What goes on in the body and mind of an endurance athlete at the limits of performance? How do they relate to the world around and prepare for the task ahead? Offering a refreshing perspective on training in the cross-lighting of aesthetic and athletic processes, this book focuses on the learning, mastery and creative adaptation of technique in performance. From traditional and physical actors to runners, boxers and other sports practitioners, it is about performers: their bodies, trainings and experiences. It interrogates what it means to prepare and train as a performer in the early 21st century. Writing from extensive experience in physical theatre and long-distance running, the author combines insights from both disciplines along with theatre history, sports science and perspectives like embodied cognition and affective science. From the kind of thoughts that go through the mind of an actor or a runner, to the economy and aesthetic of their movement and to how they feel about it, this book sheds light on the performing body and its capacities for action. Topics covered include attentional focus and distraction, affordances and equipment, ‘choking’ and stage fright, physiological regulation and effort perception, pacing and play, optimal flow and creative improvisation, and intentionality and automaticity in expert performance. The volume presents an informative and thought-provoking account accessible to readers interested in theatre, dance, performance, running, athletics, and sport.

In Poetics of Deconstruction, Lynn Turner develops an intimate attention to independent films, art and the psychoanalyses by which they might make sense other than under continued license of the subject that calls himself man. Drawing extensively from Jacques Derrida's philosophy in precise dialogue with feminist thought, animal studies and posthumanism, this book explores the vulnerability of the living as rooted in non-oppositional differences. From abjection to mourning, to the speculative and the performative, it reposes concepts and buzzwords seemingly at home in feminist theory, visual culture and the humanities more broadly. Stepping away from the carno-phallogocentric legacies of the signifier and the dialectic, Poetics of Deconstruction asks you to welcome nonpower into politics, always sexual but no longer anchored in sacrifice.

"Compressed Utterances brings focused attention to collage in a Germanic context, whose contours and impact are still so little appreciated. As this stunning volume shows, collage serves as a key medium not only for understanding art historical developments but social and political transformations as well, often embodying the dynamic forces of avant-garde criticality." (Thomas O. Haakenson, Associate Professor, History of Art and Visual Culture, California College of the Arts) "A deep dive into the paradigmatic medium of the twentieth century, Compressed Utterances is the foundational text of the growing field of collage studies. The book's established and emerging authors investigate an astonishing range of previously unknown collage work to explore German artists' and writers' deployment of this medium as appropriative, intertextual, alienating, and temporally slippery." (Elizabeth Otto, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, The University at Buffalo, State University of New York) Composite pictures create narratives and images from many fragments. They turn often disparate and juxtaposing images and text into a singular image or message. Collage makes from the broken and, arguably, no other country has reflected the fractious nature of its history more than Germany. The collage form is one of the best expressive forms to be taken up and experimented with by German artists since 1912. Compressed Utterances: Collage in a Germanic Context after 1912 brings together essays by scholars, students and curators to examine the use of collage by German-speaking artists, making in their homeland and abroad, whose works are closely connected to the tumultuous histories of Germany and neighbouring German-speaking nations since 1912 to the late 2000s.