Afrikinesis

by Ofosuwa M Abiola
Afrikinesis
Author: Ofosuwa M Abiola
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 97
Release: 2023-09-18
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 100380277X
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This book provides scholars and non-specialists alike with a roadmap for effectively conducting culturally aware, historically relevant research on African dance and on any dance style that contains African elements. This book explains why Western research paradigms are inadequate for research on Africana dance. It exposes the value of utilizing an appropriate research paradigm that offers researchers a broader perspective and a transparent, unfettered process for analysis in under-researched topics such as African and African diaspora dance styles. Researchers are introduced to the African dance aesthetic, characteristically African body movements, definitions of steps, understandings within African culture, and a host of other jewels that facilitate a deeper grasp on the subject and refine the quality of the scholar’s research, its findings, and its proficiency. This book will be of great interest to scholars of African dance studies.

Genre Transgressions

by Ramona Mosse
Genre Transgressions
Author: Ramona Mosse
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2023-12-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1003812775
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This collection gathers a set of provocative essays that sketch innovative and interdisciplinary approaches to Genre Theory in the 21st century. Focusing on the interaction between tragedy and comedy, both renowned and emerging scholarly and creative voices from philosophy, theater, literature, and cultural studies come together to engage in dialogues that reconfigure genre as social, communal, and affective. In revisiting the challenges to aesthetic categorization over the course of the 20th century, this volume proposes a shift away from the prescriptive and hierarchical reading of genre to its crucial function in shaping thought and enabling shared experience and communication. In doing so, the various essays acknowledge the diverse contexts within which genre needs to be thought afresh: media studies, rhetoric, politics, performance, and philosophy.

An Actor Survives

by Tomasz Kubikowski
An Actor Survives
Author: Tomasz Kubikowski
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2023-11-02
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1003822568
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This book focuses on the analysis and interpretation of the first volume of the book An Actor’s Work by Konstantin Stanislavsky. This volume is the only part of his planned major work on theatre art that he was able to finish and authorise before his death. Its highly edited variant has long been known as ‘An Actor Prepares’ in the English-speaking world. Tomasz Kubikowski explores Stanislavsky’s material not only as a handbook of acting but also as a philosophical testament of Stanislavsky, in which he attempts to contain his most essential experiences and reflections. This book explores the underlying theme of ‘survival’ in its various meanings, from professional to existential; and the mechanisms and actions we attempt to survive. This study will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre and performance studies.

Of Kings and Clowns

by Tiran Manucharyan
Of Kings and Clowns
Author: Tiran Manucharyan
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2024-02-28
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1003855113
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This book examines the transformations Egyptian theatre has undergone since 1967. Through detailed analyses of the plays, the book investigates the ways Egyptian theatre represents, formulates, and imagines political and cultural leadership and, by implication, enacts its own leadership. Alongside the work of established playwrights, such as Yusuf Idris, Abul-ʿEla El-Salamouny, Fathia El-ʿAssal and Lenin El-Ramly, it also discusses the input in theatre of a younger generation, reflecting the new transformations in Egyptian theatre following the 2011 revolution. Relating the theoretical underpinnings of its analyses to theoretical discussions by Egyptian playwrights, the book contributes to current English-language scholarship in theatre studies, by providing a discourse largely absent from it. Considering the growing sense in English-language academia on the need for research and education beyond the Western canon this book offers an important addition to the study resources. This book will interest both scholars and students who study the Arab world, and researchers and students with an interest in cultural studies, more specifically twentieth- and twenty-first-century theatre, and literature studies. The book’s specific focus on political theatre and its gender perspective make it also of interest to the fields of political and gender studies.

Burning Man

by Linda Noveroske-Tritten
Burning Man
Author: Linda Noveroske-Tritten
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2024-02-06
Genre: Art
ISBN: 100384717X
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This book centres on a philosophical analysis of creative acts in the Burning Man Festival and their roles in wider social change. With particular focus on the Ten Principles of Burning Man, Linda Noveroske posits a re-interpretation of common notions of “self” and “other” as they apply to identity, difference, and the ways that these personal impulses ripple outward from changing individuals into changing societies. Such radical re-imagination of ideology can be most powerful when it occurs in spaces of otherness, of heterotopia. This study casts Burning Man as a heterotopia to not only destabilizes what we think we know about visual art, performance, and creative encounters, but also bring these acts into an attitude of immediacy that facilitates previously unimagined behaviour and opens out artistic drive into the unknown. This book would be of value for scholars and practitioners in Performance Studies, Theatre and Dance, Art History, Psychology, Phenomenology, Architecture and Urban Studies.

Screened Stages

by Rachel Joseph
Screened Stages
Author: Rachel Joseph
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2024-02-28
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1003855105
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This book is devoted to tracing the variety of ways that theatre, theatricality, and performance are embedded in Hollywood cinema as screened stages. A screened stage is the literal or metaphorical appearance of a stage on screen. When the Hollywood style emerged in cinema history it traumatically severed the entwined relationship between film and theatre. The book makes the argument that cinema longs for theatre after that separation. The histories of stage and screen persistently crisscross one another making their separation problematic. The screened stage from the end of the nineteenth century until now offers a miniaturized version of cinema and theatre history. Moments of the stage within the screen compress historical styles and movements into saturated representations on film. Such examples overflow the cinematic screen into singular manifestations of presentness. Screened stages uncover what it means to be simultaneously present and absent. This book would be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre, film, dance, and performance.

Black Women Centre Stage

by Paola Prieto López
Black Women Centre Stage
Author: Paola Prieto López
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2023-12-13
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1003824927
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This book examines the political alliances that are built across the diaspora in contemporary plays written by Black women playwrights in the UK. Through the concept of creative diasporic solidarity, it offers an innovative theoretical approach to examine the ways in which the playwrights respond creatively to the violence and marginalisation of Black communities, especially Black women. This study demonstrates that theatre can act as a productive space for the ethical encounter with the Other (understood in terms of alterity, as someone different from the self) by examining the possibilities of these plays to activate the spectators’ responsibility and solidarity towards different types of violence experienced by Black women, offering alternative modes of relationality. The book engages with a range of contemporary works written by Black women playwrights in the UK, including Mojisola Adebayo, Theresa Ikoko, Diana Nneka Atuona, Gloria Williams, Charlene James, or Yusra Warsama, bringing to the fore a gendered and intersectional approach to the analysis of the texts. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in contemporary theatre, gender studies and diaspora studies.

Gut Knowledges

by Kristin Hunt
Gut Knowledges
Author: Kristin Hunt
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 173
Release: 2023-10-13
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1000985830
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This book examines historical and contemporary activist alimentary performance with an eye toward, or perhaps a taste for, what these performance modes can reveal about changing relationships between the senses, truth, justice, and ethical action amid the post-truth era’s destabilization of shared notions of truth. This inquiry emerges in response to an urgent need to understand how multisensory models of knowledge, truth, and justice can be ethically employed to nurture a more just society. Alongside this goal is a drive to understand the ways in which these modes of performance are being co-opted by authoritarians, white supremacists, anti-science activists, and others to shore up injustice, promote misinformation, and anxiously guard existing systems of power and privilege. From white supremacist milk-drinking performances to liberatory uses of culinary performance as pedagogy, Kristin Hunt analyzes both disturbing and inspiring alimentary events to understand how performers, cooks, scholars, artists, and activists can effectively cultivate models of alimentary performance that center plenitude, joy, and justice while pushing back against models rooted in anxiety, diminishment, and cruelty. The text should be of interest for students in performance studies, contemporary theatre, and theatre history as well as courses in food studies and popular culture.

Meaning in the Midst of Performance

by Gareth White
Meaning in the Midst of Performance
Author: Gareth White
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2023-12-19
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0429632460
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Being an audience participant can be a confusing and contradictory experience. When a performance requires us to do things, we are put in the situation of being both actor and spectator, of being part of the work of art while also being the audience who receives it, and of being both perceiving subject and aesthetic object. This book examines these contradictions – and many others – as they appear by accident and by design in increasingly popular forms of interactive, immersive, and participatory performance in theatre and live art. Borrowing concepts from cognitive philosophy and bringing them into a conversation with critical theory, Gareth White sharply examines meaning as a process that happens to us as we are engaged in the problems and negotiations of a participatory performance. This study will be of great interest to scholars and students of theatre and performance, intermedial arts and games studies, and to practising artists.