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Unexpected, quirky and provocative, BALL & Other Funny Stories About Cancer is a unique collection of performances about illness and the changing body over time. Documenting a trilogy of Brian Lobel’s monologue performances from 2001-2011, this collection challenges the inspirational stories of survivors and martyrs that have come before, infusing the ‘cancer story’ with an urgency and humour which is sometimes inappropriate, often salacious and always, above all else, honest and open. Published together for the first time, this collection of performances goes beyond the chemotherapy to include reflections on politics, sexuality and gender, providing cancer – and cancer narratives – with a much-deserved kick in the ball(s).
Part game show, part love story, part lecture exploring modern friendships. Purge addresses where online friendship stops and real friendship begins. In 2010, Brian discovered that his deceased ex-boyfriend and best friend, Grant, had deleted him from Friendster (a pre-Facebook networking site), which neither had checked since they stopped dating in 2006. Although they had since re-‘friended’ in life (both virtually and non-virtually), it was the discovery of this past de-friending (and impossibility to ‘reconnect’ since Grant’s death), which inspired Brian to create Purge in 2011. In 2011, Brian Lobel played a brutal game of friendship maintenance: over 5 days in cafés in both Lo...
An all-singing, all-dancing celebration of ordinary life and death. Single mum Emma confronts the highs and lows of life with a cancer diagnosis; that of her son and of the real people she encounters in the daily hospital grind. Groundbreaking performance artist Bryony Kimmings creates fearless theatre to provoke social change, looking behind the poster campaigns and pink ribbons at the experience of serious illness.
This monograph is the first study to critically examine works of performance made for an audience of one. Despite being a prolific feature of the performance scene since the turn of the millennium, critical writing about this area of contemporary practice remains scarce. This book proposes a genealogy of the curious relationship between solo performer and lone spectator through lineages in the histories of live art, visual art and theatre practices. Drawing on one-to-one performances by artists including Marilyn Arsem, Oreet Ashery, Franko B, Rosana Cade, Jess Dobkin, Karen Finley, David Hoyle, Adrian Howells, Kira O’Reilly, Barbara T Smith and Julie Tolentino, Rachel Zerihan produces research that is both affective and critical. This performance analysis proposes four frameworks through which to examine the significance and challenge of this work: cathartic, social, explicit and economic. One-to-one performance is proposed as a rich portal for examining the cultural politics of contemporary society. The book will appeal to students and scholars from performance studies, theatre, visual art and cultural studies.
How can you heal after a cancer diagnosis? The Healing Circle helps readers to answer this question for themselves. The book integrates science, wisdom and compassion, and offers a practical approach and fresh perspective on how to heal at the levels of body, mind and spirit. The Healing Circle is primarily for those who have been given a cancer diagnosis and their loved ones, but is also highly relevant for medical professionals and everyone on the healing journey of life.
This incisive and thoughtful new title in the Theatre And series confronts the difficult relationship between theatre and cancer. It explores representations of cancer in fictional worlds and autobiographical performances while also highlighting work that reimagines and reinvigorates the genre of 'Cancer Performance'. Challenging conventional narratives which rely on the binary of tragedy versus survival, Brian Lobel argues for an alternative approach to understanding cancer in relation to theatre. Concise yet thought-provoking, this book is ideal for undergraduate and postgraduate students of theatre, performance and disability studies.
This collection brings together scholarship and creative writing that brings together two of the most innovative fields to emerge from critical and cultural studies in the past few decades: Disability studies and performance studies. It draws on writings about such media as live performance art, photography, silent film, dance, personal narrative and theatre, using such diverse perspectives and methods as queer theory, gender, feminist, and masculinity studies, dance studies, as well as providing first publication of creative writings by award-winning poets and playwrights. This book was based on a special issue of Text and Performance Quarterly.
This book offers the first broad-based survey of the way artists, audiences and society at large are making use of social media, and how the emergence of social media platforms that allow two-way interaction between these groups has been held up as a ‘game changer’ by many in the theatre industry. The first book to analyse aesthetic, critical, audience development, marketing and assessment uptake of social media in the theatre industry in an integrated fashion, Theatre, Social Media and Meaning Making examines examples from the USA, UK, Europe and Australasia to provide a snapshot of this emerging niche within networked, telematic, immersive and participatory theatre production and reception practices. A vital new resource for the field, this book will appeal to scholars, students, and industry practitioners alike.
Live Art is a contested category, not least because of the historical, disciplinary and institutional ambiguities that the term often tends to conceal. Live Art can be usefully defined as a peculiarly British variation on particular legacies of cultural experimentation – a historically and culturally contingent translation of categories including body art, performance art, time-based art, and endurance art. The recent social and cultural history of the UK has involved specific factors that have crucially influenced the development of Live Art since the late 1970s. These have included issues in national cultural politics relating to sexuality, gender, disability, technology, and cultural po...
More than a billion people watched the 9/11 World Trade Center destruction unfold on television, making it the greatest shared event in world history. Reflecting this fact, the 2003 World Trade Center Memorial Design Competition was open to anyone, drawing 5,201 entries from 60 countries, all of which were posted online. Most designs were the greyscale hardscape of typical memorials. A few were radically imaginative. Some engaged memory with sound, color, movement, technology or visitor participation. Others reached across the globe, cyberspace, even outer space. These imaginings stirred questions about their creators. Who were they? What were they thinking and feeling? How did the concept develop? This book, based on a first ever review of the entries, tells the personal stories of more than 180 designers whose creative perspective translated an horrific event, giving deeper thought to the relation of memorial spaces to history, geography, technology and cultural diversity.