Performing Arts
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.
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.
Performance Art in Practice
Performance Art in practice – pedagogical approaches opens up a variety of philosophies that explore explain and challenge Performance art and introduces a range of practices used in higher level education.
The book is a collection of nine independent essays. All the writers have several years of practice as artists curators teachers professors researchers and in establishing performance art education in Finland. The essays explain challenge and deconstruct performance art from various angles: the body as a tool and a base of identity self as material pedagogic acts of dissidence challenging societal questions without politicing art building sustainable artwork based on emotions intuition and research using Fluxus scores in contemporary practices etc. are all topics dealt by the writers of Performance Art in practice – pedagogical approaches.
The essays are written from a practical point of view: how do we concretely teach performance art why have we chosen these ways and what are the outcomes. Teaching the experimental art form that doesn’t wear a uniform and relies on ever changing time and space isn’t all evident. Deconstructing performance art and reconstructing pedagogy springs out ideas that are relevant also elsewhere in the contemporary society.
The book challenges art school institutions: Individuality bound to collegiality fruitful dialogue that bases on trust and sharing with a sociologically and politically challenging curricula come out in texts written by Aapo Korkeaoja Eero Yli-Vakkuri Jussi Matilainen Pia Lindy and Tuomas Laitinen that refer to the remote countryside campus of SAMK Kankaanpää school of art. More urban perspective with philosophies research interests and pedagogic practices at The University of Arts Helsinki are opened up by Tero Nauha Annette Arlander Pilvi Porkola and Leena Kela in their essays.
Punk Rock Museum: An interview with Rob Ruckus
Rob Ruckus is a veteran of the Las Vegas punk scene and has played in punk bands and been involved in various punk projects across the past four decades. Since the Punk Rock Museum opened in Las Vegas in April 2023 Rob has managed its Jam Room. The Jam Room features a range of instruments donated to the museum by various punk bands. All the instruments are all available to be played by visitors to the museum and Rob is as enthusiastic about encouraging people to play the instruments as he is talking about the museum or his experiences in punk. Rob spoke with Paul Fields in July 2023.
A Holocaust Cabaret
Two scripts were created in 2017 from the same source materials: preserved song lyrics from a performance created in 1943 in the Terezin Ghetto called Prince Bettliegend (the Bedridden Prince) the popular 1930s jazz melodies to which those lyrics were set and fragments of testimony by survivors who performed in or witnessed that production.
The development processes took place under the auspices of the £1.8 million AHRC-funded project Performing the Jewish Archive. PtJA co-investigator Lisa Peschel has spent the past two decades researching theatrical performance in Terezin and the project’s planned performance festivals in Australia and South African in the summer of 2017 afforded a unique opportunity to allow Prince Bettliegend to speak to our present. Peschel synthesized the existing materials into a rough plot outline then collaborated with local production teams at the University of Sydney (produced by Joseph Toltz directed by Ian Maxwell) and Stellenbosch University (directed by Amelda Brand) to reconstruct/recreate/re-imagine the play.
Both teams were extraordinarily sensitive to questions of trauma and pleasure in the original performance and those questions manifested themselves in different underlying themes that emerged with each production. During the first month-long development process at the University of Sydney (July 2017) Peschel Maxwell and Toltz worked together to refine the plot outline Toltz and musical director Kevin Hunt explored the 1930s music with the entire production team then the actors recruited from Sydney’s alternative theatre scene developed the performance through improvisation. Due to fortuitous accidents of casting a theme soon emerged that dovetailed with the historical reality of the ghetto: the desire of the older prisoners to protect the youth.
While the Australian production was still in development the South African team at Stellenbosch University led by Amelda Brand began creating their own version. Their performance was based on the same plot outline and to some extent the same text developed by the Sydney performers but their production diverged radically due to their interest in addressing issues of more immediate interest to the multi-racial student case: race and power. Their musical approach also diverged: music director Leonore Bredekamp created a hybrid of 1930s jazz and klezmer music.
Part I of the book is composed of a series of essays about the original material and about each production. The essays written by Peschel and key collaborators on each development team explore the Terezin production and both reconstructions. Part II comprises the scripts. Although the texts themselves are similar detailed stage directions and illustrations make clear how each manifested its own themes.
Part of Intellect's Playtext series.
Community Arts Education
This edited collection offers global perspectives on the transverse boundary-blurring possibilities of community arts education.
Invoking ‘transversality’ as an overarching theoretical framework and a methodological structure 55 contributors – community professionals scholars artists educators and activists from sixteen countries – offer studies and practical cases exploring the complexities of community arts education at all levels.
Such complexities include challenges created by globalizing phenomena such as the COVID-19 pandemic; ongoing efforts to achieve justice for Indigenous peoples; continuing movement of immigrants and refugees; growing recognition of issues related to equity diversity and inclusion in the workplace; and the increasing impact of grassroot movements and organizations.
Chapters are grouped into four thematic clusters – Connections Practices Spaces and Relations – that map these and other intersecting assemblages of transversality. Thinking transversally about community art education not only shifts our understanding of knowledge from a passive construct to an active component of social life but redefines art education as a distinctive practice emerging from the complex relationships that form community.
Collaborative Thinking, Creating and Learning on a Remote Greek Island: Towards Community Art Education for Sustainability
This chapter contributes to understanding collaborative artmaking for sustainability as a form of community art education particularly in isolated communities. A/r/tographic roles in an intergenerational community art-making collaboration on a Greek island are discussed in relation to a theoretical cultural ecology framework. A three-level analysis of the community artwork demonstrates the potential of community art education to contribute towards the co-constitutional nature of community sustainability.
Introduction: Community Arts Education: Transversal Global Perspectives
This book is an international collaboration among 55 community professionals scholars artists educators and activists from sixteen countries. ‘Transversality’ signifies both the overarching theoretical framework and the methodological structure for reimaging the complexity of community arts education. The authors explore how community art education shifts our understanding of knowledge from a passive construct to an active component of social life. Thus community arts education becomes a distinctive practice emerging from the complex relationships that form community. Throughout this book studies and practical cases demonstrate these complex interrelationships from varied geographical locations. Yet across chapters these authors think transversally: considering and embracing blurred boundaries among the arts cultural practice and educational discourse as well as intersecting roles of artists community professionals educators learners and the public. Such collective inquiry aims to develop a methodological and conceptual framework for new approaches to community arts education.
Conversations With Gardens: Artful Spaces in Community Art Education
The educational potential of multimodal digital technologies performed as public pedagogies in a community art context is explored through a heritage garden and museum space in Quebec Canada. Using a walking methodologies approach this chapter chronicles the incubation of an immersive digital technology project that evolved from an audio walk to an experimental collaboration between les Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens and the PRISME Innovation Lab at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Through an interactive digital interface the human nonhuman and more-than-human agents forming the Jardins de Métis community become entangled in dynamic thinking-making intra-actions underscoring the complexity of the project. An assemblage of tensions and event-encounters with diverse agencies form intriguing connections and transversal refractions: being and becoming through public art and community exchange. Walking-with this garden initiates a metaphoric conversation dialogic and relational between co-constituents of a place and spaces within that place.
Seeing What Unfolds: New Ways of Exploring Community Art Education in Formal Learning Spaces
This chapter is designed around the affect of the fold. The fold unfold and refold is a metaphor for openings opportunities and becomings in-between inside|outside. We use the metaphor of the folding process of making paper aeroplanes as a creative action and practice that is iterative when the paper is folded unfolded and refolded symmetrically. We-unfold a/r/tography as community art education and fold and refold our processes to explore how through making and writing in relational dialogue with artists we see art education as a site of and for affect that enables and opens provocation interruption and contestation.