the practical philosophical and aesthetic implications of performers working in pairs. It focuses on a ten-year period in the work of Karen Christopher alongside wider reflections on the duet as a concept in artistic and social life. The book presents an investigation of the entanglement of form and practice seen through the lens of the smallest multiple unit of collaboration: the pair.
During this ten-year period Christopher set out to create a series of duets by working with one other artist. The 25 pieces in the collection includes reflections from an international group of collaborators artists linguists physicists theologians philosophers and performance scholars. Many of them deal with the question of artistic collaboration and entanglement contemplating the significance of those terms both on an interpersonal and global level.
This book provides a fascinating insight into the creative working process of a particular artist whilst providing a blueprint for how collaboration might take place. There are many passages that might provide inspiration for other artists and overall the book makes a moving and heartfelt plea for interpersonal open-ness and mutual investment.
Primary readership will be among international theatre-makers artists performance and art scholars philosophers teachers directors actors dancers performance artists and those interested in creative and personal writing about performance art and art-making. It will be of particular relevance to those with an interest in Karen Christopher or in the other contributors.
The Impact of Touch in Dance Movement Psychotherapy
This book explores the therapeutic use of touch focusing on an in-depth case study of work in an NHS setting with a client with learning disabilities and situating this within a wide theoretical context. This is a unique and influential study illustrating the impact of touch in dance movement psychotherapy and laying the ground for a theory on the use of touch in Dance Movement Psychotherapy (DMP).
The case study illustrates the impact of touch upon the therapeutic relationship with the use of video transcription and descriptive reflexive accounts of the session content. The case analysis sections establish the ground for a paradigm shift and for emergent theory and methods in support of the use of touch in Dance Movement Psychotherapy and other contexts. The role touch takes is beyond its affect which expands our understanding of its potency as an intervention. The writing is embedded in many years of practice-led-research in the field of dance and somatic practices in particular Body-Mind Centering® and Contact Improvisation in which touching and being touched is met with curiosity as a place of insight and revelation beyond the bounds of taboo and social diktat.
The study considers the philosophical landscape of both touch and non-touch. This book explores and reflects upon the use of touch considering the wider context and socially imposed perceptions that would prevent touch from taking place – including philosophical and social discourses. Through telling the story of a client case the book offers a wealth of thought-provoking content to inspire continued dialogue.
Key strengths of this book are the depth warmth and perceptiveness of the case history and the way in which this is successfully linked with theory. Particular attention is paid to embodied cognition and exosystemic theory the two leading developments of current thinking.
With the ethical practical and philosophical content the book will be of interest to psychotherapists health and social care practitioners as well as arts in health practitioners and beneficiaries in educational programs and settings.
Primary readership will be among DMP psychotherapists body psychotherapists drama therapists Body Mind Centering® practitioners arts in health practitioners people working with clients with learning disabilities and any practitioner and researcher interested in understanding the role touch may play in the psychotherapeutic encounter.
Prototyping across the Disciplines
If people from different fields are going to work together on projects then they need to begin to understand each other. They can be separated by the words they use the ways they work and how they think. However in many fields there is common ground in the attempts to create what is sometimes called inventive knowledge. These fields progress not only by understanding increasingly more about what already exists but by making guesses about possible better futures. The guesses consist of small forays into that future using strategies that are variously called learning through making research through design or more simply prototyping.
While traditionally associated primarily with industrial design and more recently with software development prototyping is now used as an important tool in areas ranging from materials engineering to landscape architecture to the digital humanities. This book collects current theories and methods of prototyping in a dozen disciplines illustrating them through case studies of actual projects whether in industry or the classroom.
This edited collection aims to provide a context a theoretical framework and a set of methodologies for interdisciplinary collaboration in design. Each chapter offers a different disciplinary perspective on prototyping providing a case study as a point of comparison for identifying commonalities and divergences in current practices. Contributions are from a group of scholars with worldwide experience of working and presenting in design and who are currently based in Canada the United States Chile and Brazil.
This book isn’t just about design across the disciplines it is about how prototyping works in different disciplines. Prototyping is a crucial part of the design process and a practice used by creators from all design disciplines from architects and engineers to industrial and service designers to test a concept or process and evaluate an idea.
Much research has been published on prototyping in design; what makes this new book unique is the cross disciplinary nature showing designers how they can learn from various approaches to improve their skills. Disciplines discussed include post-human design theatre tabletop game design landscape architecture and arts entrepreneurship.
Primarily of interest to design scholars and practitioners with an interest in integrative design. Undergraduates and graduate students in design HCI (human-computer interaction) and the digital humanities. Textbook potential.
Phenomenology for Actors
This book gives new insight into acting and theatre-making through phenomenology (the study of how the world shows itself to conscious experience). It examines Being-in-the-world in everyday life with exercises for workshops and rehearsal. Each chapter explores themes to guide the creative process through objects bodies spaces being with others time history freedom and authenticity. Key examples in the work are drawn from Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard Sophocles’ Antigone and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Practical tasks in each section explore how the theatrical event can offer unique insight into Being and existence. In this way the book makes a bold leap to understand acting as an embodied form of philosophy and to explain how phenomenology can be a rich source of inspiration for actors directors designers and the creative process of theatre-making.
This original new book will provide new insight into the practice and theory of acting stimulate new approaches to rehearsal and advance the notion of theatre making a genuine contribution to philosophical discourse.
The fundamental task of the actor is to be on stage with purposeful action in the given circumstances. But this simple act of ‘Being’ is not easy. Phenomenology can provide valuable insight into the challenge. For some time scholars have looked to phenomenology to describe and analyse the theatrical event. But more than simply drawing attention to embodiment and the subjective experience of the world a philosophical perspective can also shed light on broader existential issues of being.
No specialist knowledge of philosophy is required for the reader to find this text engaging and it will be relevant for second-year students and above at tertiary level.
For postgraduates and researchers the book will provide a valuable touchstone for phenomenology and performance as research. The book will appeal to theatre and performance studies and some applied philosophy courses. The material is also relevant to studies in literary and critical theory cultural studies and comparative literature.
The work is relevant to The International Federation of Theatre Research (IFTR/FIRT) (Performance and Consciousness) Performance Studies International (psi) and the Performance Philosophy Research Network — an influential and growing research field.
Primary markets for this book will be students (both at university and conservatoires) and academics in theatre studies as well as practitioners and actors in training. The text will be useful to students in units or modules relating to acting theory and theatre-making processes and which combine critical theory with practical performance. It will also be useful for practitioners of theatre looking to expand or inflect their own methods of approaching performance.
Actional Poetics – ASH SHE HE
A retrospective monograph of Alistair MacLennan’s performance art practice its influence on the Belfast art scene and its relationships with wider art histories. This new book is the most comprehensive and complete legacy monograph about Alastair MacLennan’s extensive performance practice
Alastair MacLennan is emeritus professor of fine art School of Art and Design Ulster University in Belfast. He is one of Britain’s major practitioners in live art and travels extensively in Eastern and Western Europe also America and Canada presenting ‘Actuations’ (his term for performance/installations). MacLennan is a founding member of Belfast's Art and Research Exchange of Belfast's Bbeyond performance collective and is a member of the performance art entity Black Market International. He has represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale (1997) and is an honorary associate of the National Review of Live Art Glasgow Scotland.
There is a wide variety of approach in the essays ranging from descriptive to interpretive. Some set the work in historical context and others provide pertinent biography. This variety is appropriate – and perhaps even necessary – in looking at the work of a living artist whose work is particularly complex. The selection of essays presents a complex body of work in an understandable way with each writer allowed to address the art in their own terms. Placing the work in historical context is important but presenting MacLennan as an influential teacher is also important.
Includes a significant contribution from Adrian Heathfield (professor of performance and visual culture at Roehampton UK) who has written an extended essay on MacLennan’s oeuvre focusing on its use of materials and its creation of sculptural environments. Discussing the artist’s deployment of slow-time action and contemplative space Heathfield sees MacLennan’s work as activating sustained contact with the elemental and locates MacLennan’s work as a significant intervention in performance art history globally and discusses the politics of its engagement with local history violence social conflict and memory.
The primary readership will be academics researchers and scholars working in performance art and contemporary art in general. Also valuable to students in performance art visual arts and related practices.
Of relevance to academics and artists in the interrelated fields of performance art art and philosophy critical theory conflict studies and Zen philosophy.
Devising Theatre and Performance
Devising Theatre and Performance is a hands-on guide for artists students and teachers of performance at any stage of their practice. It offers a wide range of creative prompts and pathways enriched with critical thinking tools and questions a hybrid approach Hill and Paris call ‘Curious Methods’.
This is a welcome addition to the field created and curated by two experienced artists who have operated at the international interface of academia and professional practice for over three decades.
The collection is packed with fun creative thoughtful exercises distilled from over twenty years of running interdisciplinary artist workshops and teaching both devising and performance making. As well providing numerous exercises and suggestions for devising composing and editing original works this book offers tools for giving and receiving feedback critical reflection and framing artistic work within academic research contexts.
Readers can choose to dip in and out to follow the book as a course or to work section by section focusing on organizing principles such as working from the body working with site working with objects or performance activism. The book includes a detailed production workbook and a practice-based research workbook you can tailor to your own projects. The 'Curious Methods' approach encourages users to take the time and space their practice deserves while offering tools nourishment and encouragement and inviting them to take risks beyond their comfort zones. The exercises are carefully described so that they can easily be tested out by readers and are well contextualized in relation to vivid examples from contemporary performance practice and relevant political contexts. This compelling approach goes beyond many other books on theatre devising which merely provide performance recipes; they do so by repeatedly highlighting the vital cultural relevance and potential personal impact of the experiments that they invite us to undertake.
The primary audience for this important new book will be academics instructors and students in courses on devised theatre improvisation performance art experimental performance and practice-based research. It will be essential for classroom use for students of theatre and performance and live art – undergraduate postgraduate and Ph.D. teachers and all those needing strategies for getting started.
It will also appeal to readers from the broader arts humanities and social sciences who are seeking resources for integrating creative methods into their research.
The Performances of Sacred Places
This is the first book to explore the notion of sacred places from the perspective of performance studies and presents both practice-as-research accounts alongside theoretical analysis. It is multidisciplinary bringing together religious studies philosophy and anthropological approaches under the umbrella of performance studies. By focusing on practice and performance rather than theology it also expands the notion of sacred places to non-religious contexts.
This new collection offers a multi-layered and contemporary approach to the question of sacred sites their practices politics and ecologies. The overarching critical framework of inquiry is performance studies a multidisciplinary methodological perspective that stresses the importance of investigating the practices and actions through which things are conducted and processes activated. This is an innovative perspective that recognizes the value function and role that practices and their materialities have in the constitution of special places their developments in culture and the politics in place for the conservation of their sense of specialness.
The questions investigated are: what is a sacred place? Is a place inherently sacred or does it become sacred? Is it a paradigm a real location an imaginary place a projected condition a charged setting an enhanced perception? What kind of practices and processes allow the emergence of a sacred place in human perception? And what is its function in contemporary societies?
The book is divided into three sections that evidence the three approaches that are generally engaged with and through which sacred places are defined actualized and activated: Crossing Breathing and Resisting. There is a strong field of international contributors including practitioners and academics working in the United Kingdom the United States Poland and Australia.
Primary interest will be students academics and practitioners studying or working in theatre and performance studies; fine art; architecture; cultural and visual studies; geography; religious studies; and psychology.
Potential for classroom use and very strong potential for inclusion on reading lists as a secondary text for undergraduate and postgraduate courses in fine art live art performance art performance and theatre studies.
Arnold Wesker
This new collection will add significantly to the body of scholarship on this important dramatist. This is the first study of the whole body of Wesker’s work and will create new interest in this partly forgotten key figure in post-war British theatre.
A new study of Wesker’s work is overdue. The editors are recognized scholars in the field with a track record of publication on British theatre. An impressive list of contributors comprises important scholars of post-war theatre – including John Bull and Chris Megson – alongside practitioners such as Edward Bond and Pamela Howard who bring professional insights to bear.
Arnold Wesker was hailed in the press as ‘one of the great overlooked’ of British drama when he died in April 2016. Despite his pivotal engagement with the cultural politics of 1960s Britain and his international career only a fraction of Wesker’s dramatic output tends to be studied. He is still remembered and discussed as the author of The Trilogy three plays staged between 1958–60 that fail to reflect the daring aesthetics of his later work thereby perpetuating an incorrect image of a naturalist playwright.
This important new book aims to remedy the recent critical neglect of the dramatist building on existing scholarship and introducing new insights and perspectives. It examines the whole body of Wesker’s work for the first time including some of his non-dramatic work and considers it from a variety of perspectives. These include Wesker’s reception in Europe his Jewishness and his attitude to politics and to community. Significant use is made of material from the Arnold Wesker archive held by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin USA.
It includes chapters on Wesker’s representation of and attitude towards women his relationship with his Jewish origins and identity and his role in establishing Centre 42 following his imprisonment for participation in the Aldermaston March in 1959. Centre 42 was initially a touring festival aimed at devolving art and culture from London to the other working class towns of Britain and arose from Resolution 42 of the 1960 Trades Union Congress which concerned the importance of arts in the community.
It will be of most interest to academics and scholars of post-war British theatre and to those teaching theatre and drama. It is accessible for a student readership at all undergraduate levels as well as postgraduates. It has potential for textbook and reading list use.
Wesker’s significance in British theatre history of the 1950s and 1960s means that the book may find readers amongst the informed general public.
Dancing to Transform
(Re:) Claiming Ballet
The collection of essays demonstrates that ballet is not a single White Western dance form but has been shaped by a range of other cultures. In so doing the authors open a conversation and contribute to the discourse beyond the vantage point of mainstream to look at such issues as homosexuality and race. And to demonstrate that ballet’s denial of the first and exclusion of the second needs rethinking.
This is an important contribution to dance scholarship. The contributors include professional ballet dancers and teachers choreographers and dance scholars in the UK Europe and the USA to give a three dimensional overview of the field of ballet beyond the traditional mainstream.
It sets out to acknowledge the alternative and parallel influences that have shaped the culture of ballet and demonstrates they are alive kicking and have a rich history. Ballet is complex and encompasses individuals and communities often invisiblized but who have contributed to the diaspora of ballet in the twenty-first century. It will initiate conversations and contribute to discourses about the panorama of ballet beyond the narrow vantage point of the mainstream – White patriarchal Eurocentric heterosexual constructs of gender race and class.
This book is certain to be a much-valued resource within the field of ballet studies as well as an important contribution to dance scholarship more broadly. It has an original focus and brings together issues more commonly addressed only in journals where issues of race are frequently discussed.
The primary market will be academic. It will appeal to academics researchers scholars and students working and studying in dance theatre and performance arts and cultural studies. It will also be of interest to dance professionals and practitioners.
Academics and students interested in the intersection of gender race and dance may also find it interesting.
Performing #MeToo
A tweet by American actor and activist Alyssa Milano sent on October 15 2017 opened the floodgates to an outpouring of testimony and witnessing across the Twitterverse that reverberated throughout social media. Facebook status lines quickly began to read “Me too” and #MeToo was trending. That tweet re-launched the ‘me too’ movement which was started in 2006 by Tarana Burke.
Performing #MeToo: How Not to Look Away does not attempt to deliver a comprehensive examination of how #MeToo is performed. What it does aim at presenting is a set of perspectives on the events identified as representative of the movement through a lens or lenses that are multinational as well as work and analysis from a variety of time periods written in a diversity of styles. By providing this means of engaging with examples of the many interpretations of and responses to the #MeToo movement and by identifying these responses (and those of audiences) as provocations of examples of how not to look away the collected chapters are intended to invite reflection discussion and hopefully incite action.
It gives writers from diverse cultural and environmental contexts an opportunity to speak about this cultural moment in their own voices. There is a wide geographical range and variety of forms of performance addressed in this timely new book. The international group of contributors are based in the UK USA Australia South Africa Scotland Canada India Italy and South Korea.
The topics addressed by writers include socially engaged practice; celebrity feminism archive and repertoire; rape/war; misogynistic speech; stage management and intimacy facilitation; key institutions’ responses; spatial practices as well as temporal ones; academic call-outs; caste/class; political contexts; adaptation of classic texts; activist events; bouffon (a clown technique) and audience response
Forms of performance practice include applied theatre performance protest verbatim solo performance institutional practice staging of plays street responses academic adaptation of classic text play reading events and the musical.
Although there is much to read in the media and alternative media on the #MeToo movement this is the first attempt to analyse the movement from and in such diverse contexts.
Bringing together twelve writers to speak about works they have either performed witnessed or studied gives the reader a nuanced way of looking at the movement and its impact. It is also an incredible archive of this moment in time that points to its importance.
Suitable for use in several graduate and undergraduate courses including performance studies feminist studies sociology psychology anthropology environmental or liberal studies and social history.
Essential reading for theatre workers academics students and anyone with an interest in feminism contemporary theatre or human rights. For artists considering projects that include the themes of #MeToo and for producers and directors of such projects looking for good practices around how to create environments of safety in their organizations as well as those who wish to organize communities of artists.
For anyone interested in learning more about how to support the movement or an interest in the specific social narratives told in each individual chapter. For women feminists and anyone with an interest in the issues.
The Drama Therapy Decision Tree
This book provides the reader with a thorough understanding of drama therapy methods through the provision of examples so therapists can select the most appropriate methods and apply them themselves. The authors provide a common language for communicating what drama therapists do in terms of diagnoses and interventions especially for new students in the field.
There has been no systematic method developed for drama therapists and drama therapy students for selecting the most appropriate drama therapy technique or method for clients. Typically students leave university and have to work out how to plan treatment through trial and error. This book is not intended as an instruction manual but the authors of this book have identified and analysed how they approached this task themselves and they explain how the theory learnt at university can be put into practice. Their desire is to give early career drama therapy professionals a reliable and effective tool for making the best clinical decisions they can. This book is not only an educational tool but also a practitioner’s reference tool for planning how to address the socio-emotional needs of their clients. Readers will find this timely book offers structure to drama therapy teachers and students alike.
It explains the basic tools that drama therapists use in all therapy situations starting with the therapeutic process then moves on to identify the core healing concepts that make drama therapy so powerful and unique. The diagnostic systems used by all mental health professionals (DSM-5 and ICD-11) are integrated by relating the core healing concepts and tools to the symptoms of diagnoses. The basic treatment planning process is also discussed. The book then explains how these components are used together systematically through a series of questions (that the therapist asks themself) in order to identify the most appropriate type of intervention for the client. Finally the book offers several examples of how this system can be applied to a variety of common diagnoses. The appendices provide resources about drama therapy in terms of theory approach and specific population.
Of primary relevance to teachers and students of drama therapy and drama therapists and integrative arts therapists in training and early career stages. May be useful for other professionals interested in drama therapy and related creative or therapeutic practices where theatre and drama are used.
Note: in the US context there is a wider range of related practices which are often regarded as part of drama therapy.
Dance and Authoritarianism
Everyone who viewed the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games can understand the power of dance and mass movement in the service of politics. While examples of such public performances and huge festivals are familiar in Nazi Germany the former Soviet Union and today's North Korea this new book addresses the lesser known examples of Spain under Franco the Dominican Republic Iran Croatia and Uzbekistan all of which have been subjected to various political regimes.
Dance and choreographed mass movement is the newest field of serious research in dance studies particularly in the fields of politics and international relations and gender and sexuality. The author uses dance as a lens through which to study political ethnic and gendered phenomena so that the reader grasps that dance
constitutes an important non-verbal lens for the study of human behaviour.
This is the first study on dance and political science to focus specifically on authoritarian regimes. It is a significant and original contribution to scholarship in the field with the key studies drawn from a variety of different geographical and historical backgrounds.
In Spain under Franco the Women's Section of the fascist Falange created a folk dance program that toured widely and through the performance of Spanish regional folk dances performed by virginal young Spanish women embodying Catholic purity permitted the regime to re-enter the world of polite diplomacy.
The Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo himself a gifted dancer raised the popular folk and vernacular dance the merengue to the level of the "national" dance which became a symbol of his regime and Dominican identity which merengue it still maintains.
For over a thousand years Croatia has endured a series of authoritarian regimes – Hapsburg Napoleon the Yugoslav royal dictatorship fascist Josip Broz Tito's communist regime Franjo Tudjaman – that ruled that small nation. For over 70 years Lado the National Folk Dance Ensemble of Croatia has served as "the light of Croatian identity." Through its public performances of folk dances and music Lado has become the face of a series of different regimes.
In Iran dance became banned under the Islamic Republic after serving the Pahlavi regime as a form of representation of its peasant population and its historic Persian identity. Uzbekistan currently has expanded the role of the invented tradition of Uzbek "classical" dance created during the soviet period as a representation of Uzbek identity in national festivals. Thus through these examples the reader will see how dance and mass movement have become important as political means for a variety of authoritarian regimes to represent themselves.
Primary readership will be dance scholars; particularly the growing number interested in ethno-identity dances of the second half of the twentieth-century
Will be of interest to academic libraries and departments with valuable information and interest also for scholars of ethnology anthropology cultural studies history.
Adapting Performance Between Stage and Screen
The book offers an introduction to adaptations between stage and screen examining stage and screen works as texts but also as performances and cultural events. Case studies of distinct periods in British film and theatre history are used to illustrate the principle that adaptations can't be divorced from the historical and cultural moment in which they are produced and to look at issues around theatrical naturalism and cinematic realism.
Written in a refreshingly accessible style it offers an original analysis with emphasis on performance and event. It opens up new avenues of exploration to include non-literary issues such as the treatment of space and place mise en scène acting styles and star personas. The recent growth of digital theatre is examined to foreground the 'events' of theatre and cinema with phenomena such as NT Live analysed for the different ways that 'liveness' is adapted.
Adapting Performance Between Stage and Screen explores how cultural values can be articulated in the act of translating between mediums. The book takes as its subject the interaction between film and theatre and argues that rather than emphasising differences between the two mediums the emphasis should be placed on elements that they share in particular the emphasis on performance and the participation in an event. It uses a number of case studies to show how this relationship is affected by changes in technology – the coming of film sound the invention of live-casting – and in the nature of the event being offered to particular audiences. These examples ranging from the well-known to the obscure are all treated with relevant and knowledgeable analysis and a strong and appropriate sense of context.
The book offers a welcome overview of previous work in this area and demonstrates the importance of basing analysis on historical context as well as giving new insights into some familiar examples. Discussion ranges from Steven Spielberg and Alfred Hitchcock to Robert Lepage and Ivo van Hove. There are detailed analyses of Alfie Gone Too Far and Festen as well as authoritative analyses of NT Live performances and British New Wave cinema.
The book will be of primary interest to academics researchers teachers and students working in adaptation studies film studies and theatre studies. Written in an accessible style it will appeal to teachers and students on A-level undergraduate and postgraduate film theatre media and cultural studies courses. The chapter on digital theatres will add to the growing body of literature in this area and appeal to students and academics working on digital cultures and new media.
Live screenings of theatre events are becoming more widely available and increasingly popular including some of the productions discussed. There is potential interest for a general audience interested in British films theatre and actors.
How Belfast Got the Blues
This is not just an important music book; it is an important history book. It captures the moment before Belfast and Northern Ireland became synonymous with the Troubles. It places one of the best-known figures in global popular music Van Morrison in his historical and sociocultural context. It also reinstates Ottilie Patterson into her rightful role as a central figure in Ireland’s music. It addresses a significant gap in Ireland’s popular music studies by appraising the contribution of a politically and musically significant female figure.
It makes a major original contribution to the understanding of popular music culture in Northern Ireland and to the broader popular music culture in Britain in the 1960s. It will remain for many years the definitive study of the subject and a point of reference for further research and controversy.
In light of the re-emergence of Northern Ireland in contemporary British political debate this book presents a nicely timed intervention placing Northern Ireland at the forefront of a key moment in British and Irish cultural history and presenting highly innovative readings of key popular cultural figures. Integrating its account of the popular music culture and local ‘scene’ in Northern Ireland with the broader and highly complex context of the sociopolitical milieu it offers original and insightful readings of key 1960s figures including film director Peter Whitehead The Rolling Stones Them Ottilie Patterson and Van Morrison. It includes much new material obtained in interviews and through meticulous archival research to challenge the mainstream narrative of the mid-1960s music scene in Belfast.
It is extremely well researched making use of newspaper and film archives and existing publications but also an impressive set of personal interviews with veteran musicians and others from that time. The authors challenge much of the received wisdom about the period – for instance about the decline of the showband – and present their arguments carefully and thoughtfully. While meticulously researched and thoroughly analytic the writing is uniquely accessible and engaging.
The chapter on the neglected Belfast blue singer Ottilie Patterson represents a paradigm shift in Irish popular music studies and sets her story and considerable achievements centre stage. This alone makes the book very noteworthy. The chapters on Van Morrison and his band Them place his early career in the context of the local and global music industry. The story of The Rolling Stones film made by Peter Whitehead is discussed in the context of the international fervour of the times. The knitting of the music scene with the distinctive social cultural political and religious factors is deftly done.
Primary readership will be academic – scholars researchers and students across a range of areas. Fields of interest include popular music studies Irish studies political history cultural studies film studies jazz/blues history women’s studies civil rights.
It will also appeal more broadly to fans writers journalists and musicians interested in Belfast Northern Ireland the Blues rock and roll jazz and the 1960s as well as to fans of the individual musicians.
Acts of Dramaturgy
A case study of one specific substantial three-part project inspired by the work of William Shakespeare. Three interconnected performances that interrogate roles in the theatre-making process along with essays that contextualize the themes and approaches of the work serve as provocations for the acts of dramaturgy the work entailed juxtapose new writing and performance writing and problematize the notion of playtexts.
Taking as their starting point a stage direction or a moment in the narrative that is not the main focus the playtexts recontextualize deconstruct and disorientate the classic text within a landscape that is more polarized free from the text and inherently and explicitly aware of its own theatricality. The work negotiates the ever-shifting relationship between the text and its performance the performers and their audience whilst acknowledging that Shakespeare often employed a play-within-a-play as a device what we now call a meta-theatrical mode of representation.
The three playtexts are The Beginning an interpretation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream The Middle a deconstruction of Hamlet and The End triggered by a stage direction from The Winter’s Tale. Shown together as The Trilogy each play asks the audience to enter a world where a performance can be a rehearsal text can be both script and set … and they are always aware of where the fire exits are. The playtexts are presented with essays from a range of contributors that reflect on their poetics themes and concerns in relation to dramaturgy.
Brings together scholarship and creative work places them in dialogue with each other and does so from a wide range of perspectives: from those involved in the process those in the margins of that process and those encountering the works without having been part of that process. The particular strengths of this challenging but accessible book are in the ways it places these perspectives in conversation with and through dramaturgy and contributes a dialogue about making and reflecting text and performance.
A rich and thought-provoking text that has the potential to move the dialogue on dramaturgy forward both among practitioners and academics. It is a fresh intellectually invigorating read; the change of perspective and the playful structure that brings a recognisable five-act dramatic structure and academic elaboration together keeps readers focused and guides them through the book. Very conscious of its own unorthodox format – a combination of script and reflection by a variety of voices – which is certainly part of the freshness of the book and part of its appeal.
Primary readership will be among practitioners academics and researchers in the field of dramaturgy teaching devising writing for performance and non-linear narrative; performance students making or reflecting on their own devised performance work; postgraduate students who are engaged in making practice as research.
Also of relevance and interest to makers and scholars of theatre and performance alongside those interested in creative critical writing; to those interested in how we make and reflect on theatre and performance; those interested in contemporary dramaturgy and embedded criticism; and those studying theatre and performance and interdisciplinary practice research.
Responding to Site
This book focuses on the performance art of Marilyn Arsem an internationally acclaimed performance artist known for her innovative and experimental work. Arsem’s work addresses women’s history and myth-making capacities the potency of site and geography the idea of the audience as witnesses and the intimacy of one-to-one works.
One of the most prolific performance artists working in the United States today Arsem performs carefully choreographed durational actions that are developed site-responsively and range from deceptively simple interventions to elaborately orchestrated actions. This edited volume seeks to extend Arsem’s legacy beyond the audiences of her live performances and enter her work into the lexicon of the art world. Accompanied by 200 images this book will be of interest to scholars and students of performance studies feminist performance feminist art history and performance history. It will also contribute to the history of alternative spaces and galleries which is only now being written.
I have had the privilege of knowing Marilyn for over 30 years. Her work has given me so many epiphanies about live art time-based art practice and durational performance practice. How and why do you choose a single action and enact it over an extended period of time? How do you respond to site and create a sacred meditational zone; a reflexive space about the human condition? And most importantly how do you teach future generations about the importance of living while making art as a spiritual and philosophical practice? This book is yet another example of Arsem’s legacy. Fundamental I’d say.
- Guillermo Gómez-Peña
Watching Marilyn Arsem perform can be a slow careful vulnerable and heart-stoppingly profound experience. To see her is to know better the complex intermingling particularities of body space time being and action. Reading this comprehensive lucidly written and deeply insightful book – the first significant publication on Arsem’s practice as a performance artist – will enable new perspectives on a major artist’s work. It also sheds vivid light upon enduring themes for the critical encounter with art: duration and doing materiality and nothingness truth and representation commitment and experiment togetherness and solitude experience and endurance.
- Dominic Johnson Queen Mary University of London
Punk Now!!
Punk Now!! brings together papers from the second incarnation of the Punk Scholars Network International Conference and Postgraduate Symposium with contributions from revered academics and new voices alike in the field of punk studies. The collection ruminates on contemporary and non-Anglophone punk as well as its most anti-establishment tendencies. It exposes not only modern punk but also punk at the margins: areas that have previously been poorly served in studies on the cultural phenomenon. By compiling these chapters Matt Grimes and Mike Dines offer a critical contribution to a field that has been saturated with nostalgic and retrospective research. The range and depth of these chapters encapsulates the diverse nature of the punk subculture – and the adjacent academic study of punk – today.
Queer Communion
Ron Athey is one of the most important prolific and influential performance artists of the past four decades. A singular example of lived creativity his radical performances are at odds with the art worlds and art marketplaces that have increasingly dominated contemporary art and performance art over the period of his career.
Queer Communion an exploration of Athey’s career refuses the linear narratives of art discourse and instead pays homage to the intensities of each mode of Athey’s performative practice and each community he engages. Emphasizing the ephemeral and largely uncollectible nature of his work the book places Athey’s own writing at its centre turning to memoir memory recall and other modes of retrieval and narration to archive his performances.
In addition to documenting Athey’s art ephemera notes and drawings the volume features commissioned essays concise 'object lessons' on individual objects in the Athey archive and short testimonials by friends and collaborators including Dominic Johnson Amber Musser Julie Tolentino Ming Ma David Getsy Alpesh Patel and Zackary Drucker among others. Together they form Queer Communion a counter history of contemporary art.
Joshua Sofaer
Joshua Sofaer works across boundaries borders and disciplines to create artworks that engage with all levels of society. In cultural institutions or on the street for art galleries or personal homes staged as operas or cast as golden sculptures Sofaer’s work weaves with and through social fabric to consider the ideas that hold us together.
Co-published with the Live Art Development Agency this lavishly illustrated volume is the first in-depth study of the artist’s work featuring discussions with producers and participants documentary images and a new photographic essay interviews with the artist himself and thirteen commissioned essays by scholars curators and artists from the perspectives of performance studies archaeology and opera criticism. With a mixture of intellect humour and striking design Joshua Sofaer: Performance | Objects | Participation analyses the artist’s oeuvre in the contexts of liveness visual art and participatory practices. It explores the binding aesthetics of his approach as a model for contemporary practice and it considers the impact of his work on audiences institutions and pedagogy as well as on fine art and performance ecologies as a whole.
MASKS
This interdisciplinary anthology explores the complex relationships in an artist’s life between fact and fiction presentation and existence and critique and creation and examines the work that ultimately results from these tensions.
Using a combination of critical and personal essays and interviews MASKS presents Bowie as the key exemplifier of the concept of the 'mask' then further applies the same framework to other liminal artists and thinkers who challenged the established boundaries of the art/pop academic worlds such as Friedrich Nietzsche Oscar Wilde Søren Kierkegaard Yukio Mishima and Hunter S. Thompson. Featuring contributions from John Gray and Slavoj Žižek and interviews with Gary Lachman and Davide De Angelis this book will appeal to scholars and students of cultural criticism aesthetics and the philosophy of art; practising artists; and fans of Bowie and other artists whose work enacts experiments in identity.
Spiritual Herstories
This is a collection of works by internationally recognized women leading the field of dance research and spirituality across the globe. Building on current soulful research scholarship in the discipline these authors offer extensive and detailed research into spirituality dance gender religion somatics and women-centred dance research. Written by women dance scholars in higher education this evocative and illuminating work highlights a growing discourse on gendered leadership in dance research. Spiritual Herstories provides new pathways and innovative research methods that respond to the educational needs of women emerging in male-centric socio-historic research traditions.
Through the Prism of the Senses
Over the past decades a fundamental epistemological shift has transformed notions of performativity and representation in the arts under the influence of new technologies. Mediation has challenged both spectators’ and performers’ conventions of corporeality embodiment cognition and perception. Centring on contemporary synaesthetic and multimodal works Through the Prism of the Senses examines new theory and practice in body-based arts and contemporary performance. Three main chapters present three distinct strands of methodological enquiry one from each author creating a work that resonates with artistic and philosophical enquiry. This book is a vital contribution to discussions surrounding research creation and the body in relation to digital media highlighting the ways in which new technologies confront the sensate somatic body.
A French-language version is to be published by Presses de l'Université du Québec (ISBN 978-2-76055-148-0). This includes additional chapters in English by Erin Manning David Howes and Luc Vanier and Elizabeth Johnson. A Spanish-language version is to be published by Centro Editoral Universidad de Caldas.
Redefining Theatre Communities
Redefining Theatre Communities explores the interplay between contemporary theatre and communities. It considers the aesthetic social and cultural aspects of community-conscious theatre-making. While doing so the volume reflects on recent transformations in structural textual and theatrical conventions and traditions and explores the changing modes of production and spectatorship in relation to theatre communities. The essays edited by Marco Galea and Szabolcs Musca present an array of emerging perspectives on the politics ethics and practices of community representation on the contemporary international theatre landscape. An international interdisciplinary collection featuring work by theatre scholars theatre-makers and artistic directors from across Europe and beyond Redefining Theatre Communities will appeal to those interested in the diverse forms of socially engaged theatre and performance.
Teachers and Teaching on Stage and on Screen
Why are educators and their profession the focus of so much film and theatre? Diane Conrad and Monica Prendergast bring together scholars and practitioners in education examining dramatic portrayals of teachers and teaching to answer this very question. Films such as Freedom Writers Bad Teacher and School of Rock to name a few intentionally or inadvertently comment on education and influence the opinions and ultimately the experiences of anyone who has taught or been taught. The chapters gathered in this collection critique the Hollywood 'good teacher' repertoire delve into satiric parodies and alternative representations and explore issues through analyses of independent and popular films and plays from around the world. By examining teacher-student relationships institutional cultures societal influences and much more Teachers and Teaching on Stage and on Screen addresses these media’s varied fascinations with the educator like no collection before it.
The Idea of the Avant Garde
The concept of the avant garde is highly contested whether one consigns it to history or claims it for present-day or future uses. The first volume of The Idea of the Avant Garde – And What It Means Today provided a lively forum on the kinds of radical art theory and partisan practices that are possible in today’s world of global art markets and creative industry entrepreneurialism. This second volume presents the work of another 50 artists and writers exploring the diverse ways that avant-gardism develops reflexive and experimental combinations of aesthetic and political praxis. The manifest strategies temporalities and genealogies of avant-garde art and politics are expressed through an international intergenerational and interdisciplinary convocation of ideas that covers the fields of film video architecture visual art art activism literature poetry theatre performance intermedia and music.
Performance / Media / Art / Culture
Experience the interdisciplinary performance scene of the 1980s and beyond through the eyes of one of its most compelling witnesses. Jacki Apple’s Performance / Media / Art / Culture traces performance art multimedia theatre audio arts and dance in the United States from 1983 to the present. Showcasing 35 years of Apple’s critical essays and reviews the collection explores the rise and diversification of intermedia performance; how new technologies (or rehashed old technologies) influence American culture and contemporary life; the interdependence of pop and performance culture; and the politics of art and the performance of politics.
Apple writes with a journalist’s attention to the immediacy of account and a historian’s attention to structural aesthetic and personal networks resulting in a volume brimming with big ideas but grounded in concentrated reviews of individual performances. Many of the pieces featured in this collection originally appeared in small press journals and magazines that have now gone out of print. Preserved and republished here for current and future readers they offer a rich portrait of performance at the end of the millennium.
Prison Cultures
Prison Cultures offers the first systematic examination of women in prison and performances in and of the institution. Using a feminist approach to reach beyond tropes of 'bad girls' and simplistic inside vs. outside dynamics it examines how cultural products can perpetuate or disrupt hegemonic understandings of the world of prisons. The book identifies how and why prison functions as a fixed field and postulates new ways of viewing performances in and of prison that trouble the institution with a primary focus on the United Kingdom and examples from popular culture. A new contribution to the fields of feminist cultural criticism and prison studies Aylwyn Walsh explores how the development of a theory of resistance and desire is central to the understanding of women’s incarceration. It problematizes the prevalence of purely literary analysis or case studies that proffer particular models of arts practice as transformative of offending behaviour.
Dancing with Parkinson's
This book explores the experience and value of dancing for people living with the neurodegenerative disorder Parkinson’s disease. Linking aesthetic values to wellbeing Sara Houston articulates the importance of the dancing experience for those with Parkinson’s and argues that the benefits of participatory dance are best understood through the experiences lives needs and challenges of people living with Parkinson’s who have chosen to dance.
Presenting personal narratives from a study that investigates the experience of people with Parkinson’s who dance intertwined with the social and political contexts in which the dancers live this volume examines the personal and systemic issues as well as the attitudes and identities that shape people’s relationship to dance. Taking this new primary research as a starting point Dancing with Parkinson’s builds an argument for how dance becomes a way of helping people live well with Parkinson’s.
The Punk Reader
Forty years after its inception punk has gone global. The founding scenes in the United Kingdom and United States now have counterparts all around the world. Most if not all cities on the planet now have some variation of punk existing in their respective undergrounds and long-standing scenes can be found in China Japan India Africa Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Each scene rather than adopting traditional interpretations of the punk filter reflects national regional and local identities.
The first offering in Intellect’s new Global Punk series The Punk Reader: Research Transmissions from the Local and the Global is the first edited volume to explore and critically interrogate punk culture in relation to contemporary radicalized globalization. Documenting disparate international punk scenes including Mexico China Malaysia and Iran The Punk Reader is a long-overdue addition to punk studies and a valuable resource for readers seeking to know more about the global influence of punk beyond the 1970s.
(Re)Positioning Site Dance
Site-based dance performance and sited movement explorations implicate dance makers performers and audience members in a number of dialogical processes between body site and environment. This book aims to articulate international approaches to the making performing and theorising of site-based dance. Drawing on perspectives from three practitioner-academics based in three distinct world regions – Europe North America and Oceania – the authors explore a range of practices that engage with sociocultural political ecological and economic discourses and demonstrate how these discourses both frame and inform processes of site dance making as well as shape the ways in which such interventions are conceived and evaluated.
Intended for artists scholars and students (Re)Positioning Site Dance is an important addition to the theoretical discourse on place and performance in an era of global sociopolitical and ecological transformation.
Performing Arts in Prisons
Across the world performing arts programmes are increasing in number scope and professionalism. They attract increasing academic and media attention. Theoretical and applied research organizational evaluation reports documentary films and journalism are detailing prison arts and creating recognition that this body of work is becoming a valued part of the correctional enterprise. There is a growing body of evidence that suggests music theatre poetry and dance can contribute to prisoner wellbeing management rehabilitation and reintegration. Performing Arts in Prisons: Creative Perspectives explores prison arts in Australia the United States the United Kingdom and Chile and creates a new framework for understanding its practices.
Performing Palimpsest Bodies
Proposing the innovative concept of palimpsest bodies to interpret provocative theatre and performance experiments that explore issues of cultural memory bodies of history archives repertoires and performing remains Ruth Hellier-Tinoco offers an in-depth analysis of four postdramatic and transdisciplinary collective creation theatre projects. Combined with ideas of postmemory and rememory palimpsest bodies are inherently trans-temporal as they perform re-visions of embodied gestures vocalized calls and sensory experiences.
Focusing on one of Mexico’s most significant contemporary theatre companies La Máquina de Teatro directed by renowned artists Juliana Faesler and Clarissa Malheiros this ground-breaking study documents the playfully rigorous performances of layered plural and trans identities as collaborative feminist and queer re-visions of official histories and collective memories.
Illustrated with over one hundred colour photos Performing Palimpsest Bodies: Postmemory Theatre Experiments in Mexico will appeal to creative artists and scholars interested in contemporary theatre and performance studies critical dance studies collective creation and performance-making.
Agency
Notoriously difficult to define as a genre Live Art is commonly positioned as a challenge to received artistic social and political categories: not theatre not dance not visual art... and often wilfully anti-mainstream and anti-establishment. But as it has become an increasingly prevalent category in international festivals major art galleries diverse publications and higher education streams it is time for a reassessment.
This collection of essays conversations provocations and archival images takes the twentieth anniversary of the founding of one of the sector’s most committed champions the Live Art Development Agency (LADA) in London as an opportunity to consider not only what Live Art has been against but also what it has been for. Rather than defining the practices in oppositional terms – what they might be seeking to critique reject or disrupt – this collection reframes these practices in terms of the relations and commitments they might be used to model or advocate. What kinds of care and recovery do they enable? What do they connect as well as reject? What do they make possible as they test the impossible? What ideas of success do they stand for as they risk failure? In this way the central theme of the collection and to which all contributors were invited to respond is the idea of agency: the capacity for new kinds of thoughts actions and energies as enacted by individual artists and groups. It seems appropriate that this question would be considered in relation to the history of one particular ‘agency’: LADA itself.
These questions are explored in a unique conversational format bringing together a diverse range of emerging and established practitioners curators and leading figures in the field each paired with another practitioner for a live conversation that has been sensitively edited for the page. Curated within a structure of five overlapping themes – Bodies Spaces Institutions Communities and Actions – this format produces unexpected insights and accounts of the development of the field. Each theme also contains two provocative essays by leading scholars thinkers and makers exploring the conceptual frames in more detail. The result is a collection that is as heterogeneous ambitious contradictory and inspiring as the field of Live Art itself.
Contributors: Aaron Williamson Adrian Heathfield Alan Read Alastair MacLennan Alexandrina Hemsley Amelia Jones Andrew Mottershead Andy Field Anne Bean Barby Asante Bryan Biggs Cassils Catherine Wood David A. Bailey Dominic Johnson Gary Anderson George Chakravarthi Guillermo Gómez-Peña Hayley Newman Heike Roms Helen Paris James Leadbitter Jamila Johnson-Small Jane Trowell Jen Harvie Johanna Tuukkanen John Jordan John McGrath Jordan McKenzie Joshua Sofaer Katherine Araniello Kira O'Reilly Lena Šimić Leslie Hill Lois Keidan Lois Weaver Manuel Vason Martin O'Brien Mary Paterson Rajni Shah Rebecca French Richard Dedomenici Ron Athey RoseLee Goldberg Selina Thompson Simon Casson and Tim Etchells.
Co-published with Live Art Development Agency.
Winner of the 2021 TaPRA Edited Collection Prize
Disability Arts and Culture
Chapters within the collection explore amongst other topics deaf theatre productions representations of disability on-screen community engagement projects and disabled bodies in dance. Disability Arts and Culture provides a comprehensive overview and a range of case studies benefitting both the practitioner and scholar.
The Igor Moiseyev Dance Company
In this book Anthony Shay examines the life and works of renowned choreographer Igor Moiseyev and his dance company. Formed in 1937 The Igor Moiseyev Dance Company have performed across the globe and are the first major Soviet dance group to perform in the United States. Through The Igor Moiseyev Dance Company dance became a vital diplomatic tool ballerinas replaced atom bombs and helped usher in a new era of cultural exchange formalized by an agreement signed by the United States and the Soviet Union. Through this book Shay explores the multiple lenses of spectacle Russian nationalism and the Cultural Cold War to describe and analyse the history of Moiseyev’s company and the shock that ‘innocent’ folk dance gave the American government. Blending academic study and personal anecdote Shay provides a nuanced analysis of Moiseyev’s importance and his place in the world of dance. This is the first English language study of Igor Moiseyev and his dance company.
Planet Cosplay
The Music of Antônio Carlos Jobim
In The Music of Antônio Carlos Jobim one of the first extensive musicological analyses of the Brazilian composer Peter Freeman examines the music philosophy and circumstances surrounding the creation of Jobim’s popular songs instrumental compositions and symphonic works. Freeman attempts to elucidate not only the many musical influences that formed Jobim’s musical output but also the stylistic peculiarities that were as much the product of a gifted composer as the rich musical environment and heritage that surrounded him.
Anne Bean
Anne Bean: Self Etc. is the first major monograph about the performance work of artist Anne Bean a noted international figure who has been working actively since the 1960s. Part of the Intellect Live series co-published with the Live Art Development Agency this book includes extensive visual documentation of Bean’s performances critical essays by leading scholars of art and performance and a series of new visual essays by the artist. Additional contributions include documentation of collaborations with influential artists such as Bean’s Drawn Conversations made at Franklin Furnace New York in collaboration with Harry Kipper Karen Finley Kim Jones and Fiona Templeton; and TAPS: Improvisations with Paul Burwell involving numerous artists including Paul McCarthy Steven Berkoff Evan Parker Brian Catling Carlyle Reedy Rose English David Toop Lol Coxhill Jacky Lansley and Maggie Nicols.
Lavishly illustrated and including previously unseen images Anne Bean explores and expands the nature form and contexts that artistic collaboration can take.
Playing for Time Theatre Company
Based on more than a decade of practice Playing for Time Theatre Company presents the reader with a rich and invaluable resource for using theatre in criminal justice contexts exploring ideas of identity community social justice and the power of the arts. The book analyses and reflects upon the company's evolution and unique model of practice with university students and prisoners working side-by-side led by industry professionals. The work draws on diverse methodologies and approaches with chapters written from multiple perspectives including a forensic psychologist director playwright historian student and ex-prisoners. Crucially the voices and reflections of participating prisoners are central to the book. Providing unprecedented access to a significant body of prison theatre Playing for Time Theatre Company presents both an overview and analysis of an extensive body of work as well as offering perspectives on the efficacy of arts practice in the UK criminal justice system from 2000 onwards.
Playwriting in Schools
Using Art as Research in Learning and Teaching
Using Art as Research in Learning and Teaching explores various multidisciplinary visual and performing art forms including creative writing as ways to provide a rich contribution and understanding to research learning and teaching. Key figures in the field share their art-based research arts practice and philosophy bringing the arts to life within their taught and learnt contexts across a variety of art forms and levels of post-compulsory education. In what is an invaluable collection this book is directly beneficial to arts researchers and educators addressing the key challenges and possibilities in a rapidly changing higher education environment.
Internationally renowned proponent of arts-based research Professor Shaun McNiff provides the Foreword of this ground-breaking book.
Performing Process
Increasingly choreographic process is examined shared and discussed in a variety of academic artistic and performative contexts. More than ever before post-show discussions artistic blogs books archives and seminars provide opportunities for choreographers to explain their particular methodologies. Performing Process: Sharing Dance and Choreographic Practice provides a unique theoretical investigation of this current trend. The chapters in this collection examine the methods politics and philosophy of sharing choreographic process aiming to uncover theoretical repercussions of and the implications for forms of knowledge the appreciation of dance education and artistic practices.
Dancing Bahia
Dancing Bahia is an edited collection that draws together the work of leading scholars artists and dance activists from Brazil Canada and the United States to examine the particular ways in which dance has responded to sociopolitical notions of race and community resisting stereotypes and redefining African Diaspora and Afro-Brazilian traditions.
Using the Brazilian city of Salvador da Bahia as its focal point this volume brings to the fore questions of citizenship human rights and community building. The essays within are informed by both theory and practice as well as black activism that inspires and grounds the research teaching and creative output of dance professionals from or deeply connected to Bahia.
Dance, Disability and Law
This collection is the first book to focus on the intersection of dance disability and the law. Bringing together a range of writers from different disciplines it considers the question of how we value validate and speak about diversity in performance practice with a specific focus on the experience of differently-abled dance artists within the changing world of the arts in the United Kingdom. Contributors address the legal frameworks that support or inhibit the work of disabled dancers and explore factors that affect their full participation including those related to policy arts funding dance criticism and audience reception.
Performing Revolutionary
The result of five years of practice-based creative research focused on Nicole Garneau’s UPRISING project Performing Revolutionary presents a number of methods for the creation of politically charged interactive public events in the style of a how-to guide. UPRISING a series of public demonstrations in eight locations in the United States and five in Europe involved thousands of voluntary participants who came together to create radical change through performance art. Bringing together accounts by participants writers theorists artists and activists as well as photographs and critical essays Performing Revolutionary offers a fresh perspective on the challenges of moving from critique to action.
The Hour of All Things and Other Plays
This book presents four plays by Caridad Svich that explore the rough waters of citizenship under the pressure of globalization and the threads of human connection – often tested but never wholly severed – across multiple geographic landscapes. Featuring an introduction by Welsh playwright and director Ian Rowlands and essays by practitioners Zac Kline Blair Baker Neil Scharnick Carla Melo and Sherrine Azab this wide-ranging daring collection of plays refuses to pretend that the complex and thorny questions of existence are easily settled.
Drama-based Pedagogy
Kathryn Dawson and Bridget Kiger Lee provide an extensive range of tried and tested strategies planning processes and learning experiences in order to create a uniquely accessible manual for those who work think train and learn in educational and/or artistic settings. It is the perfect companion for professional development and university courses as well as for already established educators who wish to increase student engagement and ownership of learning.
One Hundred Years of Futurism
More than one hundred years after Futurism exploded onto the European stage with its unique brand of art and literature there is a need to reassess the whole movement from its Italian roots to its international ramifications. In wide-ranging essays based on fresh research the contributors to this collection examine both the original context and the cultural legacy of Futurism. Chapters touch on topics such as Futurism and Fascism the geopolitics of Futurism the Futurist woman and translating Futurist texts. A large portion of the book is devoted to the practical aspects of performing Futurist theatrical ideas in the twenty-first century.