What makes a woman 'bad' is commonly linked to certain 'qualities' or behaviours seen as morally or socially corrosive, dirty and disgusting. In Bad Girls, Dirty Bodies, Gemma Commane critically explores the social, sexual and political significance of women who are labelled 'bad', sluts or dirty. Through a variety of case studies drawn from qualitative and original ethnographic research, she argues that 'Bad Girls' disrupt heterosexual normativity and contribute new embodied knowledge. From neo-burlesque, sex-positive and queer performance art, to explicit entertainment and areas of popular culture; Commane situates 'bad' women as sites of power, possibility and success. Through the combination of case studies (Ms T, Empress Stah and RubberDoll, Mouse and Doris La Trine), Gemma Commane offers a challenge to those who think that sexual, slutty, bad, and dirty women are not worth listening to. Significantly, she unpicks the issues generated by women who are complicit in the subjugation, policing and marginalization of 'other' women, both in popular culture and in sites of subcultural resistance.

Designed to be tough, practical and good value for money, the Rough Guide maps aim to forge a new standard in city maps. Apart from travel information and the city's sites, monuments and attractions, the map shows every shop, restaurant, bar and hotel listed in the Rough Guide travel guide to Cuba, together with their opening times, and, in many cases, phone numbers. The map covers the main area of Cuba on one side and an enlarged downtown city-centre maps on the reverse.

With mental health increasingly in the spotlight, this book offers a new perspective on anxiety. The focus of this book is on the application of psychological alchemical practice to address, explore and examine the nature and cause of anxiety in order to tackle and overcome it. It has never been more relevant to illustrate the reality that scientific, artistic and spiritual understanding, together with practical application, has the capacity to eliminate anxiety and gain personal control, liberation and fulfilment. The first half of the book identifies the issues to be considered and the second half explains and illustrates the alchemical practices with which to approach them. While the book puts a slight emphasis on musical performance, it is made clear at the outset that performance concerns everyone and the contents, therefore, apply universally. Music is simply a very clear example. The book is designed as a personal development book rather than a scholarly work and, although it is relevant to all ages (depending on timing), it was written with 18 - 30 year olds being the main inspiration through apparent and ever increasing necessity. It is a source book that can be dipped into anywhere or launch further investigation into any of the various disciplines and practices covered. Alchemy has the capacity to bind it all together and the alchemy of performance can become a way of life for anyone.

Contemporary Uganda and other East African states are connected by the experience of Idi Amin's tyranny, rapacious and murderous regime, and the latter second Uganda Peoples Congress government, that forced Ugandans to go into exile and initiate armed struggles from Kenya and Tanzania to oust his government. Because of these experiences of disappearances, torture, murder and war, issues of identity, politics and resistance are significant concerns for East African dramatists. Resistance and Politics in Contemporary East African Theatre demonstrates the significant role of theatre in resisting tyranny and forging a post-colonial national identity. In its engaging analysis of an important period of theatre, the book explores key moments while considering the specific practice of individual artists and groups that provoke differing experiences and performance practices. Selected examples range from early post-colonial plays reflecting the resistance to the rise of tyranny, torture and dictatorships, to more recent works that address situations involving struggles for social justice and the cult personality in political leaders.

Choreographic Dwellings explores performance practices that extend the remit of the choreographic. Covering walking practices, site-specific and nomadic performance that explore the movement potentials of everyday environments, parkour and art installation, it offers a reframing of the topologically kinaesthetic experience of the choreographic.

This book was born from a year of exchanges of movement ideas generated in cross-practice conversations and workshops with dancers, musicians, architects and engineers. Events took place at key cultural institutions such as the Royal Academy of Arts, London; and The Lowry, Salford, as well as on-site at architectural firms and on the streets of London. The author engages with dance's offer of perspectives on being in place: how the 'ordinary person' is facilitated in experiencing the dance of the city, while also looking at shared cross-practice understandings in and about the body, weight and rhythm. There is a prioritizing of how embodied knowledges across dance, architecture and engineering can contribute to decolonizing the production of place - in particular, how dance and city-making cultures engage with female bodies and non-white bodies in today's era of #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter. Akinleye concludes in response conversations about ideas raised in the book with John Bingham-Hall, Liz Lerman, Dianne McIntyer and Richard Sennett. The book is a fascinating resource for those drawn to spatial practices from dance to design to construction.

Theatre and Dictatorship in the Luso-Hispanic World explores the discourses that have linked theatrical performance and prevailing dictatorial regimes across Spain, Portugal and their former colonies. These are divided into three different approaches to theatre itself - as cultural practice, as performance, and as textual artifact - addressing topics including obedience, resistance, authoritarian policies, theatre business, exile, violence, memory, trauma, nationalism, and postcolonialism. This book draws together a diverse range of methodological approaches to foreground the effects and constraints of dictatorship on theatrical expression and how theatre responds to these impositions.

In this dynamic collection a team of experts map the development of Live Art culturally, thematically and historically. Supported with examples from around the world, the text engages with a number of key practices, asking what these practices do and how they can be contextualized and understood.

Movements of Interweaving is a rich collection of essays exploring the concept of interweaving performance cultures in the realms of movement, dance, and corporeality. Focusing on dance performances as well as on scenarios of cultural movements on a global scale, it not only challenges the concept of intercultural dance performances, but through its innovative approach also calls attention to the specific qualities of "interweaving" as a form of movement itself. Divided into four sections, this volume features an international team of scholars together developing a new critical perspective on the cultural practices of movement, travel and migration in and beyond dance.

Music-Dance explores the identity of choreomusical work, its complex authorship and its modes of reception as well as the cognitive processes involved in the reception of dance performance. Scholars of dance and music analyse the ways in which a musical score changes its prescriptive status when it becomes part of a choreographic project, the encounter between sound and motion on stage, and the intersection of listening and seeing. As well as being of interest to musicologists and choreologists considering issues such as notation, multimedia and the analysis of performance, this volume will appeal to scholars interested in applied research in the fields of cognition and neuroscience. The line-up of authors comprises representative figures of today's choreomusicology, dance historians, scholars of twentieth-century composition and specialists in cognitive science and performance studies. Among the topics covered are multimedia and the analysis of performance; the notational practice of choreographers and the parallel attempts of composers to find a graphic representation for musical gestures; and the experience of dance as a paradigm for a multimodal perception, which is investigated in terms of how the association of sound and movement triggers emotions and specific forms of cognition.

A Galaxy of Things explores the ways in which all puppets, masks, and makeup-prosthetic figures are "material characters," and uses Star Wars creatures, droids, and helmeted-characters to illustrate what makes the good ones not only compelling, but meaningful. The book begins with author Colette Searls' Star Wars thing aesthetic, described through a release-order overview of what creatures, droids and masked characters have brought to 45+ years of live-action Star Wars. Building on theories from the burgeoning field of puppetry and material performance, it sees these "material characters" as a group and describes three specific powers that they share - distance, distillation, and duality - using the ubiquitously recognizable Star Wars characters to illustrate them. The book describes Distance, Distillation, and Duality as material character powers, using characters like C-3PO and Jabba the Hutt to illustrate how all three work to generate meaning. An in-depth exploration of the original Empire Strikes Back Yoda and "Baby" Yoda (Grogu) reveals how these two puppets use those powers to transform their human companions: Luke Skywalker, and then Din Djarin. Searls provides an in-depth analysis of Darth Vader's mask trajectory across three trilogies (1977 - 2019), revealing its contribution as a "performing thing." Finally, the book presents problematic uses of material character powers by critiquing droids in service, and the historical use of racial stereotypes in characters like Jar Jar Binks, before offering a hopeful analysis of how early 2020s live-action Star Wars began centering the non-, semi-, and concealed human in redemptive ways. This is an accessible exploration for students and scholars of theatre, film, media studies and popular culture who want to better understand puppets, masks, and makeup-prosthetic characters. Its terms and concepts will be useful to scholarly explorations of non-, semi-, and concealed human portrayals for a range of other fields, including posthumanism, object-oriented ontology, ethnic studies, and material culture.

Inside The Performance Workshop: A Sourcebook for Rasaboxes and Other Exercises is the first full-length volume dedicated to the history, theory, practice, and application of a suite of performer training exercises developed by Richard Schechner and elaborated by the editors and contributors. This work began in the 1960s with The Performance Group, and has continued to evolve. Rasaboxes - a featured set of exercises - is an interdisciplinary approach for training emotional expressivity through the use of breath, body, voice, movement, and sensation. It brings together: the concept of rasa from classical Indian performance theory and practice research on emotion from neuroscience and psychology experimental performance practices theories of ritual, play, and performance This book combines both practical 'how-to' guidance, and applications in diverse contexts including undergraduate and graduate actor training, television acting, K-12 education, devising, and drama therapy. The book serves as an introduction to the work as well as an essential resource for experienced practitioners.

This book identifies and examines three years of Beyonce's career as a pop mega star using critical race, feminist, and performance studies methodologies. This book explores how the careful choreography of Beyonce's image, voice, and public persona, coupled with her intelligent use of audio and visual mediums, makes her one of the most influential entertainers of the 21st century. Keleta-Mae proposes that 2013 to 2016 was a pivotal period in Beyonce's career and looks at three artistic projects that she created during that time: her self-titled debut visual album Beyonce, her video and live performance of 'Formation', and her second visual album Lemonade. By examining the progression of Beyonce's career during this period, and the impact it had politically, culturally, and socially, the author demonstrates how Beyonce brought 21st Century feminism into the mainstream through layered explorations of female blackness. Ideal for scholars and students of performance in the social and political spheres, and of course fans of Beyonce herself, this book examines the mega superstar's transition into a creator of art that engages with Black culture and Black life with increased thoughtfulness.

Performance in the digital age has undergone a radical shift in which a once ephemeral art form can now be relived, replayed and repeated. Until now, much scholarship has been devoted to the nature of live performance in the digital age; Documenting Performance is the first book to provide a collection of key writings about the process of documenting performance, focused not on questions of liveness or the artistic qualities of documents, but rather on the professional approaches to recovering, preserving and disseminating knowledge of live performance. Through its four-part structure, the volume introduces readers to important writings by international practitioners and scholars on: * the contemporary context for documenting performance * processes of documenting performance * documenting bodies in motion * documenting to create In each, chapters examine the ways performance is documented and the issues arising out of the process of documenting performance. While theorists have argued that performance becomes something else whenever it is documented, the writings reveal how the documents themselves cannot be regarded simply as incomplete remains from live events. The methods for preserving and managing them over time, ensuring easy access of such materials in systematic archives and collections, requires professional attention in its own right. Through the process of documenting performance, artists acquire a different perspective on their own work, audiences can recall specific images and sounds for works they have witnessed in person, and others who did not see the original work can trace the memories of particular events, or use them to gain an understanding of something that would otherwise remain unknown to them and their peers.

"I am Jugoslovenka" argues that queer-feminist artistic and political resistance were paradoxically enabled by socialist Yugoslavia's unique history of patriarchy and women's emancipation. Spanning performance and conceptual art, video works, film and pop music, lesbian activism and press photos of female snipers in the Yugoslav wars, the book analyses feminist resistance in a range of performative actions that manifest the radical embodiment of Yugoslavia's anti-fascist, transnational and feminist legacies. It covers celebrated and lesser-known artists from the 1970s to today, including Marina Abramovic, Sanja Ivekovic, Vlasta Delimar, Tanja Ostojic, Selma Selman and Helena Janecic, along with music legends Lepa Brena and Esma Redzepova. "I am Jugoslovenka" tells a unique story of women's resistance through the intersection of feminism, socialism and nationalism in East European visual culture. -- .

This book draws upon cognitive and affect theory to examine applications of contemporary performance practices in educational, social and community contexts. The writing is situated in the spaces between making and performance, exploring the processes of creating work defined variously as collaborative, participatory and socially engaged.

1. This book is a crucial conversation about how racialized bodies and power intersect within actor training spaces. 2. this book specifically examines race from various and diverse points of view. 3. the book looks at acting training and race from a voice and movement perspective.

Transgendered playwright, performer, columnist, and sex worker Nina Arsenault has undergone more than sixty plastic surgeries in pursuit of a feminine beauty ideal. In "TRANS(per)FORMING Nina Arsenault," Judith Rudakoff brings together a diverse group of contributors, including artists, scholars, and Arsenault herself to offer an exploration of beauty, image, and the notion of queerness through the lens of Arsenault's highly personal brand of performance art.Illustrated throughout with photographs of the artist's transformation over the years and demonstrating her diversity of personae, this volume contributes to a deepening of our understanding of what it means to be a woman and what it means to be beautiful. Also included in this volume is the full script of Arsenault's critically acclaimed stage play, "The Silicone Diaries."

Dance on the American Musical Theatre Stage: A History chronicles the development of dance, with an emphasis on musicals and the Broadway stage, in the United States from its colonial beginnings to performances of the present day. This book explores the fascinating tug-and-pull between the European classical, folk and social dance imports and America's indigenous dance forms as they met and collided on the popular musical theatre stage. The historical background influenced a specific musical theatre movement vocabulary and a unique choreographic approach that is recognizable today as Broadway style dancing. Throughout the book, a cultural context is woven into the history to reveal how the competing values within American culture, and its attempts as a nation to define and redefine itself, played out through developments in dance on the musical theatre stage. This book is central to the conversation on how dance influences and reflects society, and will be of interest to students and scholars of Musical Theatre, Theatre Studies, Dance and Cultural History.