This is a collection of works by internationally recognized women leading the field of dance research and spirituality across the globe. Building on current soulful research scholarship in the discipline, these authors offer extensive and detailed research into spirituality, dance, gender, religion, somatics and women-centred dance research. Written by women dance scholars in higher education, this evocative and illuminating work highlights a growing discourse on gendered leadership in dance research. Spiritual Herstories provides new pathways and innovative research methods that respond to the educational needs of women emerging in male-centric socio-historic research traditions.

Minstrel Traditions: Mediated Blackface in the Jazz Age explores the place and influence of black racial impersonation in US society during a crucial and transitional time period. Minstrelsy was absorbed into mass-culture media that was either invented or reached widespread national prominence during this era: advertising campaigns, audio recordings, radio broadcasts, and film. Minstrel Traditions examines the methods through which minstrelsy's elements connected with the public and how these conventions reified the racism of the time. This book explores blackface and minstrelsy through a series of overlapping case studies which illustrate the extent to which blackface thrived in the early twentieth century. It contextualizes and analyzes the last musical of black entertainer Bert Williams, the surprising live career of pancake icon Aunt Jemima, a flourishing amateur minstrel industry, blackface acts of African American vaudeville, and the black Broadway shows which brought new musical styles and dances to the American consciousness. All reflect, and sometimes incorporate, the mass-culture technologies of the time, either in their subject matter or method of distribution. Retrograde blackface seamlessly transitioned from live to mediated iterations of these cultural products, further pushing black stereotypes into the national consciousness. The book project oscillates between two different types of performances: the live and the mediated. By focusing on how minstrelsy in the Jazz Age moved from live performance into mediatized technologies, the book adds to the intellectual and historical conversation regarding this pernicious, racist entertainment form. Jazz Age blackface helped normalize new media technologies and that technology extended minstrelsy's influence within US culture. Minstrel Traditions tracks minstrelsy's social impact over the course of two decades to examine how ideas of national identity employ racial nostalgias and fantasias. This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers in theatre studies, communication studies, race and media, and musical scholarship

The Routledge Dance Studies Reader has been expanded and updated, giving readers access to thirty-seven essential texts that address the social, political, cultural, and economic impact of globalization on embodiment and choreography. These interdisciplinary essays in dance scholarship consider a broad range of dance forms in relation to historical, ethnographic, and interdisciplinary research methods including cultural studies, reconstruction, media studies, and popular culture. This new third edition expands both its geographic and cultural focus to include recent research on dance from Southeast Asia, the People's Republic of China, indigenous dance, and new sections on market forces and mediatization. Sections cover: Methods and approaches Practice and performance Dance as embodied ideology Dance on the market and in the media Formations of the field. The Routledge Dance Studies Reader includes essays on concert dance (ballet, modern and postmodern dance, tap, kathak, and classical khmer dance), popular dance (salsa and hip-hop), site-specific performance, digital choreography, and lecture-performances. It is a vital resource for anyone interested in understanding dance from a global and contemporary perspective.

The Routledge Comedy Studies Reader is a selection of the most outstanding critical analysis featured in the journal Comedy Studies in the decade since its inception in 2010. The Reader illustrates the multiple perspectives that are available when analysing comedy. Wilkie's selections present an array of critical approaches from interdisciplinary scholars, all of whom evaluate comedy from different angles and adopt a range of writing styles to explore the phenomenon. Divided into eight unique parts, the Reader offers both breadth and depth with its wide range of interdisciplinary articles and international perspectives. Of interest to students, scholars, and lovers of comedy alike, The Routledge Comedy Studies Reader offers a contemporary sample of general analyses of comedy as a mode, form, and genre.

Devising Theatre and Performance is a hands-on guide for artists, students and teachers of performance at any stage of their practice. It offers a wide range of creative prompts and pathways enriched with critical thinking tools and questions, a hybrid approach Hill and Paris call 'Curious Methods'. This is a welcome addition to the field, created and curated by two experienced artists who have operated at the international interface of academia and professional practice for over three decades. The collection is packed with fun, creative, thoughtful exercises distilled from over twenty years of running interdisciplinary artist workshops and teaching both devising and performance making. As well providing numerous exercises and suggestions for devising, composing and editing original works, this book offers tools for giving and receiving feedback, critical reflection and framing artistic work within academic research contexts. Readers can choose to dip in and out, to follow the book as a course or to work section by section, focusing on organizing principles such as working from the body, working with site, working with objects or performance activism. The book includes a detailed production workbook and a practice-based research workbook you can tailor to your own projects. The 'Curious Methods' approach encourages users to take the time and space their practice deserves while offering tools, nourishment and encouragement and inviting them to take risks beyond their comfort zones. The exercises are carefully described so that they can easily be tested out by readers, and are well contextualized in relation to vivid examples from contemporary performance practice and relevant political contexts. This compelling approach goes beyond many other books on theatre devising, which merely provide performance recipes; they do so by repeatedly highlighting the vital cultural relevance and potential personal impact of the experiments that they invite us to undertake. The primary audience for this important new book will be academics, instructors and students in courses on devised theatre, improvisation, performance art, experimental performance and practice-based research. It will be essential for classroom use, for students of theatre and performance and live art - undergraduate, postgraduate and Ph.D., teachers and all those needing strategies for getting started. It will also appeal to readers from the broader arts, humanities and social sciences who are seeking resources for integrating creative methods into their research.

In this volume, Soe Marlar Lwin proposes a contextualized multimodal framework that brings together storytelling practitioners' and academic researchers' conceptions of storytelling. It aims to highlight the ways in which various institutions in contemporary society have been using live storytelling performances as an effective communicative, educative and meaning-making tool. Drawing on theories of narrative from narratology as well as from related fields such as discourse analysis, multimodal analysis, communication and performance studies, the author proposes a contextualized multimodal framework to (a) uncover the potential narrativity of a live storytelling performance through an analysis of narrative elements constituting the story, (b) capture the process of developing actual narrativity through a multimodal analysis of performance features in the storytelling discourse, and (c) highlight the importance of context and dynamics between the storyteller and audience for an achievement of optimal narrativity in a particular storytelling event. The sample analysis shows how the framework not only describes the system governing institutionalized storytelling performances in general but also serves as a useful model to examine individual performance as a unique realization of the general system. The book also offers implications for possible applications of such contextualized multimodal frameworks more broadly across the disciplines.

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.

Part of the series Key Concepts in Indigenous Studies, this book focuses on the concepts that recur in any discussion of nature, culture and society among the indigenous. This final volume in the five-volume series deals with the two key concepts of performance and knowledge of the indigenous people from all continents of the world. With contributions from renowned scholars, activists and experts across the globe, it looks at issues and ideas of the indigenous peoples in the context of imagination, creativity, performance, audience, arts, music, dance, oral traditions, aesthetics and beauty in North America, South America, Australia, East Asia and India from cultural, historical and aesthetic points of view. Bringing together academic insights and experiences from the ground, this unique book, with its wide coverage, will serve as a comprehensive guide for students, teachers and scholars of indigenous studies. It will be essential reading for those in social and cultural anthropology, tribal studies, sociology and social exclusion studies, cultural studies, media studies and performing arts, literary and postcolonial studies, religion and theology, politics, Third World and Global South studies, as well as activists working with indigenous communities.

If today students of social theory read Jurgen Habermas, Michael Foucault and Anthony Giddens, then proper regard to the question of culture means that they should also read Raymond Williams, Julia Kristeva and Slavoj Zizek. The second edition of the Routledge Handbook of Social and Cultural Theory is fully revised and updated to provide students, teachers and researchers with a comprehensive, critical guide to the major traditions of thought in social and cultural theory, as well as tracing the complex intellectual connections between these distinct but related approaches to understanding society and culture. The Handbook, edited by acclaimed sociologist Anthony Elliott, develops a powerful argument for bringing together social and cultural theory more systematically than ever before. Key social and cultural theories, ranging from classical approaches to postmodern, psychoanalytic and post-feminist approaches, are drawn together and critically appraised. There are also new chapters on mobilities and migrations, as well as posthumanism. The Handbook, written in a clear and direct style will appeal to a wide audience of students and scholars. The extensive references and sources will direct students to areas of further study.

This study of Bob Dylan's art employs a performance studies lens, exploring the distinctive ways he brings words and music to life on recordings, onstage, and onscreen. Chapters focus on the relationship of Dylan's recorded performances to the historical bardic role, to the American popular song tradition, and to rock music culture. His uses of both stage and studio to shape his performances are explored, as are his forays into cinema. Special consideration is given to his vocal performances and to his use of particular personae as a performer. The full scope of Dylan's body of work to date is situated in terms of the influences that have shaped his performances and the ways these performances have shaped contemporary popular music.

Investigating Musical Performance considers the wide range of perspectives on musical performance made tangible by the cross-disciplinary studies of the last decades and encourages a comparison and revision of theoretical and analytical paradigms. The chapters present different approaches to this multi-layered phenomenon, including the results of significant research projects. The complex nature of musical performance is revealed within each section which either suggests aspects of dialogue and contiguity or discusses divergences between theoretical models and perspectives. Part I elaborates on the history, current trends and crucial aspects of the study of musical performance; Part II is devoted to the development of theoretical models, highlighting sharply distinguished positions; Part III explores the relationship between sign and sound in score-based performances; finally, the focus of Part IV centres on gesture considered within different traditions of musicmaking. Three extra chapters by the editors complement Parts I and III and can be accessed via the online Routledge Music Research Portal. The volume shows actual and possible connections between topics, problems, analytical methods and theories, thereby reflecting the wealth of stimuli offered by research on the musical cultures of our times.

This book is the first of its kind offering a materialistic semiotic analysis of a non-Western theatre culture: Bengali group theatre. Arnab Banerji fills two lacunas in contemporary theatre scholarship. First, the materialist semiotic approach to studying a non-Western theatre event allows Banerji to critically examine the material conditions in which theatre is created and seen outside the Euro-American context. And second, by shifting the critical lens onto a contemporary urban theatre phenomenon from India, the book attempts to even out the scholastic imbalance in Indian theatre scholarship which has largely focused on folk and classical traditions. The book shows a refreshing new perspective toward a theatre culture that frequently escapes the critical lens in spite of being one of the largest urban theatre cultures in the world. Theatre events are a sum total of the conditions in which they are built and the conditions in which they are viewed. Studying the event separate from its materialistic beginnings and semiotic effects allow only a partial insight into the performance phenomenon. The materialist semiotic critical framework of this book locates the Bengali group theatre within its performative context and offers a heretofore unexplored insight into this vibrant theatre culture.

Combines some of today's leading performance scholars to offer their unique perspectives on how to teach this subject. Invaluable information and ideas for any teachers of Performance Studies, Drama, Performing Arts and Theatre Studies degrees Gives a much broader range of applications than the competition - drama class, studio practice, performance studies seminar, theatre theory class.

This volume brings together performance texts from nine productions by the experimental theatre company Lightwork and one playtext from Lightwork's precursor company Academy Productions, presented between 1997 and 2011. Lightwork specialized in collaboratively created and multimedia performance. The company also experimented with several performance forms that emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century, including verbatim and site-specific approaches. Because of this, the texts cover a range of forms and formats - scripted plays such as Here's What I Did With My Body One Day by Dan Rebellato and Blavatsky by Clare Bayley; multimedia adaptations of classical myths such as Back At You (based on the story of Echo and Narcissus) and Once I was Dead (based on the story of Daedalus and Icarus); site-specific experiments such as The Good Actor, which took place in various spaces across Hoxton Hall, a Victorian theatre in London's East End; and the use of verbatim witness testimony from the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, War Crimes section in Sarajevo Story. The defining aspect of the Lightwork aesthetic is that multimedia and scenographic experimentation does not come at the expense of the mainstays of dramatic theatre: character, story and emotional resonance. What lies at the heart of the Lightwork shows you will encounter here are human-scale stories: relationships between lovers or family members, confrontations with the past (both as personal and as cultural history) and, in many cases, matters of life or death that entail wrestling with causality, consequence and fate. The twelve-year span covered by this work reflects a period in British performance practice when the interrelation of page and stage, process and production, text and 'non-text', were being radically rethought. In the collaborative and processual theatre making that Lightwork exemplifies, the text may be one element among many and is more likely to be the outcome of the process than its precursor. How do such playtexts (or performance texts) differ from those that are conceived and scripted by a single desk-based playwright in advance of the rehearsal? What gaps are left when the work of many hands is channelled through the pen (or keyboard) of one among them? The texts featured in this volume represent a number of answers to these questions about the nature of writing for the stage. The performance texts are each preceded (and sometime followed) by short essays written by some of the many people who have been involved in productions by Lightwork, including established academics and theatre practitioners: David Annen, Clare Bayley, Gregg Fisher, Sarah Gorman, Andy Lavender, Aneta Mancewicz, Bella Merlin, Alex Mermikides, Jo Parker, Dan Rebellato, and Ayse Tashkiran. Their contributions reflect the collaborative nature of the company and the respect that it accorded the various disciplinary perspectives that make up a theatre company. There are sections on scenography, sound design and technical operation, as well as on those crafts that might more usually draw attention: directing, writing and acting. These contributions offer an insight into the collaborative, multi-layered and sometimes messy business of their creation from an individual maker's or spectator's point of view. This book will be invaluable for those who are making, studying or researching performance in the twenty-first century, and an essential resource for the rehearsal room. Primary readership will include researchers, educators, students and practitioners interested in creative practice, theatre-making, integrated design and performance, and contemporary theatre. It will be an important resource for those on theatre and performance courses at all levels, as well as acting, theatre and performance design, dramaturgy and direction courses, creative writing courses and media arts programmes. It will have appeal for general readers interested in new texts and processes in theatre and performance, and individual texts are likely to be of interest to specialist researchers working in related fields - for example performance and the occult (Blavatsky), performance and conflict (Sarajevo Story).

Interpreting the meaning of hospitality in an unwelcoming political moment Amid xenophobic challenges to America's core value of welcoming the tired and the poor, Irina Aristarkhova calls for new forms of hospitality in her engagement with the works of eight international artists. In this first monograph on hospitality in contemporary art, Aristarkhova employs a feminist perspective to critically explore the artworks of Ana Prvacki, Faith Wilding, Lee Mingwei, Kathy High, Mithu Sen, Pippa Bacca, Silvia Moro, and Ken Aptekar and asks who, how, and what determines who is worthy of our welcome. Spanning a diverse range of contemporary art practices, Arrested Welcome shows how artists challenge our existing notions of hospitality-culturally, philosophically, and politically. From the role of "microcourtesies" in social change to the portrayal of waiting as a feminist endeavor, Aristarkhova looks deeply into topics such as gender stereotypes of welcome, ways to reclaim civility, and the means by which guests (sometimes human, sometimes animal) push the limits of our hosting traditions. Blending a feminist analysis of hospitality with in-depth case studies on how contemporary artists stimulate personal reflection and political engagement, Aristarkhova initiates these important conversations at a critical time of national and international hospitality crises.

There has never been and will never be another nightclub to rival the sheer glamour, energy, and wild creativity that was Studio 54. Now, in the first official book on the legendary club, co-owner Ian Schrager presents a spectacular volume brimming with star-studded photographs and personal stories from the greatest party of all time. From the moment it opened in 1977, Studio 54 celebrated spectacle and promised a never-ending parade of anything goes. Although it existed for only three years, it served as a catalyst that brought together some of the most famous and creative people in the world. It quickly became known for its celebrity guest list and uniquely chic clientele. From the cutting-edge lighting displays to its elaborate sets, it was the beginning of nightclub as performance art. Now, Studio 54 explores this cultural zeitgeist and gives us Schrager s personal firsthand account of what it was like to create and run the most famous nightclub of our age. With hundreds of photographs, many of which have never been seen before, of the celebrities and beautiful people and engaging stories and quotes from such cultural luminaries as Liza Minelli, David Geffen, Brooke Shields, Pat Cleveland, and Diane von Furstenberg, this exciting volume depicts the wild energy and glittering creativity of the era. One of the most important cultural landmarks of the twentieth century, Studio 54 continues to inspire with its legendary glamour. This exhilarating volume is a must-have for style and fashion aficionados today.

Rebecca Horn (*1944) is one of today's most outstanding artists. Since the early 1970s her poetic performances, drawings, films, and kinetic sculptures have laid the foundation for the body-related art of today. In 2018 Saint Hedwig's Cathedral in Berlin showed her installation Glowing Core, which quickly became the highlight of the Berlin Art Week. The cathedral opened each day at sunset and remained open until late in the evening, revealing a new universe of light. In this book three photographers and four renowned authors examine this work. Text in English and German.

This book provides a new social history of British performance cultures in the early decades of the twentieth century, where performance across stage and screen was generated by dynamic and transformational industries. Exploring an era book-ended by wars and troubled by social unrest and political uncertainty, A Social History of British Performance Cultures 1900-1939 makes use of the popular material cultures produced by and for the industries - autobiographies, fan magazines and trade journals, as well as archival holdings, popular sketches, plays and performances. Maggie B. Gale looks at how the performance industries operated, circulated their products and self-regulated their professional activities, in a period where enfranchisement, democratization, technological development and legislation shaped the experience of citizenship. Through close examination of material evidence and a theoretical underpinning, this book shows how performance industries reflected and challenged this experience, and explored the ways in which we construct our 'performance' as participants in the public realm. Suited not only to scholars and students of British theatre and theatre history, but to general readers as well, A Social History of British Performance Cultures 1900-1939 offers an original intervention into the construction of British theatre and performance histories, offering new readings of the relationship between the material cultures of performance, the social, professional and civic contexts from which they arise, and on which they reflect.

First published in 1986. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Performing presence: Between the live and the simulated proposes that the advent of new media forms, and the increasing integration of contemporary performance and media, has generated new engagements, practices and understandings of presence. Addressing new media art and performance, multi-media theatre, video installation, mixed reality environments and locative arts, the book presents case studies of work by Lynn Hershman Leeson, Paul Sermon, Gary Hill, Tony Oursler, The Builders Association and Blast Theory, as well as analyses of a series of related experiments created for CAVE, an immersive virtual reality environment. Performing presence combines extensive analysis, and extracts from interviews with the artists, as well as the documentation of elements of work and working processes, in order to provide specific insight into these engagements with contemporary practices and concepts presence. -- .

Reimagines black and brown sensuality to develop new modes of knowledge production In Sensual Excess, Amber Jamilla Musser imagines epistemologies of sensuality that emerge from fleshiness. To do so, she works against the framing of black and brown bodies as sexualized, objectified, and abject, and offers multiple ways of thinking with and through sensation and aesthetics. Each chapter draws our attention to particular aspects of pornotropic capture that black and brown bodies must always negotiate. Though these technologies differ according to the nature of their encounters with white supremacy, together they add to our understanding of the ways that structures of domination produce violence and work to contain bodies and pleasures within certain legible parameters. To do so, Sensual Excess analyzes moments of brown jouissance that exceed these constraints. These ruptures illuminate multiple epistemologies of selfhood and sensuality that offer frameworks for minoritarian knowledge production which is designed to enable one to sit with uncertainty. Through examinations of installations and performances like Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, Kara Walker's A Subtlety, Patty Chang's In Love and Nao Bustamante's Neapolitan, Musser unpacks the relationships between racialized sexuality and consumption to interrogate foundational concepts in psychoanalytic theory, critical race studies, feminism, and queer theory. In so doing, Sensual Excess offers a project of knowledge production focused not on mastery, but on sensing and imagining otherwise, whatever and wherever that might be.

Short Plays with Great Roles for Women is an antidote to the traditional underrepresentation of women on stage, by offering twenty-two short plays that put women right at the centre of the action. The push for more women's roles has gathered force over the last few years, and this collection is part of that movement, with rich, intelligent roles for women of all ages and backgrounds. This anthology offers a vital slice of life, addressing relevant and diverse topics such as: a young, Islamic woman coming out to her religious mother; black women's navigation of the natural hair movement; bullying in a small-town American school; social media addiction; and the trials and tribulations of family life. Plays from award-winning playwrights are supported by original production details and playwrights' afterwords, forming a broad and comprehensive collection of complete texts that offer full character journeys. Appealing to aspiring performers, playwrights, directors and students, Short Plays with Great Roles for Women is an essential resource for actor training, assessments, showcases, show-reels, short films and theatre performances.

Teaching Acting with Practical Aesthetics uses constructivist pedagogy to teach acting via Practical Aesthetics, a system of actor training created in the mid-1980s by David Mamet. The book melds the history of Practical Aesthetics, Practical Aesthetics itself, educational theory, and compatible physical work into the educational approach called Praxis to create a comprehensive training guide for the modern actor and theatre instructor. It includes lesson plans, compatible voice and movement exercises, constructivist teaching materials, classroom handouts, and a suggested calendar for Acting courses. Written for Acting instructors at the college and secondary levels, Acting scholars, and professionals looking for a new way to perform, Teaching Acting with Practical Aesthetics offers detailed instructions to help students sharpen their performing skills and excel on stage.