Aotearoa New Zealand in the Global Theatre Marketplace offers a case study of how the theatre of Aotearoa has toured, represented and marketed itself on the global stage. How has New Zealand work attempted to stand out, differentiate itself, and get seen by audiences internationally? This book examines the journeys of a dynamic range of culturally and theatrically innovative works created by Aotearoa New Zealand theatre makers that have toured and been performed across time, place and theatrical space: from Moana Oceania to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, from a Maori Shakespeare adaptation to an immersive zombie theatre experience. Drawing on postcolonialism, transnationalism, cosmopolitanism and globality to understand how Aotearoa New Zealand has imagined and conceived of itself through drama, the author investigates how these representations might be read and received by audiences around the world, variously reinforcing and complicating conceptions of New Zealand national identity. Developing concepts of theatrical mobility, portability and the market, this study engages with the whole theatrical enterprise as a play travels from concept and scripting through to funding, marketing, performance and the critical response by reviewers and commentators. This book will be of global interest to academics, producers and theatre artists as a significant resource for the theory and practice of theatre touring and cross-cultural performance and reception.

What can an art biennale in Dakar, Senegal, tell us about current discourses surrounding the place of art in the world, and in the academic study of anthropology? This volume investigates the Dak'Art biennale, ranked among the world's top 20 biennials, drawing upon fieldwork, archival research, and the experiences of those involved. In so doing, the chapters make a statement about the impact of globally-acting art biennials, contributing to current scholarship both on biennales and the anthropology of art scene more widely. Part I opens with the history of its foundation and considers it in conjunction with the rise of contemporary art in Senegal. Part II deals with the biennale's various objectives, selection strategies, exhibition spaces, platforms for debate, and discourses between the State, the secretariat and local artists and art world professionals. Part III examines the cyclical creation of contemporary African art, and questions if the Biennial creates local canonical practices. The Epilogue uses the Dak'art biennale to question assumptions around practice in general biennale scholarship and work. Featuring a dialogic structure between practitioners of art and anthropologists, this unique volume will be of interest to students of anthropology, art history and practice, African studies and curatorial practice.

In this study, Josefine Wikstroem challenges a concept of performance that makes no difference between art and non-art and argues for a new concept. This book confronts and criticises the way in which the dominating concept of performance has been used in art theory and performance and dance studies. Through an analysis of 1960s performance practices, Wikstroem focuses specifically on task-dance and event-score practices and provides an examination of the key philosophical concepts that are inseparable from such a concept of art and are necessary for the reconstruction of a critical concept of performance, such as "practice", "experience", "object", "abstraction" and "structure". This book will be of great interest to scholars, students and practitioners across dance, performance art, aesthetics and art theory.

Voice, Art Practice visual culture contemporary art audiences

The mention of the term "melodrama" is likely to evoke a response from laymen and musicians alike that betrays an acquaintance only with the popular form of the genre and its greatly heightened drama, exaggerated often to the point of the ridiculous. Few are aware that there exists a type of melodrama that contains in its smaller forms the beauty of the sung ballad and, in the larger-scale works, the appeal of the spoken play. This category of melodrama is one that surfaced in many cultures but was perhaps never so enthusiastically cultivated as in the Czech lands. The melodrama varied greatly at the hands of its Czech advocates. While the works of Zdenek Fibich and his contemporary Josef Bohuslav Foerster, a composer best known for his songs, remained closely bound to the text, those of conductor/composer Otakar Ostrcil reveal a stance that privileged the music and, given their creator's orchestral experience, are more reminiscent of the symphonic poem. Fibich in his staged works and Josef Suk (composer/violinist and Dvorak's son-in-law), in his incidental music reflect variously late nineteenth-century Romanticism, the influence of Wagner, and early manifestations of Impressionism. In its more recent guise, the principles of the staged melodrama reside quite comfortably in the film score. Judith A. Mabary's important volume will be of interest not only to musicologists, but those working in Central and East European studies, voice studies, European theatre, and those studying music and nationalism.

As his personal circumstances move in constant flux, Ai Weiwei remains a cultural magnet. Renowned for his political activism and social media activity almost as much as for his social interventions, contemporary approach to the readymade, and knowledge of Chinese traditional crafts, Ai's fame extends throughout and beyond the art world. Drawn from TASCHEN's limited Collector's Edition, this monograph explores each of Ai's career phases up until his release from Chinese custody. It features extensive visual material to trace Ai's development from his early New York days right through to his recent practice. Focus moments include his international breakthrough in the early 2000s, his porcelain Sunflower Seeds at the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern, his response to the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, and his police detention in 2011. With behind-the-scenes studio pictures, production shots, and numerous statements derived from exclusive interviews with Ai, we gain privileged access to the artist's process, influences, and importance. The book includes texts from Uli Sigg, Ai's longtime friend and former Swiss ambassador to China and Roger M. Buergel, who curated the 2007 documenta and hosted the artist's Fairytale piece. About the series TASCHEN is 40! Since we started our work as cultural archaeologists in 1980, TASCHEN has become synonymous with accessible publishing, helping bookworms around the world curate their own library of art, anthropology, and aphrodisia at an unbeatable price. Today we celebrate 40 years of incredible books by staying true to our company credo. The 40 series presents new editions of some of the stars of our program-now more compact, friendly in price, and still realized with the same commitment to impeccable production.

What is artistic resonance and how can it be linked to one's life and one's art? This latest book of essays from legendary theatre director Anne Bogart, considers the creation of resonance in the artistic endeavour, with a focus on the performing arts. The word 'resonance' comes from the Latin meaning to 're-sound' or 'sound together'. From music to physics, resonance is a common thread that evokes a response and, in general, is understood as a quality that makes something personally meaningful and valuable. For Bogart, curiosity is a key personal quality to be nurtured throughout life and that very same curiosity, as an artist, thinker and human being. Creating pathways between performance theory, art history, neuroscience, music, architecture and the visual arts, and consistently forging new thought-paths, the writing draws upon Anne Bogart's own life and artistic journeys to illuminate potent philosophical ideas. Woven with personal anecdotes, stories and reflections, this is a book that will be of interest to any theatre artist and anyone who reflects on the power of the arts, of theatre-making and what it means to be engaged in the artistic process.

Towards an Ecocritical Theatre investigates contemporary theatre through the lens of Anthropocene-oriented ecocriticism. It assesses how Anthropocene thinking engages different modes of theatrical representation, as well as how the theatrical apparatus can rise to the representational challenges of changing interactions between humans and the nonhuman world. To explore these problems, the book investigates international Anglophone plays and performances by Caryl Churchill, Stephen Sewell, Andrew Bovell, E.M. Lewis, Chantal Bilodeau, Jordan Hall, and Miwa Matreyek, who have taken significant steps towards re-orienting theatre from its traditional focus on humans to an ecocritical attention to nonhumans and the environment in the Anthropocene. Their theatrical works show how an engagement with the problem of scale disrupts the humanist bias of theatre, provoking new modes of theatrical inquiry that envision a scale beyond the human and realign our ecological culture, art, and intimacy with geological time. Moreover, the plays and performances studied here, through their liveness, immediacy, physicality, and communality, examine such scalar shifts via the problem of agency in order to give expression to the stories of nonhuman actants. These theatrical works provoke reflections on the flourishing of multispecies responsibilities and sensitivities in aesthetic and ethical terms, providing a platform for research in the environmental humanities through imaginative conversations on the world's iterative performativity in which all bodies, human and nonhuman, are cast horizontally as agential forces on the theatrical world stage. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre studies, environmental humanities, and ecocritical studies.

High Tech - sometimes known as Structural Expressionism - is a style of Modern architecture that produced some of the most prominent and visually exciting buildings of the twentieth century: the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation headquarters in Hong Kong, the Lloyd's of London headquarters in London, UK, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France. Extensively illustrated with photographs and diagrams, and accessibly written, High Tech Architecture - A style reconsidered discusses the intended meanings of the visual vocabulary involved in High Tech, and places the style in the broad context of other Modern architecture of the twentieth century. The book offers a balanced re-appraisal of the extravagant claims that have been made for High Tech, by its progenitors and by architectural critics, as an architecture appropriate for the built environment of the future.

Les Waters is a master director who has worked with many of the most important American theatre artists of the 21st century. A thorough examination of his creative practice and body of work amounts to a picture of American theatre in our time. While collaboration is promoted and celebrated in practical theatre courses and professional training programs far and wide, this book offers concrete and situation-specific examples of how accomplished theatre artists have grapple with the challenges of creating together. The book features writing from the full spectrum of professional disciplines (actors, designers, stage managers, and dramaturgs, as well as directors and playwrights).

The first in a two-volume survey, readers are invited to reexamine the history of the West and its art through a multifaceted modern lens. More than 40 artists are included who reflect the tremendous diversity, depth, and breadth of a field steeped in history. While some follow the traditions established by Remington and Russell, others seek to break from tradition, busting myths and bringing new insights and artistic styles to the genre. They come from both sides of the Mississippi and have pedigrees that range from bona fide cowboy or Native American credentials to careers in commercial illustration. The unifying theme is a common concern for and commitment to their art and the West itself. In this volume, contemporary artists are featured whose work revolves around the American cowboy. Within these pages, many different artists, some of whom have been cowboys themselves, exhibit their rendition of the wonderful world of the West.

This book explores how three contemporary American artists through the mediums of film, literature and popular music have contributed to the tradition of American progressivism, and provides an invaluable companion to the understanding of complex issues such as inequality and social and economic decline that are apparent in America today. Connecting the works of these artists through a fictional country - the 'Other America' - the book shows how they have refuted middle-class values and goals of success, money and social affirmation to unveil the less celebrated, dark side of contemporary America, which, despite the troubles currently faced, never loses hope for a better future. This utopic vision in the face of adversity is explored through the plots, characters and mis-en-scene of Auster and Jarmusch's work and Waits's lyrics and sound. This vision challenges the dominant narratives of America as the land of opportunity and values democracy, civic engagement, communitarianism and egalitarianism. Offering an important new perspective to literature on contemporary American culture, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of American studies, film studies, popular music, postmodern literature, cultural studies and sociology.

History, Art politics, African, African American, Performance

An evocative chronicle of the power of solitude in the natural world I'm often asked, but have no idea why I chose Iceland, why I first started going, why I still go. In truth I believe Iceland chose me.-from the introduction Contemporary artist Roni Horn first visited Iceland in 1975 at the age of nineteen, and since then, the island's treeless expanse has had an enduring hold on Horn's creative work. Through a series of remarkable and poetic reflections, vignettes, episodes, and illustrated essays, Island Zombie distills the artist's lifelong experience of Iceland's natural environment. Together, these pieces offer an unforgettable exploration of the indefinable and inescapable force of remote, elemental places, and provide a sustained look at how an island and its atmosphere can take possession of the innermost self. Island Zombie is a meditation on being present. It vividly conveys Horn's experiences, from the deeply profound to the joyful and absurd. Through powerful evocations of the changing weather and other natural phenomena-the violence of the wind, the often aggressive birds, the imposing influence of glaciers, and the ubiquitous presence of water in all its variety-we come to understand the author's abiding need for Iceland, a place uniquely essential to Horn's creative and spiritual life. The dramatic surroundings provoke examinations of self-sufficiency and isolation, and these ruminations summon a range of cultural companions, including El Greco, Emily Dickinson, Judy Garland, Wallace Stevens, Edgar Allan Poe, William Morris, and Rachel Carson. While brilliantly portraying nature's sublime energy, Horn also confronts issues of consumption, destruction, and loss, as the industrial and man-made encroach on Icelandic wilderness. Filled with musings on a secluded region that perpetually encourages a sense of discovery, Island Zombie illuminates a wild and beautiful Iceland that remains essential and new.

Metaphors in audiovisual media receive increasing attention from film and communication studies as well as from linguistics and multimodal metaphor research. The specific media character of film, and thus of cinematic metaphor, remains, however, largely ignored. Audiovisual images are all too frequently understood as iconic representations and material carriers of information. Cinematic Metaphor proposes an alternative: starting from film images as affective experience of movement-images, it replaces the cognitive idea of viewers as information-processing machines, and heals the break with rhetoric established by conceptual metaphor theory. Subscribing to a phenomenological concept of embodiment, a shared vantage point for metaphorical meaning-making in film-viewing and face-to-face interaction is developed. The book offers a critique of cognitive film and metaphor theories and a theory of cinematic metaphor as performative action of meaning-making, grounded in the dynamics of viewers' embodied experiences with a film. Fine-grained case studies ranging from Hollywood to German feature film and TV news, from tango lesson to electoral campaign commercial, illustrate the framework's application to media and multimodality analysis.

Shio Kusaka’s ceramic vessels articulate poetic connections, creating a cohesive and unique installation. ---------- “It’s a striking effect—some pieces are bowl-shaped, others are cylindrical, a few have slim, sloping necks. Their linear arrangement suggests some kind of progression through time and space.” — Document Journal ----------- While pulling inspiration and techniques from ancient Japanese ceramics as well as from popular culture and everyday life, Kusaka carves new language into her artwork. Employing various types of clay and firing methods, she experiments with line, color, and size to bring fresh life to the medium. This harmonious presentation is created from individual pieces and thematic groupings, resulting in an extraordinary, unified installation to be experienced in the round. Created in close collaboration with the artist and with many detail images, this book provides a deep dive into Kusaka’s incredible work one light year. Published after Kusaka’s hugely successful exhibition at David Zwirner, New York, in 2022, this catalogue studies her singular installation from all angles. A text by Kusaka illuminates her working process and provides unique insight into this particular work.

theatre, philosophy, new materialism, environmental humanities, gesture, and the ontology of response.

In Instructional Cinema and African Audiences in Colonial Kenya, 1926-1963, the author argues against the colonial logic instigating that films made for African audiences in Kenya influenced them to embrace certain elements of western civilization but Africans had nothing to offer in return. The author frames this logic as unidirectional approach purporting that Africans were passive recipients of colonial programs. Contrary to this understanding, the author insists that African viewers were active participants in the discourse of cinema in Kenya. Employing unorthodox means to protest mediocre films devoid of basic elements of film production, African spectators forced the colonial government to reconsider the way it produced films. The author frames the reconsideration as bidirectional approach. Instructional cinema first emerged as a tool to "educate" and "modernize" Africans, but it transformed into a contestable space of cultural and political power, a space that both sides appropriated to negotiate power and actualize their abstract ideas.

The 20th century was a dynamic period for the theatrical arts in China. Booming urban theatres, the interaction between commercial practice and theatre, dramas staged during the War of Resistance against Japan and a healthy dialogue between Western and Eastern theatres all contributed to the momentousness of this period. The four volumes of A History of Chinese Theatre in the 20th Century display the developmental trajectories of Chinese theatre over those 100 years. This volume deals with the development of Chinese theatre from 1949 to 2000, covering the fluctuations of 'drama reform', spectacles of the 'Cultural Revolution', and theatre in the immediate years before the opening up of the country. The author demonstrates how Chinese dramatic traditions endured and adapted in the face of modernity and how politics and art interacted. By combining academic rigour with a high degree of readability, this volume is both an essential guide for scholars and students in the history of the arts and general readers interested in Chinese theatre.

This book examines how circus and circus imaginary have shaped the historical avant-gardes at the beginning of the 20th century and the cultures they help constitute, to what extent this is a mutual shaping, and why this is still relevant today. This book aims to produce a better sense of the artistic work and cultural achievements that have emerged from the interplay of circus and avant-garde artists and projects, and to clarify both their transhistorical and trans-medial presence, and their scope for interdisciplinary expansion. Across 14 chapters written by leading scholars - from fields as varied as circus, theatre and performance studies, art, media studies, film and cultural history - some of which are written together with performers and circus practitioners, the book examines to what extent circus and avant-garde connections contribute to a better understanding of early 20th century artistic movements and their enduring legacy, of the history of popular entertainment, and the cultural relevance of circus arts. Circus and the Avant-Gardes elucidates how the realm of the circus as a model, or rather a blueprint for modernist experiment, innovation and (re)negotiation of bodies, has become fully integrated in our ways of perceiving avant-gardes today. The book does not only map the significance of circus/avant-garde phenomena for the past, but, through an exploration of their contemporary actualisations (in different media), also carves out their achievements, relevance, and impact, both cultural and aesthetic, on the present time.

Part of the popular and successful Routledge Performance Practitioners series Includes a wealth of both original exercises and invaluable primary material Written with input from Hart's close collaborators and company members

Borderlands Children's Theatre highlights the social and performative construction of Chicana/o Mexican-American Childhood. Borderlands Children's Theatre teach and educate Anglo citizens on Chicana/o Mexican-American culture. Borderlands Children's Theatre explores traditional and contemporary literature and dramatic literature for Chicana/o Mexican-American children and youth. Borderlands Children's Theatre is a more in-depth analysis of Chicana/o Mexican-American childhood in the field of Childhood Studies. Borderlands Children's Theatre is a unique scholarly book that is the first to examine U.S. Chicana/o/Mexican-American childhood in Performance Studies.

This book is about some of the ways we remember the dead through performance. It examines the dramaturgical techniques and strategies that enable artists to respond to the imperative: 'Remember Me' - the command King Hamlet's ghost gives to his son in Shakespeare's famous tragedy, Hamlet. The book develops the concept of hauntological dramaturgy by engaging with a series of performances that commemorate, celebrate, investigate, and sometimes seek justice for the dead. It draws on three interrelated discourses on haunting: Derrida's hauntology with its ethical exhortation to be with ghosts and listen to ghosts; Abraham and Torok's psychoanalytic account of the role spectres play in the transmission of intergenerational trauma; and, finally, Mark Fisher's and Simon Reynolds' development of Derrida's ideas within the field of popular culture. Taken together, these writers, in different ways, suggest strategies for reading and creating performances concerned with questions of commemoration. Case studies focus on a set of known and unknown figures, including Ian Charleson, Spalding Gray and David Bowie. This study will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners working within theatre and performance studies as well as philosophy and cultural studies.