This book considers arousal as a mode of theoretical and artistic inquiry to encourage new ways of staging and examining bodies in performance across artistic disciplines, modern history, and cultural contexts. Looking at traditional drama and theatre, but also visual arts, performance activism, and arts-based community engagement, this collection draws on the complicated relationship between arousing images and the frames of their representability to address what constitutes arousal in a variety of connotations. It examines arousal as a project of social, scientific, cultural, and artistic experimentation, and discusses how our perception of arousal has transformed over the last century. Probing "what arouses" in relation to the ethics of representation, the book investigates the connections between arousal and pleasures of voyeurism, underscores the political impact of aroused bodies, and explores how arousal can turn the body into a mediated object.

This book investigates theatre as a tool for community engagement, education, and resistance. Understanding Indigenous cultures as critical sources of knowledge and meaning, each essay addresses issues that remind us that the way to reconciliation between Canadians and Indigenous peoples is neither straightforward nor easily achieved. Comprised of multidisciplinary and diverse perspectives, Performing Turtle Island considers performance as both a means to self-empowerment and self-determination, and a way of placing Indigenous performance in dialogue with other nations, both on the lands of Turtle Island and on the world stage.

Tadeusz Kantor (1915-1990) was a Polish visual artist, writer, and theatre director, who can be placed among a select group of the twentieth century's most influential performance practitioners. The breadth and diversity of his artistic endeavours align Kantor with such varied figures as Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy), Marcel Duchamp, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Oskar Schlemmer, Antonin Artaud, Jackson Pollock, Jerzy Grotowski, Allan Kaprow, Peter Brook, Pina Bausch, and Robert Wilson. In significant ways, Kantor's work with the Cricot 2 company and his theories of theatre consistently challenged and expanded the boundaries of traditional and non-traditional theatre forms. Tadeusz Kantor's Memory: Other pasts, other futures -- published following Kantor's centenary year and the 60th anniversary of the founding of Cricot 2, as well as anniversaries of the group's key productions The Dead Class (1975), Wielopole, Wielopole (1980), and Let the Artists Die (1985) -- gathers international perspectives from across academia and the arts to offer a major critical reappraisal of Kantor's work. The book includes scholarly contributions by researchers from around the world, alongside reflections by leading collaborators and colleagues, and a selection of rarely seen images. Together, these materials offer an invaluable, contemporary insight into Kantor's theoretical and artistic practice and an unprecedented view of its global sphere of influence. Michal Kobialka is Professor of Theatre Arts at the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance, University of Minnesota. He has published over 75 articles, essays, and reviews in academic journals in the US and Europe. He is the author of A Journey Through Other Spaces: Essays and Manifestos, 1944-1990 (University of California Press, 1993), This Is My Body: Representational Practices in the Early Middle Ages (University of Michigan Press, 1999), and Further on, Nothing: Tadeusz Kantor's Theatre (University of Minnesota Press, 2009); editor of Of Borders and Thresholds: Theatre History, Practice, and Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 1999); and co-editor (with Barbara Hanawalt) of Medieval Practices of Space (University of Minnesota Press, 2000) as well as (with Rosemarie K. Bank) of Theatre/Performance Historiography: Time, Space, Matter (Palgrave, 2015). Natalia Zarzecka is Director of Cricoteka: The Centre for the Documentation of the Art of Tadeusz Kantor, in Krakow, where she has led development of the centre's new building and museum space on the Vistula river. She has co-curated several Polish and international exhibitions, including within the Kantor Centenary programme at Cricoteka (2015) and 'An Impossible Journey: The Art and Theatre of Tadeusz Kantor' at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich, UK, within the Polska! Year (2009). She is co-editor of Italian and Polish editions of the Wielopole, Wielopole Dossier (Titivillus, 2006; Cricoteka, 2007) and Kantor Was Here (Black Dog Publishing, 2011), co-translator (with Silvia Parlagreco) of Podroz Tadeusza Kantora kompendium biograficzne (2002), and author of various texts on Tadeusz Kantor and Cricoteka. For more information about Polish Theatre Perspectives, and to view Open Access editions of this and other PTP titles, please visit www.ptp.press.

Joseph Beuys is arguably the most important and most controversial German artist of the late twentieth century, not least because his persona is interwoven with Germany's fascist past. This book illuminates two defining threads in Beuys's life and art: the centrality of trauma, and his sustained investigation of the very notion of art itself. In addition to the materials of fat and felt that Beuys used widely in his oeuvre, numerous Beuys artworks are autobiogra-ph-ical in content. His self-woven legend of rescue and redemption still strikes many as a highly inappropriate fantasy, or even an outright lie, located as it is in the harrowing context of the Second World War as it was lived by a German soldier or 'Nazi'. Nevertheless, Beuys's self-mythology confronted the post-traumatic, foregrounding his struggle for psychic recovery. Perhaps most importantly, this led to his major efforts to expand Western art, freeing artists after him to work in a thoroughly interdisciplinary way and to embrace anthropological conclusions about art and culture. Beuys's lived experience determined a consistent commitment to peaceful change and positive transformation not only through his work, but in the discussions and institutions he initiated. His notion of activism-as-art has not only become a widespread practice, but is predominant in contemporary art of the twenty-first century. Exploring Beuys's expansive conception of art and following him into the realms of science, politics and spirituality, this book, in contrast to many other accounts of Beuys's life, attributes extraordinary importance to his own myth-making as a positive force in the post-war confrontation of Germany's past.

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

This handsome book peers into Troubleyn/Laboratorium, the workspace, collective art space, and creative incubator of Belgian multidisciplinary artist Jan Fabre (b. 1958), whose performances, staged since the 1980s, have brought him international acclaim and recognition. Expressing the collective aims of Fabre's theatre company, Troubleyn/Laboratorium functions as his workspace as well as a nurturing environment for the activities of his theater company and young artists alike, in which artists are free to develop and materialize their creative impulses. The building, situated in a progressive multicultural neighborhood in northern Antwerp, houses a uniquely integrated collection of art works from international visual artists, writers, theatre makers, and philosophers, with whom Jan Fabre feels a close affinity and whose works represent the overall cooperative spirit of the space itself. Fostering an environment that is as progressive as the artist's varied oeuvre, Troubleyn/Laboratorium provides the grounds for an idealistic hotbed of artistic activity and this publication offers a glimpse of that possible utopia. Distributed for Mercatorfonds