Performing Arts
artmaking as embodied enquiry
What can a fold be? Virtually anything and everything.
For centuries folds/folding has captured the world’s imagination. Folds readily appear in revivals of the ancient craft of origamithe simplest acts of pedestrian life in art design architecture performing arts linguistics the philosophical turnings of the mind and last but not the least in the many ingenious computations of (bio)engineering and technology. What awaits our understanding is how deeply the fold roots into embodiment into our very impulse to create.
This book is about folding as a vibrant stimulus for trans-disciplinary artistic research – whether for the performative for product realization or simply to enliven body mind and spirit. Conceived as art-made-differently Susan and Glenna share the abundance of their decade-long collaboration in developing their approach to practice research in the fold. In addition to their own insights they invite eight of their collaborators to contribute each a veteran artist. The fold is destined for artmaking – for making any art. Etching into the very fabric of embodiment the fold practice reaches outside the constraints of disciplinary silos into niche areas that embrace the unknown with all its underlying tensions and ambiguities.
Reflecting on a current and unique somatic oriented arts research practice and pedagogy with an intriguing blend of interdisciplinary concern and theory practice and includes a wide variety of practice samples and images.
In Smithereens
What happens to contemporary dance costumes when the show is over and their surrounding legacy slips from view? How might costumes be mobilised towards representational repair post-performance? Located within Lea Anderson’s choreographic archive this book charts a series of hands-on interventions with the fabric remains of her companies The Cholmondeleys and The Featherstonehaughs. Centred on practices of Disintegration Preservation Transaction and Display they offer provocative modes of engaging with the physical leftovers of performance the degrading of memory and legacy around pre-digital theatre work and the temporal material transitions of artefacts enduring outside of traditional museological contexts.
How might we regard these mercurial items? As precious relics to be protected in museum holdings ghostly harbingers of residual performance histories or inconvenient detritus? The book travels from props-makers’ studios to auction houses and galleries incorporating film-making artefact handling and curation along the way in lively dialogue with perspectives from dance history material culture sociology and performance studies. The choreographic archive is envisioned as repository of the awkward scattered remains of legacy blown apart into fragments. Smithereens which can if we allow them demand an alternative after-life that disrupts the vanishing inflicted on these costumes and the companies who danced in them.
Obsessions of a Showwoman
Explores ‘showwomanry’ tracing a trajectory of incredible weird women at work: women who were stone eaters fire walkers women who hypnotized alligators or presented crucifixion shows; women in entertainment who worked for themselves; women that were often referred to as showgirls despite their extraordinary skill and artistry.
Carnesky continues an important lineage of performing women with bombastic theatrical flair and an extraordinary skill that ‘do not work for the management or the man. Showwomen work for themselves and other people work for them”. Carnesky has been a central figure in performance and live art during the last thirty years; her practice as a showwoman promotes alternative visions of matriarchal entertainment utopias and a new relationship to women’s position to power and politics.
The term showwoman introduces a new identity a new kind of performer who does not control or exploit others but opens up a possibility for collaboration that enables ‘shared experiences of visceral euphoria applause loss shape abjection hustle and struggle marginalisation and the fight against patriarchal injustices’ (Carnesky
2019 53). The book will use Carnesky’s work to showcase women working in radical ways treading the margins of cabaret and live art disrupting normative ideologies through the spectacular and opening new lines of feminist enquiry through weirdness absurdity provocation in live art and popular culture.
Consent Practices in Performing Arts Education
This book explores consent as a foundational principle to guide practices and policies in university level performing arts education. It includes descriptions of the structural power dynamics present in educational spaces as well as tools for defusing them. It adapts the consent-forward protocols that are foundational to intimacy training in order to apply them to classroom and rehearsal spaces across performing arts disciplines.
This includes opening lines of communication actively discussing personal boundaries and modeling behavior that respects those boundaries. Additionally the book uses experiential reflections to address the real-world challenges that teachers face as they work to reshape their teaching habits and processes to include consent practices.
Digital Embodiment and the Arts
A timely examination of the use of emerging technologies in the arts in recent decades from the first wave of Virtual Reality through to the current use of Mixed Augmented and Extended Realities. It highlights the necessity of understanding technological experiences through the assumption that all experience is embodied. An explosion of digital culture and experience has most certainly given artists and creative practitioners new ways of exploring a hybridisation of creative practices with access to technological tools only previously dreamt of. Further there are a number of threads around digital embodiment and its centrality to the digital experience.
The book is divided into 3: Section 1 explores the whole notion of embodied experience through a study of space and virtuality imagination and technology. Section 2 lays the ground for a more explicit understanding of the role the body has in our engagement with the digital technologies focussing on three distinct bodies: the gravitational body the virtual body and finally the hybrid body. Section 3 is split into three chronological chapters in terms of technological developments that of VR Virtual Worlds and Augmented Mixed and Extended Realities.
While individual aspects and themes covered here can be found in some recent books there is little that places digital embodiment within the arts in the way this book does. A unique synthesis.
Performing Maternities
Performing Maternities is a collection of essays creative work images and scripts which emerged out of an online international symposium held at Brighton University in November 2020. Collectively the contributors challenge celebrate and share the normative the queer the transgressive the joy and the pain of performing maternity. The book asks key questions about the construction of maternal identities and mythologies in the contemporary world the ways these impact on indivduals in different social economic and sexual identities and the ways in which - as mothers writers artists parents and grandparents -we can challenge and address those identities.
Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective
Taking as its starting point the first-ever retrospective exhibition (2021) of Canadian performance artist Jess Dobkin the book reflects on the internationally acclaimed artist’s playful and provocative practice as performer activist curator and community leader. At the same time it grapples with a question that is vital for art and performance studies: How do archives perform?
More than a discrete showing of a single artist’s work the exhibition including its new staging in book form is a large-scale research experiment in performance curation investigating what it might mean for art institutions to take seriously the embodied and communal nature of performance art in their practices of archiving and museological display.
In Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective a cast of renowned international performance theorists and artists dive into this exploration alongside Dobkin curator Emelie Chhangur and performance theorist and dramaturg Laura Levin. These contributions appear alongside a riot of full colour photographs providing access to Dobkin’s celebrated artistic productions from the last 25 years.
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.
From Broadway to The Bronx
The depiction of New York City in song across a variety of different genres focusing on jazz genres as well as the work of both New York born artists like Billy Joel or Lin-Manuel Miranda and artists living most of their life in New York City like Shinehead or Debbie Harry that are intimately connected with the city.
The book analyzes songs written about New York City and engage with the depiction of the city within them but mainly use it as a way to deal with several musical genres that the city has been home to and instrumental in developing. These include the musical theatre scene on Broadway and beyond but also early 20th century sheet music hip hop disco punk dancehall jazz swing rock or pop music. The collection includes essays from authors with a cultural studies media studies cultural history or musicology background making possible a far-ranging treatment of the interconnection of the city space and its musical history.
Designing and Conducting Practice-Based Research Projects
This is a textbook aimed primarily at upper undergraduate and Master’s students undertaking practice-based research in the arts and includes practical guidance examples exercises and further resources.
The book offers definitions and a brief background to practice-related research in the arts contextualization of practice-based methods within that frame a step-by-step approach to designing practice-based research projects chapter summaries examples of practice-related research exercises for progressing methods design and evaluating research approach and lists for further reading. This textbook can serve as the foundation for a wider online “living” textbook for practice-related research in the arts.
Designing and Conducting Practice-Based Research Projects
This is a textbook aimed primarily at upper undergraduate and Master’s students undertaking practice-based research in the arts and includes practical guidance examples exercises and further resources.
The book offers definitions and a brief background to practice-related research in the arts contextualization of practice-based methods within that frame a step-by-step approach to designing practice-based research projects chapter summaries examples of practice-related research exercises for progressing methods design and evaluating research approach and lists for further reading. This textbook can serve as the foundation for a wider online “living” textbook for practice-related research in the arts.
Socially Engaged Creative Practice
This is the second book in the Performance and Communities series. An edited collection from academics and artists engages with both these notions of performance – that of identities in and through time and space - and of more formal instances of specific time-limited performances; textual embodied visual and communal.
Each chapter focuses on an individual or group’s mode of working and methodological practice of performance across a range of modes disciplines and media – from community opera to online queer performance from anti-racist class-room pedagogy to 1980s cabaret in nightclubs from community art projects in schools to community writing projects in transport interchanges the performers writers and creators represented here all engage and grapple with contemporary performance as a situated practice and as a problematic.
The personal perspective of each performer – directors librettists producers writers performers – is explicitly located in a community and the book offers a series of case studies detailing socially engaged work that aligns with concepts of performance and community.
Performing with the Dead
Proposes a methodology for incorporating concepts drawn from ancestor trance in Afrolatinx ritual for actors trained in Western methods. Danowski created four new works of theatrical performance writing the play texts and incorporating acting exercises from Afrolatinx rituals adapted for non–practitioners. Working toward a phenomenological understanding of what is happening when a performer incorporates a character drawing on the ritual knowledge of trance possession in Lukumí and Palo Monte to examine how ontologies might speak to each other.
Constructing a methodology called kanga (from the Bantu for tying and untying) using three methods based on aspects of Afrolatinx ritual and modified for performance contexts: spell charm and trance. This methodology enacts and complicates distinctions between performance and ritual serving as a contribution to respectful and responsible intercultural performance practices.
The methodology is bricoleur drawing from ethnography psychoanalytic theory and phenomenology. Kanga in practice leads to a state of consciousness that Danowski calls hauntological. This borrows from Derrida but is redefined to refer to the study of haunted states of consciousness where reality is co–constituted by the living and the dead where ancestral spirits are invoked to do the work once reserved for characters.
Putting the ego aside: A case study of the peer-to-peer feedback dialogue among electronic popular music makers within higher education
Settings where students showcase their original songs to peers and teachers can seem advantageous and harmless. However beneath this surface is a complex multifaceted negotiation. In this article I engage with the construction of this complexity. I interviewed eight Norwegian electronic popular music students at the university level on how they experienced the real-time peer group song assessment (PGSA) setting. Through semi-structured interviews I seek to give a critical view on how PGSA works as a vehicle for learning. I discuss how the student’s experience of risk varies according to what the student is presenting and what the feedback focuses on. The interviews indicate that feedback that engages with elements that contain the highest degree of creative and personal investment is the hardest feedback to give and yet most desirable to receive. Appendix 1 offers suggestions for presenters peers and teachers related to the PGSA setting.
The Drama Therapy Decision Tree, 2nd Edition
This substantially revised and expanded edition of the The Drama Therapy Decision Tree provides an integrated model for therapeutic decision-making by uniting drama therapy interventions with diagnostic information individual and group processes psychological distance the drama therapy pie and global outcomes.
This book is a practical guide in four sections not a checklist. Rather than using a standardized protocol that makes the decisions for the therapist drama therapy is based on dynamic embodied creative action with participants in the here and now. Conscious planning on the part of the drama therapist before the session supports spontaneity and creativity preparing them to make good therapeutic decisions in the moment during the session.
The opening section guides readers through the foundational principles leading readers into Section Two The Decision Tree which is a series of questions for early career drama therapists to ask themselves as they prepare treatment plans for clients. Diversity Equity and Ethics are covered in Section Three from the point of view of creative arts therapy practitioners. Section Four looks at Integrating the Five Phases of Treatment with the Drama Therapy Pie following different populations (diagnosis) of clients through the five phases of group therapy in order to illustrate how the Decision Tree supports intervention choice in the different phases of treatment.
The authors strive to provide a common language for communicating what drama therapists do and how they do it in order to demystify drama therapy for other mental health and medical professionals. Using the decision tree as a guide early career drama therapists can move forward confidently and ground their work with participants in an integrated system.
An online searchable database of drama therapy interventions provides descriptions therapeutic outcomes addressed and other useful information provides a wealth of additional supporting material. There is also a separate online resource of deroling activities.
The online resources can also be an asset for non-drama therapists who are wanting to incorporate a more active and embodied component safely into their work particularly in terms of warm-ups closure and deroling.
Between necessity and fragments of alternativity: DIY experiences in French roller derby
Between 1935 and 1970 roller derby was a co-ed North American sport practised on roller skates and played on a banked track. The 2000s marked its revival when a group of women decided to give it a new lease of life: roller derby is now exclusively for women and takes place on a flat track. Teams assert their independence from established institutions and follow a model of ‘do-it-yourself’ organization. According to some critics the roller derby revival is a continuation of the feminist Riot Grrrl movement. This article aims to understand how French roller derby players use the ‘alternative’ heritage of American women. By mobilizing the frameworks of Cultural Studies and Sport Subculture the article reflects on the ways in which the legacy of Riot Grrrl as a movement to challenge a dominant order enables derby teams to create alternatives to mainstream sports models. Through 90 interviews and participant observation conducted between January 2020 and the present day the study was able to show a use of the DIY ethos articulated between resourcefulness and a claim to independence. While Riot Grrrl radically defends the values of the punk movement against the prevailing economic and gender order French roller derby and its teams propose a hybrid sporting model articulated between reflections on a different way of looking at sport and a move away from the DIY model of the early days.
Family first: Yahritza y Su Esencia, family bands and the musical education of Mexican Americans
Beginning with a description of música Mexicana’s rising stars Yahritza y Su Esencia a ‘family band’ of young Mexican American musicians we suggest that school music educators become more informed of the musical interests involvements and learning styles of Mexican American students at home within their families and in the communities that surround them. Yahritza’s trademark sierreño style is described and contextualized in light of other notable genres such as mariachi música nortena son jarocho banda grupera and trap corridos. The phenomenon of family bands within Mexican American communities is explored as a means of children’s musical enculturation away from school juxtaposed with a history of exclusion of Mexican American students from school music opportunities. The article addresses limitations of the American model of school music programmes including (1) the need for opportunities for Mexican American (and other) populations to access meaningful musical education experiences and (2) the gap between the music genres offered within the curriculum and those that Mexican American (and other) students experience at home and within their communities. Even as we acknowledge and applaud the presence of family bands and other strong music community music practices among Mexican Americans we call for a national initiative among music educators to ensure that the music which students learn in school is at least germane to students’ home experiences.
Nihilism and the ‘death of God’ in the work of Siouxsie and the Banshees
This article locates Siouxsie and the Banshees within the philosophical tradition of existentialism specifically the work of Nietzsche and Heidegger. Aspects of 1970s British punk-rock share with Nietzsche a concern with the condition of ‘nihilism’. For Nietzsche with the western decline in the belief in God humankind no longer has an external source of authority within which meaning evaluation and morality are anchored. Nietzsche’s philosophical project can be read as an elaboration of the conditions under which the creation of new values may be possible to avoid nihilistic despair. Following Nietzsche’s retreat into the Self Heidegger is concerned with authentic existence: his philosophical project can be read as a call to an authentic life. The song ‘Israel’ by Siouxsie and the Banshees can be read as a commentary on the collective anxiety surrounding the ‘death of God’ nihilism and a preoccupation with authentic existence in the twentieth century.
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.
Applied Theatre, Third Edition
Applied Theatre was the first collection to assist practitioners and students in developing critical frameworks for their own community-based theatrical projects. The editors draw on thirty case studies in applied theatre from fifteen countries—covering a wide range of disciplines from theatre studies to education medicine and law—and collect essential readings to provide a comprehensive survey of the field.
Infused with a historical and theoretical overview of practical theatre Applied Theatre offers clear developmental approaches and models for practical application.
This third edition offers refreshed case studies from many countries worldwide that provide exemplars for the practice of applied theatre. The book will be useful to both instructors and students in its focus on providing clear introductory chapters that lay out the scope of the field dozens of case studies in all areas of the field and a new chapter on responses to the global pandemic of 2020.
Also includes a new section on representation in its final chapter looking at the issues of how we represent ourselves and others on stage.
‘I take them on as if facts in a book’: Sex educators’ cumulative witnessing of sexual trauma
Through a visual essay the author explores the intersection of trauma and sexual health education (SHE) using art-based expressions from an ethnographic exploration of novice educators’ embodied experiences of SHE training. In particular the author examines educators’ engagements with two forms of trauma: (1) self-trauma: trauma personally experienced by sex educators and (2) trauma transposition: other individuals’ disclosures of past harms to the educators. The author theorizes these engagements together as a form of cumulative witnessing – the collective excessive consumption of violence through direct and vicarious exposures. Inspired by palimpsest methods carbon tracing paper and photography were used to express the educators’ cumulative witnessing of sexual traumas via visually layering their words drawings and expressed feelings about the sexual traumas that thread through SHE. The inquiry highlights key implications for SHE pedagogical practices including acknowledging trauma dealing with trauma disclosures and learning from and with trauma.
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.
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.
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.
The importance of teaching performance artistry
This article will explain the philosophy and methodology behind developing and teaching the performance artistry curriculum at the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami. Students who study performance artistry are more prepared to work in the popular music industry/marketplace – personally artistically and professionally. They report being more widely informed about the business of their artistry having clearer goals owning their identities embracing communication with their audiences using a more honest voice on their social platforms and feeling freer to take risks. Success in this field is a combination of presentation forethought execution content strategy and effectiveness on top of talent. I will detail performance artistry assignments and illustrate their role in bringing out authenticity and excellence in a collegiate music major population. This curriculum contains valuable training tools in different educational configurations (lecture-style classes private instruction and workshop/masterclass settings) and all genres.
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.
Finding Possibility in the Liminality of Socially Engaged Arts: Fostering Learning and Wellbeing With Refugee Youth
This chapter introduces a socially engaged arts project called ‘Youth Artists and Allies Taking Action in Society’ (YAAAS) uniquely designed for educators and refugee high school students to work side by side in a collaborative partnership. After a project overview a literature review reveals the essential ways in which trauma-informed practice social-emotional learning and culturally sustaining pedagogy can intersect with socially engaged art to support both the learning and wellness of refugee youth. The chapter describes the pedagogical and curricular practices of YAAAS to illustrate how the liminality afforded by socially engaged arts has allowed YAAAS to become an exceptionally generative space of learning and wellness.
I Wish You a Good Life: Embedding Intergenerational Learning Into Pre-service Education Through Art, Community and Environment
The ‘Our Waste Our Place Our Actions’ Art-Reach project brings place-making formal and informal learning together. Through intergenerational learning the project built shared ‘waste wisdoms’ by activating a form of community-based art education that softened institutional divides while questioning our waste behaviours. By rethinking community through the porosity of waste/wildlife/land/sea/children/pre-service teachers/seniors/local/regional knowledge evoked through art we realized our interrelationship with other animals plants and entities (like waste). Together we became aware of local wildlife and their need for a waste-free life. Simultaneously participants reported a sense of feeling valued joyous and excited because of involvement with each other through art. The chapter explores these intersections of art wellbeing and ecological awareness as well as the role social networks and communities play in educational reform within pre-service teacher education. We need to reach beyond academia to community contexts if art education wants to remain relevant to real-world issues.
Intercultural Eye for Art: Becoming a Member of a Global Community Through Arts-Based Exchange
We introduce the Indiana-Hiroshima Intercultural Eye for Art Project from 2015 to 2021 aimed at developing a global community by interconnecting schools across borders using new information technology. We demonstrate through action research and arts-informed case studies how children cooperatively develop a transborder community by engaging in intercultural communication in schools.
International Art Symposia as a Space of Knowledge Creation and Creative Engagement
The chapter focuses on socially engaged art in education and its potential for sustainability as a response to ongoing environmental crises and eco-anxiety. Ecological crises call for artistic interventions and for art education to produce strategies making it possible to live in a humbler way to decolonize nature and deepen humans’ relations with non-human nature. Art-based action research was carried out to develop socially engaged art symposia as informal learning. The chapter presents three case studies using art-based action research to develop art symposia as community art education. Art symposia have potential to foster learning and create transformative experiences that encourage deeper and more respectful interactions among community members and non-human nature. Three perspectives on learning converge in the art symposia: those of the curators participating artists and community members.
Visual Ecologies: Artistic Research Transversing Stable, Dynamic and Interstitial Relations in an Australian Settler Colonial Context
Using artistic and scientific reference points I focus on two of my artworks that exemplify creative encountering as a self-organizational ecosystem. Alternative exhibition and educational sites beyond the archive locate my work in community art education as a space of creative practice and pedagogical knowledge creation. Locutionary work in alternative spaces entails traversing archives for interstitial ancestral stories with the artistic collective of Indigenous and non-Indigenous women ‘SISTAS Holding Space’ (SHS). Experimental visual ecologies are discussed in metaphoric and literal ways. A natural occurrence of desert ecosystems in Newman Western Australia exemplifies how networks can be conceived as an ecology of practice rather than reliant on individual dispositions. The concept of a ‘counter-encounter’ creates new interstitial pedagogical mechanics to countermand dominant discovery and progress narratives. The resultant visual pattern morphologies trouble historical ‘encounters’ and relations in the contested space of Australia's settler colonial context.
We Are Small, but We Have Loud Voices: Children Leading the Way to Support Community Connections Through Art
As a visual arts specialist I draw upon a/r/tography to refine my teaching practice to enrich my students’ civic engagement. This chapter showcases three arts-led projects at a small metropolitan school in Perth Western Australia demonstrating how community cohesion is instilled through visual arts. Each project embodies the school's motto ‘Achieving Together with Pride’. By embedding community-based art education into the school's regular art programme and establishing genuine partnerships with families and community groups the school positions itself as the local community hub to achieve a mutual goal of community cohesion.
Community Dance as an Approach to Reimagine Place in Aotearoa/New Zealand
This chapter weaves the themes of arts education place-based pedagogy and Indigenous Māori philosophies. Through reflections on encounters within a community dance project in Aotearoa/New Zealand ideas are highlighted about how bodily encounters and experiences with the environment provide possibilities to actively engage young people in learning. Such ideas while situated within a dance context are considered in relation to what they might offer arts education and more broadly decolonized views of education.
Infernal Learning: Becoming Members of Academic Communities
This chapter explores how dominant cultural norms of class serve to silence and marginalize people with less affluent socio-economic backgrounds or who otherwise represent cultural and linguistic diversity. We further inquire how experiences of discrimination impact the narrative experiences of people with academic aspirations in Finnish arts education institutions and education cultures. The research this project undertakes is based on feminist collective narrative inquiry.
Twenty-First Century Winter Journey: Exploring Comics, Adaptation and Community Art Education
This academic comic documents a project employing comics as a transversal language and a form of participatory and relational culture linking people and communities. The project's ultimate success lies in efficacious applications of Community Art Education (CAE) theory and connects two very different segments of the local community by offering a focus and a creative purpose for their joint efforts through the collaborative adaptation of an opera into a graphic novel. The investigation in question is a comics-based research (CBR) project that explores the ways making comics can impact communities on a local national and global level. However the process and outcomes of this collaborative project – between Year Two Comics and Graphic Novels students at Teesside University and the national UK charity Streetwise Opera – were dramatically heightened by the unexpected impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Inclusive Dance
Inclusive Dance is an ethnography of disability arts and historiographic overview of the 1980s when many new disability arts groups came to fruition. Touchdown Dance was the research 'ambition' of dancer Steve Paxton and theatre maker and psychotherapist Anne Kilcoyne involving visually impaired and sighted adults in Contact Improvisation - a dyadic movement form requiring physical contact. Katy Dymoke took over Touchdown Dance in 1994 and refers here to archives accounts and personal experience to share the learning that has been shared over the years to today.
Touch and movement are vital for accessibility and inclusion and modality specific approaches were devised to ensure a democratic process towards the inclusion of visually impaired people in a pro-touch activity. The continuum of movement based methods fills the gaps in polarities of visual and nonvisual and a two-way membrane interlinks all the participants in a body focused learning experience. The mutable membrane becomes a heuristic device for the relational realm a locus for debate for change. Touch deprivation exclusion and inequality are the consequence of an inaccessible visually dominant society.
Three point of view chapters - from two visually impaired and one sighted company dancer - further describe the performance work revealing how lives are changed and why sociocultural inclusion is imperative.
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.
Conversation I: Prinz Bettliegend in Australia and Bearing the Gift Forward
Chapter 5 presents excerpts of a conversation that the two directors and the lead researcher had in September 2020 shortly after the first drafts of most of the chapters were completed. Together we looked back upon the development process in Australia and on aspects of that process that were mirrored in South Africa. We recalled the visits of Terezin survivor Edith Sheldon to our rehearsals and Ian evoked Marcel Mauss's concept of the ‘gift economy’: the obligation to engage with the Terezín artists’ work as a gift we had received and the obligation to bear it forward. Key issues in the Australian development process manifested themselves differently in South Africa; for example in the ways that a cast in their fifties versus a cast in their twenties absorbed and animated the responsibility weighing on the Jewish leaders.
Conversation II: The Prinz and Pedagogy, Identity and Cultural Appropriation
In Chapter 9 the two directors and the lead researcher resume their conversation this time focusing mainly on the South African production and questions of cultural appropriation. The development process at Stellenbosch University unfolded in a pedagogical space with students who were just beginning their development as artists. They were also struggling with questions of self-identification versus the identities being imposed upon them—a situation which gave them a unique perspective from which to understand the Terezín prisoners’ relationship to their own Jewishness. We discuss whether performance can help us find a way to move past arguments that prevent us from engaging productively with other cultures given the frequent inevitability in theatre of speaking from a place that is not our own.
Out of the Shadows: Notions of Memory and Remembrance
This chapter documents the experience of musical director Leonore Bredekamp and some of the band members who took part in the Stellenbosch production of Prinz Bettliegend. Engagement with the music included reworking arrangements by the musical director of the Australian production reinterpreting and adapting the songs to fit a younger cast and adding improvised sections and underscoring of stage actions. The chapter reflects on decisions made from a local and therefore outsider perspective and how stereotypical ideas of the other may influence interpretations of essentially unfamiliar and unshared histories. In creative processes acceptance of outsider status can work towards creating a new perspective by linking the known to the unknown. In this case the music was infused with musical elements that may reflect “Jewishness” and with local influences – essentially a fusion of Klezmer and Cape Jazz styles – the latter intuitively introduced by the assistant musical director and piano repetiteur Throy Petersen. While interrogating re-interpretation of memory the chapter touches on questions of cultural appropriation and references local student protests and other political issues that coincided with the production timeline.
Prinz Bettliegend in the Western Cape, South Africa: Permission to Play
In Chapter 6 Amelda Brand director of the South African production describes the challenges of exploring this story of Jewish experience with a nine-person multiracial student cast at Stellenbosch University formerly a bastion of white Afrikaner culture. In a political moment when questions of cultural appropriation were hotly debated on campus she and the students found permission to engage with Prinz Bettliegend through intense study of the history and engagement with the humour in the original script. Drawing upon Michael Rothberg's notion of multidirectional memory she describes how they ultimately conveyed the prisoners’ world to their audiences while linking it with the complexities of their own.
Student Ethnographers in the Rehearsal Room: Witnessing Prinz Bettliegend
Rehearsal Studies developed at the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies (University of Sydney) trains students in ethnographic methodology to observe document and analyse rehearsal and other performance preparation practices. This chapter describes this approach and the ways in which the best student casebooks reveal to us not only a sophisticated understanding of the Rehearsal Studies ethnographic task but also a sensitive response to the source materials and the artists’ engagement with those materials in the rehearsal process. Drawing on the accounts in the outstanding casebooks created by two undergraduate students Milly Roberts and Shon Ho who observed the creation of Prinz Bettliegend the work of this chapter reflects that of the Prinz Bettliegend project overall whereby something of the elusive ephemeral nature of past live performance is captured and preserved for later audiences.
‘There must be some way to protect this young man’: Re-making Prince Bettliegend
This chapter analyses and reflects on the process of developing from a scant handful of resources—a poster some songs and lyrics and survivor testimony—a version of Prinz Bettliegend a cabaret/revue created initially by inhabitants of the Jewish ghetto at Thereseinstadt. In particular the chapter focusses upon the foundational decision to work collaboratively with performance-makers from a post-dramatic tradition in order to generate a performance text grounded in physical technique and what might be described in short-hand as ‘postmodern’ performance-making practices affording an exploration based less in character narrative and dramatic resolution than in ambiguity and play.
Prince Bettliegend Performance Script: Australia, August 2017
The script of the devised performance of Prince Bettliegend presented at the Seymour Theatre Centre Sydney Australia in August 2017 after a period of creative development at the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Sydney. The text is a collaborative work devised by a cast of performers drawn in the main from post-dramatic practices. It is grounded less in extensive dialogue and a dramaturgy of dramatic closure than on physical performance and a dramaturgy of non-resolution and open-ness.
‘Race’, Power … and Clowning: The Stellenbosch Cast Reflects
In Chapter 8 Amelda talks with several members of her student cast almost three years after the 2017 premiere. The students share their perspective on the development process and the effect the show has had upon their subsequent engagements in the arts and politics. They look back on the importance of their collective conversations about ‘race’ and the virtues of clowning as a way to engage with the difficult history of Terezín and their own post-apartheid society. They also reflect on the emotional impact of the final moments of the show when each stepped forward to describe the fate of the Terezín actor who played their character in the 1943 production.
Prinz Bettliegend Performance Script: Western Cape, South Africa, March 2018
This script represents the South African performance of Prinz Bettliegend at the Woordfees (Word Festival) March 2018 in Stellenbosch. It was developed by writing team Malan Steyn and Mercy Kannemeyer with the Stellenbosch University's Drama Department student cast directed by Amelda Brand. The 2018 script is an expanded version of the script developed in 2017 as part of the Out of the Shadows festival in Cape Town and Stellenbosch for the Performing the Jewish Archive project which drew upon the plot outline and other aspects of the work of the Australian development team. Suggestions related to blocking choreography during songs and comedic actions by Hocus & Pocus (two tricksters and clown-like characters) are also included in this script.
Singing Up the Past and Stompin’ with the Prinz: Jaroslav Ježek and the Music of Prinz Bettliegend
This chapter explores the music score of Prinz Bettliegend a cabaret composed in the Terezín ghetto by Jewish inmates. The Sydney reconstruction of this work used a musical dramaturgy developed by Joseph Toltz which integrated ethnographic material from survivors of the ghetto with musicological research on the Czech composer Jaroslav Ježek and historical research on jazz of the period. The dramaturgical material was applied performatively by the musical director Kevin Hunt using a cohort of talented tertiary jazz musicians with advice from international experts in Czech jazz idioms.
Dances with Sheep
Dances with Sheep presents the methodology of Felt Thinking in Movement as an eco-somatic practice inspired by re-thinking nature of being human as well as contextualises it within wider frameworks of cultural philosophical and therapeutic viewpoints on wellbeing.
Felt Thinking is a self-inquiry practice grounded in somatic movement experience that originates in site-specific and embodied dialoguing between what is felt and what shapes as a responsive thought as creative movement itself and which paths ways for ecologically inclusive care for being well with self and other.
The book elaborates on creative processes in and with the natural environment in relation to the movers’ overall wellbeing and covers creative journeys of opening up to the living agency of Nature itself through the emergent three phases of experiential relatedness in embodied experience of the self. The book presents its original contribution to eco-phenomenology with its ontological principle of embodied relationality in towards and away from movement as a primal gateway to wellbeing and its creative inter-constitution.
An intriguing and inspiring resource for students practitioners educators self-learners therapists and researchers. Foreword by Sondra Fraleigh.
Enacting Embodiment and Blue Muffins
In this essay a dance of my imagining draws upon topics of embodiment imperfection and lack of art political art implicatedness boredom and being stupid. Questions of abstraction and records of thought hinge on discussions of disembodied movement technology and performance. Key choreographic works include Blue Muffins; Bill T. Jones GHOSTCATCHING; Troika Ranch and Interactive Installations. Key sources include Susan Kozel's Closer (2007); Antonio Damasio's Self Comes to Mind (2012); and Francisco Varela's The Embodied Mind (1991). The essay explains movement and stillness as bodily enactments that can be arrested and recorded in arts technologies. Such records become part of why we care to make art and how we make it matter.
Body and Nature: Quest for Somatic Values, East, and West
This essay is informed by autobiography and embodied research. It views somatic values through lenses of philosophy both East and West particularly eco-phenomenology virtue ethics and Zen Buddhism. Nature as embodied is the theme a current imperative of phenomenology and a growing ecological concern in somatic studies. The text conceives intrinsic (experiential) values of somatic processes relative to body and nature. As a somatic practice for the reader to do it scripts a Dance Map on neutral attention or suchness in nature which positions nature as a subjective ideal or virtue in somatic contexts. Photographs and dance/music videos illustrate the article.
Everyone Needs to Breathe
This essay is written with an eye towards the future and a foot in the past. It is partly autobiographical and in each of four parts offers reflective somatic practices. The author is sheltering at home so her thoughts centre on the meaning of home family and pets. At the same time she articulates somatic skills to cultivate embodied presence insightful verbal interactions and healing touch. Her writing invites readers into somatic movement explorations and somatic communication practices through poetry. Life and death love and war ground her essay. The section on Simbi involves global shadow work through butoh and the healing essence of water. Golden shadows appear as elemental and ecosomatic in Morphic Curiosity a butoh invitation to site-specific dance. Video links and photographs further embody the work. The final section Dance back the world presents somatic witnessing as an extraordinary process of intimate notice and care. Becoming friends with the whole world is an exhortation of Mahatma Gandhi and the life work of this author. Her essay was written before the brutal murder of George Floyd and the international protests that began in America as cries for social and racial justice. Now we have a new imperative for Gandhi's call because everyone has a right to breathe.
A Future Worth Having: Somatic Ethics of Flow and Curiosity
Ecological well-being with understanding of the body as part of a nature-culture continuum motivate the examples of this essay. Place Dance site-specific improvisations show that learning through curiosity is vital to somatic encounters and ethics. Virtue ethics and value theory position this work where values arise first as possibilities or promises actualized in our lives and dances but not guaranteed. Here we recognize an abundance of somatic values as guides to consider in a future worth having.
Back to the Dance Itself: In Three Acts
Back to the things themselves I cry or else philosophy will die. My cry is an ontological one asking as constitutive phenomenology does ‘what is this thing called “dance”made of’? How do we live consciousness in dance? Let me count the ways. In its aim to rescue consciousness and experience as key concerns of philosophy phenomenology is no stranger to conceptual analysis but not as a science. At the same time definitional work is key in the performance of phenomenology with the experiential study of things (anything) being basic. How does meaning arise in dance for instance and why is intentionality important? What is the difference between movement and action? What are the materials of dance? Or shall we assume that dance is wholly immaterial? These are fundamental questions of philosophical enquiry in phenomenology that interest me deeply in this essay even as I have engaged phenomenology for 49 years and am still learning. Phenomenology is not a philosophy of closure and in this spirit is being developed on several fronts in dance as recent Intellect journals show Dance Movement and Spiritualities 2:2 and Dance and Somatic Practices 8:2. I hope to contribute further in this endeavour. When I first encountered non-dual discourses of ‘the lived body’ and ‘pre-objective world’ I realized what a goldmine this represented for bodily oriented studies. I barely scratch the surface here or in the wider scope of Dance and the Lived Body (1987) and Dancing Identity: Metaphysics in Motion (2004). Since Edmund Husserl's initiation of phenomenology questions regarding normative understandings of body self materiality and subjectivity continue. Consciousness is shaped or we could say ‘intended’ in countless ways. This has consequences for understanding somatic movement arts as a field of study as we take up.
Attunement and Evanescence
The following essay is both subjective and theoretic based on personal conviction and also an enduring fascination with the potentials of dancing relative to Buddhist philosophy. Butoh the postmodern dance of Japan appears in context especially where it relates to the terms of the title. Zen poetry in the form of haiku dots the essay throughout. We also note that in Japan last names come first.
Mind Matters: Mind as Portal and Precarity in Somatic Experience
‘Mind Matters’ rejects the notion that body and mind are bridged or somehow connected in movement. Rather they embody synergistically constantly emerging in co-creation. It is typically supposed that minds think while bodies feel but this work holds that minds don't just think; they feel while they think and what they think. Images arise subjectively in the process and they speak to the body thus to soul and spirit. To write about image as a matter of consciousness is to push the boundaries of mind towards individual character spirit or personae. Images made of words sounds shapes and senses have the opportunity to linger and grow in conscious modes of movement; consequently the somatic cultivation of mind in movement and the arrival of ethics.
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.