Reading Contemporary Performance

Author : Gabrielle Cody
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1136246568
Total Pages : 508 pages
Book Rating : 4.62/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Reading Contemporary Performance written by Gabrielle Cody and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-09-25 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the nature of contemporary performance continues to expand into new forms, genres and media, it requires an increasingly diverse vocabulary. Reading Contemporary Performance provides students, critics and creators with a rich understanding of the key terms and ideas that are central to any discussion of this evolving theatricality. Specially commissioned entries from a wealth of contributors map out the many and varied ways of discussing performance in all of its forms – from theatrical and site-specific performances to live and New Media art. The book is divided into two sections: Concepts - Key terms and ideas arranged according to the five characteristic elements of performance art: time; space; action; performer; audience. Methodologies and Turning Points - The seminal theories and ways of reading performance, such as postmodernism, epic theatre, feminisms, happenings and animal studies. Case Studies – entries in both sections are accompanied by short studies of specific performances and events, demonstrating creative examples of the ideas and issues in question. Three different introductory essays provide multiple entry points into the discussion of contemporary performance, and cross-references for each entry also allow the plotting of one’s own pathway. Reading Contemporary Performance is an invaluable guide, providing not just a solid set of familiarities, but an exploration and contextualisation of this broad and vital field.

Author : Jen Harvie
Publisher : Manchester University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780719074929
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Making Contemporary Theatre written by Jen Harvie and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-15 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making Contemporary Theatre reveals how some of the most significant international contemporary theatre is actually made. The book opens with an introductory chapter which contextualizes recent trends in approaches to theatre-making. In the ensuing eleven chapters, eleven different writer-observers describe, contextualize and analyze the theatre-making practices of eleven different companies and directors, including Japan’s Gekidan Kaitaisha and the Québécois director Robert Lepage. Each chapter is enriched with extensive illustrations as well as boxed-off "asides," giving the reader different perspectives on the work. Chapters usually focus on a single production, such as Complicite’s 2003-04 The Elephant Vanishes, allowing detailed investigations of complex practices to emerge. The book concludes with a brief manifesto for making contemporary theatre by the editors, plus a bibliography suggesting further reading. Making contemporary theatre is a rich resource for the theatre-making student and the theatre--goer alike, full of diverse examples of how the most exciting theatre is actually made.

Author : Stephen Watt
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
ISBN 13 : 9780472108725
Total Pages : 244 pages
Book Rating : 4.27/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Postmodern/drama written by Stephen Watt and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scrutinizing the critical tendency to label texts or writers as "postmodern", scholar Stephen Watt argues that "reading post modernly" merely implies reading culture more broadly. In contemporary drama, Watt considers postmodernity less a question of genre or media than a mode of subjectivity shared by both playwright and audience. 6 illustrations.

Author : Susan Leigh Foster
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 9780520063334
Total Pages : 342 pages
Book Rating : 4.33/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Reading Dancing written by Susan Leigh Foster and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Dance Perspectives Foundation de la Torre Bueno Prize Recent approaches to dance composition, seen in the works of Merce Cunningham and the Judson Church performances of the early 1960s, suggest the possibility for a new theory of choreographic meaning. Borrowing from contemporary semiotics and post-structuralist criticism, Reading Dancing outlines four distinct models for representation in dance which are illustrated, first, through an analysis of the works of contemporary choreographers Deborah Hay, George Balanchine, Martha Graham, and Merce Cunningham, and then through reference to historical examples beginning with court ballets of the Renaissance. The comparison of these four approaches to representation affirms the unparalleled diversity of choreographic methods in American dance, and also suggests a critical perspective from which to reflect on dance making and viewing.

Author : Louise Steinman
Publisher : Shambhala Publications
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 182 pages
Book Rating : 4.87/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Knowing Body written by Louise Steinman and published by Shambhala Publications. This book was released on 1986 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whoopi Goldberg, Meredith Monk, Ping Chong, Spalding Gray, Barbara Dilley, and other contemporary performance artists talk about their work.

Author : Lance Esplund
Publisher : Basic Books
ISBN 13 : 0465094678
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.77/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Art of Looking written by Lance Esplund and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2018-11-27 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A veteran art critic helps us make sense of modern and contemporary art The landscape of contemporary art has changed dramatically during the last hundred years: from Malevich's 1915 painting of a single black square and Duchamp's 1917 signed porcelain urinal to Jackson Pollock's midcentury "drip" paintings; Chris Burden's "Shoot" (1971), in which the artist was voluntarily shot in the arm with a rifle; Urs Fischer's "You" (2007), a giant hole dug in the floor of a New York gallery; and the conceptual and performance art of today's Ai Weiwei and Marina Abramovic. The shifts have left the art-viewing public (understandably) perplexed. In The Art of Looking, renowned art critic Lance Esplund demonstrates that works of modern and contemporary art are not as indecipherable as they might seem. With patience, insight, and wit, Esplund guides us through the last century of art and empowers us to approach and appreciate it with new eyes. Eager to democratize genres that can feel inaccessible, Esplund encourages viewers to trust their own taste, guts, and common sense. The Art of Looking will open the eyes of viewers who think that recent art is obtuse, nonsensical, and irrelevant, as well as the eyes of those who believe that the art of the past has nothing to say to our present.

Author : Matthew Reason
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 131733485X
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.59/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Experiencing Liveness in Contemporary Performance written by Matthew Reason and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-10-26 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together dynamic perspectives on the concept of liveness in the performing arts, engaging with the live through the particular analytical focus of audiences and experience. The status and significance of the live in performance has become contested: perceived as variously as a marker of ontological difference, a promotional slogan, or a mystical evocation of cultural value. Moving beyond debates about the relationship between the live and the mediated, this collection considers what we can know and say about liveness in terms of processes of experiencing and processes of making. Drawing together contributions from theatre, music, dance, and performance art, it takes an interdisciplinary approach in asking not what liveness is, but how it matters and to whom. The book invites readers to consider how liveness is produced through processes of audiencing - as spectators bring qualities of (a)liveness into being through the nature of their attention - and how it becomes materialized in acts of performance, acts of making, acts of archiving, and acts of remembering. Theoretical chapters and practice-based reflections explore liveness, eventness and nowness as key concepts in a range of topics such as affect, documentation, embodiment, fandom, and temporality, showing how the relationship between audience and event is rarely singular and more often malleable and multiple. With its focus on experiencing liveness, this collection will be of interest to disciplines including performance, audience and cultural studies, visual arts, cinema, and sound technologies.

Author : Louise Steinman
Publisher : North Atlantic Books
ISBN 13 : 9781556432026
Total Pages : 180 pages
Book Rating : 4.2X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Knowing Body written by Louise Steinman and published by North Atlantic Books. This book was released on 1995-11-29 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Steinman's book really stands alone among performance art books. While there are many that document what particular artists are doing, this one offers a way in for a person who wants to perform (or know more about how performance artists work). Must reading for anyone interested in performance art, it will also be fascinating to those in theatre, playwriting, visual arts and performance of any sort.

Author : Emma Govan
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1134447973
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.78/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Making a Performance written by Emma Govan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-05-14 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making a Performance traces innovations in devised performance from early theatrical experiments in the twentieth-century to the radical performances of the twenty-first century. This introduction to the theory, history and practice of devised performance explores how performance-makers have built on the experimental aesthetic traditions of the past. It looks to companies as diverse as Australia's Legs on the Wall, Britain's Forced Entertainment and the USA-based Goat Island to show how contemporary practitioners challenge orthodoxies to develop new theatrical languages. Designed to be accessible to both scholars and practitioners, this study offers clear, practical examples of concepts and ideas that have shaped some of the most vibrant and experimental practices in contemporary performance.

Author : Bertie Ferdman
Publisher : Southern Illinois University Press
ISBN 13 : 0809334704
Total Pages : 214 pages
Book Rating : 4.04/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Off Sites written by Bertie Ferdman and published by Southern Illinois University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-30 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Honorable Mention, ATHE's 2018 Outstanding Book Award Contextualizing the techniques and methods of the incredibly rich and vital genre of site-specific performance, author Bertie Ferdman traces the evolution of that term. Originally used for experimental staging practices and then later also for engaged situational events, site-specific is no longer sufficient for the genre’s many contemporary variations. Using the term off-site, Ferdman illustrates five distinct ways artists have challenged the disciplinary framework of site-specific theatre: blurring the traditional boundaries between the fictional and the real; changing how the audience and actor interact with each other and whether they are physically together or apart; fabricating sites from physically bound, conceptually constructed, or virtual spaces; staging live situations in real/nonreal and often mediated encounters; and challenging our preconceived notions of time and space. Tracing the genealogy of site-based work through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Ferdman outlines the theoretical groundwork for her study in the introduction. Individual chapters focus on distinct types of off-sites—the interdisciplinary discourse of disciplinary sites; the spaces of audience engagement with spectator sites; the dislocation of time for temporal sites; and the historiographical spaces of mapping for urban sites. Ferdman examines site-based work being done in the Americas by contemporary companies and artists experimenting with new forms and practices for site-driven theatre. Key productions discussed include Private Moment by David Levine, Geyser Land by Mary Ellen Strom and Ann Carlson, Jim Findlay’s Dream of the Red Chamber, and Lola Arias’ Mi Vida Después.