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Books > Arts & Architecture > History of art / art & design styles > From 1900 > Art styles, 1960 - > Performance art
What does artistic resistance look like in the twenty-first
century, when disruption and dissent have been co-opted and
commodified in ways that reinforce dominant systems? In The Play in
the System Anna Watkins Fisher locates the possibility for
resistance in artists who embrace parasitism-tactics of complicity
that effect subversion from within hegemonic structures. Fisher
tracks the ways in which artists on the margins-from hacker
collectives like Ubermorgen to feminist writers and performers like
Chris Kraus-have willfully abandoned the radical scripts of
opposition and refusal long identified with anticapitalism and
feminism. Space for resistance is found instead in the mutually, if
unevenly, exploitative relations between dominant hosts giving only
as much as required to appear generous and parasitical actors
taking only as much as they can get away with. The irreverent and
often troubling works that result raise necessary and difficult
questions about the conditions for resistance and critique under
neoliberalism today.
This volume brings together performance texts from nine productions
by the experimental theatre company Lightwork and one playtext from
Lightwork's precursor company Academy Productions, presented
between 1997 and 2011. Lightwork specialized in collaboratively
created and multimedia performance. The company also experimented
with several performance forms that emerged at the turn of the
twenty-first century, including verbatim and site-specific
approaches. Because of this, the texts cover a range of forms and
formats - scripted plays such as Here's What I Did With My Body One
Day by Dan Rebellato and Blavatsky by Clare Bayley; multimedia
adaptations of classical myths such as Back At You (based on the
story of Echo and Narcissus) and Once I was Dead (based on the
story of Daedalus and Icarus); site-specific experiments such as
The Good Actor, which took place in various spaces across Hoxton
Hall, a Victorian theatre in London's East End; and the use of
verbatim witness testimony from the Court of Bosnia and
Herzegovina, War Crimes section in Sarajevo Story. The defining
aspect of the Lightwork aesthetic is that multimedia and
scenographic experimentation does not come at the expense of the
mainstays of dramatic theatre: character, story and emotional
resonance. What lies at the heart of the Lightwork shows you will
encounter here are human-scale stories: relationships between
lovers or family members, confrontations with the past (both as
personal and as cultural history) and, in many cases, matters of
life or death that entail wrestling with causality, consequence and
fate. The twelve-year span covered by this work reflects a period
in British performance practice when the interrelation of page and
stage, process and production, text and 'non-text', were being
radically rethought. In the collaborative and processual theatre
making that Lightwork exemplifies, the text may be one element
among many and is more likely to be the outcome of the process than
its precursor. How do such playtexts (or performance texts) differ
from those that are conceived and scripted by a single desk-based
playwright in advance of the rehearsal? What gaps are left when the
work of many hands is channelled through the pen (or keyboard) of
one among them? The texts featured in this volume represent a
number of answers to these questions about the nature of writing
for the stage. The performance texts are each preceded (and
sometime followed) by short essays written by some of the many
people who have been involved in productions by Lightwork,
including established academics and theatre practitioners: David
Annen, Clare Bayley, Gregg Fisher, Sarah Gorman, Andy Lavender,
Aneta Mancewicz, Bella Merlin, Alex Mermikides, Jo Parker, Dan
Rebellato, and Ayse Tashkiran. Their contributions reflect the
collaborative nature of the company and the respect that it
accorded the various disciplinary perspectives that make up a
theatre company. There are sections on scenography, sound design
and technical operation, as well as on those crafts that might more
usually draw attention: directing, writing and acting. These
contributions offer an insight into the collaborative,
multi-layered and sometimes messy business of their creation from
an individual maker's or spectator's point of view. This book will
be invaluable for those who are making, studying or researching
performance in the twenty-first century, and an essential resource
for the rehearsal room. Primary readership will include
researchers, educators, students and practitioners interested in
creative practice, theatre-making, integrated design and
performance, and contemporary theatre. It will be an important
resource for those on theatre and performance courses at all
levels, as well as acting, theatre and performance design,
dramaturgy and direction courses, creative writing courses and
media arts programmes. It will have appeal for general readers
interested in new texts and processes in theatre and performance,
and individual texts are likely to be of interest to specialist
researchers working in related fields - for example performance and
the occult (Blavatsky), performance and conflict (Sarajevo Story).
Shortlisted for the Theatre Book Prize 2021 This is the vital story
of the amateur theatre as it developed from the medieval guilds to
the modern theatre of Ayckbourn and Pinter, with a few mishaps and
missed cues along the way. Michael Coveney - a former member of
Ilford's Renegades - tells this tale with a charm and wit that will
have you shouting out for an encore. This is the first account of
its kind, packed with anecdote and previously unheard stories, and
it shows how amateur theatre is more than a popular pastime: it has
been endemic to the birth of the National Theatre, as well as a
seedbed of talent and a fascinating barometer and product of the
times in which we live. Some of the companies Coveney delves into -
all taking centre stage in this entertaining and lively book -
include the Questors and Tower Theatre in London; Birmingham's
Crescent Theatre; The Little Theatre in Bolton, where Ian McKellen
was a schoolboy participant; Lincolnshire's Broadbent Theatre,
co-founded by Jim Broadbent's father and other conscientious
objectors at the end of World War II; and Cornwall's stunning
cliff-top Minack.
Traditional speech work has long favored an upper-class white
accent as the model of intelligibility. Because of that,
generations of actors have felt disconnected from their own
identities and acting choices. This much-needed textbook redresses
that trend and encourages actors to achieve intelligibility through
rigorous language analysis and an exploration of their own accent
and articulation practices. Following an acting class model, where
you first analyze the script then reveal yourself through it, this
work breaks down a process for analyzing language in a way that
excites the imagination. Guiding the student through the labyrinth
of abstract concepts and terms, readers are delivered into the
practicality of exercises and explorations, giving them
self-awareness that enables them to make their own speech come
alive. Informed throughout by notes from the author's own extensive
experience working with directors and acting teachers, this book
serves as an ideal speech-training resource for the 21st -century
actor, and includes specially commissioned online videos
demonstrating key exercises.
Using elements of autobiography to address such issues as religion,
sex, race, family and the struggle of women to move beyond their
traditional roles in society, these women integrate aspects of
ritual, monologue, music, visual arts and theatre in their
performances as they help to forge a new literary and theatrical
tradition.
In the 21st century, actors face radical changes in plays and
performance styles, as they move from stage to screen and grapple
with new technologies that present their art to ever-expanding
audiences. Active Analysis offers the flexibility of mind, body,
and spirit now urgently needed in acting. Dynamic Acting through
Active Analysis brings to light this timely legacy, born during the
worst era of Soviet repression and hidden for decades from public
view. Part I unfolds like a mystery novel through letters, memoirs,
and transcripts of Konstantin Stanislavsky's last classes. Far from
the authoritarian director of his youth, he reveals himself as a
generous mentor, who empowers actors with a brand new collaborative
approach to rehearsals. His assistant, Maria Knebel, first bears
witness to his forward-looking ideas and then builds the bridge to
new plays in new styles through her directing and influential
teaching. Part II follows a 21st century company of diverse actors
as they experience the joy of applying Active Analysis to their own
creative and professional work.
Poet Stephen James Smith's sympathies lie with the addicted and the
convicted, often responding to what he finds on life's margins. His
sharp-edged forceful language derives from his gifts as a
performance poet and his fearlessness in looking into the eye of
his subject matter. His poems get their charge, as well as their
shape and substance, from his use of demotic rhythms, the vividness
of his vernacular and his emotional directness.
The first performances by Joseph Beuys were a radical turning point
for twentieth-century art. Beuys saw art as a transformative action
that is both personal and communal, and his expanded artistic
practice engaged spirituality, personal mythology, political
structures, and symbolic materials. For Manresa, one of his
legendary performance actions, which took place on December 15,
1966 in Dusseldorf, he collaborated with the Danish artists Henning
Christiansen and Bjorn Norgaard. This book presents
never-before-seen materials from the performance, including texts,
images, scripts, and preparatory drawings, alongside contributions
from scholars and critics that offer further insight. Friedhelm
Mennekes, an art critic and Jesuit priest, analyses Saint Ignatius
of Loyola's imprint on Beuys's work while elucidating its spiritual
complexity, looking beyond the popular vision of the artist as
shaman. Pilar Parcerisas examines Beuys's spiritual geography,
explaining the importance the town of Manresa within it and also
laying out the physical and mystical coordinates of Eurasia, a site
that was always present in Beuys's work. Klaus-D. Pohl addresses
the paradoxical union between Beuys's mysticism and the
neo-Dadaists of Fluxus. Beuys's collaborator Bjorn Norgaard recalls
his time working with the German artist and reflects on the paths
he opened up. Finally, art historian Harald Szeemann considers the
possibility of liberating politics through spirituality.
This book was born from a year of exchanges of movement ideas
generated in cross-practice conversations and workshops with
dancers, musicians, architects and engineers. Events took place at
key cultural institutions such as the Royal Academy of Arts,
London; and The Lowry, Salford, as well as on-site at architectural
firms and on the streets of London. The author engages with dance's
offer of perspectives on being in place: how the 'ordinary person'
is facilitated in experiencing the dance of the city, while also
looking at shared cross-practice understandings in and about the
body, weight and rhythm. There is a prioritizing of how embodied
knowledges across dance, architecture and engineering can
contribute to decolonizing the production of place - in particular,
how dance and city-making cultures engage with female bodies and
non-white bodies in today's era of #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter.
Akinleye concludes in response conversations about ideas raised in
the book with John Bingham-Hall, Liz Lerman, Dianne McIntyer and
Richard Sennett. The book is a fascinating resource for those drawn
to spatial practices from dance to design to construction.
Since entering the performance lexicon in the 1970s, the term Live
Art has been used to describe a diverse but interrelated array of
performance practices and approaches. This volume offers a
contextual and critical introduction to the scene of contemporary
Live Art in Britain. Focusing on key artists whose prolific body of
work has been vital to the development of contemporary practice,
this collection studies the landscape of Live Art in the UK today
and illuminates its origins, as well as particular concerns and
aesthetics. The introduction to the volume situates Live Art in
relation to other areas of artistic practice and explores the form
as a British phenomenon. It considers questions of cultural
specificity, financial and institutional support, and social
engagement, by tracing the work and impact of key organizations on
the UK scene: the Live Art Development Agency, SPILL Festival of
Performance and Compass Live Art. Across three sections, leading
scholars offer case studies exploring the practice of key artists
Tim Etchells, Marisa Carnesky, Marcia Farquhar, Franko B, Martin
O'Brien, Oreet Ashery, David Hoyle, Jordan McKenzie, and Cosey
Fanni Tutti.
Tracing the configuration of the slapstick, destitute
Peladita/Peladito and the Pachuca/Pachuco (depicted in flashy zoot
suits) from 1928 to 2004, Wild Tongues is an ambitious, extensive
examination of social order in Mexican and Chicana/o cultural
productions in literature, theater, film, music, and performance
art. From the use of the Peladita and the Peladito as stock
characters who criticized various aspects of the Mexican government
in the 1920s and 1930s to contemporary performance art by Maria
Elena Gaitan and Dan Guerrero, which yields a feminist and
queer-studies interpretation, Rita Urquijo-Ruiz emphasizes the
transnational capitalism at play in these comic voices. Her study
encompasses both sides of the border, including the use of the
Pachuca and the Pachuco as anti-establishment, marginal figures in
the United States. The result is a historically grounded,
interdisciplinary approach that reimagines the limitations of
nation-centered thinking and reading. Beginning with Daniel
Venegas's 1928 novel, Las aventuras de don Chipote o Cuando los
pericos mamen, Rita Urquijo-Ruiz's Wild Tongues demonstrates early
uses of the Peladito to call attention to the brutal physical
demands placed on the undocumented Mexican laborer. It explores
Teatro de Carpa (tent theater) in-depth as well, bringing to light
the experience of Mexican Peladita Amelia Wilhelmy, whose "La
Willy" was famous for portraying a cross-dressing male soldier who
criticizes the failed Revolution. In numerous other explorations
such as these, the political, economic, and social power of
creativity continually takes center stage.
Rejecting broad-brush definitions of post-revolutionary art, What
People Do with Images provides a nuanced account of artistic
practice in Iran and its diaspora during the first part of the
twenty-first century. Careful attention is paid to the effects of
shifts in internal Iranian politics; the influence of US elections,
travel bans and sanctions; and global media sensationalism and
Islamophobia. Drawing widely on critical theory from both cultural
studies and anthropology, Mazyar Lotfalian details an ecosystem for
artistic production, covering a range of media, from performance to
installations and video art to films. Museum curators, it is
suggested, have mistakenly struggled to fit these works into their
traditional-modern-contemporary schema, and political commentators
have mistakenly struggled to position them as resistance,
opposition or counterculture to Islam or the Islamic Republic.
Instead, the author argues that creative artworks neutralize such
dichotomies, working around them, and playing a sophisticated game
of testing and slowly shifting the boundaries of what is
acceptable. They do so in part by neutralizing the boundaries of
what is inside and outside the nation-state, travelling across the
transnational circuits in which the domestic and diasporic arenas
reshape each other. While this book offers the valuable opportunity
to gain an understanding of the Iranian art scene, it also has a
wider significance in asking more generally how identity politics
is mediated by creative acts and images within transnational
socio-political spheres.
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