The Methuen Drama Companion to Performance Art offers a comprehensive guide to the major issues and interdisciplinary debates concerning performance in art contexts that have developed over the last decade. It understands performance art as an institutional, cultural, and economic phenomenon rather than as a label or object. Following the ever-increasing institutionalization and mainstreaming of performance, the book's chapters identify a marked change in the economies and labor practices surrounding performance art, and explore how this development is reflective of capitalist approaches to art and event production. Embracing what we perceive to be the 'oxymoronic status' of performance art-where it is simultaneously precarious and highly profitable-the essays in this book map the myriad gestures and radical possibilities of this extreme contradiction. This Companion adopts an interdisciplinary perspective to present performance art's legacies and its current practices. It brings together specially commissioned essays from leading innovative scholars from a wide range of approaches including art history, visual and performance studies, dance and theatre scholarship in order to provide a comprehensive and multifocal overview of the emerging research trends and methodologies devoted to performance art.

'Everyone's an abyss. You get dizzy if you look down.' -- Woyzeck Georg Buchner's Woyzeck was left unfinished at the time of its author's death in 1837, but the play is now widely recognised as the first 'modern' drama in the history of European theatre. Its fragmentary form and critical socio-political content have had a lasting influence on artists, readers and audiences to this day. The abuse, exploitation, and disenfranchisement that Woyzeck's titular protagonist endures find their mirror in his own murderous outburst. But beyond that, they also echo in the flux and confusion of the various drafts and versions in which the play has been presented since its emergence. In this fresh engagement with a modern classic, Gritzner examines the revolutionary dimensions of Buchner's political and creative practice, as well as modern approaches to the play in performance.

All the girls love a bastard. Tom Jones follows the adventures of a young man of illegitimate birth through a tale of love, deception and mistaken identity; a feast of human nature, served up in the plain and simple manner of the West Country with all the high French and Italian seasoning of sex and vice. Will he gain his darling Sophia's hand? Will he escape the hangman's noose? Will he ever learn to keep it in his trousers...? Henry Fielding's comic picaresque novel 'A History Of Tom Jones, a foundling' caused a stir upon first publication in 1749. Often referred to as the first novel in the English language, this cunning new stage version tells the escapades and exploits of the infamous protagonist through an accessible and highly entertaining adaptation.

In May 2011, Munich-based artists Thomas Huber and Wolfgang Aichner set off with a seventeen-foot boat on a journey of a few hundred miles that would nonetheless take several weeks--because the route would take them across Italy's Zillertal Alps. Destined for the 2011 Venice Biennale, Huber and Aichner conceived of this seemingly Sisyphean task, "Passage 2011," as a metaphor for human hubris and the pursuit of success. As neither expected to complete the pass, "Passage 2011" would also serve as a study of failure.
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Passage 2011: An Actionistic Transalpine Drama "draws on the artists' photographs and detailed journal entries to reconstruct this epic journey, its moments of heartwarming success and its physically and mentally testing travails, including one instance in which they had to rappel the cheery red boat down a steep rock face that dropped more than two hundred feet. As a finale, Huber and Aichner launched the boat in the Venice Lagoon for a triumphant cruise along the Grand Canal, where, as expected, it rapidly sank and had to be retrieved in order to be installed in its place at the Biennale.

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.

Die meisten Leute sind der Meinung, dass sie nur schlecht auswendig lernen konnen, aber Andrew Page hat die Entdeckung gemacht, dass man sich die Reihenfolge der Ereignisse im Markus-Evangelium sehr leicht merken kann. Dieses Buch will kein Kommentar sein, sondern zu einem Experiment einladen: Jesus neu kennen lernen, indem man sich die Jesus-Geschichte selbst erzahlt. Damit bietet das Markus-Experiment einen neuen und faszinierenden Zugang zur Bibel. Ein Resultat dieses Buches ist das Markus-Theater, bei dem 15 Christen einer Gemeinde oder einer Studentengruppe jede Begebenheit des Markusevangeliums als Rundtheater auffuhren. Das Markus-Theater findet in zahlreichen Landern statt.

Text in English & German. Like literary texts, films often tell stories on multiple levels. Ridley Scott made an ironic reference to this when he called his legendary science-fiction film Blade Runner a "700-layer cake". These buried structures are created in two ways: by elements that resonate throughout the film itself and by references to other films, texts, myths, paintings, historical events etc. that are adapted in a specific way by the director, the scriptwriter and the production team. The heroine in Hitchcock's film The Birds, for instance, is a modern Aphrodite / Venus. Just as Venus, born from the sea foam, was carried to land on a seashell, Melanie is carried across Bodega Bay in a boat that is not much bigger than Venus' vessel in Botticelli's painting. Melanie's name is another reference to Aphrodite, who was also known as Melaina, "the black one". In the fist scene of the film, in which she enters the pet shop where she later gets to know Mitch and buys the love birds, Melanie is also dressed in black. The Venus-like Melanie is felt to be a threat by others within their world, and especially by more conventional women. One of them screams at her hysterically: "I think you're evil! Evil!". This creates a particular connection between love and horror in the film. The classical Aphrodite also had a dark side -- her union with Ares produced not only Harmonia, but also Deimos and Phobos: "dread" and "fear". Detecting hidden references is only the first step in creating an analysis; the next step is to elucidate the function of the reference within the film. For instance, what does it mean that Hitchcock's heroine is attacked by birds, whereas Venus was depicted accompanied by a dove? And why does Melanie, our "Venus", wear furs? Kirsch's investigations of this and other questions open up new perspectives on a number of films, with extensive illustrations allowing the reader to follow these in detail. The book invites us to take a second look at The Birds, Blake Edwards' The Party, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner and Gladiator and Stefan Ruzowitzky's Anatomy. Konrad Kirsch is a PhD in literature and an enthusiastic viewer of films. He has published texts on Georg Buchner, Elias Canetti, Robert Walser, Franz Kafka and William Shakespeare. Most recently, his article on Heinrich von Kleist was published in the Zeitschrift fur deutsche Philologie.

The art avengers...took on toxic debt culture - and won the Guardian These artists want to blow up the whole financial system The New York Times Meet the Bonnie and Clyde of bad debt! When art meets finance, 'The Big Bang' takes on a whole new meaning. This is brilliant performative protest. Kate Raworth, author of Doughnut Economics Bank Job is a white-knuckle ride into the dark heart of the global financial system. Artist and filmmaker duo Hilary Powell and Dan Edelstyn discover that behind the opaque language of loans and the defunct diagrams of money and debt is a system flawed by design and ripe for hacking. They assemble a team and bring a community together by printing their own money in a disused bank in East London, in order to buy up and abolish local debt. Part daring tale, part personal memoir and part economic education, this book is perfect for fans of Grace Blakely and David Graeber. Bank Job shows how the financial system can be changed to meet the needs of the many, not just the few one bank job at a time.

One of the first Swiss performance artists, Manon has fashioned a career for herself out of the identities of others. Whether exploring the limits of gender or the beauty of decay, Manon--through her personas, installations, and performance pieces--continually foregrounds the instability of place and self. Her most recent project, "She Was Once MISS RIMINI," is one of her most brutal and touching. Here, she literally depicts imagined futures for an aging beauty queen.
Each exquisite image in this pictorial essay teases out the possible paths Miss Rimini--an alter-ego for Manon who "happened" upon a beauty pageant in the early 1970s and walked away with the crown--could have taken. A small-town diva? A hypersensitive viola player? Perhaps even a psychiatric patient?
"She Was Once MISS RIMINI" is a trenchant meditation on the art, or artifice, of growing older. Costume, lipstick, lighting, attitude--all aspects of self-presentation are in concert here with quiet critiques of social and economic systems that limit the options of older women. Accompanied by an enlightening introduction by art theorist Brigitte Ulmer, "She Was Once MISS RIMINI" is the first and only documentation of Miss Rimini and one of the first books in English on Manon.

G. H. Hovagimyan is an absurdist, a strategist, a serial collaborator, and nothing short of a cultural icon in the world of contemporary art, particularly as it relates to how artists have adopted the digital technological tools of our times, adapting them in his work for critique of art, popular culture, and social engagement. Situationist Funhouse is a joyride through this history. The journey Stephen Zacks so meticulously documents and describes is not only an incredibly comprehensive ride through G. H.'s life work to date - Hovagimyan adopted G. H. as an acronym in the 1990s as a kind of gesture of personal rebirth and to ease others' difficulty with his last name [pronounced ho-va-GIM-yan] - it also serves as a document that tracks a particular view on the alternative contemporary art scene of New York from the 1970s to the present day.

The first book to chart Scott Burton's performance art and sculpture of the 1970s. Scott Burton (1939-89) created performance art and sculpture that drew on queer experience and the sexual cultures that flourished in New York City in the 1970s. David J. Getsy argues that Burton looked to body language and queer behavior in public space-most importantly, street cruising-as foundations for rethinking the audiences and possibilities of art. This first book on the artist examines Burton's underacknowledged contributions to performance art and how he made queer life central in them. Extending his performances about cruising, sexual signaling, and power dynamics throughout the decade, Burton also came to create functional sculptures that covertly signaled queerness by hiding in plain sight as furniture waiting to be used. With research drawing from multiple archives and numerous interviews, Getsy charts Burton's deep engagements with postminimalism, performance, feminism, behavioral psychology, design history, and queer culture. A restless and expansive artist, Burton transformed his commitment to gay liberation into a unique practice of performance, sculpture, and public art that aspired to be antielitist, embracing of differences, and open to all. Filled with stories of Burton's life in New York's art communities, Queer Behavior makes a case for Burton as one of the most significant out queer artists to emerge in the wake of the Stonewall uprising and offers rich accounts of queer art and performance art in the 1970s.

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.

An Illustrated History of British Theatre and Performance chronicles the history and development of theatre from the Roman era to the present day. As the most public of arts, theatre constantly interacted with changing social, political, and intellectual movements and ideas, and Robert Leach's masterful work restores to the foreground of this evolution the contributions of women, gay people, and ethnic minorities, as well as the regional theatres of Wales and Scotland. Highly-illustrated chapters trace the development of theatre through major plays from each period; evaluations of playwrights; contemporary dramatic theory; acting and acting companies; dance and music; the theatre buildings themselves; and the audience, while also highlighting enduring features of British theatre, from comic gags to the use of props.

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.

It's 1992. In a small town in Fife, a girl is busting to get out into the world and see what's on offer. And an ad in the local paper declares: Band Seeks Singer. Grunge has just gone global, scruffy indie kids are inheriting the earth, and a schoolgirl from Glenrothes is catapulted to a rock star lifestyle as the singer in a hot new indie band. Touring with Radiohead, partying with Blur, she was living the dream. Until she wasn't. What Girls Are Made Of is the true story of Bissett's teenage years, based on her meticulously detailed, pull-no-punches diaries, which she found after the death of her father. It's a rollercoaster journey from the girl she was to the woman she wanted to be: rocketed into teenage stardom, suddenly dropped by their manager, and then the following of years of becoming an actor, writer and director. Described by Miro Magazine as "a glorious mixture of harrowing and life-affirming messages", the script also includes a play list of female-led soundtracks, that were played in the production.

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.

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 So Much Wasted, Patrick Anderson analyzes self-starvation as a significant mode of staging political arguments across the institutional domains of the clinic, the gallery, and the prison. Homing in on those who starve themselves for various reasons and the cultural and political contexts in which they do so, he examines the diagnostic history of anorexia nervosa, fasts staged by artists including Ana Mendieta and Marina Abramovic, and a hunger strike initiated by Turkish prisoners. Anderson explores what it means for the clinic, the gallery, and the prison when one performs a refusal to consume as a strategy of negation or resistance, and the ways that self-starvation, as a project of refusal aimed, however unconsciously, toward death, produces violence, suffering, disappearance, and loss differently from other practices. Drawing on the work of Martin Heidegger, Sigmund Freud, Giorgio Agamben, Peggy Phelan, and others, he considers how the subject of self-starvation is refigured in relation to larger institutional and ideological drives, including those of the state. The ontological significance of performance as disappearance constitutes what Anderson calls the "politics of morbidity," the embodied, interventional embrace of mortality and disappearance not as destructive, but rather as radically productive stagings of subject formations in which subjectivity and objecthood, presence and absence, and life and death are intertwined.

This body of work is a contemplation of human beings' passage on earth and their intimate interrelation with the environment. This book attempts to bring humour to the things we are getting attached to. It points at the invisible within the visible, the immaterial within the material or the vertical nature of being (and its mirror-like quality) within our horizontal way of living (where our mind, time, and space condition our experiences). The naked body is seen as our primary indivisible unit of perception which is usually pushed and pulled by our thinking mind's desire to either get less or more. In other words, our lives are coloured by our minds and since body-mind is a single entity, most of the colours painted on the body are an allusion to the range of our changing desires from being invisible or transparent to wanting to be singular and the centre of attention. The book's Interviews (the interviewers are from Russia, Colombia, Korea, Germany, and the US) stanzas, and photographs are not seen as being subservient to one another but can be seen as an assemblage of three independent directions that may or may not intersect following each reader.

"Performance" has multiple and often overlapping meanings that signify a wide variety of social behaviors. In this invitation to reflect on the power of performance, Diana Taylor explores many of its uses and iterations: artistic, economic, sexual, political, and technological performance; the performance of everyday life; and the gendered, sexed, and racialized performance of bodies. This book performs its argument. Images and texts interact to show how performance is at once a creative act, a means to comprehend power, a method of transmitting memory and identity, and a way of understanding the world.

Why do so many writers and audiences turn to theatre to resolve overwhelming topics of pain and suffering? This collection of essays from international scholars reconsiders how theatre has played a crucial part in encompassing and preserving significant human experiences. Plays about global issues, including terrorism and war, are increasing in attention from playwrights, scholars, critics and audiences. In this contemporary collection, a gathering of diverse contributors explain theatre's special ability to generate dialogue and promote healing when dealing with human tragedy. This collection discusses over 30 international plays and case studies from different time periods, all set in a backdrop of war. The four sections document British and American perspectives on theatres of war, global perspectives on theatres of war, perspectives on Black Watch and, finally, perspectives on The Great Game: Afghanistan. Through this, a range of international scholars from different disciplines imaginatively rethink theatre's unique ability to mediate the impacts and experiences of war. Featuring contributions from a variety of perspectives, this book provides a wealth of revealing insights into why authors and audiences have always turned to the unique medium of theatre to make sense of war.

How do the temporal features of sacred music affect social life in South Asia? Due to new time constraints in commercial contexts, devotional musicians in Bengal have adapted longstanding features of musical time linked with religious practice to promote their own musical careers. The Politics of Musical Time traces a lineage of singers performing a Hindu devotional song known as kirtan in the Bengal region of India over the past century to demonstrate the shifting meanings and practices of devotional performance. Focusing on padabali kirtan, a type of devotional sung poetry that uses long-duration forms and combines song and storytelling, Eben Graves examines how expressions of religious affect and political belonging linked with the genre become strained in contemporary, shortened performance time frames. To illustrate the political economy of performance in South Asia, Graves also explores how religious performances and texts interact with issues of nationalism, gender, and economic exchange. Combining ethnography, history, and performance analysis, including videos from the author's fieldwork, The Politics of Musical Time reveals how ideas about the sacred and the modern have been expressed and contested through features of musical time found in devotional performance.