Giving and Taking Voice in Learning Disabled Theatre

Giving and Taking Voice in Learning Disabled Theatre

Author: Tony McCaffrey

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-04-26

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1000863549

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Giving and Taking Voice in Learning Disabled Theatre offers unique insight into the question of ‘voice’ in learning disabled theatre and what is gained and lost in making performance. It is grounded in the author's 18 years of making theatre with Different Light Theatre company in Christchurch, New Zealand, and includes contributions from the artists themselves. This book draws on an extensive archive of performer interviews, recordings of rehearsal processes, and informal logs of travelling together and sharing experience. These accounts engage with the practical aesthetics of theatre-making as well as their much wider ethical and political implications, relevant to any collaborative process seeking to represent the under- or un-represented. Giving and Taking Voice in Learning Disabled Theatre asks how care and support can be tempered with artistic challenge and rigour and presents a case for how listening learning disabled artists to speech encourages attunement to indigenous knowledge and the cries of the planet in the current socio-ecological crisis. This is a vital and valuable book for anyone interested in learning disabled theatre, either as a performer, director, dramaturg, critic, or spectator.


The Cambridge Guide to Mixed Methods Research for Theatre and Performance Studies

The Cambridge Guide to Mixed Methods Research for Theatre and Performance Studies

Author: Tracy C. Davis

Publisher:

Published: 2024-01-31

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 100929489X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

We often know performance when we see it - but how should we investigate it? And how should we interpret what we find out? This book demonstrates why and how mixed methods research is necessary for investigating and explaining performance and advancing new critical agendas in cultural study. The wide range of aesthetic forms, cultural meanings, and social functions found in theatre and performance globally invites a corresponding variety of research approaches. The essays in this volume model reflective consideration of the means, processes, and choices for conducting performance research that is historical, ethnographic, aesthetic, or computational. An international set of contributors address what is meant by planning or designing a research project, doing research (locating and collecting primary sources or resources), and the ensuing work of interpreting and communicating insights. Providing illuminating and necessary guidance, this volume is an essential resource for scholars and students of theatre, performance, and dance.


How Does Disability Performance Travel?

How Does Disability Performance Travel?

Author: Christiane Czymoch

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-12-12

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 1003821014

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This edited collection investigates the myriad ways in which disability performance travels in a globalized world. Disability arts festivals are growing in different parts of the world; theatre and dance companies with disabled artists are increasingly touring and collaborating with international partners. At the same time, theatre spaces are often not accessible, and the necessity of mobility excludes some disabled artists from being part of an international disability arts community. How does disability performance travel, who does not travel – and why? What is the role of funding and producing structures, disability arts festivals and networks around the world? How do the logics of international (co-)producing govern the way in which disability art is represented internationally? Who is excluded from being part of a touring theatre or dance company, and how can festivals, conferences, and other agents of a growing disability culture create other forms of participation, which are not limited to physical co-presence? This study will contextualize disability aesthetics, arts, media, and culture in a global frame, yet firmly rooted in its smaller national, state, and local community settings and will be of great interest to students and scholars in the field.


Out of Time?

Out of Time?

Author: Elena Backhausen

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-07-10

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 1000889149

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Out of Time? has many different meanings, amongst them outmoded, out of step, under time pressure, no time left, or simply delayed. In the disability context, it may also refer to resistant attitudes of living in “crip time” that contradict time as a linear process with a more or less predictable future. According to Alison Kafer, “crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.” What does this mean in the disability arts? What new concepts of accessibility, crip futures, and crip resistance can be staged or created by disability performance? And how does the notion of “out of time” connect crip time with pandemic time in disability performance? The collective volume seeks to respond to these questions by exploring crip time in disability performance as both a concept and a phenomenon. The book tackles the topic from two angles: on the one hand from a theoretical point of view that connects performance analysis with crip and performance theory, on the other hand from a practice-based perspective of disability artists who develop new concepts and dramaturgies of crip time based on their own lived experiences and observations in the field of the performing and disability arts. The book gathers different types of text genres, forms, and styles that mirror the diversity of their authors. Besides theoretical and academic chapters on disability performance, the book also includes essays, poems, dramatic texts, and choreographic concepts that ref lect upon the alternative knowledge in the disability arts.


Ethics of Alterity

Ethics of Alterity

Author: Jörg Sternagel

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2023-04-04

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 1538178419

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Providing a solid media-philosophical groundwork, the book contributes to the theory of alterity in Performance Philosophy, while stimulating and inspiring future inquiries where studies in media, art, and literature intersect with philosophy. It collects a selective as well as productive diversity of philosophical, literary, and artistic figures of thought, attaining an exacting framework as a result of a clearly elaborated ethics of alterity, innovatively opened up by way of an aisthetics of existence: Touching upon the Aristotelian concept of aisthesis, the material, perceptual and sensory dimensions of everyday bodily existence are highlighted to move beyond what aesthetics in Modern Philosophy just specializes in, namely art and the beautiful. The notion of existence is therefore borrowed from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who understands it as something concrete and richly interrelated, so as to avoid the dualisms both of psychological processes of consciousness and of physiological mechanisms. It is thus made explicit such that the unity of body and soul is not any arbitrarily arranged connection between “subject” and “object” but, rather, that it is enacted at every instant in the movement of existence. Imaginatively then, the book puts into writing how alterity not only can be treated theoretically but can be also made accessible through writing as well as rendered relatable through reading. That is why it deals with exemplary interpersonal encounters in the lifeworld, in the arts, and in the media, which are initially thematized as intercorporeal experiences, so as to enable an approach for an ethics of alterity by way of, in particular, sites located within a phenomenology of perception oriented towards the lived body.


Incapacity and Theatricality

Incapacity and Theatricality

Author: Tony McCaffrey

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-01-15

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 1351165186

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Incapacity and Theatricality acknowledges the distinctive contribution to contemporary theatrical performance made by actors with intellectual disabilities. It presents a close examination of certain key theatrical performances across a variety of different media, including John Cassavetes’ 1963 social issues film A Child Is Waiting; the performance art collaboration between Robert Wilson and Christopher Knowles; and the provocative pranksterism of Christoph Schlingensief’s talent show mockumentary FreakStars 3000. Tracing a global path of performances, Incapacity and Theatricality offers an analysis of how actors with intellectual disabilities have emerged onto the main stage, and how their inclusion calls into question long-held assumptions about both theatre and intellectual disability. For postgraduate students, or anyone interested in the shifting dynamics of twenty-first century theatre, McCaffrey’s work offers a vital consideration of the intersubjective relations between people with and without intellectual disabilities and ultimately addresses urgent questions about the situation and representation of the contemporary subject caught up somewhere between incapacity and theatricality.


Giving Voice to Profound Disability

Giving Voice to Profound Disability

Author: John Vorhaus

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-06-26

Total Pages: 154

ISBN-13: 1317437322

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Giving Voice to Profound Disability is devoted to exploring the lives of people with profound and multiple learning difficulties and disabilities, and brings together the voices of those best placed to speak about the rewards and challenges of living with, supporting and teaching this group of vulnerable and dependent people – including parents, carers and teachers. Along with their personal insights the book offers philosophical reflections on the status, role and treatment of profoundly disabled people, and the subjects discussed include: Respect and human dignity Dependency Freedom and human capabilities Rights, equality and citizenship Valuing people Caring for others The experience and reflections presented in this book illustrate the progress and achievements in supporting and teaching people with profound disabilities, but they also reveal the challenges involved in enabling them to develop their full potential. It is suggested, also, that these challenges apply not only to this group, but also to people who, through sickness, accident and old age, face equivalent levels of dependency and disability. Giving Voice to Profound Disability will be of interest to all those involved in the lives of severely and profoundly disabled people, including parents, carers, teachers, nurses, therapists, academics, researchers, students and policymakers.


Fearlessly Different

Fearlessly Different

Author: Mickey Rowe

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2022-03-15

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 1538163136

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"... powerfully renders what it’s like to live life to the fullest." Publishers Weekly Starred Review My name is Mickey Rowe. I am an actor, a theatre director, a father, and a husband. I am also a man with autism. You think those things don’t go together? Let me show you that they do. Growing up, Mickey Rowe was told that he couldn’t enter the mainstream world. He was iced out by classmates and colleagues, infantilized by well-meaning theatre directors, barred from even earning a minimum wage. Why? Because he is autistic. Fearlessly Different: An Autistic Actor's Journey to Broadway's Biggest Stage is Mickey Rowe’s story of growing up autistic and pushing beyond the restrictions of a special education classroom to shine on the stage. As an autistic and legally blind person, living in a society designed by and for non-disabled people, it was always made clear to Mickey the many things he was apparently incapable of doing. But Mickey did them all anyway—and he succeeded because of, not in spite of, his autism. He became the first autistic actor to play the lead role in the play The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, landed the title role in the play Amadeus, co-created the theatre/philanthropy company Arts on the Waterfront, and founded the National Disability Theatre. Mickey faced untold obstacles along the way, but his story ends in triumph. Many people feel they are locked out of the world of autism—that it’s impossible to even begin to understand. In Fearlessly Different, Mickey guides readers to that world while also helping those with autism to feel seen and understood. And he shows all people—autistic and non-autistic alike—that the things that make us different are often our biggest strengths.


Inclusivity and Equality in Performance Training

Inclusivity and Equality in Performance Training

Author: Petronilla Whitfield

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-11-09

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 1000461572

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Inclusivity and Equality in Performance Training focuses on neuro and physical difference and dis/ability in the teaching of performance and associated studies. It offers 19 practitioners’ research-based teaching strategies, aimed to enhance equality of opportunity and individual abilities in performance education. Challenging ableist models of teaching, the 16 chapters address the barriers that can undermine those with dis/ability or difference, highlighting how equality of opportunity can increase innovation and enrich the creative work. Key features include: Descriptions of teaching interventions, research, and exploratory practice to identify and support the needs and abilities of the individual with dis/ability or difference Experiences of practitioners working with professional actors with dis/ability or difference, with a dissemination of methods to enable the actors A critical analysis of pedagogy in performance training environments; how neuro and physical diversity are positioned within the cultural contexts and practices Equitable teaching and learning practices for individuals in a variety of areas, such as: dyslexia, dyspraxia, visual or hearing impairment, learning and physical dis/abilities, wheelchair users, aphantasia, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and autistic spectrum. The chapter contents originate from practitioners in the UK, USA and Australia working in actor training conservatoires, drama university courses, youth training groups and professional performance, encompassing a range of specialist fields, such as voice, movement, acting, Shakespeare, digital technology, contemporary live art and creative writing. Inclusivity and Equality in Performance Training is a vital resource for teachers, directors, performers, researchers and students who have an interest in investigatory practice towards developing emancipatory pedagogies within performance education.


Actors’ and Performers’ Yearbook 2024

Actors’ and Performers’ Yearbook 2024

Author:

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2023-10-31

Total Pages: 483

ISBN-13: 1350408212

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This well-established and respected directory supports actors in their training and search for work in theatre, film, TV, radio and comedy. It is the only directory to provide detailed information for each listing and specific advice on how to approach companies and individuals, saving hours of further research. From agents and casting directors to producing theatres, showreel companies, photographers and much more, this essential reference book editorially selects only the most relevant and reputable contacts for the industry. Covering training and working in theatre, film, radio, TV and comedy, it contains invaluable resources such as a casting calendar and articles on a range of topics from your social media profile to what drama schools are looking for to financial and tax issues. With the listings updated every year, the Actors' and Performers' Yearbook continues to be the go-to guide for help with auditions, interviews and securing/sustaining work within the industry. Actors' and Performers' Yearbook 2024 is fully updated and includes a newly commissioned article by actor Mark Weinman, a new foreword, 4 new interviews by casting director Sam Stevenson, giving timely advice in response to today's fast-changing industry landscape, and an article by Paterson Joseph.