In this latest addition to Oxford's Modernist Literature & Culture series, renowned modernist scholar Michael North poses fundamental questions about the relationship between modernity and comic form in film, animation, the visual arts, and literature. Machine-Age Comedy vividly constructs a cultural history that spans the entire twentieth century, showing how changes wrought by industrialization have forever altered the comic mode. With keen analyses, North examines the work of a wide range of artists - including Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett, and David Foster Wallace - to show the creative and unconventional ways the routinization of industrial society has been explored in a broad array of cultural forms. Throughout, North argues that modern writers and artists found something inherently comic in new experiences of repetition associated with, enforced by, and made inevitable by the machine age. Ultimately, this rich, tightly focused study offers a new lens for understanding the devlopment of comedic structures during periods of massive social, political, and cultural change to reveal how the original promise of modern life can be extracted from its practical disappointment.

Dance on the American Musical Theatre Stage: A History chronicles the development of dance, with an emphasis on musicals and the Broadway stage, in the United States from its colonial beginnings to performances of the present day. This book explores the fascinating tug-and-pull between the European classical, folk and social dance imports and America's indigenous dance forms as they met and collided on the popular musical theatre stage. The historical background influenced a specific musical theatre movement vocabulary and a unique choreographic approach that is recognizable today as Broadway style dancing. Throughout the book, a cultural context is woven into the history to reveal how the competing values within American culture, and its attempts as a nation to define and redefine itself, played out through developments in dance on the musical theatre stage. This book is central to the conversation on how dance influences and reflects society, and will be of interest to students and scholars of Musical Theatre, Theatre Studies, Dance and Cultural History.

Inside The Performance Workshop: A Sourcebook for Rasaboxes and Other Exercises is the first full-length volume dedicated to the history, theory, practice, and application of a suite of performer training exercises developed by Richard Schechner and elaborated by the editors and contributors. This work began in the 1960s with The Performance Group, and has continued to evolve. Rasaboxes - a featured set of exercises - is an interdisciplinary approach for training emotional expressivity through the use of breath, body, voice, movement, and sensation. It brings together: the concept of rasa from classical Indian performance theory and practice research on emotion from neuroscience and psychology experimental performance practices theories of ritual, play, and performance This book combines both practical 'how-to' guidance, and applications in diverse contexts including undergraduate and graduate actor training, television acting, K-12 education, devising, and drama therapy. The book serves as an introduction to the work as well as an essential resource for experienced practitioners.

This book investigates Jimmie Durham's community-building process of making and display in four of his projects in Europe: Something ... Perhaps a Fugue or an Elegy (2005); two Neapolitan nativities (2016 and ongoing); The Middle Earth (with Maria Thereza Alves, 2018); and God's Poems, God's Children (2017). Andrea Feeser explores these artworks in the context of ideas about connection set forth by writers Ann Lauterbach, Franz Rosenzweig, Pamela Sue Anderson, Vinciane Despret, and Hirokazu Miyazaki, among others. Feeser argues that the materials in Durham's artworks; the method of their construction; how Durham writes about his pieces; how they exist with respect to one another; and how they address viewers, demonstrate that we can create alongside others a world that embraces and sustains what has been diminished. The book will be of interest to scholars working in contemporary art, animal studies, new materialism research, and eco-criticism.

The book provides an open and integrated view of creativity in the 21st century, merging theories and case studies from design, psychology, sociology, computer science and human-computer interaction, while benefitting from a continuous dialogue within a network of experts in these fields. An exploratory journey guides the reader through the major social, human, and technological changes that influence human creative abilities, highlighting the fundamental factors that need to be stimulated for creative empowerment in the digital era. The book reflects on why and how design practice and design research should explore digital creativity, and promote the empowerment of creativity, presenting two flexible tools specifically developed to observe the influences on multiple level of human creativity in the digital transition, and understand their positive and negative effect on the creative design process. An overview of the main influences and opportunities collected by adopting the two tools are presented with guidelines to design actions to empower the process for innovation.

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 fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm according to David Hockney are like no other version you will have read before. Although inspired by earlier illustrators of the tales, from Arthur Rackham to Edmund Dulac, Hockney's extraordinary etchings re-imagine these strange and supernatural stories for a modern audience, capturing their distinctive atmosphere in a style that is recognisably the artist's own. Reprinted for the first time since its original publication in 1969, Hockney's book brings together some well-known tales - Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin - with others that are less familiar. Informed by great art of the past, attuned to idiosyncrasies of character and incident, and fresh in execution and content, his illustrations invite us to read each one as if for the first time.

This pioneering volume explores the contribution of migrants to European culture from the early modern era to today. It takes culture as an aesthetic and social activity of making, one practised by migrants on the move and also by those who represent their lives in an act of support. Adopting a multilingual approach, the book interprets the aesthetics and political practices developed by and with migrants in Spain, Italy and France. It juxtaposes early modern and modern work with contemporary, reconceiving migrants as crucial agents of change. Scholars and artists track people on the move within the continent and without, drawing a significant map for the cultural history of migration around Europe. An electronic version of this book is available under a creative commons licence: manchesteropenhive.com/view/9781526166180/9781526166180.xml -- .

This beautiful and informative volume illustrates the vitality and importance of North Carolina's contemporary art scene, showcasing the creation, collection, and celebration of art in all its richness and diversity. Featuring profiles of individual artists, compelling interviews, and beautiful full-color photography, this book tells the story of the state's evolution through the lens of its art world and some of its most compelling figures. Liza Roberts introduces readers to painters, photographers, sculptors, and other artists who live and work in North Carolina and who contribute to its growing reputation in the visual arts. Roberts also provides fascinating historical context, such as the influence of Black Mountain College, the birth and growth of Penland School of Crafts, and short histories of North Carolina's art museums, including Charlotte's Mint Museum, Raleigh's North Carolina Museum of Art, Winston-Salem's Reynolda House, and those flourishing at universities. Artists featured include Stephen Hayes, Mel Chin, Cristina Cordova, Beverly McIver, and Scott Avett. The result is the most comprehensive, informative, and visually rich story of contemporary art in North Carolina.

Western Theatre in Global Contexts explores the junctures, tensions, and discoveries that occur when teaching Western theatrical practices or directing English-language plays in countries that do not share Western theatre histories or in which English is the non-dominant language. This edited volume examines pedagogical discoveries and teaching methods, how to produce specific plays and musicals, and how students who explore Western practices in non-Western places contribute to the art form. Offering on-the-ground perspectives of teaching and working outside of North American and Europe, the book analyzes the importance of paying attention to the local context when developing theatrical practice and education. It also explores how educators and artists who make deep connections in the local culture can facilitate ethical accessibility to Western models of performance for students, practitioners and audiences. Western Theatre in Global Contexts is an excellent resource for scholars, artists, and teachers that are working abroad or on intercultural projects in theatre, education and the arts.

Louis Comfort Tiffany was highly skilled in jewellery design, ceramics, enamels, and metalwork but he is best known for his beautiful stained-glass designs. Using opalescent glass in a variety of colours and textures, he created a stunning range of jewel-like Art Nouveau works that influenced much of American modern art. This sumptuous new book features page after page of astounding work, showing Tiffany's skill as a colourist and a craftsman, with works that still inspire artists and audiences today.

This book studies the intersection of performance and nationalism in South Asia.It traces the emergence of the culture of nationalism from the late nineteenth century through to contemporary times. Drawing on various theatrical performance texts, it looks at the ways in which performative narratives have reflected the national narrative and analyses the role performance has played in engendering nationhood. The volume discusses themes such as political martyrdom as performative nationalism, the revitalisation of nationalism through new media, the sanitisation of physical gestures in dance, the performance of nationhood through violence in Tajiki films, as well as K-Pop and the new northeastern identity in India. A unique contribution to the study of nationalism, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers of history, theatre and performance studies, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, modern India, Asian studies, political studies, social anthropology and sociology.

The Routledge Companion to Performance Philosophy is a volume of especially commissioned critical essays, conversations, collaborative, creative and performative writing mapping the key contexts, debates, methods, discourses and practices in this developing field. Firstly, the collection offers new insights on the fundamental question of how thinking happens: where, when, how and by whom philosophy is performed. Secondly, it provides a plurality of new accounts of performance and performativity - as the production of ideas, bodies and knowledges - in the arts and beyond. Comprising texts written by international artists, philosophers and scholars from multiple disciplines, the essays engage with questions of how performance thinks and how thought is performed in a wide range of philosophies and performances, from the ancient to the contemporary. Concepts and practices from diverse geographical regions and cultural traditions are analysed to draw conclusions about how performance operates across art, philosophy and everyday life. The collection both contributes to and critiques the philosophy of music, dance, theatre and performance, exploring the idea of a philosophy from the arts. It is crucial reading material for those interested in the hierarchy of the relationship between philosophy and the arts, advancing debates on philosophical method, and the relation between Performance and Philosophy more broadly.

The Whitbread Prize-winning biography of Vita Sackville-West. Vita Sackville-West was a vital, gifted and complex woman. A dedicated writer, she made her mark as poet, novelist, biographer, travel writer, journalist and broadcaster. She was also one of the most influential English gardeners of the century, creating with her husband the famous gardens at Sissinghurst. In her Whitbread Prize-winning biography, Glendinning documents Vita's extraordinary life, focusing on her relationships with Violet Trefusis, Virginia Woolf, her husband, and her two sons together with her unpublicised love affairs. Vita was determined to be more than just a married woman and mother; her passionate, secretive character, and the strains, mistakes and achievements of her remarkable life makes this an absorbing and disturbing book.

Born in Mexico in 1907, Frida Kahlo learned about suffering at an early age. She fell victim to polio at the age of six, and was then seriously hurt in a bus accident at eighteen, resulting in injuries that affected her for the rest of her life. The young and indomitable Frida met Diego Rivera, the great mural painter, when Mexico was at a great cultural and political crossroads. They formed a legendary partnership, with a strong attachment to Mexican folk art, a deep commitment to the Communist struggle and a raging artistic ambition that survived all the trials of their marriage. Admired by the Surrealists and photographed by the greatest, Frida was most renowned for her self-portraits and unusual still lifes. This book traces the extraordinary life of this artist whose unforgettable imagery combined cruelty and wit, honesty and insolence, pain and empowerment.

"I am Jugoslovenka" argues that queer-feminist artistic and political resistance were paradoxically enabled by socialist Yugoslavia's unique history of patriarchy and women's emancipation. Spanning performance and conceptual art, video works, film and pop music, lesbian activism and press photos of female snipers in the Yugoslav wars, the book analyses feminist resistance in a range of performative actions that manifest the radical embodiment of Yugoslavia's anti-fascist, transnational and feminist legacies. It covers celebrated and lesser-known artists from the 1970s to today, including Marina Abramovic, Sanja Ivekovic, Vlasta Delimar, Tanja Ostojic, Selma Selman and Helena Janecic, along with music legends Lepa Brena and Esma Redzepova. "I am Jugoslovenka" tells a unique story of women's resistance through the intersection of feminism, socialism and nationalism in East European visual culture. -- .

This volume investigates performance cultures as rich and dynamic environments of knowledge practice through which distinctive epistemologies are continuously (re)generated, cultivated, and celebrated. Epistemologies are dynamic formations of rules, tools, and procedures not only for understanding but also for doing knowledges. This volume deals in particular with epistemological challenges posed by practices and processes of interweaving performance cultures. These challenges arise in artistic and academic contexts because of hierarchies between epistemologies. European colonialism worked determinedly, violently, and often with devastating effects on instituting and sustaining a hegemony of modern Euro-American rules of knowing in many parts of the world. Therefore, Interweaving Epistemologies critically interrogates the (im)possibilities of interweaving epistemologies in artistic and academic contexts today. Writing from diverse geographical locations and knowledge cultures, the book's contributors-philosophers, political scientists as well as practitioners and scholars of theater, performance, and dance-investigate prevailing forms of epistemic ignorance and violence. They introduce key concepts and theories that enable critique of unequal power relations between epistemologies. Moreover, contributions explore historical cases of interweaving epistemologies and examine innovative present-day methods of working across and through epistemological divides in non-hegemonic, sustainable, creative, and critical ways. Ideal for practitioners, students and researchers of theater, performance, and dance as well as of philosophy and history (of science), Interweaving Epistemologies emphasizes the urgent need to acknowledge, study and promote epistemological plurality and diversity in practices of performance making as well as in scholarship on theater and performance around the globe today.

A plain speaking, jargon-free account of contemporary art that identifies key themes and approaches, providing the reader with a clear understanding of the contexts in which art is being made today. Since the 1960s contemporary art has overturned the accepted historical categorizations of what constitutes art, who creates it, and how it is represented and validated. This guide brings the subject right up-to-date, exploring the notion of ‘contemporary’ and what it means in the present as well as how it came about. Curator and writer Natalie Rudd explains the many aspects of contemporary art, from its backstory to today, including different approaches, media and recurring themes. Each chapter addresses a core question, explored via an accessible narrative and supported by an analysis of six relevant works. Rudd also looks at the role of the art market and its structures, including art fairs and biennales and how these have developed since the millennium; the expanded role of the contemporary artist as personality; how artists are untangling historical and contemporary narratives to expose inequalities; the ethics of making; and the potential for art to improve the world and effect political change. A ‘toolkit’ section offers advice on how to interpret contemporary art and where to access it. Offering a more multi-narrative and international perspective, this guide discusses what motivates artists as they try to make sense of the world, and their place within it.

A seminar conducted by Nicholas Wegner in June 1995 for the MA History of Art course at Kingston University explores in depth Francis Bacon, his emergence and influence both in the spheres of art and business. His early life in London and Berlin, analysis of key works, his social milieu. Compares Bacon with predecessors Goya, Egon Schiele, Pablo Picasso, and contemporaries Frank Auerbach and Lucian Freud. There is also a review of Francis Bacon at The Hayward Gallery London in 1998.

What did it mean for painter Lee Krasner to be an artist and a woman if, in the culture of 1950s New York, to be an artist was to be Jackson Pollock and to be a woman was to be Marilyn Monroe? With this question, Griselda Pollock begins a transdisciplinary journey across the gendered aesthetics and the politics of difference in New York abstract, gestural painting. Revisiting recent exhibitions of Abstract Expressionism that either marginalised the artist-women in the movement or focused solely on the excluded women, as well as exhibitions of women in abstraction, Pollock reveals how theories of embodiment, the gesture, hysteria and subjectivity can deepen our understanding of this moment in the history of painting co-created by women and men. Providing close readings of key paintings by Lee Krasner and re-thinking her own historic examination of images of Jackson Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler at work, Pollock builds a cultural bridge between the New York artist-women and their other, Marilyn Monroe, a creative actor whose physically anguished but sexually appropriated star body is presented as pathos formula of life energy. Monroe emerges as a haunting presence within this moment of New York modernism, eroding the policed boundaries between high and popular culture and explaining what we gain by re-thinking art with the richness of feminist thought. -- .