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.

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.

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.

Theatre is often said to offer unique insights into the nature of reality, but this obscures the reality of theatre itself. In Real Theatre, Paul Rae takes a joined-up approach to the realities of theatre to explain why performances take the forms they do, and what effects they have. Drawing on examples ranging from Phantom of the Opera and Danny Boyle's Frankenstein, to the performances of the Wooster Group and arthouse director Tsai Ming-liang, he shows how apparently discrete theatrical events emerge from dynamic and often unpredictable social, technical and institutional assemblages. These events then enter a process of cultural circulation that, as Rae explains, takes many forms: fleeting conversations, the mercurial careers of theatrical characters and the composite personae of actors, and high-profile products like the Hollywood movie Birdman. The result is a real theatre that speaks of, and to, the idiosyncratic and cumulative experience of every theatre participant.

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

Blue Man Group has evolved from its experimental roots in New York City to a global brand. A combination of music, comedy, and state-of-the-art technology, the show is now seen by 2 million people every year and its broad fans include kids and adults, ages 8 to 80. A veritable cultural icon, Blue Man Group appears in numerous contexts from the face of branding campaigns for Intel to the heart one of the funniest running jokes onArrested Development. Blue Man World is a graphically rich, textually dynamic, cheekily clever anthropological investigation of the Blue Men as well as being a hilarious social satire. Including original and archival photographs, specially commissioned artwork, infographics, and interviews with Blue Man experts (both real and imagined), Blue Man World answers all the burning questions, including Who are the Blue Men?, Why are they obsessed with squishy food? and What do they want with us?