Female Corporeal Performances
Author: Stavroula Constantinou
Publisher:
Published: 2005
Total Pages: 240
ISBN-13:
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Plotting with Eros
Author: Ingela Nilsson
Publisher: Museum Tusculanum Press
Published: 2009
Total Pages: 294
ISBN-13: 8763507900
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis volume aims at providing both students and scholars with a series of discussions of the long tradition of reading and writing the erotic, seen from a number of different perspectives.
Performing women
Author: Susannah Crowder
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2018-08-31
Total Pages: 262
ISBN-13: 1526106418
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book takes on a key problem in the history of drama: the ‘exceptional’ staging of the life of Catherine of Siena by a female actor and a female patron in 1468 Metz. Exploring the lives and performances of these previously anonymous women, the book brings the elusive figure of the female performer to centre stage. It integrates new approaches to drama, gender and patronage with a performance methodology to explore how the women of fifteenth-century Metz enacted varied kinds of performance that extended beyond the theatre. For example, decades before the 1468 play, Joan of Arc returned from the grave in the form of an impersonator named Claude. Offering a new paradigm of female performance that positions women at the core of public culture, Performing women is essential reading for scholars of pre-modern women and drama, and is also relevant to lecturers and students of late-medieval performance, religion and memory.
Dancing Women
Author: Usha Iyer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2020-10-02
Total Pages: 336
ISBN-13: 0190938765
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema, an ambitious study of two of South Asia's most popular cultural forms cinema and dance historicizes and theorizes the material and cultural production of film dance, a staple attraction of popular Hindi cinema. It explores how the dynamic figurations of the body wrought by cinematic dance forms from the 1930s to the 1990s produce unique constructions of gender, sexuality, stardom, and spectacle. By charting discursive shifts through figurations of dancer-actresses, their publicly performed movements, private training, and the cinematic and extra-diegetic narratives woven around their dancing bodies, the book considers the "women's question" via new mobilities corpo-realized by dancing women. Some of the central figures animating this corporeal history are Azurie, Sadhona Bose, Vyjayanthimala, Helen, Waheeda Rehman, Madhuri Dixit, and Saroj Khan, whose performance histories fold and intersect with those of other dancing women, including devadasis and tawaifs, Eurasian actresses, oriental dancers, vamps, choreographers, and backup dancers. Through a material history of the labor of producing on-screen dance, theoretical frameworks that emphasize collaboration, such as the "choreomusicking body" and "dance musicalization," aesthetic approaches to embodiment drawing on treatises like the Natya Sastra and the Abhinaya Darpana, and formal analyses of cine-choreographic "techno-spectacles," Dancing Women offers a variegated, textured history of cinema, dance, and music. Tracing the gestural genealogies of film dance produces a very different narrative of Bombay cinema, and indeed of South Asian cultural modernities, by way of a corporeal history co-choreographed by a network of remarkable dancing women.
Women and Embodied Mythmaking in Irish Theatre
Author: Shonagh Hill
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2019-08-29
Total Pages: 269
ISBN-13: 1108618278
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe rich legacy of women's contributions to Irish theatre is traditionally viewed through a male-dominated literary canon and mythmaking, thus arguably silencing their work. In this timely book, Shonagh Hill proposes a feminist genealogy which brings new perspectives to women's mythmaking across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The performances considered include the tableaux vivants performed by the Inghinidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Ireland), plays written by Alice Milligan, Maud Gonne, Lady Augusta Gregory, Eva Gore-Booth, Mary Devenport O'Neill, Mary Elizabeth Burke-Kennedy, Paula Meehan, Edna O'Brien and Marina Carr, as well as plays translated, adapted and performed by Olwen Fouéré. The theatrical work discussed resists the occlusion of women's cultural engagement that results from confinement to idealised myths of femininity. This is realised through embodied mythmaking: a process which exposes how bodies bear the consequences of these myths, while refusing to accept the female body as passive bearer of inscription through the assertion of a creative female corporeality.
In the Presence of Power
Author: Maurice A. Pomerantz
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2017-12-05
Total Pages: 302
ISBN-13: 1479879363
DOWNLOAD EBOOKInsights into power, spectacle, and performance in the courts of Middle Eastern rulers In recent decades, scholars have produced much new research on courtly life in medieval Europe, but studies on imperial and royal courts across the Middle East have received much less attention, particularly for courts before 1500AD. In the Presence of Power, however, sheds new light on courtly life across the region. This insightful, exploratory collection of essays uncovers surprising commonalities across a broad swath of cultures. The pre-modern period in this volume includes roughly seven centuries, opening with the first dynasty of Islam, the Umayyads, whose reign marked an important watershed for Late Antique culture, and closing with the rule of the so-called “gunpowder” empires of the Ottomans and Safavids over much of the Near East in the sixteenth century. In between, this volume locates similarities across the Western Medieval, Byzantine and Islamicate courtly cultures, spanning a vast history and geography to demonstrate the important cross-pollinations that occurred between their literary and cultural legacies. This study does not presume the presence of one shared courtly institution across time and space, but rather seeks to understand the different ways in which contemporaries experienced and spoke about these places of power and performance. Adopting a very broad view of performances, In the Presence of Power includes exuberant expressions of love in Arabic stories, shadow plays in Mamluk Cairo, Byzantine storytelling, religious food traditions in Christian Cyprus, advice, and political and ethnographic performances of power.
Literature, Performance, and Somaesthetics
Author: Katarzyna Lisowska
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Published: 2017-05-11
Total Pages: 299
ISBN-13: 1443892262
DOWNLOAD EBOOKLiterature, Performance, and Somaesthetics views textual and extra-textual worlds as intimately connected, as forming a continuum, in fact. The essays – on literature, philosophy and the arts – gathered here derive their theoretical inspirations from two realms where embodiment and agency are particularly stressed: namely, from philosophical somaesthetics, a discipline proposed by Richard Shusterman in 1999, and from performance studies, remarkable for its current expansion. In most general terms, the point of convergence for somaesthetics and performativity is their stressing the agency of the embodied and sentient human self. The contributors explore the question of agency in its various manifestations. They examine the construction of literary characters, with emphasis on the representation of their corporeality and affectivity. They look into the problem of the formation of the literary canon as en-acted rather than established, and into literary history as retold rather than re-written. They also focus on the problems of literary reception, considering it on the physical, visceral level. While showing keen interest in performance studies and somaesthetics, the authors also bring in the expertise gained in their primary fields of research. Hence, the ideas explored in their essays are drawn from philosophy, literary theory, cultural studies, psychology, and hard science. The essays here are concerned with a variety of generic forms – epic literature, lyrical poetry, tragedy, experimental novel, thriller, literary history, theological treatise, documentary, flamenco and opera – in order to outline the field in the humanities where literature, philosophy and performance can meet, and where literary studies can benefit from the approaches offered by performance studies and philosophical somaesthetics.
Emotions and Gender in Byzantine Culture
Author: Stavroula Constantinou
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2018-09-17
Total Pages: 339
ISBN-13: 3319960385
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book examines the gendered dimensions of emotions and the emotional aspects of gender within Byzantine culture and suggests possible readings of such instances. In so doing, the volume celebrates the current breadth of Byzantine gender studies while at the same time contributing to the emerging field of Byzantine emotion studies. It offers the reader an array of perspectives encompassing various sources and media, including historiography, hagiography, theological writings, epistolography, erotic literature, art objects, and illuminated manuscripts. The ten chapters cover a time span ranging from the early to the late Byzantine periods. This diversity is secured by an expanded and enriched exploration of the collection’s unifying theme of gendered emotions. The scope and breadth of the chapters also reflect the ways in which Byzantine gender and emotion have been studied thus far, while at the same time offering novel approaches that challenge established opinions in Byzantine studies.
Women's Intercultural Performance
Author: Julie Holledge
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2002-01-04
Total Pages: 358
ISBN-13: 1134688768
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis is the first in-depth examination of contemporary intercultural performance by women around the world. Contemporary feminist performance is explored in the contexts of current intercultural practices, theories and debates. Holledge and Tompkins provide ways of thinking about and analysing contemporary performance and representations of the performing, female, culturally-marked body. The book includes discussions of: * ritual performance by women from Central Australia and Korea * the cultural exchange of A Doll's House and Antigone * plays from Algeria, South Africa and Ghana * the work of the Takarazuka revue company * the market forces that govern the distribution of women and women's performance. This is an essential read for anyone studying or interested in women's performance.
An Obscure Portrait
Author: Mati Meyer
Publisher: Pindar Press
Published: 2007-12-31
Total Pages: 571
ISBN-13: 1915837227
DOWNLOAD EBOOKRecent discussions on Byzantine art have been dominated by the question of representing realia. Among these, however, the way works of art reflect the daily life of women have not received much space or attention. The present book studies various images representing women's status and her performative tasks, and their significance from the fourth century to the fall of the Empire, through analysis of archaeological evidence and works of art. It addresses a wide range of questions, some pertaining both to pictorial traditions and to their late antique antecedents, others peculiar to changing and evolving Byzantine culture and mentality. The first chapter deals with the imagery of childbearing, starting with conception and concluding with the care given to the new born and the mother. The second chapter investigates motherhood imagery (breastfeeding, child care, and child-mother intimacy) and the portrayal of women as caretakers and managers of the household (preparing food, bringing water, carding and weaving, or working side by side with their husbands). The third chapter is dedicated to representations of women holding positions outside the house: midwives, maidservants, wet nurses, and mourners. Images of women engaged in disreputable occupations-dancers, musicians, prostitutes and courtesans - complete this chapter. The fourth chapter discusses images of women portrayed in the metaphorical margins - looking out from the gynaikon (the women's apartments), or at their private toilette; it also deals with representations of women who stray from the societal mainstream - concubines; adulteresses, women consenting to sexual acts or being coerced into them - considered symbolically as belonging to the margins of society. The book concludes with a discussion of the degree to which the visual material reliably reflects reality and changing attitudes toward women between Late Antiquity and late Byzantium; and further, to what extent it reveals embedded perceptions and conceptions of women, constructed by canonic regulations and imperial law, popular beliefs and accepted customs. The book aims to lift a veil from known and less known works of art and to present the rarely described picture of the daily life of women in Byzantine art over a very wide chronological span of time, in an effort to expand our knowledge of women in Byzantium and their realia.
