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Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance
by Jon McKenzie'Performance' has become one of the key terms for the new century. But what do we mean by 'performance'? In today's world it can refer to experimental art; productivity in the workplace; and the functionality of technological systems. Do these disparate fields bear any relation to each other?In Perform or Else Jon McKenzie asserts that there is a relationship cultural, organisational, and technological performance. In this theoretical tour de force McKenzie demonstrates that all three paradigms operate together to create powerful and contradictory pressures to 'perform...or else'. This is an urgent and important intervention in contemporary critical thinking. It will profoundly shape our understanding of twenty-first century structures of power and knowledge.
Performance (New Directions in Theatre)
by Julian Hilton...this superb book should be required reading for every drama and literature student and all trainee actors and directors.' Times Higher Educational Supplement
Performance: The Ethics and the Politics of Conservation and Care, Volume I (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)
by Hanna B. Hölling Jules Pelta Feldman Emilie MagninThis book focuses on performance and performance-based artworks as seenthrough the lens of conservation, which has long been overlooked in the largertheoretical debates about whether and how performance remains. Unraveling the complexities involved in the conservation of performance,Performance: The Ethics and the Politics of Conservation and Care (vol. 1)brings this new understanding to bear in examining performance as an object ofstudy, experience, acquisition, and care. In so doing, it presents both theoreticalframeworks and functional paradigms for thinking about—and enacting—theconservation of performance. Further, while the conservation of performance isundertheorized, performance is nevertheless increasingly entering the artmarket and the museum, meaning that there is an urgent need for discourse onhow to care for these works long-term. In recent years, a few pioneering conservators,curators, and scholars have begun to create frameworks for the longtermcare of performance. This volume presents, explicates, and contextualizestheir work so that a larger discourse can commence. It will thus serve the needsof conservation students and professors, for whom literature on this subject issorely needed. This interdisciplinary book thus implements a novel rethinking of performancethat will challenge and revitalize its conception in many fields, such as art history,theater, performance studies, heritage studies, and anthropology.
Performance: An electrifying memoir from the dark heart of London's Soho
by Ruth Ivo'Stunning . . . a love letter to the aliveness of London and its nightlife' SOPHIE MACKINTOSH'A wild night of a book' OCTAVIA BRIGHTAs 'Ruby', Ruth Ivo was a successful burlesque performer, living in blissful bohemian squalor on a decommissioned military boat and spending her evenings unfolding from a Fabergé egg in various London clubs. Her life changes when she is asked to become show director at 'The Club', a place as secretive as it is notorious. Before long, she's trawling Soho back streets for props and knocking back shots with movie stars and billionaires. But as her nights unravel in a maelstrom of glamour and chaos behind the scenes, she feels her grasp on reality slipping through her fingers, and her soul wrung out by decadence. Under pressure to produce shows each more shocking than the last, she watches the performers under her care contort themselves before baying crowds. When a devastating event leaves her unmoored, Ruby has to wonder if she's sold her soul to the devil . . . or become him. Performance is a visceral and exquisitely written portrait of a place that has come to embody the excesses of late capitalism; of tumbling willingly down the rabbit hole, only to lose yourself in the dark.______'Performance is theatrical, immersive and utterly heartbreaking. An astonishing debut' CHRISTIE WATSON'A story this addictive, it's hard not to consume it in one go' RHYANNON STYLES'I devoured this book in two days, all of its twisting corners and dark alleyways. I know Soho like the back of my hand and this brought that lost world back in vivid colours' JODIE HARSH
Performance (BFI Film Classics)
by Colin MacCabeDirected by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, and starring James Fox, Mick Jagger and Anita Pallenberg, Performance was filmed in 1968, but not released until 1970. When its studio backers saw the director's cut, they were so shocked by the film's sexual explicitness and formal radicalism that attempts were made to destroy the negative. In his study of the film, Colin MacCabe draws on extensive interviews with surviving participants to present the definitive history of the making of Performance, as well as a new interpretation of its consummate artistry.This edition includes an afterword reflecting on the film 50 years on, and the reasons for its continuing classic status. Performance's extraordinary power, suggests MacCabe, comes partly from its entrancing portrayal of London in the late 1960s, but primarily from its full scale assault on any notion of normality, not simply at the level of content but also of form. The remarkable ending, when the thriller and the psychodrama merge into one, means that there is no comfortable resolution to the film's meanings. Performance is one of those rare narrative film which takes us into the complexity of sound and image without the comforting guarantee of a safe exit.
Performance (BFI Film Classics)
by Colin MacCabeDirected by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, and starring James Fox, Mick Jagger and Anita Pallenberg, Performance was filmed in 1968, but not released until 1970. When its studio backers saw the director's cut, they were so shocked by the film's sexual explicitness and formal radicalism that attempts were made to destroy the negative. In his study of the film, Colin MacCabe draws on extensive interviews with surviving participants to present the definitive history of the making of Performance, as well as a new interpretation of its consummate artistry.This edition includes an afterword reflecting on the film 50 years on, and the reasons for its continuing classic status. Performance's extraordinary power, suggests MacCabe, comes partly from its entrancing portrayal of London in the late 1960s, but primarily from its full scale assault on any notion of normality, not simply at the level of content but also of form. The remarkable ending, when the thriller and the psychodrama merge into one, means that there is no comfortable resolution to the film's meanings. Performance is one of those rare narrative film which takes us into the complexity of sound and image without the comforting guarantee of a safe exit.
The Performance: A Novel
by Claire Thomas'A potent meditation on the intensity of women's lives'Charlotte Wood, author of The Weekend'Thomas writes these women with such wisdom and compassion, that by the end we are all transformed'Claire Fuller, author of Bitter Orange'An intimate, intensely brooding novel: at once claustrophobic and yet revelatory. Thomas gently questions the certainties of modern life that so many of us take for granted'Guinevere Glasfurd, author of The Year Without Summer 'Read it as soon as you possibly can'Emily Bitto, author of The Strays The false cold of the theatre makes it hard to imagine the heavy wind outside in the real world, the ash air pressing onto the city from the nearby hills where bushfires are taking hold.The house lights lower.The auditorium feels hopeful in the darkness.As bushfires rage outside the city, three women watch a performance of a Beckett play.Margot is a successful professor, preoccupied by her fraught relationship with her ailing husband. Ivy is a philanthropist with a troubled past, distracted by the snoring man beside her. Summer is a young theatre usher, anxious about the safety of her girlfriend in the fire zone.As the performance unfolds, so does each woman's story. By the time the curtain falls, they will all have a new understanding of the world beyond the stage.
Performance: The Ethics and the Politics of Conservation and Care, Volume I (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)
This book focuses on performance and performance-based artworks as seenthrough the lens of conservation, which has long been overlooked in the largertheoretical debates about whether and how performance remains. Unraveling the complexities involved in the conservation of performance,Performance: The Ethics and the Politics of Conservation and Care (vol. 1)brings this new understanding to bear in examining performance as an object ofstudy, experience, acquisition, and care. In so doing, it presents both theoreticalframeworks and functional paradigms for thinking about—and enacting—theconservation of performance. Further, while the conservation of performance isundertheorized, performance is nevertheless increasingly entering the artmarket and the museum, meaning that there is an urgent need for discourse onhow to care for these works long-term. In recent years, a few pioneering conservators,curators, and scholars have begun to create frameworks for the longtermcare of performance. This volume presents, explicates, and contextualizestheir work so that a larger discourse can commence. It will thus serve the needsof conservation students and professors, for whom literature on this subject issorely needed. This interdisciplinary book thus implements a novel rethinking of performancethat will challenge and revitalize its conception in many fields, such as art history,theater, performance studies, heritage studies, and anthropology.
Performance Activism: Precursors and Contemporary Pioneers (Palgrave Studies In Play, Performance, Learning, and Development)
by Dan FriedmanThis is the first book length study of performance activism. While Performance Studies recognizes the universality of human performance in daily life, what is specifically under investigation here is performance as an activity intentionally entered into as a means of engaging social issues and conflicts, that is, as an ensemble activity by which we re-construct/transform social reality. Performance Activism: Precursors and Contemporary Pioneers provides a global overview of the growing interface of performance with education, therapy, conflict resolution, civic engagement, community development and social justice activism. It combines an historical study of the processes by which, over the course of the 20th Century, performance has been loosened from the institutional constraints of the theatre with a mosaic-like overview of the diverse work/play of contemporary performance activists around the world. Performance Activism will be of interest to theatre and cultural historians, performance practitioners and researchers, psychologists and sociologists, educators and youth workers, community organizers and political activists.
Performance Affects: Applied Theatre and the End of Effect
by J. ThompsonPerformance Affects explores performance projects in disaster and war zones to argue that joy, beauty and celebration should be the inspiration for the politics of community-based or participatory performance practice, seeking to realign the field of Applied Theatre away from effects towards an affective role, connected to sensations of pleasure.
Performance Analysis: An Introductory Coursebook
by Colin Counsell Laurie WolfThis revolutionary introductory performance studies coursebook brings together classic texts in critical theory and shows how these texts can be used in the analysis of performance. The editors put their texts to work in examining such key topics as: * decoding the sign * the politics of performance * the politics of gender and sexual identity * performing ethnicity * the performing body * the space of performance * audience and spectatorship * the borders of performance. Each reading is clearly introduced, making often complex critical texts accessible at an introductory level and immediately applicavble to the field of performance. The ideas explored within these readings are further clarified through innovative, carefully tested exercises and activities.
Performance Analysis: An Introductory Coursebook
by Colin Counsell Laurie WolfThis revolutionary introductory performance studies coursebook brings together classic texts in critical theory and shows how these texts can be used in the analysis of performance. The editors put their texts to work in examining such key topics as: * decoding the sign * the politics of performance * the politics of gender and sexual identity * performing ethnicity * the performing body * the space of performance * audience and spectatorship * the borders of performance. Each reading is clearly introduced, making often complex critical texts accessible at an introductory level and immediately applicavble to the field of performance. The ideas explored within these readings are further clarified through innovative, carefully tested exercises and activities.
Performance and Civic Engagement
by Ananda Breed Tim PrentkiThis book explores 'civic engagement' as a politically active encounter between institutions, individuals and art practices that addresses the public sphere on a civic level across physical and virtual spaces. Taking a multidisciplinary approach, it tracks across the overlapping discourses of politics, cultural geography and performance, investigating how and why physical and digital spaces can be analysed and utilised to develop new art forms that challenge traditional notions of how performance is political and how politics are performative. Across three sections - Politicising Communities, Applying Digital Agency and Performing Landscapes and Identities - the ten chapters and three interviews cover a wide variety of international perspectives, all informed by innovative ways of addressing the current crisis of social fragmentation through performance. Providing access to many debates on the theory and practice of new media, this book is of significance to readers from a broad set of academic disciplines, including politics, sociology, geography, and performance studies.
Performance and Civic Engagement
by Ananda Breed Tim PrentkiThis book explores 'civic engagement' as a politically active encounter between institutions, individuals and art practices that addresses the public sphere on a civic level across physical and virtual spaces. Taking a multidisciplinary approach, it tracks across the overlapping discourses of politics, cultural geography and performance, investigating how and why physical and digital spaces can be analysed and utilised to develop new art forms that challenge traditional notions of how performance is political and how politics are performative. Across three sections - Politicising Communities, Applying Digital Agency and Performing Landscapes and Identities - the ten chapters and three interviews cover a wide variety of international perspectives, all informed by innovative ways of addressing the current crisis of social fragmentation through performance. Providing access to many debates on the theory and practice of new media, this book is of significance to readers from a broad set of academic disciplines, including politics, sociology, geography, and performance studies.
Performance and Cosmopolitics: Cross-Cultural Transactions in Australasia (Studies in International Performance)
by H. Gilbert J. LoThis ground-breaking study of cross-cultural theatre in the Australasian region focuses on theatrical events and practices in avant-garde and mainstream contexts. It explores the cultural and political dimensions of Australia's engagement with Asia and sheds light on international arts marketing and trends in cross-cultural performance training.
Performance and Cultural Politics
by Elin DiamondPerformance and Cultural Politics is a groundbreaking collection of essays which explore the historical and cultural territories of performance, written by the foremost scholars in the field. The essays, exploring performance art, theatre, music and dance, range from Oscar Wilde to Eric Clapton; from the Rose Theatre to U.S. Holocaust museums. The topic includes: * Sex Play: Stereotype, Pose and Dildo * Grave Performances: The Cultural Politics of Memory * Genealogies: Critical Performances * Identity Politics: Passing, Carnival and the Law In the concluding section, `Performer's Performance', performance artist Robbie McCauley offers the practitioner's perspective on performance studies. Interdisciplinary, thought-provoking and rich in new ideas, Performance and Cultural Politics is a landmark in the emerging field of performance studies.
Performance and Cultural Politics
by Elin DiamondPerformance and Cultural Politics is a groundbreaking collection of essays which explore the historical and cultural territories of performance, written by the foremost scholars in the field. The essays, exploring performance art, theatre, music and dance, range from Oscar Wilde to Eric Clapton; from the Rose Theatre to U.S. Holocaust museums. The topic includes: * Sex Play: Stereotype, Pose and Dildo * Grave Performances: The Cultural Politics of Memory * Genealogies: Critical Performances * Identity Politics: Passing, Carnival and the Law In the concluding section, `Performer's Performance', performance artist Robbie McCauley offers the practitioner's perspective on performance studies. Interdisciplinary, thought-provoking and rich in new ideas, Performance and Cultural Politics is a landmark in the emerging field of performance studies.
Performance and Dementia: A Cultural Response to Care
by Nicky HattonThis book explores how theatre and performance can change the way we think about dementia and some of the environments in which dementia care takes place. Drawing on the author’s creative practice and other performance projects in the UK, it explores some of the challenges and opportunities of making performance in care homes. Rather than focusing on the transformative potential of the arts, it asks how artists can engage with the different types of relationships that exist in a care community. These include the relationships that residents and staff have with each other as well as relationships with care spaces. Exploring the intersection between participatory performance and the everyday creativity of a care home, it argues that the arts have a cultural role to play in supporting dementia care as a relational practice. Moreover, it celebrates the intrinsic creativity of caregiving and how principles and practices of care work can inform theatre and performance in diverse ways.
Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin: Out of the Natural Order
by Jane GoodallPerformance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin reveals the ways in which the major themes of evolution were taken up in the performing arts during Darwin's adult lifetime and in the generation after his death. The period 1830-1900 was the formative period for evolutionary ideas. While scientists and theorists investigated the law and order of nature, show business was more concerned with what was out of the natural order. Missing links and throwbacks, freak taxonomies and exotic races were favourite subject matter for the burgeoning variety theatre movement. Focusing on popular theatre forms in London, New York and Paris, Jane Goodall shows how they were interwoven with the developing debate about human evolution. With this book, Goodall contributes an important new angle to the debates surrounding the history of evolution. She reveals that, far from creating widespread culture shock, Darwinian theory tapped into some of the long-standing themes of popular performance and was a source for diverse and sometimes hilarious explorations.
Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin: Out of the Natural Order
by Jane GoodallPerformance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin reveals the ways in which the major themes of evolution were taken up in the performing arts during Darwin's adult lifetime and in the generation after his death. The period 1830-1900 was the formative period for evolutionary ideas. While scientists and theorists investigated the law and order of nature, show business was more concerned with what was out of the natural order. Missing links and throwbacks, freak taxonomies and exotic races were favourite subject matter for the burgeoning variety theatre movement. Focusing on popular theatre forms in London, New York and Paris, Jane Goodall shows how they were interwoven with the developing debate about human evolution. With this book, Goodall contributes an important new angle to the debates surrounding the history of evolution. She reveals that, far from creating widespread culture shock, Darwinian theory tapped into some of the long-standing themes of popular performance and was a source for diverse and sometimes hilarious explorations.
Performance and Identity in Irish Stand-Up Comedy: The Comic 'i'
by S. CollearyOne of the cultural phenomena to occur in Ireland in the last two decades has been the highly successful growth of stand-up comedy as a popular entertainment genre. This book examines stand-up comedy from the perspective of the narrated self, through the prism of the fabricated comedy persona, including Tommy Tiernan, Dylan Moran and Maeve Higgins.
Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field
by Sarah Bay-Cheng Jennifer Parker-Starbuck David Z. SaltzThis timely collaboration by three prominent scholars of media-based performance presents a new model for understanding and analyzing theater and performance created and experienced where time-based, live events, and mediated technologies converge–particularly those works conceived and performed explicitly within the context of contemporary digital culture. Performance and Media introduces readers to the complexity of new media-based performances and how best to understand and contextualize the work. Each author presents a different model for how best to approach this work, while inviting readers to develop their own critical frameworks, i.e., taxonomies, to analyze both past and emerging performances. Performance and Media capitalizes on the advantages of digital media and online collaborations, while simultaneously creating a responsive and integrated resource for research, scholarship, and teaching. Unlike other monographs or edited collections, this book presents the concept of multiple taxonomies as a model for criticism in a dynamic and rapidly changing field.
Performance and Migration (4x45)
by Emma CoxThis third volume in the 4x45 series addresses some of the most current and urgent performance work in contemporary theatre practice. As people from all backgrounds and cultures criss-cross the globe with an ever-growing series of pushes and pulls guiding their movements, this book explores contemporary artists who have responded to various forms of migration in their theatre, performance and multimedia work. The volume comprises two lectures and two curated conversations with theatre-makers and artists. Danish scholar of contemporary visual culture, Anne Ring Petersen, brings artistic and political aspects of ‘postmigration’ to the fore in an essay on the innovations of Shermin Langhoff at Berlin’s Ballhaus Naunynstraße, and the decolonial work of Danish-Trinidadian artist Jeannette Ehlers. The racialised and gendered exclusions associated with navigating ‘the industry’ for non-white female and non-white non-binary artists are interrogated in Melbourne-based theatre scholar Paul Rae’s interview with two Australian performers of Indian heritage, Sonya Suares and Raina Peterson. UK playwrights Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson of Good Chance Theatre discuss their work in dialogue, and with their colleague, Iranian animator and illustrator Majid Adin. Emma Cox’s essay on Irish artist Richard Mosse’s video installation, Incoming, discusses thermographic ‘heat signatures’ as a means of seeing migrants and the imperative of envisioning global climate change. An accessible and forward-thinking exploration of one of contemporary performance’s most pressing influences, 4x45 | Performance and Migration is a unique resource for scholars, students and practitioners of Theatre Studies, Performance Studies and Human Geography.
Performance and Migration (4x45)
by Emma CoxThis third volume in the 4x45 series addresses some of the most current and urgent performance work in contemporary theatre practice. As people from all backgrounds and cultures criss-cross the globe with an ever-growing series of pushes and pulls guiding their movements, this book explores contemporary artists who have responded to various forms of migration in their theatre, performance and multimedia work. The volume comprises two lectures and two curated conversations with theatre-makers and artists. Danish scholar of contemporary visual culture, Anne Ring Petersen, brings artistic and political aspects of ‘postmigration’ to the fore in an essay on the innovations of Shermin Langhoff at Berlin’s Ballhaus Naunynstraße, and the decolonial work of Danish-Trinidadian artist Jeannette Ehlers. The racialised and gendered exclusions associated with navigating ‘the industry’ for non-white female and non-white non-binary artists are interrogated in Melbourne-based theatre scholar Paul Rae’s interview with two Australian performers of Indian heritage, Sonya Suares and Raina Peterson. UK playwrights Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson of Good Chance Theatre discuss their work in dialogue, and with their colleague, Iranian animator and illustrator Majid Adin. Emma Cox’s essay on Irish artist Richard Mosse’s video installation, Incoming, discusses thermographic ‘heat signatures’ as a means of seeing migrants and the imperative of envisioning global climate change. An accessible and forward-thinking exploration of one of contemporary performance’s most pressing influences, 4x45 | Performance and Migration is a unique resource for scholars, students and practitioners of Theatre Studies, Performance Studies and Human Geography.
Performance and Place (Performance Interventions)
by L. Hill H. ParisWritten by both practitioners and scholars, this significant and timely collection explores the sites of contemporary performance, and the notion of place. The volume examines how we experience performance's varied sites as part of the fabric of the art work itself, whether they are institutional or transient, real or online.