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Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts
In the early twentieth century, female performers regularly
appeared on the stages and screens of American cities. Though
advertised as dancers, mimics, singers, or actresses, they often
exceeded these categories. Instead, their performances adopted an
aesthetic of intermediality, weaving together techniques and
elements drawn from a wide variety of genres and media, including
ballet, art music, photography, early modern dance, vaudeville
traditions, film, and more. Onstage and onscreen, performers
borrowed from existing musical scores and narratives, referred to
contemporary shows, films, and events, and mimicked fellow
performers, skating neatly across various media, art forms, and
traditions. Behind the scenes, they experimented with
cross-promotion, new advertising techniques, and various
technologies to broadcast images and tales of their performances
and lives well beyond the walls of American theaters, cabarets, and
halls. The performances and conceptions of art that emerged were
innovative, compelling, and deeply meaningful. Body Knowledge:
Performance, Intermediality, and American Entertainment at the Turn
of the Twentieth Century examines these performances and the
performers behind them, highlighting the Ziegfeld Follies and The
Passing Show revues, Salome dancers, Isadora Duncan's Wagner
dances, Adeline Genee and Bessie Clayton's "photographic" danced
histories, Hazel Mackaye and Ruth St. Denis's pageants, and Anna
Pavlova's opera and film projects. By destabilizing the boundaries
between various media, genres, and performance spaces, each of
these women was able to create performances that negotiated
turn-of-the-century American social and cultural issues:
contemporary technological developments and the rise of mass
reproduction, new modes of perception, the commodification of art
and entertainment, the evolution of fan culture and stardom,
changing understandings of the body and the self, and above all,
shifting conceptions of gender, race, and sexual identity. Tracing
the various modes of intermediality at work on- and offstage, Body
Knowledge re-imagines early twentieth-century art and entertainment
as both fluid and convergent.
Through a career that spanned decades and included dozens of
films-among them such American masterpieces asThe Searchers, The
Grapes of Wrath, The Quiet Man, Stagecoach, and How Green Was My
Valley-John Ford managed to leave as his legacy a body of work that
few filmmakers will ever equal. Yet as bold as the stamp of his
personality was on each film, he was reticent about his personal
life. Basically shy, and intensely private, he was known to enjoy
making up stories about himself, some of them based loosely on fact
but many of them pure fabrications. Ford preferred instead to let
his films speak for him. What mattered to Ford was always what was
up there on the screen. Now, in this definitive look at the life
and career of one of America's true cinematic giants, noted
biographer and critic Scott Eyman, working with the full
participation of the Ford estate, has managed to document and
delineate both aspects of John Ford's life-the human and the
legend.
When we bury our secrets, they always come back to haunt us...Their
rise was meteoric. Only a few years before, they had been three
friends from Glasgow, just trying to survive tough lives of danger
and dysfunction. But on one Hollywood evening in 1993, they were on
the world's biggest stage, accepting their Oscar in front of the
watching world. That night was the beginning of their careers. But
it was also the end of their friendship. Over the next twenty
years, Mirren McLean would become one of the most powerful writers
in the movie industry. Zander Leith would break box-office records
as cinema's most in-demand action hero. And Davie Johnson would
rake in millions as producer of some of the biggest shows on TV.
For two decades they didn't speak, driven apart by a horrific
secret. Until now... Their past is coming back to bite them, and
they have to decide whether to run, hide, or fight. Because when
you rise to the top, there's always someone who wants to see you
fall. An exciting new glam thriller for the fans of Taylor Jenkins
Reid, Liane Moriarty and Jo Spain Previously published in the UK as
TAKING HOLLYWOOD by Shari King. 'Brilliant, a white-knuckle ride of
a novel. Gripping and wildly glamorous' Tilly Bagshawe 'It's a real
slice of Hollywood and a brilliant read' Gerard Butler 'A glam,
edgy thriller, just the way I like them' Martina Cole 'Sex, scandal
and secrets galore' Jackie Collins 'A high-stakes thriller with a
dark, moving story at its core. Page-turning entertainment at its
very best' - TJ Emerson 'It's a thriller that's gritty, sexy and a
sensational page turner. You won't be able to put it down. I loved
it!' Lorraine Kelly 'I loved this Hollywood tale with deep Scottish
roots. It's dark, sinful, glittering and thrilling. An absolute
adventure from the very first page' Carmen Reid 'The mean streets
of Glasgow meet the glitz of Hollywood. A riveting read!' - Evie
Hunter
Alejandro Jodorowsky is a theatre director, writer of graphic
novels and comics, novelist, poet, and an expert in the Tarot. He
is also an auteur filmmaker who garnered attention with his
breakthrough film El Topo in 1970. He has been called a "cult"
filmmaker, whose films are surreal, hallucinatory, and provocative.
The Transformative Cinema of Alejandro Jodorowsky explores the ways
in which Jodorowsky's films are transformative in a psychologically
therapeutic way. It also examines his signature style, which
includes the symbolic meaning of various colors in which he clothes
his actors, the use of his own family members in the films, and his
casting of himself in leading roles. This total involvement of
himself and his family in his auteur films led to his
psycho-therapeutic theories and practices: metagenealogy and
psychomagic. This book is the only the second book in the English
language in print that deals with all of Jodorowsky's films,
beginning with his earliest mime film in 1957 and ending with his
2019 film on psychomagic. It also connects his work as a writer and
therapist to his films, which themselves attempt to obliterate the
line between fantasy and reality.
Musical theatre is often perceived as either a Broadway based art
form, or as having separate histories in London and New York.
Musical Theatre Histories: Expanding the Narrative, however,
depicts the musical as neither American nor British, but both and
more, having grown out of frequent and substantial interactions
between both centres (and beyond). Through multiple thematic
'histories', Millie Taylor and Adam Rush take readers on a series
of journeys that include the art form's European and American
origins, African American influences, negotiations arounddiversity,
national identity, and the globalisation of the form, as well as
revival culture, censorship and the place of social media in the
21st century. Each chapter includes case studies and key concept
boxes to identify, explain and contextualise important discussions,
offering an accessible study of a dynamic and ever evolving medium.
Written and developed for undergraduate students, this introductory
textbook provides a newly focused and alternative way of
understanding musical theatre history.
The importance of citywide festivals like Mardi Gras and Fiesta for
the LGBTQ community Festivals like Mardi Gras and Fiesta have come
to be annual events in which entire cities participate, and LGBTQ
people are a visible part of these celebrations. In other words,
the party is on, the party is queer, and everyone is invited. In
Queer Carnival, Amy Stone takes us inside these colorful,
eye-catching, and often raucous events, highlighting their
importance to queer life in America's urban South and Southwest.
Drawing on five years of research, and over a hundred days at LGBTQ
events in cities such as San Antonio, Santa Fe, Baton Rouge, and
Mobile, Stone gives readers a front-row seat to festivals,
carnivals, and Mardi Gras celebrations, vividly bringing these
queer cultural spaces and the people that create and participate in
them to life. Stone shows how these events serve a larger
fundamental purpose, helping LGBTQ people to cultivate a sense of
belonging in cities that may be otherwise hostile. Queer Carnival
provides an important new perspective on queer life in the South
and Southwest, showing us the ways that LGBTQ communities not only
survive, but thrive, even in the most unexpected places.
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