Performance art in the West has developed in part as a response to the commercialization of the art object. But what are the roots of performance art in Eastern Europe and Russia, where there was no real art market to speak of? While Western performance artists of the late 20th century aimed to create works that could not be bought or sold, performances in the communist bloc in the absence of an art market, more often took the form of social critique. Instead of creations that questioned what the art object is, their work often related to local issues within the context of late- or post-socialism. By placing these performances both within a local and international context, this book pinpoints the nuances between performance art East and West.
Post-Socialist performance art in Russia, Poland, and Latvia is examined for the first time as agent and chronicle of the transition from Soviet states to free-market democracies. Drawing upon previously unpublished sources and exclusive interviews with the artists themselves, Amy Bryzgel explores the spontaneous theater of the period from Oleg Kulik's Russian Dog performances to Miervaldis Polis's The Bronze Man and Vladislav Mayhshev's Monroe. Bryzgel demonstrates that performativity in Eastern Europe went beyond the modernist critique to express ideas outside the official discourse, shocking and empowering the citizenry in the truest avant-garde tradition. Performing the East open the way to an urgent reassessment of the history, function, and influence of performance art.

Live Art in LA: Performance Art in Southern California , 1970-1983 documents and critically examines one of the most fecund periods in the history of live art. The book forms part of the Getty Institute's Pacific Standard Time initiative - a series of exhibitions, performance re-enactments and research projects focused on the greater Los Angeles area. This extraordinary volume, beautifully edited by one of the leading scholars in the field, makes vivid the compelling drama of performance history on the west coast. Live Art in LA: moves lucidly between discussions of legendary figures such as Judy Chicago and Chris Burden, and the crucial work of less-celebrated solo artists and collectives; examines the influence of key institutions, particularly Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions and the California Institute of the Arts - and the Feminist Art Programme established at the latter; features original and incisive essays by Peggy Phelan and Amelia Jones, and eloquent contributions by Michael Ned Holte, Suzanne Lacy and Jennifer Flores Sternad. Combining cutting-edge research with over 100 challenging and provocative photographs and video stills, Live Art in LA represents a major re-evaluation of a crucial moment in performance history. And, as performance studies becomes ever more relevant to the history of art, promises to become a vital and enduring resource for students, academics and artists alike.

First, pick up a copy of Rachel Rosenthal s inspiring The DbD Experience; Part manual, part manifesto, part memoir, then head for Los Angeles

FRIDAY - Origins
Arrive at the Doing by Doing workshop to be greeted by Rosenthal, pioneering theatre explorer and your host for the weekend ahead. Explore non-human ways of living and moving. Begin to develop a shared vocabulary with your fellow students through exercises.

SATURDAY - Connections
Continue to connect with the group on an energetic level. Make the journey from Kansas to OZ. Collaborate and create as a group, moving and vocalising without language. Improvise boldly at every step. Treat music, voice, lighting, costume, sets, props and fellow performers as equals.

SUNDAY - Power
Learn to arrive in the moment when you are needed. Engage with transformative processes and take part in the Star Meditation. Understand your own individual power, joining your physical and emotional self. Perform solo improvisations and the Rambler the final, extended culmination of everything that you have learned through the 34 hour experience.

Praise for Dan Kwong:
"Somehow, Kwong has held onto his sense of childlike wonder about the cosmos, and that awe informs his free-wheeling and uproarious performance."
-"Asian Week"
"He weaves striking, multi-focus stage pictures around simple monologues about his Chinese and Japanese grandfathers, ironic accounts of his own childhood, and litanies of the trials facing Asian American males."
-"L.A. Times"
"Saturated with high-spirited enthusiasm . . . a refreshingly forthright approach to his often dark material."
-"Chicago Tribune"
"Kwong's humor is warm and loving . . . it stems from a delightfully twisted taste for the absurdity of human behavior. . . . Be prepared to laugh, to be moved, and to fall in love with a performer."
-"L.A. Reader"
Dan Kwong's performances delve into the complexities of growing up as a working-class Chinese-Japanese-American male in L.A., land of Hollywood and Disney. Kwong's remarkable performances, a potent array of multimedia effects and athletic physicalization, investigate questions of identity and the intersecting effects of race, culture, class, gender, and sexuality. "From Inner Worlds to Outer Space" brings together Kwong's scripts with illuminating commentary by critic Robert Vorlicky. The book includes interviews that reveal Kwong's personal and artistic influences, his evolution as an artist, and his philosophical and technical approach to art-making.

In Ulrike Flaig's art practice, the media of drawing, installation, performance, and experimental music overlap. She describes her works, among other things, as making images audible - and thus as extensions of the art cosmos. Ulrike Flaig translates paintings into installations set to music by making the structure of a painting the basis for notations. The artist's analytical view and reflection on art practices play a major role here. In her research, she is as concerned with musical icons at the interface of art and music as she is with literature and philosophy. The publication conveys numerous cross-references and thoughts of the artist and shows a further development of her statements.

Consuming Scenography offers an insight into contemporary scenographic practice beyond the theatre. It explores the ways in which scenography is used to create a global cultural impact and accelerate profits in the site-specific context of themed shopping malls. It analyses the effect of the architectural, aesthetic, spatial, material and sensory aspects of design through their performative encounters with consumers in order to offer a better understanding of performance design. In the first part the author explores the spatial seduction of an enclosed market space and traces the origins of scenographic temporality in permanent architectonic spaces for trade and commerce, from ancient Greek and Roman roofed markets and Oriental bazaars to 19th-century arcades and department stores to modern-day shopping malls.The second section addresses the site-specific theatricality of the shopping mall, considering the use of performative aspects of scenography in the creation of corporate identity. It engages with production and consumption of experience in themed shopping malls, using historical, aesthetical, social and political lenses. In the final section, the author intertwines fluidity of market changes with flexibility of scenographic matter, drawing attention to both contradictions and prospects that merging of scenography and architecture can bring along. Considering a variety of case studies of themed shopping malls, including the Ibn Battuta Mall in Dubai, Terminal 21 in Bangkok, the Villaggio in Doha and Montecasino in Johannesburg, as well as further examples from Europe, USA and Asia - this book provides a wide-ranging critical examination of the ways in which scenographic thinking and practices are exploited in wider cultural contexts for impact, branding, and higher profits.

Today, teachers and performers of Turkish classical music intentionally cultivate melancholies, despite these affects being typically dismissed as remnants of the Ottoman Empire. Melancholic Modalities is the first in-depth historical and ethnographic study of the practices socialized by musicians who enthusiastically teach and perform a present-day genre substantially rooted in the musics of the Ottoman court and elite Mevlevi Sufi lodges. Author Denise Gill analyzes how melancholic music-making emerges as pleasurable, spiritually redeeming, and healing for both the listener and performer. Focusing on the diverse practices of musicians who deploy and circulate melancholy in sound, Gill interrogates the constitutive elements of these musicians' modalities in the context of emergent neoliberalism, secularism, political Islamism, Sufi devotionals, and the politics of psychological health in Turkey today. In an essential contribution to the study of ethnomusicology and psychology, Gill develops rhizomatic analyses to allow for musicians' multiple interpretations to be heard. Melancholic Modalities uncovers how emotion and musical meaning are connected, and how melancholy is articulated in the world of Turkish classical musicians. With her innovative concept of "bi-aurality," Gill's book forges new possibilities for the historical and ethnographic analyses of musics and ideologies of listening for music scholars.

Shortlisted for the Millia Davenport Publication Award Experimental Fashion traces the proliferation of the grotesque and carnivalesque within contemporary fashion and the close relation between fashion and performance art, from Lady Gaga's raw meat dress to Leigh Bowery's performance style. The book examines the designers and performance artists at the turn of the twenty-first century whose work challenges established codes of what represents the fashionable body. These innovative people, the book argues, make their challenges through dynamic strategies of parody, humour and inversion. It explores the experimental work of modern designers such as Georgina Godley, Bernhard Willhelm, Rei Kawakubo and fashion designer, performance artist, and club figure Leigh Bowery. It also discusses the increased centrality of experimental fashion through the pop phenomenon, Lady Gaga.

The extraordinary life and death-defying work of one of the most important and pioneering performance artists in contemporary art. When Marina Abramovic Dies examines the extraordinary life and death-defying work of one of the most pioneering artists of her generation-and one who is still at the forefront of contemporary art today. This intimate, critical biography chronicles Abramovic's formative and until now undocumented years in Yugoslavia, and tells the story of her partnership with the German artist Ulay-one of the twentieth century's great examples of the fusion of artistic and private life. In one of many long-durational performances in the renewed solo career that followed, Abramovic famously lived in a New York gallery for twelve days without eating or speaking, nourished only by prolonged eye contact with audience members. It was here, in 2002, that author James Westcott first encountered her, beginning an exceptionally close relation between biographer and subject. When Marina Abramovic Dies draws on Westcott's personal observations of Abramovic, his unprecedented access to her archive, and hundreds of hours of interviews he conducted with the artist and the people closest to her. The result is a unique and vivid portrait of the charismatic self-proclaimed "grandmother of performance art."

Founded in 1992 by internationally renowned theater artist Robert Wilson, the Watermill Center on Long Island, New York, is a unique performance art laboratory for young and emerging artists. This compendium of documents, texts and images includes contributions by artists Marina Abramovic and Jonathan Meese, long-time Wilson collaborators Lucinda Childs and Philip Glass, performers Isabella Rossellini and Isabelle Huppert, curators Chrissie Iles and Elisabeth Sussman, singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright, scholars Antonio Damasio and Bonnie Marranca, collector Jean Paul Barbier-Mueller, writers Jay McInerney and Barbara Goldsmith, as well as many Watermill Center alumni artists. Covering every aspect of life at the Center, Wilson's summer workshops, the year-round residency programs, the extensive collection, outreach programs with community, landscaped gardens and architecture, this is the first extensive glimpse into the world of Watermill and an intimate look at Wilson's artistic process and the legacy he is creating for future generations.

With very few exceptions, interdisciplinary art and interarts practices-examined as such, including the perspective of artist-researchers, and not subsumed under a singular category of performance or visual art-have, until now, been largely ignored. While it would be simplistic to think that this collection somehow rectifies the "piecemeal" status of this discourse, our wager is that this collection works towards presenting an understanding of this status as, in a certain sense, constitutive of the field. Beginning with an introduction to the very multiplicities that compose and complicate interdisciplinary practices, then moving into questions of body/technology, location/movement, space/practice, performativity/aesthetics, this collection covers an enormous amount, while still retaining an overarching sense of unity in the context of the subject as a whole. Each of these sections negotiates a series of interrelated collisions in order to address a range of theoretical positions, as well as a variety of international and cultural perspectives. In addition to addressing the notion of interdisciplinarity and the challenges of specific interarts practices, this publication seeks to question how we might understand interarts practice in a way that does not exclude perspectives such as spirituality, law, political activism and community development, to name only a few. The inclusion of these disparate practices within this publication-itself a site of collision of the poetic, the conversational, and the theoretical-is thus not presented as an attempt to unify or normalize them, but rather as a productive charting of their radical explosion; a collision that is always a colliding.

This volume brings together practitioners and theorists of music and sonic art. Contributions explore a wide range of historical, artistic, pedagogical and critical issues from multiple perspectives, emphasizing the continuities and links along a broad spectrum of hearing and listening practices and art-making that use sound.

This book describes diverse urban planning projects in Turkey, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates (Dubai and Sharjah) Kuwait, Afghanistan, Albania, Syria and Yemen. One thing in common between these countries is that the author has personally worked on all of these projects, and thus the book is a partial professional autobiography. Each chapter tackles not only a different country but also a different aspect of urban planning and development, as follows: upgrading or improving recent illegal or informal slums, including detailed local planning and strategic planning; urban conservation of Al Muharraq, a historic Gulf city; traditional building construction as a reference point for modern design; urban design of new city centre areas in three prosperous Gulf cities - Kuwait, Dubai and Sharjah; the recreation - post-war - of an urban planning system in Kabul; a historical account of urban planning in the Zog-Mussolini period in Albania, which is contrasted with the currently collapsed system; an account of urban economic regeneration in Syria; and local planning aiming at economic revival in Aden. These essays articulate eight themes: tradition versus modernism; regionalism and identity; the property market in the urban economy; privacy, the family/tribe etc.; arts and crafts, industrialised construction; the impact of the motor car, and urban infrastructure; the courtyard house; and public administration, local politics and corruption. The book will be of interest to urban and regional planners, infrastructure engineers, urban economists, architects, urban managers and local government experts as well as those with an interest in the region itself. The book will be useful as an academic textbook in the region, because it presents a wide range of views of the topic, and a wide spread of countries and backgrounds.

This 368-page monograph is the first substantial publication in 15 years to take on Russia's most famous performance artist, Oleg Kulik. Also a sculptor and curator, Kulik is most renowned for his disconcerting performances as a dog. "Art in America" reviewed his 1997 solo exhibition at New York's Deitch Projects thus: ""On a sunny afternoon, Oleg Kulik emerged from the dark cage where he had spent the preceding two weeks on public view, living a dog's life in a gallery. Naked except for a studded leather collar, he had romped on hands and knees, eaten from bowls, slept on a mat and uttered only guttural growlsO Kulik's past performances as a dog include a turn as Pavlov's pet in a laboratory where he was subjected to the sort of behavioral experiments routinely endured by lab animals. Most notorious was a Stockholm exhibition in which Kulik bit several visitors (including an art critic), leading to his arrest at the request of the curator.

"RoseLee Goldberg amazed with PERFORMA 05, billed as the city's first biennial of 'visual art performance.' Working with a tiny staff, a shoestring budget and no institutional affiliation, Ms. Goldberg put together a program that covered a lot of aesthetic bases--old school, just out of school, high-tech, no-tech--and encompassed more than 60 scheduled events all of which makes the prospect of PERFORMA 07 shine with promise." --Roberta Smith, the "New York Times" This volume is the first in a series of important publications drawing content and inspiration from the "PERFORMA" biennial. Featuring inventive documentation by the 100 artists who made the first "PERFORMA" so extraordinary, it offers an exhilarating view into contemporary visual art performance and "performs" as a collective artists' journal might. Vibrant photographs of each artist's performance are accompanied by their scripts, sketches and storyboards, providing unique insight into process and upending conventions around archiving performance. Lively interviews with some of the most significant artists of our time--including Francis Alys, Tamy Ben-Tor, Jesper Just, Marina Abramovic, Gelitin, Laurie Simmons and Mike Smith--appear alongside context-setting essays by some of our most inspired young curators. "PERFORMA" founder RoseLee Goldberg, who pioneered the study of performance art with her seminal book "Performance Art from Futurism to the Present" (1979), presents an authoritative introduction addressing the genre's many forms--radio broadcast, dance, live installation, new technologies, film and video, music, historic reconstructions and lecture-as-performance among them. "PERFORMA" is not only an invaluable reference, it is a new kind of guide to cultural life, a time capsule of this very moment in New York's eminent performance history, complete with profiles of the city's nonprofit biennial venues that, like this book, give ephemeral art a physical place in which to persist.

There have been many books published on acting, actor training, and practical theories for preparing for a role, but none of these books have ever looked philosophically at the language and the concepts that we use when we talk about acting. "The Philosophical Actor" is the first attempt to grapple with the fundamental questions of truth, art, and human nature unexamined in past treatments, from the first great essay by Diderot to the exhaustive system described by Stanislavski. With wide appeal to actors, directors, acting students, acting teachers and trainers, Donna Soto-Morettini draws from twenty-five years of experience as an acting teacher and director to introduce innovative ways of thinking about acting.

In "Waxing West", Daniella, newly arrived in the US from Romania, is haunted by the ghosts of the deposed dictator Ceausescu and his wife Elena until she experiences 9/11. Thida San in "Eyes of the Heart", cannot rid herself of the horrific memory of her daughter's execution during the reign of the Khmer Rouge. In "My Political Israeli Play", Miriam Bloom, a young Israeli woman living in the US, is asked by her agent to write a political play. "America Dreaming" juxtaposes a professor discussing the policies governing American colonists with the experience of a young Japanese woman in the US during World War II. "The Black Eyed" skewers traditional views on sex, family and terrorism as four Arab women from different periods wait at the 'Gates of Martyrs.'