Bringing together contributors from dance, theatre, visual studies, and art history, this title addresses the conundrum of how live art is positioned within history.
As the nature of contemporary performance continues to expand into new forms, genres and media, it requires an increasingly diverse vocabulary. Reading Contemporary Performance provides students, critics and creators with a rich understanding of the key terms and ideas that are central to any discussion of this evolving theatricality. Specially commissioned entries from a wealth of contributors map out the many and varied ways of discussing performance in all of its forms – from theatrical and site-specific performances to live and New Media art. The book is divided into two sections: Concepts - Key terms and ideas arranged according to the five characteristic elements of performance art: time; space; action; performer; audience. Methodologies and Turning Points - The seminal theories and ways of reading performance, such as postmodernism, epic theatre, feminisms, happenings and animal studies. Case Studies – entries in both sections are accompanied by short studies of specific performances and events, demonstrating creative examples of the ideas and issues in question. Three different introductory essays provide multiple entry points into the discussion of contemporary performance, and cross-references for each entry also allow the plotting of one’s own pathway. Reading Contemporary Performance is an invaluable guide, providing not just a solid set of familiarities, but an exploration and contextualisation of this broad and vital field.
"With great originality and scholarship, Amelia Jones maps out an extraordinary history of body art over the last three decades and embeds it in the theoretical terrain of postmoderism. The result is a wonderful and permissive space in which the viewer...can wander"...-Moira Roth, Trefethen professor of art history, Mills College.
The Methuen Drama Companion to Performance Art offers a comprehensive guide to the major issues and interdisciplinary debates concerning performance in art contexts that have developed over the last decade. It understands performance art as an institutional, cultural, and economic phenomenon rather than as a label or object. Following the ever-increasing institutionalization and mainstreaming of performance, the book's chapters identify a marked change in the economies and labor practices surrounding performance art, and explore how this development is reflective of capitalist approaches to art and event production. Embracing what we perceive to be the 'oxymoronic status' of performance art-where it is simultaneously precarious and highly profitable-the essays in this book map the myriad gestures and radical possibilities of this extreme contradiction. This Companion adopts an interdisciplinary perspective to present performance art's legacies and its current practices. It brings together specially commissioned essays from leading innovative scholars from a wide range of approaches including art history, visual and performance studies, dance and theatre scholarship in order to provide a comprehensive and multifocal overview of the emerging research trends and methodologies devoted to performance art.
Performing Immanence: Forced Entertainment is a unique probe into the multi-faceted nature of the works of the British experimental theatre Forced Entertainment via the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Jan Suk explores the transformation-potentiality of the territory between the actors and the spectators, namely via Forced Entertainment’s structural patterns, sympathy provoking aesthetics, audience integration and accentuated emphasis of the now. Besides writings of Tim Etchells, the company’s director, the foci of the analyses are devised as well as durational projects of Forced Entertainment. The examination includes a wider spectrum of state-of the-art live artists, e.g. Tehching Hsieh, Franko B or Goat Island, discussed within the contemporary performance discourse. Performing Immanence: Forced Entertainment investigates how the immanent reading of Forced Entertainment’s performances brings the potentiality of creative transformative experience via the thought of Gilles Deleuze. The interconnections of Deleuze’s thought and the contemporary devised performance theatre results in the symbiotic relationship that proves that such readings are not mere academic exercises, but truly life-illuminating realizations.
Seeing Differently offers a history and theory of ideas about identity in relation to visual arts discourses and practices in Euro-American culture, from early modern beliefs that art is an expression of an individual, the painted image a "world picture" expressing a comprehensive and coherent point of view, to the rise of identity politics after WWII in the art world and beyond. The book is both a history of these ideas (for example, tracing the dominance of a binary model of self and other from Hegel through classic 1970s identity politics) and a political response to the common claim in art and popular political discourse that we are "beyond" or "post-" identity. In challenging this latter claim, Seeing Differently critically examines how and why we "identify" works of art with an expressive subjectivity, noting the impossibility of claiming we are "post-identity" given the persistence of beliefs in art discourse and broader visual culture about who the subject "is," and offers a new theory of how to think this kind of identification in a more thoughtful and self-reflexive way. Ultimately, Seeing Differently offers a mode of thinking identification as a "queer feminist durational" process that can never be fully resolved but must be accounted for in thinking about art and visual culture. Queer feminist durationality is a mode of relational interpretation that affects both "art" and "interpreter," potentially making us more aware of how we evaluate and give value to art and other kinds of visual culture.
An innovative analysis of Simone Forti's interdisciplinary art, viewing her influential 1960s “dance constructions” as negotiating the aesthetic strategies of John Cage and Anna Halprin. Simone Forti's art developed within the overlapping circles of New York City's advanced visual art, dance, and music of the early 1960s. Her “dance constructions” and related works of the 1960s were important for both visual art and dance of the era. Artists Robert Morris and Yvonne Rainer have both acknowledged her influence. Forti seems to have kept one foot inside visual art's frames of meaning and the other outside them. In Soft Is Fast, Meredith Morse adopts a new way to understand Forti's work, based in art historical analysis but drawing upon dance history and cultural studies and the history of American social thought. Morse argues that Forti introduced a form of direct encounter that departed radically from the spectatorship proposed by Minimalism, and prefigured the participatory art of recent decades. Morse shows that Forti's work negotiated John Cage's ideas of sound, score, and theater through the unique approach to movement, essentially improvisational and grounded in anatomical exploration, that she learned from performer and teacher Ann (later Anna) Halprin. Attentive to Robert Whitman's and La Monte Young's responses to Cage, Forti reshaped Cage's concepts into models that could accommodate Halprin's charged spaces and imagined, interpenetrative understanding of other bodies. Morse considers Forti's use of sound and her affective use of materials as central to her work; examines Forti's text pieces, little discussed in art historical literature; analyzes Huddle, considered one of Forti's signature works; and explicates Forti's later improvisational practice. Forti has been relatively overlooked by art historians, perhaps because of her work's central concern with modes of feeling and embodiment, unlike other art of the 1960s, which was characterized by strategies of depersonalization and affectlessness. Soft Is Fast corrects this critical oversight.
Artists especially from dance and performance art as well as opera are involved to an increasing degree in the transfer between different media, not only in their productions but also the events, materials, and documents that surround them. At the same time, the focus on that which remains has become central to any discussion of performance. Performing Arts in Transition explores what takes place in the moments of transition from one medium to another, and from the live performance to that which "survives" it. Case studies from a broad range of interdisciplinary scholars address phenomena such as: The dynamics of transfer between the performing and visual arts. The philosophy and terminologies of transitioning between media. Narratives and counternarratives in historical re-creations. The status of chronology and the document in art scholarship. This is an essential contribution to a vibrant, multidisciplinary and international field of research emerging at the intersections of performance, visual arts, and media studies.
The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment brings together a cross-section of artists and scholars engaged with the phenomenon of reenactment in dance from a practical and theoretical standpoint. Synthesizing myriad views on danced reenactment and the manner in which this branch of choreographic performance intersects with important cultural concerns around appropriation this Handbook addresses originality, plagiarism, historicity, and spatiality as it relates to cultural geography. Others topics treated include transmission as a heuristic device, the notion of the archive as it relates to dance and as it is frequently contrasted with embodied cultural memory, pedagogy, theory of history, reconstruction as a methodology, testimony and witnessing, theories of history as narrative and the impact of dance on modernist literature, and relations of reenactment to historical knowledge and new media.