A Cruel Theatre of Self-Immolations
A Cruel Theatre of Self-Immolations

Author: Grzegorz Ziółkowski

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-02-13

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0429602227

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A Cruel Theatre of Self-Immolations investigates contemporary protest self-burnings and their echoes across culture. The book provides a conceptual frame for the phenomenon and an annotated, comprehensive timeline of suicide protests by fire, supplemented with notes on artworks inspired by or devoted to individual cases. The core of the publication consists of six case studies of these ultimate acts, augmented with analyses and interpretations hailing from the visual arts, film, theatre, architecture, and literature. By examining responses to these events within an interdisciplinary frame, Ziółkowski highlights the phenomenon’s global reach and creates a broad, yet in-depth, exploration of the problems that most often prompt these self-burnings, such as religious discrimination and harassment, war and its horrors, the brutality and indoctrination of authoritarian regimes and the apathy they produce, as well as the exploitation of the so-called "subalterns" and their exclusion from mainstream economic systems. Of interest to scholars from an array of fields, from theatre and performance, to visual art, to religion and politics, A Cruel Theatre of Self-Immolations offers a unique look at voluntary, demonstrative, and radical performances of shock and subversion.

Performing Arousal
Performing Arousal

Author: Julia Listengarten

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-12-16

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1350155640

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This book considers arousal as a mode of theoretical and artistic inquiry to encourage new ways of staging and examining bodies in performance across artistic disciplines, modern history, and cultural contexts. Looking at traditional drama and theatre, but also visual arts, performance activism, and arts-based community engagement, this collection draws on the complicated relationship between arousing images and the frames of their representability to address what constitutes arousal in a variety of connotations. It examines arousal as a project of social, scientific, cultural, and artistic experimentation, and discusses how our perception of arousal has transformed over the last century. Probing “what arouses” in relation to the ethics of representation, the book investigates the connections between arousal and pleasures of voyeurism, underscores the political impact of aroused bodies, and explores how arousal can turn the body into a mediated object.

A Cruel Theatre of Self-Immolations
A Cruel Theatre of Self-Immolations

Author: Grzegorz Ziólkowski

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-12-13

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 9781032238456

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A Cruel Theatre of Self-Immolations investigates contemporary protest self-burnings and their echoes across culture. The book provides a conceptual frame for the phenomenon and an annotated, comprehensive timeline of suicide protests by fire, supplemented with notes on artworks inspired by or devoted to individual cases. The core of the publication consists of six case studies of these ultimate acts, augmented with analyses and interpretations hailing from the visual arts, film, theatre, architecture, and literature. By examining responses to these events within an interdisciplinary frame, Ziólkowski highlights the phenomenon's global reach and creates a broad, yet in-depth, exploration of the problems that most often prompt these self-burnings, such as religious discrimination and harassment, war and its horrors, the brutality and indoctrination of authoritarian regimes and the apathy they produce, as well as the exploitation of the so-called subalterns and their exclusion from mainstream economic systems. Of interest to scholars from an array of fields, from theatre and performance, to visual art, to religion and politics, A Cruel Theatre of Self-Immolations offers a unique look at voluntary, demonstrative, and radical performances of shock and subversion.

Shielding
Shielding

Author: Sandra Noeth

Publisher: transcript Verlag

Published: 2024-09-30

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 3839472806

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Shielding offers a collection of conceptual approaches through which bodies, intentionally or involuntarily, become shields. Bodies take on an ambivalent status in the process: they serve as protection or a buffer and express resistance. At the same time, they turn and are turned into weapons when they intervene on the ground and politically, in war, conflicts, and through activism. The contributorsaddress the idea of bodily integrity, both in a material sense and with regard to the symbolic and ethical relations that a body entangles. The book engages with ongoing debates around the re-evaluation of corporeality and embodiment in contemporary socio-political contexts.

Staging Detection
Staging Detection

Author: Isabel Stowell-Kaplan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-07-29

Total Pages: 173

ISBN-13: 1000418774

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Staging Detection reveals how the new figure of the stage detective emerged in nineteenth-century Britain. The first book to explore the productive intersections between detection and performance across a range of Victorian plays, Staging Detection foregrounds the role of the stage detective in shaping important theatrical modes of the period, from popular melodrama to society comedy. Beginning in 1863 with Tom Taylor’s blockbuster play, The Ticket-of-Leave Man, the book criss-crosses London following the earliest performances of stage detectives. Centring the work of playwrights, novelists, critics and actors, from Sarah Lane and Horace Wigan to Wilkie Collins and Oscar Wilde, Staging Detection sheds new light on Victorian acting styles, furthers our understanding of melodrama, and resituates the famous Wildean dandy as a successor to the stage detective. Drawing on histories of masculinity and gender performance as well as developing scientific theory and nineteenth-century visual culture, Staging Detection shows how the earliest stage portrayals of the detective shaped broader Victorian debates concerning fraud, omniscience and earned authority. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre history, Victorian literature and popular culture – as well as anyone with an interest in the figure of the detective.

The Motional Improvisation of Al Wunder
The Motional Improvisation of Al Wunder

Author: H.R. Elliott

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-05-16

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 1351587978

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The Motional Improvisation of Al Wunder takes readers on a journey through the life history, creative genealogies and unique working processes of one of the master teachers of Euro-American postmodern movement-based improvisational performance who has, until now, received scant critical attention. The book offers a long overdue examination of the significant impact made by an important figure on grassroots movement-based improvisational performance in 1960s/1970s America and in Australia from the 1980s onwards. It revisits the work of groundbreaking New York choreographer Alwin Nikolais, with whom Wunder trained and for whom he later taught in the 1960s; covers collaborations with founders of ‘Action Theater’ Ruth Zaporah and ‘Motivity Aerial Dance’ Terry Sendgraff as part of the explosion of improvisation in San Francisco in the 1970s and tracks the consolidation of a unique pedagogy that would see hundreds of students learn how to map their performative creativity in Melbourne from the 1980s onwards. It conducts a fascinating investigation into the wellsprings of Wunder’s approach to improvised performance as an end in itself, covering teaching innovations such as his use of the Hum Drum, positive feedback, personal power sources and articulators. It includes valuable contributions from a number of ex-students and established Australian artists in dance, music and visual art who share the profound impact Wunder has made on their creative practices. This book will be a valuable resource to movement/dance improvisation students and teachers at undergraduate and postgraduate level and independent artists drawn to movement improvisation as performance.

Dances of José Limón and Erick Hawkins
Dances of José Limón and Erick Hawkins

Author: James Moreno

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-04-19

Total Pages: 159

ISBN-13: 1351403575

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Dances of José Limón and Erick Hawkins examines stagings of masculinity, whiteness, and Latinidad in the work of US modern dance choreographers, José Limón (1908-1972) and Erick Hawkins (1908-1994). Focusing on the period between 1945 to 1980, this book analyzes Limón and Hawkins’ work during a time when modern dance was forming new relationships to academic and governmental institutions, mainstream markets, and notions of embodiment. The pre-war expressionist tradition championed by Limón and Hawkins’ mentors faced multiple challenges as ballet and Broadway complicated the tenets of modernism and emerging modern dance choreographers faced an increasingly conservative post-war culture framed by the Cold War and Red Scare. By bringing the work of Limón and Hawkins together in one volume, Dances of José Limón and Erick Hawkins accesses two distinct approaches to training and performance that proved highly influential in creating post-war dialogues on race, gender, and embodiment. This book approaches Limón and Hawkins’ training regimes and performing strategies as social practices symbiotically entwined with their geo-political backgrounds. Limón’s queer and Latino heritage is put into dialogue with Hawkins’ straight and European heritage to examine how their embodied social histories worked co-constitutively with their training regimes and performance strategies to produce influential stagings of masculinity, whiteness, and Latinidad.

Code-Choice and Identity Construction on Stage
Code-Choice and Identity Construction on Stage

Author: Sirkku Aaltonen

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-06-01

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 1351613685

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Code-Choice and Identity Construction on Stage challenges the general assumption that language is only one of the codes employed in a theatrical performance; Sirkku Aaltonen changes the perspective to the audience, foregrounding the chosen language variety as a trigger for their reactions. Theatre is ‘the most public of arts’, closely interwoven with contemporary society, and language is a crucial tool for establishing order. In this book, Aaltonen explores the ways in which chosen languages on stage can lead to rejection or tolerance in diglossic situations, where one language is considered unequal to another. Through a selection of carefully chosen case studies, the socio-political rather than artistic motivation behind code-choice emerges. By identifying common features of these contexts and the implications of theatre in the wider world, this book sheds light on high versus low culture, the role of translation, and the significance of traditional and emerging theatrical conventions. This intriguing study encompassing Ireland, Scotland, Quebec, Finland and Egypt, cleverly employs the perspective of familiarising the foreign and is invaluable reading for those interested in theatre and performance, translation, and the connection between language and society.

Shakespeare in Singapore
Shakespeare in Singapore

Author: Philip Smith

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-01-29

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 0429772114

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Shakespeare in Singapore provides the first detailed and sustained study of the role of Shakespeare in Singaporean theatre, education, and culture. This book tracks the role and development of Shakespeare in education from the founding of modern Singapore to the present day, drawing on sources such as government and school records, the entire span of Singapore's newspaper archives, playbills, interviews with educators and theatre professionals, and existing academic sources. By uniting the critical interest in Singaporean theatre with the substantial body of scholarship that concerns global Shakespeare, the author overs a broad, yet in-depth, exploration of the ways in which Singaporean approaches to Shakespeare have been shaped by, and respond to, cultural work going on elsewhere in Asia. A vital read for all students and scholars of Shakespeare, Shakespeare in Singapore offers a unique examination of the cultural impact of Shakespeare, beyond its usual footing in the Western world.

Staging and Re-cycling
Staging and Re-cycling

Author: John Keefe

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-06-01

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 1000073092

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In Staging and Re- cycling , John Keefe and Knut Ove Arntzen re-visit and reappraise a selection of their work to explore how the retrieval, re-approaching and re-framing of material can offer pathways for new work and new thinking. The book includes a collection of reprinted and first-published (although previously presented) textual material interspersed with editorial material – reflective essays from John and Knut on these pieces from the archives and original essays from invited scholars that explore the theme of repetition and re-cycling. The project has a number of aims: to suggest how the status of ‘new’ with regard to academic and staged dramaturgical materials may be reframed; to re-examine these through certain lenses and concepts (re-cycling; re-working; the spectator; landscape, post- and other dramaturgies); to explore the possibilities of critique offered by particular modes of juxtaposition, dialogue and dialectic; to offer further provocations to received ideas; and to retrieve and re-approach material, once published or presented, that becomes ‘lost’ in archives or on library shelves. As shown here, the role of the hyphen acts as an indicator to the status of ‘re-’ in relation to the ‘new’. Written for scholars and academics, researchers, undergraduate and postgraduate students, and practitioners working in all forms for theatre and performance, Staging and Re-cycling suggests a new form of dialogue between work, authors and readers, and draws out threads that extend back into the past and potentially forward into the future.