The use of disability as a metaphor is ubiquitous in popular culture – nowhere more so than in the myths, stereotypes and tropes around blindness. To be 'blind' has never referred solely to the inability to see. Instead blindness has been used as shorthand for, among other things, a lack of understanding, immorality, closeness to death, special insight or second sight. Although these 'meanings' attached to blindness were established as early as antiquity, readers, receivers and spectators into the present have been implicated in the stereotypes, which persist because audiences can be relied on to perpetuate them. This book argues for a new way of seeing – and of understanding classical reception - by offering assemblage-thinking as an alternative to the presumed passivity of classical influence. And the theatre, which has been (incorrectly) assumed to be principally a visual medium, is the ideal space in which to investigate new ways of seeing.
Using the social model of disability as a catalyst, this practice as research project starts with the understanding that theatre can disable some of its spectators. Contemporary theatre is conventionally visual. If a theatregoer has low or no vision she or he can be disable by theatre. An investigation of historic directing practice and dramaturgy will demonstrate an ocular bias in contemporary performance. A theatre director is in a unique position to counter this bias and influence opening performance to those with visual impairments or blindness. The idea of blind spectatorship is a provocation for directors and theatre makers. What are popular and experiential definitions of blindness and how might these ideas influence conceptions of an audience? How does theatre disable someone with low or no-vision? What can a director do to open performance to a blind or visually impaired spectator? Audio description interviews with audience members and access specialists, the practice of theatre companies like Extant and Graeae and an Affirmative Model of Disability frame and inform this study. It will be argued that access strategies for the visually impaired or blind, outside of a very few companies, are not widely considered within an artistic purview. This thesis aims to place these access responsibilities firmly within a director's control and considerations. By locating this study in my own directing practice, I can demonstrate how performance can be opened to a broader audience. Four fully produced stage plays covering a range of performance styles (kōläzh, 2006; Foto, 2010; In the Tunnel, 2010; Variations on the Death of Trotsky, 2012) and several laboratory experiments focused on elements of staging, production, directorial intent and perceptive intersections of access are used to question and exhibit the findings of this study. Sonic dramaturgy emerges as a particularly useful tool for theatre makers and an economic and scalable balance to visual conventions.
"Catanese's beautifully written and cogently argued book addresses one of the most persistent sociopolitical questions in contemporary culture. She suggests that it is performance and the difference it makes that complicates the terms by which we can even understand 'multicultural' and 'colorblind' concepts. A tremendously illuminating study that promises to break new ground in the fields of theatre and performance studies, African American studies, feminist theory, cultural studies, and film and television studies." ---Daphne Brooks, Princeton University "Adds immeasurably to the ways in which we can understand the contradictory aspects of racial discourse and performance as they have emerged during the last two decades. An ambitious, smart, and fascinating book." ---Jennifer DeVere Brody, Duke University Are we a multicultural nation, or a colorblind one? The Problem of the Color[blind] examines this vexed question in American culture by focusing on black performance in theater, film, and television. The practice of colorblind casting---choosing actors without regard to race---assumes a performing body that is somehow race neutral. But where, exactly, is race neutrality located---in the eyes of the spectator, in the body of the performer, in the medium of the performance? In analyzing and theorizing such questions, Brandi Wilkins Catanese explores a range of engaging and provocative subjects, including the infamous debate between playwright August Wilson and drama critic Robert Brustein, the film career of Denzel Washington, Suzan-Lori Parks's play Venus, the phenomenon of postblackness (as represented in the Studio Museum in Harlem's "Freestyle" exhibition), the performer Ice Cube's transformation from icon of gangsta rap to family movie star, and the controversial reality television series Black. White. Concluding that ideologies of transcendence are ahistorical and therefore unenforceable, Catanese advances the concept of racial transgression---a process of acknowledging rather than ignoring the racialized histories of performance---as her chapters move between readings of dramatic texts, films, popular culture, and debates in critical race theory and the culture wars.
The five-volume set LNCS 12932-12936 constitutes the proceedings of the 18th IFIP TC 13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, INTERACT 2021, held in Bari, Italy, in August/September 2021. The total of 105 full papers presented together with 72 short papers and 70 other papers in these books was carefully reviewed and selected from 680 submissions. The contributions are organized in topical sections named: Part I: affective computing; assistive technology for cognition and neurodevelopment disorders; assistive technology for mobility and rehabilitation; assistive technology for visually impaired; augmented reality; computer supported cooperative work. Part II: COVID-19 & HCI; croudsourcing methods in HCI; design for automotive interfaces; design methods; designing for smart devices & IoT; designing for the elderly and accessibility; education and HCI; experiencing sound and music technologies; explainable AI. Part III: games and gamification; gesture interaction; human-centered AI; human-centered development of sustainable technology; human-robot interaction; information visualization; interactive design and cultural development. Part IV: interaction techniques; interaction with conversational agents; interaction with mobile devices; methods for user studies; personalization and recommender systems; social networks and social media; tangible interaction; usable security. Part V: user studies; virtual reality; courses; industrial experiences; interactive demos; panels; posters; workshops. The chapter ‘Stress Out: Translating Real-World Stressors into Audio-Visual Stress Cues in VR for Police Training’ is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com. The chapter ‘WhatsApp in Politics?! Collaborative Tools Shifting Boundaries’ is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com.
Written soon before and in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, when theatre ground to a halt and spectatorship was suspended, this book takes stock of spectatorship as theatre’s living archive and affirms its value in the midst of the present crisis. Drawing from a manifold affective archive of performances and installations (by Marina Abramović, Ron Athey, Forced Entertainment, Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, Blast Theory, LIGNA, Doris Salcedo, Graeme Miller, Lenz Rifrazioni, Cristina Rizzo, etc.), and expanding on the work of many theorists and scholars, such as Roland Barthes and Jacques Rancière, Giorgio Agamben and Alain Badiou, Nicholas Ridout and Alan Read, among others, the book focuses on the spectator as the subject, rather than the object, of investigation. This is the right time to remember their secret power and theorise their collective time in the theatre. This book is an archive of their adventure and a manifesto rooted in their potentiality. It boldly posits the spectator as the inaugurator of theatre, the surplus that survives it. The book will be of great interest to spectators all and sundry, to scholars and students of theatre and performance studies, of spectatorship and politics.
A major new interpretation of the philosophical significance of the oeuvre of Denis Diderot. Dramatic Experiments offers a comprehensive study of Denis Diderot, one of the key figures of European modernity. Diderot was a French Enlightenment philosopher, dramatist, art critic, and editor of the first major modern encyclopedia. He is known for having made lasting contributions to a number of fields, but his body of work is considered too dispersed and multiform to be unified. Eyal Peretz locates the unity of Diderots thinking in his complication of two concepts in modern philosophy: drama and the image. Diderots philosophical theater challenged the work of Plato and Aristotle, inaugurating a line of drama theorists that culminated in the twentieth century with Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud. His interest in the artistic image turned him into the first great modern theorist of painting and perhaps the most influential art critic of modernity. With these innovations, Diderot provokes a rethinking of major philosophical problems relating to life, the senses, history, and appearance and reality, and more broadly a rethinking of the relation between philosophy and the arts. Peretz shows Diderot to be a radical thinker well ahead of his time, whose philosophical effort bears comparison to projects such as Gilles Deleuzes transcendental empiricism, Martin Heideggers fundamental ontology, Jacques Derridas deconstruction, and Jacques Lacans psychoanalysis.
Along these lines, he shows that the aesthetic has affinities with the logic of reversal/recognition in Greek tragedy and with theories of subject formation based on intersubjective recognition. The marking of these affinities sets up a discussion of how the aesthetic can serve protocols of rational choice-making. Within this perspective, aesthetic practice is revealed to be a meaningful social enterprise rather than an effete refuge from the conflicts of social existence.
"At the same time that this chapter continues to introduce readers to Tete Montoliu's life, musical work, and impact, it also challenges certain transnational assumptions regarding Spanish jazz. It is important to attend to ways in which the listening practices of mid-twentieth-century Anglophone audiences were shaped by the popular jazz market. In particular, it is by dispensing with misrepresentations of the connection between jazz and flamenco that readers can move beyond mere sketches of Spain and begin to appreciate the full complexity of Iberian jazz. This effort is further supported by Montoliu's own strong opinion that "Mezclar flamenco con el jazz es como mezclar las almejas con el chocolate. Es una mezcla imposible de digerir" [Mixing flamenco with jazz is like mixing clams with chocolate. It is a mixture that is impossible to digest"--
