Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The Miriam Tradition
The Miriam Tradition works from the premise that religious values form in and through movement, with ritual and dance developing patterns for enacting those values. Cia Sautter considers the case of Sephardic Jewish women who, following in the tradition of Miriam the prophet, performed dance and music for Jewish celebrations and special occasions. She uses rabbinic and feminist understandings of the Torah to argue that these women, called tanyaderas, "taught" Jewish values by leading appropriate behavior for major life events. Sautter considers the religious values that are in music and dance performed by tanyaderas and examines them in conjunction with written and visual records and evidence from dance and music traditions. Explaining the symbolic gestures and motions encoded in dances, Sautter shows how rituals display deeply held values that are best expressed through the body. The book argues that the activities of women in other religions might also be examined for their embodiment and display of important values, bringing forgotten groups of women back into the historical record as important community leaders
Performance Studies
In this second edition, the author opens with a discussion of important developments in the discipline. His closing chapter, 'Global and Intercultural Performance', is completely rewritten in light of the post-9/11 world. Fully revised chapters with new examples, biographies and source material provide a lively, easily accessible overview of the full range of performance for undergraduates at all levels in performance studies, theatre, performing arts and cultural studies. Among the topics discussed are the performing arts and popular entertainments, rituals, play and games as well as the performances of everyday life. Supporting examples and ideas are drawn from the social sciences, perform...
Philosophical Foundations of the African Humanities through Postcolonial Perspectives
Philosophical Foundations of the African Humanities through Postcolonial Perspectives critiques recent claims that the humanities, especially in public universities in poor countries, have lost their significance, defining missions, methods and standards due to the pressure to justify their existence. The predominant responses to these claims have been that the humanities are relevant for creating a “world culture” to address the world’s problems. This book argues that behind such arguments lies a false neutrality constructed to deny the values intrinsic to marginalized cultures and peoples and to justify their perceived inferiority. These essays by scholars in postcolonial studies critique these false claims about the humanities through critical analyses of alterity, difference, and how the Other is perceived, defined and subdued. Contributors: Gordon S.K. Adika, Kofi N. Awoonor, E. John Collins, Kari Dako, Mary Esther Kropp Dakubu, James Gibbs, Helen Lauer, Bernth Lindfors, J.H. Kwabena Nketia, Abena Oduro, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Olúfémi Táíwò, Alexis B. Tengan, Kwasi Wiredu, Francis Nii-Yartey
Impossible Dance
"Impossible Dance is a highly accessible, original and engaging account of the complex and often heavily theorized debates around the body, identity and community. Focusing on gay, lesbian and queer club culture in the 1990s New York City, this is the first book to bring together vital issues such as dance culture, queer community, sex culture, HIV identity and politics. Based on four years of field work, the book takes readers on a journey from the streets of New York City into the dance clubs and onto the dance floor. Detailed interviews with club-goers capture their perspectives on how they stage their self-fashioning through dancing. Fiona Buckland argues that such dancing embodies and rehearses a powerful political imagination, laying claim to the space and to one's body as queer."—Publishers Weekly
Collective Creativity
Collective Creativity combines complex and ambivalent concepts. While ‘creativity’ is currently experiencing an inflationary boom in popularity, the term ‘collective’ appeared, until recently, rather controversial due to its ideological implications in twentieth-century politics. In a world defined by global cultural practice, the notion of collectivity has gained new relevance. This publication discusses a number of concepts of creativity and shows that, in opposition to the traditional ideal of the individual as creative genius, cultural theorists today emphasize the collaborative nature of creativity; they show that ‘creativity makes alterity, discontinuity and difference attrac...
Games and Play in the Theater of Spanish American Women
In the seventeen dramatic texts examined in this study, women writers from Spanish America have self-consciously incorporated games into their plays' structures to highlight from a woman's perspective the idea that life, as well as the theatre, is a game. Some dramas are so overtly about games that the word appears significantly in their titles. Others reflect game playing in less direct ways or connect metatheatrical examinations of role-playing to the ludic. In every drama examined, however, a game of some sort plays a key role in the construction of the playtest. By looking at the nature and number of the games played in these women-authored dramas from the past fifty years, we can see the ways in which play is used to effect social control and the connections between play and aggression, gender, history and politics. In these representative dramas, the theatre serves as a vehicle for encouraging audiences to think about (if not act upon) the issues that have shaped Spanish America. Games, rules, winners and losers join together as the playwrights explore events and times of fundamental importance in the countries' historical and political evolutions.
The Poem in the Story
Fact and fiction meet at the boundaries, the betwixt and between where transformations occur. This is the area of ambiguity where fiction and fact become endowed with meaning, and this is the area—where ambiguity, irony, and metaphor join forces—that Harold Scheub exposes in all its nuanced and evocative complexity in The Poem in the Story. In a career devoted to exploring the art of the African storyteller, Scheub has conducted some of the most interesting and provocative investigations into nonverbal aspects of storytelling, the complex relationship between artist and audience, and, most dramatically, the role played by poetry in storytelling. This book is his most daring effort yet, a...
The Chinese in Vancouver, 1945-80
In The Chinese in Vancouver, Wing Chung Ng captures the fascinating story of the city's Chinese in their search for identity. He juxtaposes the cultural positions of different generations of Chinese immigrants and their Canadian-born descendants and unveils the ongoing struggle over the definition of being Chinese. It is an engrossing story about cultural identity in the context of migration and settlement, where the influence of the native land and the appeal of the host city continued to impinge on the consciousness of the ethnic Chinese.
Franco-American Identity, Community, and La Guiannée
French traditions in America do not live solely in Louisiana. Franco-American Identity, Community, and La Guiannée travels to Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, and Prairie du Rocher, Illinois, to mark the Franco-American traditions still practiced in both these Midwestern towns. This Franco-American cultural identity has continued for over 250 years, surviving language loss, extreme sociopolitical pressures, and the American Midwest's demands for conformity. Ethnic identity presents itself in many forms, including festivals and traditional celebrations, which take on an even more profound and visible role when language loss occurs. On New Year's Eve, the guionneurs, revelers who participate in the ...
Mnemodrama in Action
This book provides an introductory guide to the experiments in actor training conducted by the Italian theatre maker Alessandro Fersen in his studio laboratory in Rome between 1957 and 1983. This work resulted in the creation of Mnemodrama, a “drama of memory”. The technique was designed by Fersen to provide actors with a psychic training. By entering a state of trance, they were able to access previously hidden dimensions of their personas, using techniques inspired by ancient ritual practices. In the process of creating Mnemodrama, Fersen collaborated with practitioners in the fields of anthropology, ethnology, and psychology. The inclusion of a selection of his theatre writings reveals the scope and diversity of Fersen’s thinking and argues for this previously little-known artist to be considered one of the pioneers of mid-20th century experimental theatre practice. Through tracing one artist’s journey, this book provides new insights into the relationship between theatre and ritual.
