You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This book investigates the role of arts practitioners in cultural policy-making, challenging the perception that arts practitioners have little or no involvement in policy and seeking to discover the extent and form of their engagement. Examining the subject through a case-study of playwriting policy in England since 1945, and paying particular attention to playwrights’ organisations and their history of self-directed activity, the book explores practitioners’ participation in cultural policy-making, encompassing both “invited” and “uninvited” interventions that also weave together policy activity and creative practice. It discusses why their involvement matters, and argues that arts practitioners and their organisations can be understood as participants in civil society whose policy activity contributes to the maintenance and enlargement of democratic practices and values.
Through comparative and integrated case studies, this book demonstrates how aesthetics becomes politics in cultural policy. Contributors from Norway, Sweden and the UK analyse exactly what happens when art is considered relevant for societal development, at both a practical and theoretical level. Cultural policy is seen here as a mechanism for translating values, that through organized and practical aesthetical judgement lend different forms of agency to the arts. What happens when aesthetical value is reinterpreted as political value? What kinds of negotiations take place at a cultural policy ground level when values are translated and reinterpreted? By addressing these questions, the editors present an original collection that effectively centralises and investigates the role of aesthetics in cultural policy research.
The definitive guide to post-war British theatre's huge variety and expansion, exploring the diverse contexts that shaped it.
The book critically examines the epistemological disparities between colonialism and capitalism-critical cultural practices and Western art institutions. It does so through the lens of documenta 15, focusing on ruangrupa’s lumbung approach, which confronts Eurocentric cultural norms and stimulates a shift towards pluriversal horizons, demonstrating the transformative potential of alternative methodologies. This book provides a comprehensive understanding of how collective methods and practices can cultivate pluriversal horizons in cultural institutions and policies, informed by extensive field research at documenta 15. The key elements of the approach include interdisciplinary perspectives...
The New Irish Studies demonstrates how diverse critical approaches enable a richer understanding of contemporary Irish writing and culture. The early decades of the twenty-first century in Ireland and Northern Ireland have seen an astonishing rate of change, one that reflects the common understanding of the contemporary as a moment of acceleration and flux. This collection tracks how Irish writers have represented the peace and reconciliation process in Northern Ireland, the consequences of the Celtic Tiger economic boom in the Republic, the waning influence of Catholicism, the increased authority of diverse voices, and an altered relationship with Europe. The essays acknowledge the distinctiveness of contemporary Irish literature, reflecting a sense that the local can shed light on the global, even as they reach beyond the limited tropes that have long identified Irish literature. The collection suggests routes forward for Irish Studies, and unsettles presumptions about what constitutes an Irish classic.
This book includes full coverage of the content of professional studies modules and goes beyond to support trainees on placements and in their learning on the course.
'Actors always talk about what the audience does. I don’t understand, we are just sitting here.' Audience as Performer proposes that in the theatre, there are two troupes of performers: the actors and the audience. Although academics have scrutinised how audiences respond, make meaning and co-create while watching a performance, little research has considered the behaviour of the theatre audience as a performance in and of itself. This insightful book describes how an audience performs through its myriad gestural, vocal and paralingual actions, and considers the following questions: If the audience are performers, who are their audiences? How have audiences’ roles changed throughout hist...
This book offers a wide-ranging examination of acts of ‘virtual embodiment’ in performance/gaming/applied contexts that abstract an immersant’s sense of physical selfhood by instating a virtual body, body-part or computer-generated avatar. Emergent ‘immersive’ practices in an increasingly expanding and cross-disciplinary field are coinciding with a wealth of new scientific knowledge in body-ownership and self-attribution. A growing understanding of the way a body constructs its sense of selfhood is intersecting with the historically persistent desire to make an onto-relational link between the body that ‘knows’ an experience and bodies that cannot know without occupying their u...
Text and Performance in Contemporary British Theatre interrogates the paradoxical nature of theatre texts, which have been understood both as separate literary objects in their own right and as material for performance. Drawing on analysis of contemporary practitioners who are working creatively with text, the book re-examines the relationship between text and performance within the specific context of British theatre. The chapters discuss a wide range of theatre-makers creating work in the UK from the 1990s onwards, from playwrights like Tim Crouch and Jasmine Lee-Jones to companies including Action Hero and RashDash. In doing so, the book addresses issues such as theatrical authorship, art...
Research into creative and cultural organisations has proliferated, benefitting from insights from a range of disciplinary perspectives. Starting a research journey can be daunting in such a diverse field. This book provides expert insights into research process and practice, with a qualitative focus. The book helps readers to plan, execute, and analyse research, turning their work into data, results, and new knowledge. Taking an individual perspective, the author addresses a trio of paradigms, methodologies, and methods, and applies them to the whole research process, from start to finish. The book seamlessly links theoretical and conceptual aspects with best research practice along the way. A book for researchers at all stages of their work, the resources are also valuable for students and reflective cultural practitioners who want to know how to plan, implement, and evaluate their research project.