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Focused on the contemporary Anglophone adoption from the 1960s onwards, Beyond Scenography explores the porous state of contemporary theatre-making to argue a critical distinction between scenography (as a crafting of place orientation) and scenographics (that which orientate acts of worlding, of staging). With sections on installation art and gardening as well as marketing and placemaking, this book is an argument for what scenography does: how assemblages of scenographic traits orientate, situate, and shape staged events. Established stage orthodoxies are revisited - including the symbiosis of stage and scene and the aesthetic ideology of 'the scenic' - to propose how scenographics are formative to all staged events. Consequently, one of the conclusions of this book is that there is no theatre practice without scenography, no stages without scenographics. Beyond Scenography offers a manifesto for a renewed theory of scenographic practice for the student and professional theatrical designer.
Analysing Gender in Performance brings together the fields of Gender Studies and Performance Analysis to explore how contemporary performance represents and interrogates gender. This edited collection includes a wide range of scholarly essays, as well as artists’ voices and their accounts of their works and practices. The Introduction outlines the book’s key approaches to concepts in English language gender discourses and gender’s intersectionalities, and sets out the approaches to performance analysis and methods of research employed by the various contributors. The book focuses on performances from the Global North, staged over the past fifty years. Case studies are diverse, ranging from site-specific, dance theatre, speculative drag, installation, and music video performances to Mabou Mines, Churchill, Shakespeare and Ibsen. Contributors explore how gender intersects with sexuality, social class, race, ethnicity, indigeneity, culture and history. Read individually or in tension with one another, the essays confront the contemporary complexities of analysing gender in performance.
Kinaesthesia and Visual Self-reflection in Contemporary Dance features interviews with UK-based professional-level contemporary, ballet, hip hop, and breaking dancers and cross-disciplinary explication of kinaesthesia and visual self-reflection discourses. Expanding on the concept of a ‘kinaesthetic mode of attention’ leads to discussion of some of the key values and practices which nurture and develop this mode in contemporary dance. Zooming in on entanglements with video self-images in dance practice provides further insights regarding kinaesthesia’s historicised polarisation with the visual. It thus provides opportunities to dwell on and reconsider reflections, opening up to a set of playful yet disruptive diffractions inherent in the process of becoming a contemporary dancer, particularly amongst an increasingly complex landscape of visual and theoretical technologies.
"Nearly four hundred and fifty years in, ballet still resonates-though the stages have become international, and the dancers, athletes far removed from noble amateurs. While vibrations from the form's beginnings clearly resound, much has transformed. Nowadays ballet dancers aspire to work across disciplines with choreographers who value a myriad of abilities. Dance theorists and historians make known possibilities and polemics in lieu of notating dances verbatim, and critics do the daily work of recording performance histories and interviewing artists. Ideas circulate, questions arise, and discussions about how to resist ballet's outmoded traditions take precedence. In the dance community, c...
On a global platform we are witnessing the increased visibility of the people we call children and teenagers as political activists. Meanwhile, across the contemporary performance landscape, children are participating as performers and collaborators in ways that resonate with this figure of the child activist. Beyond Innocence: Children in Performance proposes that performance has the ability to offer alternatives to hegemonic perceptions of the child as innocent, in need of protection, and apolitical. Through an in-depth analysis of selected performances shown in the UK within the past decade, alongside newly gathered documentation on children’s participation in professional performance i...
Excerpt from The Early Germans of New Jersey: Their History, Churches, and Genealogies This work is the result of an attempt to discover the exact time of the first settlement of New Jersey by people of the German race. It is believed that this fact has been ascertained with sufficient certainty. Between 1710 and 1713 nearly all palatines, who have left any trace of their presence, began to arrive in the State and to fulfill their important part in the upbuilding of this commonwealth. In the course of this investigation extending, as it needs must do, in so many directions and having to do with so many records, a large amount of valuable material would naturally accumulate. This has appeared...
This project addresses the contexts of Practice as Research and how to undertake it. This second iteration updates thinking and practices but sustains a direct and clear approach on how to become a practitioner-researcher. New features include an extension of range “beyond” the arts and a case for intra-disciplinarity in Practice Research as an influence in the formation of the “future university”. A comparison is made between Artistic Research and Practice Research recognizing that research through practices with being-doing-knowing is central to both. Acknowledging the current crisis in legitimation, a broad view is taken of how things might be known by an onto-epistemology for the twenty-first century foregrounding the bodymind but sustaining rationality and community by way of Other/other dialogic exchange. Perspectives from around the world in Part II offset the more Eurocentric emphasis in Part I.
Explores the speculative and projective acts of designing performance and performing design. This work offers a range of performative expressions across disciplines, where design artefacts - objects, gestures, images, occasions and environments - are aligned to performance through notions of embodiment, action and event.
Insubordinate Costume: Inspiring Performance presents a comprehensive study of historical and contemporary examples of scenographic costume – the type of costume that creates an almost complete stage environment by itself, simultaneously acting as costume, set and performance. This book provides readers with an overview of the costumes, designers, context and theory that have contributed to the emerging field of ‘costume as performance’. Focusing on artists and their creative approach to space, form, materials and movement, the book looks at iconic figures such as Loïe Fuller, Oskar Schlemmer and Leigh Bowery, amongst contemporary examples of practitioners that are blurring disciplina...