Performance artist Linda Montano, curious about the influence childhood experience has on adult work, invited other performance artists to consider how early events associated with sex, food, money/fame, or death/ritual resurfaced in their later work. The result is an original and compelling talking performance that documents the production of art in an important and often misunderstood community.
Among the more than 100 artists Montano interviewed from 1979 to 1989 were John Cage, Suzanne Lacy, Faith Ringgold, Dick Higgins, Annie Sprinkle, Allan Kaprow, Meredith Monk, Eric Bogosian, Adrian Piper, Karen Finley, and Kim Jones. Her discussions with them focused on the relationship between art and life, history and memory, the individual and society, and the potential for individual and social change. The interviews highlight complex issues in performance art, including the role of identity in performer-audience relationships and art as an exploration of everyday conventions rather than a demonstration of virtuosity.

This is the first textbook designed for students, practitioners and scholars of the performing arts who are curious about the power of the cognitive sciences to throw light on the processes of performance. It equips readers with a clear understanding of how research in cognitive neuroscience has illuminated and expanded traditional approaches to thinking about topics such as the performer, the spectator, space and time, culture, and the text. Each chapter considers four layers of performance: conventional forms of theatre, performance art, and everyday life, offering an expansive vision of the impact of the cognitive sciences on performance in the widest sense. Written in an approachable style, An Introduction to Theatre, Performance and the Cognitive Sciences weaves together case studies of a wide range of performances with scientific evidence and post-structural theory. Artists such as Robert Wilson, Societas Raffaello Sanzio, Ariane Mnouchkine, Bertolt Brecht, and Antonin Artaud are brought into conversation with theories of Gilles Deleuze, Shaun Gallagher, Alva Noe, Tim Ingold and the science of V. S. Ramachandran, Vittorio Gallese, and Antonio Damasio. John Lutterbie offers a complex understanding of not only the act of performing but the forces that mark the place of theatre in contemporary society. In drawing on a variety of scientific articles, Lutterbie provides readers with an accessible account of significant research in areas in the field and reveals how the sciences can help us understand the experience of art.

Following on from Sandra Reeve's Nine Ways of Seeing a Body (which offered a historical perspective on different key approaches to the body over time), this new edited collection brings together a wide range of contemporary approaches to the body that are being used by performers or in the context of performance training. The intention is for students, dancers, performers, singers, musicians, directors and choreographers to locate their own preferred approach(es) to the body-in-performance amongst the lenses described here. The collection is also designed to facilitate further research in that direction as well as to signpost alternatives that might enrich their current vocabulary. All 12 approaches represent the praxis and research of their authors. The chapters reveal a wide variety of different interests but they share the common framework of the notion of 'body as flux', of 'no fixed or determined sense of self' and of supporting the performer's being-becoming-being as a skilful creative entity, emphasising the intelligence of the body at work. Authors: Campbell Edinborough, Hull University Sreenath Nair & Arya Madhavan, Lincoln University Konstantinos Thomaidis, Royal Holloway, Univ. of London Kate Hunter, Victoria University Niamh Dowling, Rose Bruford College, London Suze Adams, Independent Research Artist Emma Meehan, Coventry University Nicholas Hope, Intl. Screen Academy, Sydney Roisin O'Gorman, Univ. College, Cork Natalie Garrett Brown, Coventry University Imogene Newland & Franziska Schroeder, Queen's Univ, Belfast Pam Woods, Exeter University

Phantom of the Opera is the longest-running, largest-grossing musical of all time. This book is the story of the stage show, film, and sequel, and the controversies that have surrounded them. You will learn why: Sarah Brightman had to leave the UK after her divorce from Lloyd Webber and how she became the highest paid soprano in the world. Gerard Butler was cast as a "younger, hotter" Phantom in the film, and why diehard fans thought he was not ugly enough. Lloyd Webber ignored early warnings that fans would spurn a sequel-a decision that cost him millions. A social media campaign led to the demise of the Phantom sequel, and how it was reborn. Phantom of the Opera: A Social History of the World's Most Popular Musical is the first book that fully documents the history of a musical now in its 31st year of a continual run that has become a cultural force.

A coming of age story inspired by Dizzee Rascal's seminal album. In a strict Mormon household somewhere in the seam between East London and Essex, a girl is given Dizzee Rascal's ground-breaking grime album Boy in da Corner by her best friend SS Vyper. Precisely 57 minutes and 21 seconds later, her life begins to change - from feeling muted by dyslexia to spitting the power of her words; from being conflicted about her sexuality to finding the freedom to explore; from feeling alone to being given the greatest gift by her closest friend. In this semi-autobiographical piece, step into a technicolour world where music, dance and spoken word collide, and discover how grime allowed Debris Stevenson to redefine herself.