This 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.
This 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.
Lengel takes the reader on a journey from India and Romania, where women preserve cultural rituals through mourning songs, to South Africa, where the body is a site of struggle for meaning and power in contemporary dance. This volume examines the interrelationship of cultural and national identity, ethnicity, gender, performance, and lived experience. It offers an understanding of how music and dance function within the lives of its performers and audiences, and how they embody meaning, carry social value, and act as a vehicle for intercultural communication. This book analyzes the communicative impact of women's cultural products and creative practice and creates links across disciplines such as communication, cultural studies, and performance studies. Contributors have lived, researched, and performed in the United States, Australia, Belize, Barbados, Canada, China, England, India, the Pacific, Romania, and Yemen. Their chapters address women's creative performance as a means of political and ideological expression.
The Methuen Drama Handbook of Interculturalism and Performance explores ground-breaking new directions and critical discourse in the field of intercultural theatre and performance while surveying key debates concerning interculturalism as an aesthetic and ethical series of encounters in theatre and performance from the 1960s onwards. The handbook's global coverage challenges understandings of intercultural theatre and performance that continue to prioritise case studies emerging primarily from the West and executed by elite artists. By building on a growing field of scholarship on intercultural theatre and performance that examines minoritarian and grassroots work, the volume offers an alternative and multi-vocal view of what interculturalism might offer as a theoretical keyword to the future of theatre and performance studies, while also contributing an energized reassessment of the vociferous debates that have long accompanied its critical and practical usage in a performance context. By exploring anew what happens when interculturalism and performance intersect as embodied practice, The Methuen Drama Handbook of Interculturalism and Performance offers new perspectives on a seminal theoretical concept still as useful as it is controversial. Featuring a series of indispensable research tools, including a fully annotated bibliography, this is the essential scholarly handbook for anyone working in intercultural theatre and performance, and performance studies.
Casting Gender puts forward a vision of theatre, storytelling, and the performance of the everyday function within the lived spaces of its performers and audiences, asking how women artists/scholars embody meaning, carry social value, and constitute possible identities. Drawing on scholarship in intercultural communication, performance studies, women's studies, and cultural studies, this collection of new, critically informed research advances our understanding of how theater works as intercultural communication and as a vehicle for change. Casting Gender offers varied locations and sites of research, highlighting the rich diversity of women's cultural identities, roles, and societal positions. This book moves beyond the western-centered nature of intercultural performance and intercultural communication theory and practice by creating a forum for nonwestern voices.
This comprehensively revised, illustrated edition discusses recent performance work and takes into consideration changes that have taken place since the book's original publication in 1996. Marvin Carlson guides the reader through the contested definition of performance as a theatrical activity and the myriad ways in which performance has been interpreted by ethnographers, anthropologists, linguists, and cultural theorists. Topics covered include: *the evolution of performance art since the 1960s *the relationship between performance, postmodernism, the politics of identity, and current cultural studies *the recent theoretical developments in the study of performance in the fields of anthropology, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and technology. With a fully updated bibliography and additional glossary of terms, students of performance studies, visual and performing arts or theatre history will welcome this new version of a classic text.
This book is the first edited collection to respond to an undeniable resurgence of critical activity around the controversial theoretical term ‘interculturalism’ in theatre and performance studies. Long one of the field’s most vigorously debated concepts, intercultural performance has typically referred to the hybrid mixture of performance forms from different cultures (typically divided along an East-West or North-South axis) and its related practices frequently charged with appropriation, exploitation or ill-founded universalism. New critical approaches since the late 2000s and early 2010s instead reveal a plethora of localized, grassroots, diasporic and historical approaches to the theory and practice of intercultural performance which make available novel critical and political possibilities for performance practitioners and scholars. This collection consolidates and pushes forward reflection on these recent shifts by offering case studies from Asia, Africa, Australasia, Latin America, North America, and Western Europe which debate the possibilities and limitations of this theoretical turn towards a ‘new’ interculturalism.
This volume is based on the premise that artistic performance is epistemological, a way of knowing self, culture, and other. The nine essays in this book, based on a broad range of ethnic, racial, and gender groups, share a common interest in exploring how performance reveals, shapes, and sometimes transforms personal and cultural identity. Editors Fine and Speer begin by examining the interdisciplinary roots of performance studies and the role of performance studies in the field of communication. They also discuss the power of performance to shape personal and cultural identity. The first two chapters explore the ritual nature of performance in two different cultural contexts: an African-American church service and an Appalachian storytelling event of the legendary Ray Hicks. In both arenas, the performers act as shamans, transporting the audience from their everyday, secular lives to the higher ground of the mythic spheres of heroic and fantastic events. The next three chapters discuss the notion of place and performance in various landscapes--the English countryside, the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the farmland of the Midwest. Through analysis of the speech and songs of a modern Sussex yeoman, the ghost tales of Appalachian storytellers, and the narratives of Midwest farmers coping with hard times, the authors reveal a variety of ways in which narrative performances function to preserve people's relationship with the land. The last four chapters share a focus on women as storytellers. One chapter offers a feminist critique of personal narrative research and challenges normative assumptions about the storytelling behavior of women. Another chapter interprets a narration of a Galician woman's typical day to reveal how the performance expresses deeply held attitudes and beliefs of her cultural community. Words are not the only medium that women use to tell their stories. The next chapter examines the story cloths of Hmong women refugees from Laos as intercultural and dialogical performances. The last chapter explores self-discovery and identity in the storytelling of a woman in the last years of her life. This volume is particularly representative of the ways in which communication scholars approach performance studies, but will also interest researchers and students of folklore, anthropology, sociology, theatre, and related disciplines.
How are hybrid and diasporic identities performed in increasingly diverse societies? How can we begin to think differently about theatrical flow across cultures? Interculturalism is an increasingly urgent topic in the 21st century. As human traffic between nations increases, it becomes imperative to critically re-examine the way cultural exchange is performed. Theatre & Interculturalism surveys established approaches and asks what it would mean to reconsider intercultural performance, not from the points of view of the colonizing cultures, but 'from below'- from the viewpoints of the historically colonized and marginalized.
