Gomez-Pena Unplugged is an anthology of recent and rewritten classic writings from Guillermo Gomez-Pena, a figure who stands alone as unique and ground-breaking in the history of performance art and as the artistic director of transdisciplinary performance troupe La Pocha Nostra. Throughout this collection, Gomez-Pena tackles literature, theory, pedagogy, activism and live art in an eclectic mix that demonstrates how the process of writing is simultaneously a performative exercise in embodied language. The writing stands as a call for action, utilizing what Gomez-Pena terms "imaginary activism" and "radical citizenship"; it invites the reader to embrace a borderless, polygendered, crossgenerational and race-literate ethos. This timely anthology comes straight from the heart of a troubled Trump-era United States and a crime cartel-ridden Mexico. Artists and writers are prompted to engage in radical performance pedagogy within the civic realm and to think of themselves as public intellectuals and "artivists" participating in the great debates of our times. By encouraging emerging artists and writers to wildly imagine their practice beyond the normative art world and academia, this book is a fundamental read for scholars and students of performance art, political theatre, cultural studies, literature, poetry, activism and race and gender politics. Performance Art, Live or Time-Based Art, Cultural Studies, Experimental Poetry, Multiculturalism, Social Practice, Chicano/Latino/Border Art & Literature, Relational Aesthetics, Public Art, Artivism, Activism, Psychomagic Ritual, Literary Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, Ethnic & Gender Studies, Queer & Women Studies, Post-Colonial Theory, Techno-Art, Cyborgian Studies, Exoticized & Fetishized Identities, Deconstruction Stereotypes & Binaries, Anti-Essentialism, Anti-Nationalism, Radical Citizenship, Anti-Racism, Race & Gender Literacy

Theatre Institutions in Crisis examines how theatre in Europe is beset by a crisis on an institutional level and the pressing need for robust research into the complex configuration of factors at work that are leading to significant shifts in the way theatre is understood, organised, delivered, and received. Balme and Fisher bring together scholars from different disciplines and countries across Europe to examine what factors can be said to be most common to the institutional crisis of European theatre today. The methods employed are drawn from systems theory, social-scientific approaches, economics and statistics, theatre and performance, and other interpretative approaches (hermeneutics), and labour studies. This book will be of great interest to researchers, students, and practitioners working in the fields of performance and theatre studies. It will be particularly relevant to researchers with a particular interest in European theatre and its networks.

Relevance and Marginalisation in Scandinavian and European Performing Arts 1770-1860: Questioning Canons reveals how various cultural processes have influenced what has been included, and what has been marginalised from canons of European music, dance, and theatre around the turn of the nineteenth century and the following decades. This collection of essays includes discussion of the piano repertory for young ladies in England; canonisation of the French minuet; marginalisation of the popular German dramatist Kotzebue from the dramatic canon; dance repertory and social life in Christiania (Oslo); informal cultural activities in Trondheim; repertory of Norwegian musical clocks; female itinerant performers in the Nordic sphere; preconditions, dissemination, and popularity of equestrian drama; marginalisation and amateur staging of a Singspiel by the renowned Danish playwright Oehlenschlager, also with perspectives on the music and its composers; and the perceived relevance of Henrik Ibsen's staged theatre repertory and early dramas. By questioning established notions about canon, marginalisation, and relevance within the performing arts in the period 1770-1860, this book asserts itself as an intriguing text both to the culturally interested public and to scholars and students of musicology, dance research, and theatre studies.

Dance Legacies of Scotland compiles a collage of references portraying percussive Scottish dancing and explains what influenced a wide disappearance of hard-shoe steps from contemporary Scottish practices. Mats Melin and Jennifer Schoonover explore the historical references describing percussive dancing to illustrate how widespread the practice was, giving some glimpses of what it looked and sounded like. The authors also explain what influenced a wide disappearance of hard-shoe steps from Scottish dancing practices. Their research draws together fieldwork, references from historical sources in English, Scots, and Scottish Gaelic, and insights drawn from the authors' practical knowledge of dances. They portray the complex network of dance dialects that existed in parallel across Scotland, and share how remnants of this vibrant tradition have endured in Scotland and the Scottish diaspora to the present day. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of Dance and Music and its relationship to the history and culture of Scotland.

Katie Mitchell: Beautiful Illogical Acts offers the first comprehensive study of Britain's most internationally recognised, influential, and controversial theatre director. It examines Mitchell's innovations in fourth-wall realism, opera, and Live Cinema across major British and European institutions, bringing three decades of practice vividly to life. Informed by first-hand rehearsal observations and in-depth conversations with the director and her collaborators, Fowler investigates the intense and immersive qualities of Mitchell's distinctive theatrical realism and challenges mainstream narratives about realism as a defunct or inherently conservative genre. He explores Mitchell's theatre-and its often polarised reception-to question familiar assumptions governing contemporary performance criticism, including common binaries that pit realism against radical experimentation, auteurs against texts, feminists against Naturalism, and Britain against Europe. By examining a career trajectory that intersects with huge cultural change, Fowler places Mitchell at the centre of urgent contemporary debates about cultural transformation and its genuinely inclusive potential. This is an essential book for those interested in Katie Mitchell, British theatre, directing, the transformative power of realism and feminism in contemporary theatre practice, and challenges to hierarchical distributions of power inside the mainstream.

A guide to the contemporary London stage as well as an argument about its future, the book walks readers through the city's performance spaces following the Brexit vote. Austerity-era London theatre is suffused with the belief that private ownership defines full citizenship, its perspective narrowing to what an affluent audience might find relatable. From pub theatres to the National, Michael Meeuwis reveals how what gets put on in London interacts with the daily life of the neighbourhoods in which they are set. This study addresses global theatregoers, as well as students and scholars across theatre and performance studies-particularly those interested in UK culture after Brexit, urban geography, class, and theatrical economics.

La Pocha Nostra: A Handbook for the Rebel Artist in a Post-Democratic Society marks a transformation from its sister book, Exercises for Rebel Artists, into a pedagogical matrix suited for use as a performance handbook and conceptual tool for artists, activists, theorists, pedagogues, and trans-disciplinary border crossers of all stripes. Featuring a newly reworked outline of La Pocha Nostra's overall pedagogy, and how it has evolved in the time of Trump, cartel violence, and the politics of social media, this new handbook presents deeper explanations of the interdisciplinary pedagogical practices developed by the group that has been labeled "the most influential Latino/a performance troupe of the past ten years." Co-written by Guillermo Gomez-Pena in collaboration with La Pocha Nostra's artistic co-director Saul Garcia-Lopez and edited by Paloma Martinez-Cruz, this highly anticipated follow-up volume raises crucial questions in the new neo-nationalist era. Drawing on field experience from ten years of touring, the authors blend original methods with updated and revised exercises, providing new material for teachers, universities, radical artists, curators, producers, and students. This book features: Introductions by the authors and editor to Pocha Nostra practice in a post-democratic society. Theoretical, historical, poetic, and pedagogical contexts for the methodology. Suggestions for how to use the book in the classroom and many other scenarios. Detailed, hands-on exercises for using Pocha Nostra-inspired methods in workshops. A step-by-step guide to creating large-scale group performances. New, unpublished photos of the Pocha Nostra methods in practice. Additional texts by Reverend Billy and Savitri D., Dragonfly, Francesca Carol Rolla, VestAndPage, Micha Espinosa, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Praba Pilar, L. M. Bogad, Anuradha Vikram, and Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, among many others. The book is complemented by the new book Gomez-Pena Unplugged: Texts on Live Art, Social Practice and Imaginary Activism (2008-2019).

Between 1955 and 1975 music theatre became a central preoccupation for European composers digesting the consequences of the revolutionary experiments in musical language that followed the end of the Second World War. The 'new music theatre' wrought multiple, significant transformations, serving as a crucible for the experimental rethinking of theatrical traditions, artistic genres, the conventions of performance, and the composer's relation to society. This volume brings together leading specialists from across Europe to offer a new appraisal of the genre. It is structured according to six themes that investigate: the relation of new music theatre to earlier and contemporaneous theories of drama; the use of new technologies; the relation of new music theatre to progressive politics; the role of new venues and environments; the advancement of new conceptions of the performer; and the challenges that new music theatre lays down for music analysis. Contributing authors address canonical works by composers such as Berio, Birtwistle, Henze, Kagel, Ligeti, Nono, and Zimmermann, but also expand the field to figures and artistic developments not regularly represented in existing music histories. Particular attention is given to new music theatre as a site of intense exchange - between practitioners of different art forms, across national borders, and with diverse mediating institutions.

What does Immersive Theatre 'do'? By contrasting two specific performances on the same theme - one an 'immersive' experience and the other a more conventional theatrical production - Nandita Dinesh explores the ways in which theatrical form impacts upon actors and audiences. An in-depth case study of her work Pinjare (Cages) sets out the 'hows' and 'whys' of her specific aesthetic framework. Memos from a Theatre Lab places Dinesh's practical work within the context of existing analyses of Immersive Theatre, using this investigation to generate an underpinning theory of how Immersive Theatre works for its participants.

Jana Sanskriti is internationally recognised as the most iconic post-Boalian Theatre of the Oppressed operation in the world today. This fully illustrated book by the Bengali company's founder and artistic director Sanjoy Ganguly, edited by Ralph Yarrow, collects and explains their programme of workshop exercises, placing them in the context of their social and activist work. A set of interviews with Ganguly complements these practical sequences, drawing in topics such as the role of the joker, the nature of development, participation and agency, aesthetics as transformation, and Theatre of the Oppressed in the context of a market economy.

Theatre has always been subject to a wide range of social, political, moral, and doctrinal controls, with authorities and social groups imposing constraints on scripts, venues, staging, acting, and reception. Focusing on a range of countries and political regimes, this book examines the many forms that theatre censorship has taken in the 20th century and continues to take in the 21st, arguing that it remains a live issue in the contemporary world. The book re-examines assumptions about prohibition and state control, and offers a more complex reading of theatre censorship as a continuum ranging from the unconscious self-censorship built into social structures and discursive practices, through bureaucratic regulation or unofficial influence, up to detention and physical violence. An international team of contributors offers an illuminating set of case studies informed by both new archival research and the first-hand experience of playwrights and directors, covering theatre censorship in areas such as Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Poland, East Germany, Nepal, Zimbabwe, the USA, Ireland, and Britain. Focusing on right-wing dictatorships, post-colonial regimes, communist systems and Western democracies, the essays analyze methods and discourses of censorship, identify the multiple agents involved, examine the responses of theatremakers, and show how each example reveals important features of its political and cultural contexts. Expanding understanding of the nature and effects of censorship, this volume affirms the power of theatre to challenge authorized discourses and makes a timely contribution to debates about freedom of expression through performance.

Putting food and theatre into direct conversation, this volume focuses on how food and theatre have operated for centuries as partners in the performative, symbolic, and literary making of meaning. Through case studies, literary analyses, and performance critiques, contributors examine theatrical work from China, Japan, India, Greece, Italy, France, Germany, England, the United States, Chile, Argentina, and Zimbabwe, addressing work from classical, popular, and contemporary theatre practices. The investigation of uses of food across media and artistic genres is a burgeoning area of scholarly investigation, yet regarding representation and symbolism, literature and film have received more attention than theatre, while performance studies scholars have taken the lead in examining the performative aspects of food events. This collection looks across dramatic genres, historical periods, and cultural contexts, and at food in all of its socio-political, material complexity to examine the particular problems and potentials of invoking and using food in live theatre. The volume considers food as a transhistorical, global phenomenon across theatre genres, addressing the explosion of food studies at the end of the twentieth century that has shown how food is a crucial aspect of cultural identity.

Incapacity and Theatricality acknowledges the distinctive contribution to contemporary theatrical performance made by actors with intellectual disabilities. It presents a close examination of certain key theatrical performances across a variety of different media, including John Cassavetes' 1963 social issues film A Child Is Waiting; the performance art collaboration between Robert Wilson and Christopher Knowles; and the provocative pranksterism of Christoph Schlingensief's talent show mockumentary FreakStars 3000. Tracing a global path of performances, Incapacity and Theatricality offers an analysis of how actors with intellectual disabilities have emerged onto the main stage, and how their inclusion calls into question long-held assumptions about both theatre and intellectual disability. For postgraduate students, or anyone interested in the shifting dynamics of twenty-first century theatre, McCaffrey's work offers a vital consideration of the intersubjective relations between people with and without intellectual disabilities and ultimately addresses urgent questions about the situation and representation of the contemporary subject caught up somewhere between incapacity and theatricality.

Drama and the Politics of Generational Conflict in Shakespeare's England examines the intersection between art and culture and explains how ideas about age circulated in early modern England. Stephannie Gearhart illustrates how a variety of texts - including drama by Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton - placed elders' and youths' voices in dialogue with one another to construct the period's ideology of age and shape elder-youth relations.

Affective Movements, Methods and Pedagogies invites readers to think with affect about performance, pedagogies and their inherent activist, embodied and collective natures. It works across multiple spheres to help readers understand how to deploy affective approaches rather than to simply think with affect theory about traditional methods. The book is structured and curated across three main thematic sections: affective movements, methods and pedagogies, each of which treats the core explorations of affect and performance through a different perspective. It is concerned with the ways performance and theatrical methods work with and through a theoretics of affect. The sixteen chapters include work that models theoretical practices in writing, and demonstrates how theorising affect and its methods is itself a performative practice. The contributors offer rich examples from diverse geopolitical as well as disciplinary contexts, innovative methods, and finally, intersectional theoretics. This collection will be of interest to higher education students exploring methodologies, and academic researchers and teachers in the fields of performance studies, communication, critical studies, sociology and the arts.

This book presents a ground-breaking, comprehensive study of the modern performance history of plays in the John Fletcher canon, excluding his collaborations with Shakespeare. It examines how seventeen of Fletcher's plays have been interpreted in British productions. In addition, the book offers a consideration of the contexts in which these productions took place, from the early twentieth century 'Elizabethan Revival' to the more politicized theatrical cultures of the 1960s and beyond. Revived with Care opens a window on some of the theatrical developments of the past 135 years, in the context of radical changes in the presentation and reception of early modern drama, while for theatre practitioners it provides ideas and inspiration for exploring little-known but powerful plays in exciting new productions. The book will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners working in the field of theatre and performance studies.

Floating Bones charts the author's journey into tensegrity, which begins in ballet and culminates in a model for addressing one's body as a teacher. Tensegrity flips traditional biomechanical models such that instead of support coming from the bones, the bones float, and it is the muscles and other soft connective tissue that provide support for the moving body. Using the model of tensegretic experience, Roses-Thema connects somatics, cognition, rhetoric, and reflective practices detailing the means that constructed approaching the body as a teacher. This study presents the argument for extending the models of thinking to include bodily thinking, by citing how the experiential perspective of tensegrity constructs physical evidence of the rhetorical concept, metis, where the body thinks as it moves. This book will be of great interest to students, scholars, and practitioners of dance, theater, and sociology.

Commedia dell'Arte, its Structure and Tradition chronicles a series of discussions between two renowned experts in commedia dell'arte - master practitioners Antonio Fava and John Rudlin. These discussions were recorded during three recent visits by Fava to Rudlin's rural retreat in south west France. They take in all of commedia dell'arte's most striking and enduring elements - its masks, its scripts and scenarios, and most outstandingly, its cast of characters. Fava explores the role of each stock Commedia character and their subsequent incarnations in popular culture, as well as their roots in prominent figures of their time. The lively and wide-ranging conversations also take in methods of staging commedia dell'arte for contemporary audiences, the evolution of its gestures, and the collective nature of its theatre-making. This is an essential book for any student or practitioner of commedia dell'arte - provocative, expansive wisdom from the modern world's foremost exponent of the craft.

Non-representational Theory explores a range of ideas which have recently engaged geographers and have led to the development of an alternative approach to the conception, practice, and production of geographic knowledge. Non-representational Theory refers to a key body of work that has emerged in geography over the past two and a half decades that emphasizes the importance of practice, embodiment, materiality, and process to the ongoing formation of social life. This title offers the first sole-authored, accessible introduction to this work and its impact on geography. Without being prescriptive the text provides a general explanation of what Non-representational Theory is. This includes discussion of the disciplinary context it emerged from, the key ideas and themes that characterise work associated with Non-representational Theory, and the theoretical points of reference that inspires it. The book then explores a series of conjunctions of 'Non-representational Theory and...', taking an area of geographic enquiry and exploring the impact Non-representational Theory has had on how it is researched and understood. This includes the relationships between Non-representational Theory and Practice, Affect, Materiality, Landscape, Performance, and Methods. Critiques of Non-representational Theory are also broached, including reflections on issues on identity, power, and difference. The text draws together the work of a range of established and emerging scholars working on the development of non-representational theories, allowing scholars from geography and other disciplines to access and assess the animating potential of such work. This volume is essential reading for undergraduates and post-graduate students interested in the social, cultural, and political geographies of everyday living.

This is a very readable, useful and above all, deeply historical account of some of the defining tropes in art history and performance today. Written by world renowned feminist art historian, Amelia Jones, this genealogy is a key work bridging art historical and performance studies approaches. Each chapter includes 'Ruptures' - bursts of intimately written accounts of experiences of performance (and related interludes) - which help make the content accessible.

This is a very readable, useful and above all, deeply historical account of some of the defining tropes in art history and performance today. Written by world renowned feminist art historian, Amelia Jones, this genealogy is a key work bridging art historical and performance studies approaches. Each chapter includes 'Ruptures' - bursts of intimately written accounts of experiences of performance (and related interludes) - which help make the content accessible.

The 20th century was a dynamic period for the theatrical arts in China. Booming urban theatres, the interaction between commercial practice and theatre, dramas staged during the War of Resistance against Japan and a healthy dialogue between Western and Eastern theatres all contributed to the momentousness of this period. The four volumes of A History of Chinese Theatre in the 20th Century display the developmental trajectories of Chinese theatre over those 100 years. This volume deals with the development of Chinese theatre from 1949 to 2000, covering the fluctuations of 'drama reform', spectacles of the 'Cultural Revolution', and theatre in the immediate years before the opening up of the country. The author demonstrates how Chinese dramatic traditions endured and adapted in the face of modernity and how politics and art interacted. By combining academic rigour with a high degree of readability, this volume is both an essential guide for scholars and students in the history of the arts and general readers interested in Chinese theatre.

This book tells the story of teaching Kathakali, a seventeenth century Indian dance-drama, to contemporary performers in Australia. A rigorous analysis and detailed documentation of the teaching of multiple learners in Melbourne, both in the group workshop mode and one-on-one, combined with the author's ethnographic research in India, leads to a unique insight into what the author argues persuasively is at the heart of the art's aesthetic- a practical realisation of the theory of rasa as first articulated in the ancient Sanskrit treatise on drama The Natyashastra. The research references the latest discoveries in neuroscience on 'mirror neurons' and argues for a reconceptualization of Kathakali's imitative methodology, advancing it from the reductive category of 'mimicry' to a more contemporary and complex mirroring which is where its value lies in Australian actor performer training. The Teaching of Kathakali in Australia will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre and dance, intercultural actor training, practice-led research, and interdisciplinary studies of neuroscience and performance.

In this study, Josefine Wikstroem challenges a concept of performance that makes no difference between art and non-art and argues for a new concept. This book confronts and criticises the way in which the dominating concept of performance has been used in art theory and performance and dance studies. Through an analysis of 1960s performance practices, Wikstroem focuses specifically on task-dance and event-score practices and provides an examination of the key philosophical concepts that are inseparable from such a concept of art and are necessary for the reconstruction of a critical concept of performance, such as "practice", "experience", "object", "abstraction" and "structure". This book will be of great interest to scholars, students and practitioners across dance, performance art, aesthetics and art theory.

Involuntary Motion contributes to the study of refugee flight by using movement as a lens to explore problems in refugee performance and understand the experience of bodies in motion. Drawing from somatics, movement analysis, and dance praxis, the chapters explore forces that set bodies in motion; the spaces in which forced movement occurs; the movement of refugee identity arcs; the monstrosity of refugee performance; and the relationship between writing and body culture. How does forced movement impact identity? What are the philosophical implications of robbing individuals of agency over motion? What performances does involuntary motion necessitate? These questions are important as the world confronts the threat of a return of the horrors of the twentieth century. Bringing together debates in migration studies and movement studies, the book argues that refugees are akin to dancers performing on disappearing stages not of their choosing. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of performance, dance, and politics.