Performing Mourning
Performing Mourning

Author: Guy Cools

Publisher:

Published: 2021-06

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 9789492095985

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Each person?s grief is as unique as their fingerprint. But what everyone has in common is that no matter how they grieve, they share a need for their grief to be witnessed.?0David Kessler (2019)0The pandemic has once again made us more aware of the fragility of life and the importance of being able to properly mourn the dead. Dramaturg Guy Cools has been researching laments and other rituals of mourning. He is particularly interested in how the emotions of loss need to be externalized. The laments are a formal device, used in many cultures to express and contain the emotions of grief.0In a poetic, meandering, personal way Cools explores cultural habits, traditions, rituals, and artists? performances. His narrative looks into many forms of laments: literary, anthropological, philosophical, and in contemporary art practices. The latter part delves into artistic strategies to address or embody mourning: dialogical strategies that deal with personal losses; collective mourning rituals and how they invite communities to witness these losses; contemporary examples of laments that are not only used to dialogue with the dead but also to communicate with loved ones who are absent because of migration or exile; a very specific form of mourning that occurs when we grieve for the unrealized potential of a child?s unlived life, including that of an unborn child. And finally, the very recent phenomenon of lamenting not just the losses of the past, but also the loss of a future.

Mourning Diana
Mourning Diana

Author: Adrian Kear

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2002-01-22

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 1134650418

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The death of Diana, Princess of Wales, on September 1 1997, prompted public demonstrations of grief on an almost unprecented global scale. But, while global media coverage of the events following her death appeared to create an international 'community of mourning', popular reacions in fact reflected the complexities of the princess's public image and the tensions surrounding the popular conception of royalty. Mourning Diana examines the events which followed the death of Diana as a series of cultural-political phenomena, from the immediate aftermath as crowds gathered in public spaces and royal palaces, to the state funeral in Westminister Abbey, examining the performance of grief and the involvement of the global media in the creation of narratives and spectacles relating to the commemoration of her life. Contributors investigate the complex iconic status of Diana, as a public figure able to sustain a host of alternative identifications, and trace the posthumous romanticisation of aspects of her life such as her charity activism and her relationship with Dodi al Fayed. The contributors argue that the events following the death of Diana dramatised a complex set of cultural tensions in which the boundaries dividing nationhood and citizenship, charity and activism, private feeling and public politics, were redrawn.

Mourning Sex
Mourning Sex

Author: Peggy Phelan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-07-23

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 113618483X

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This is a book about the exhilaration and the catastrophe of embodiment. Analyzing different instances of injured bodies, Peggy Phelan considers what sustained attention to the affective force of trauma might yield for critical theory. Advocating what she calls "performative writing", she creates an extraordinary fusion of critical and creative thinking which erodes the distinction between art and theory, fact and fiction. The bodies she examines here include Christ's, as represented in Caravaggio's painting The Incredulity of St Thomas, Anita Hill's and Clarence Thomas's bodies as they were performed during the Senate hearings, the disinterred body of the Rose Theatre, exemplary bodies reconstructed through psychoanalytic talking cures, and the filmic bodies created by Tom Joslin, Mark Massi, and Peter Friedman in Silverlake Life: The View From Here. This new work by the highly-acclaimed author of Unmarked makes a stunning advance in performance theory in dialogue with psychoanalysis, queer theory, and cultural studies.

Re-performance, Mourning and Death
Re-performance, Mourning and Death

Author: Sarah Julius

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-10-30

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 3030847748

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This book examines the recent trend for re-performance and how this impacts on the relationship between live performance and death. Focusing specifically on examples of performance art the text analyses the relationship between performance, re-performance and death, comparing the process of re-performance to the process of mourning and arguing that both of these are processes of adaptation and survival. Using a variety of case studies, including performances by Ron Athey, Julie Tolentino, Martin O’Brien, Sheree Rose, Jo Spence and Hannah Wilke, the book explores performances which can be considered acts of re-performance, as well as performances which examine some of the critical concerns of re-performance, including notions of illness, loss and death. By drawing upon both philosophical and performance studies discourses the text takes a novel approach to the relationship between re-performance, mourning and death.

Performing Grief
Performing Grief

Author: Anne E. McLaren

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2008-07-31

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0824863925

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This is the first in-depth study of Chinese bridal laments, a ritual and performative art practiced by Chinese women in premodern times that gave them a rare opportunity to voice their grievances publicly. Drawing on methodologies from numerous disciplines, including performance arts and folk literatures, the author suggests that the ability to move an audience through her lament was one of the most important symbolic and ritual skills a Chinese woman could possess before the modern era. Performing Grief provides a detailed case study of the Nanhui region in the lower Yangzi delta. Bridal laments, the author argues, offer insights into how illiterate Chinese women understood the kinship and social hierarchies of their region, the marriage market that determined their destinies, and the value of their labor in the commodified economy of the delta region. The book not only assesses and draws upon a large body of sources, both Chinese and Western, but is grounded in actual field work, offering both historical and ethnographic context in a unique and sophisticated approach. Unlike previous studies, the author covers both Han and non-Han groups and thus contributes to studies of ethnicity and cultural accommodation in China. She presents an original view about the ritual implications of bridal laments and their role in popular notions of "wedding pollution." The volume includes an annotated translation from a lament cycle. This important work on the place of laments in Chinese culture enriches our understanding of the social and performative roles of Chinese women, the gendered nature of China’s ritual culture, and the continuous transmission of women’s grievance genres into the revolutionary period. As a pioneering study of the ritual and performance arts of Chinese women, it will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of anthropology, social history, gender studies, oral literature, comparative folk religion, and performance arts.

The Absent One
The Absent One

Author: Susan L. Cole

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2010-11-01

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 9780271038124

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Here is presented a new theory of the origins of tragedy, based on its perceived kinship with mourning ritual. Mourners and tragic protagonists alike journey through dangerous transitional states, confront the uncanny, express themselves in antithetical style, and, above all, enact their ambivalence toward their beloved dead. Elements common to both tragedy and mourning ritual are first identified in actual Chinese, African, and Greek funerary rites and then analyzed in tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Racine, Ibsen, O'Neill, Miller, Beckett, and Ionesco. Included is a firsthand account of exploration of the tragedy-mourning link in the rehearsal process of the great experimental theater director, Joseph Chaikin. Opening her first chapter, Dr. Cole says, "The grave is the birthplace of tragic drama and ghosts are its procreators. For tragedy is the performance of ambivalence which ghosts emblematize: what we fear in particular--the revenant, the ghost returning to haunt us--is also what we desire--the extending of life beyond the moment of death."

Good Mourning
Good Mourning

Author: Elizabeth Meyer

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2015-08-25

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1476783659

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Elizabeth Meyer’s “sweet, touching, and funny” (Booklist) memoir reads as if “Carrie Bradshaw worked in a funeral home a la Six Feet Under” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Good Mourning offers a behind-the-scenes look at a legendary funeral chapel on New York City’s Upper East Side—mixing big money, society drama, and the universal experience of grieving—told from the unique perspective of a fashionista turned funeral planner. Elizabeth Meyer stumbled upon a career in the midst of planning her own father’s funeral, which she turned into an upbeat party with Rolling Stones music, thousands of dollars worth of her mother’s favorite flowers, and a personalized eulogy. Starting as a receptionist, Meyer quickly found she had a knack for helping people cope with their grief, as well as creating fitting send-offs for some of the city’s most high-powered residents. Meyer has seen it all: two women who found out their deceased husband (yes, singular) was living a double life, a famous corpse with a missing brain, and funerals that cost more than most weddings. By turns illuminating, emotional, and darkly humorous, Good Mourning is a lesson in how the human heart grieves and grows—whether you’re wearing this season’s couture or drug-store flip-flops.

Death's Summer Coat
Death's Summer Coat

Author: Brandy Schillace

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2016-01-15

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 1681770938

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Death is something we all confront—it touches our families, our homes, our hearts. And yet we have grown used to denying its existence, treating it as an enemy to be beaten back with medical advances.We are living at a unique point in human history. People are living longer than ever, yet the longer we live, the more taboo and alien our mortality becomes. Yet we, and our loved ones, still remain mortal. People today still struggle with this fact, as we have done throughout our entire history. What led us to this point? What drove us to sanitize death and make it foreign and unfamiliar?Schillace shows how talking about death, and the rituals associated with it, can help provide answers. It also brings us closer together—conversation and community are just as important for living as for dying. Some of the stories are strikingly unfamiliar; others are far more familiar than you might suppose. But all reveal much about the present—and about ourselves.

Cultural Melancholy
Cultural Melancholy

Author: Jermaine Singleton

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2015-11-12

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780252039621

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A daring cultural and literary studies investigation, Cultural Melancholy explores the legacy of unresolved grief produced by ongoing racial oppression and resistance in the United States. Using acute analysis of literature, drama, musical performance, and film, Singleton demonstrates how rituals of racialization and resistance transfer and transform melancholy discreetly across time, consolidating racial identities and communities along the way. He also argues that this form of impossible mourning binds racialized identities across time and social space by way of cultural resistance efforts. Singleton develops the concept of "cultural melancholy" as a response to scholarship that calls for the separation of critical race studies and psychoanalysis, excludes queer theoretical approaches from readings of African American literatures and cultures, and overlooks the status of racialized performance culture as a site of serious academic theorization. In doing so, he weaves critical race studies, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and performance studies into conversation to uncover a host of hidden dialogues—psychic and social, personal and political, individual and collective—for the purpose of promoting a culture of racial grieving, critical race consciousness, and collective agency. Wide-ranging and theoretically bold, Cultural Melancholy counteracts the racial legacy effects that plague our twenty-first century multiculture.

Music and Mourning
Music and Mourning

Author: Jane W. Davidson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-28

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1317092406

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While grief is suffered in all cultures, it is expressed differently all over the world in accordance with local customs and beliefs. Music has been associated with the healing of grief for many centuries, with Homer prescribing music as an antidote to sorrow as early as the 7th Century BC. The changing role of music in expressions of grief and mourning throughout history and in different cultures reflects the changing attitudes of society towards life and death itself. This volume investigates the role of music in mourning rituals across time and culture, discussing the subject from the multiple perspectives of music history, music psychology, ethnomusicology and music therapy.