Today, teachers and performers of Turkish classical music intentionally cultivate melancholies, despite these affects being typically dismissed as remnants of the Ottoman Empire. Melancholic Modalities is the first in-depth historical and ethnographic study of the practices socialized by musicians who enthusiastically teach and perform a present-day genre substantially rooted in the musics of the Ottoman court and elite Mevlevi Sufi lodges. Author Denise Gill analyzes how melancholic music-making emerges as pleasurable, spiritually redeeming, and healing for both the listener and performer. Focusing on the diverse practices of musicians who deploy and circulate melancholy in sound, Gill interrogates the constitutive elements of these musicians' modalities in the context of emergent neoliberalism, secularism, political Islamism, Sufi devotionals, and the politics of psychological health in Turkey today. In an essential contribution to the study of ethnomusicology and psychology, Gill develops rhizomatic analyses to allow for musicians' multiple interpretations to be heard. Melancholic Modalities uncovers how emotion and musical meaning are connected, and how melancholy is articulated in the world of Turkish classical musicians. With her innovative concept of "bi-aurality," Gill's book forges new possibilities for the historical and ethnographic analyses of musics and ideologies of listening for music scholars.

In August 1960, Anna Halprin taught an experimental workshop attended by Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer (along with Trisha Brown and other soon-to-be important artists) on her dance deck on the slopes of Mount Tamalpais, north of San Francisco. Within two years, Forti's conceptually forceful Dance Constructions had premiered in Yoko Ono's loft and Rainer had cofounded the groundbreaking Judson Dance Theater. Radical Bodies reunites Halprin, Forti, and Rainer for the first time inmore than fifty-five years. Dance was a fundamental part of the art world in the 1960s, the most volatile decade in American art, offering a radical image of bodily presence in a moment of revolutionary change. Halprin, Forti, and Rainer-all with Jewish roots-found themselves at the epicenter of this upheaval. Each, in her own tenacious, humorous, and critical way, created a radicalized vision for dance, dance making, and, ultimately, for music and the visual arts. Placing the body and performance at the center of debate, each developed corporeal languages and methodologies that continue to influence choreographers and visual artists around the world to the present day, enabling a critical practice that reinserts social and political issues into postmodern dance and art. Published in association with the Art, Design & Architecture Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara. Exhibition dates: Art, Design & Architecture Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara: January 17-April 30, 2017 New York Public Library for the Performing Arts: May 24-September 16, 2017 Events: Pillowtalks, Jacob's Pillow, Becket, MA: July 1, 2017

In this collection of interviews conducted between 2019-2021 with New York theater artists who have spent their lives working in and inventing the avant-garde, playwright Sara Farrington brings to light a series of "lost conversations" about class, race, difficulty, endurance, and privilege in the New York avant-garde of the past fifty years, as well as conversations about the ephemerality, the always-about-to-be-lostness of the medium itself. Featuring conversations with Joanne Akalaitis, Anne Bogart, Lee Breuer, Ping Chong, Richard Foreman, Andre Gregory, Deborah Hay, Bill T. Jones, Adrienne Kennedy, Lola Pashalinksi, Jennifer Tipton, Kate Valk, Mac Wellman, and Robert Wilson, The Lost Conversation is also a record both of the avant-garde's past and of its urgent present.

This work presents a timeline of the political and cultural milestones of the past ten years through the eyes of notorious performance artist Karen Finley. Each performance in this lively collection is introduced by the author to give it context and history.

This book focuses on the performance art of Marilyn Arsem, an internationally acclaimed performance artist known for her innovative and experimental work. Arsem's work addresses women's history and myth-making capacities, the potency of site and geography, the idea of the audience as witnesses and the intimacy of one-to-one works. One of the most prolific performance artists working in the United States today, Arsem performs carefully choreographed durational actions that are developed site-responsively and range from deceptively simple interventions to elaborately orchestrated actions. This edited volume seeks to extend Arsem's legacy beyond the audiences of her live performances and enter her work into the lexicon of the art world. Accompanied by 200 images, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of performance studies, feminist performance, feminist art history and performance history. It will also contribute to the history of alternative spaces and galleries, which is only now being written. I have had the privilege of knowing Marilyn for over 30 years. Her work has given me so many epiphanies about live art, time-based art practice and durational performance practice. How and why do you choose a single action and enact it over an extended period of time? How do you respond to site and create a sacred meditational zone; a reflexive space about the human condition? And most importantly, how do you teach future generations about the importance of living while making art as a spiritual and philosophical practice? This book is yet another example of Arsem's legacy. Fundamental, I'd say. Guillermo Gomez-Pena Watching Marilyn Arsem perform can be a slow, careful, vulnerable and heart-stoppingly profound experience. To see her is to know better the complex, intermingling particularities of body, space, time, being and action. Reading this comprehensive, lucidly written and deeply insightful book - the first significant publication on Arsem's practice as a performance artist - will enable new perspectives on a major artist's work. It also sheds vivid light upon enduring themes for the critical encounter with art: duration and doing, materiality and nothingness, truth and representation, commitment and experiment, togetherness and solitude, experience and endurance. Dominic Johnson, Queen Mary University of London