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Lively yet intriguing, The Body in Performance is a varied collection of essays about this much-discussed area. Posing the question "Why this current preoccupation with the performed body?" the collection of specially commissioned essays from both academics and practitioners - in some cases one and the same person - considers such cutting edge topics as the abject body and performance, censorship and live art, the presentation of violence on stage, carnal art, and the vexed issue of mimesis in the theatre. Drawing variously on the work of Franko B., Orlan, Annie Sprinkle, Karen Finley, and Forced Entertainment, it concludes with a creative piece about a 'Famous New York Performance Artist.' Contributors include Rebecca Schneider whose book The Explicit Body in Performance is a key text in this area, and Joan Lipkin, director and writer.
The Natyasastra is the deep repository of Indian performance studies. It embodies centuries of performance knowledge developed in South Asia on a range of conceptual issues and practical methodologies of the body. The composition of the Natyasastra is attributed to Sage Bharatha, and dates back to between 200 BC and AD 200. Written in Sanskrit, the text contains 6000 verse stanzas integrated in 36 chapters discussing a wide range of issues in theatre arts, including dramatic composition; construction of the playhouse; detailed analysis of the musical scales; body movements; various types of acting; directing; division of stage space; costumes; make-up; properties and musical instruments. As a discourse on performance, the Natyasastra is an extensive documentation of terminologies, concepts and methodologies. This book presents 14 scholarly essays exploring the Natyasastra from the multiple perspectives of Indian performance studies—epistemological, aesthetic, scientific, religious, ethnological and practical.
The General Motors G-Body is one of the manufacturer's most popular chassis, and includes cars such as Chevrolet Malibu, Chevrolet Monte Carlo and El Camino; the Buick Regal, the Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme; the Pontiac Grand Prix, and more.
12 contemporary approaches to the human body that are being used by performers or in the context of performance training. The 12 lenses draw on techniques like body-mind centering, Feldenkrais and Alexander technique; approaches like corporeal feminism and object relations, thinkers like Laban, Deleuze, Damasio and Merleau-Ponty; and practitioners like Erin Manning, Joan Davis, and Jane Bennett.
It is the very nature of representation to be theatrical and self-referential. This book undercuts the fact that all representational knowledge is autonomous and sovereign. At times, theatrical representations can misguide and mislead. Representation can also ineluctably project ones own preferences and preoccupations. Thus, representation and subjective interpretation divulge into myriad domains. This book is concerned with the effects and consequences of representation and its politics. This book examines not only how language as well as representation produce meaning, but also how discursive knowledge connected to power regulates, conducts, and constructs identities and defines the way certain things are thought about practices and are studied. The book takes note of the fact that within the framework of performance, a performative subject does not wear a coherent identity as it is fragmented, decentered, simulated and is unstable, while being both virtual as well as actual. In the field of semiotics, theatre is historically and reciprocally affected by practice, especially within contingent conditions of time. In theatre semiotics, the new image of knowledge is that of turbulence. Here, knowledge is not so much a system as it is a confluence. Carrying this stance further we can say that contemporary Assamese theatre is characterised by shifting counter-voices and sub-textual underpinnings. This act forces reading into two directions: dialogic openness and variability of meaning that question the theatre directors as the only ones who know.
In this critical volume, leading scholars in the field examine the performance of Shakespeare in Asia. Emerging out of the view that it is in "play" or performance, and particularly in intercultural / multicultural performance, that the cutting edge of Shakespeare studies is to be found, the essays in this volume pay close attention to the modes of transference of the language of the text into the alternative languages of Asian theatres; to the history and politics of the performance of Shakespeare in key locations in Asia; to the new Asian experimentation with indigenous forms via Shakespeare and the consequent revitalizing and revising of the traditional boundaries of genre and gender; and to Shakespeare as a cultural capital world wide. Focusing specifically on the work of major directors in the central and emerging areas of Asia – Japan, China, India, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines - the chapters in this volume encompass a broader and more representative swath of Asian performances and locations in one book than has been attempted till now.
A historical, theoretical, and comparative study of the emergence of the director-as-author phenomenon, posing questions of authorship and redefining the relationship between 'playwright' and the director-playwright.
Begun in 2010 as part of the “Histories of Literatures in European Languages” series sponsored by the International Comparative Literature Association, the current project on New Literary Hybrids in the Age of Multimedia Expression recognizes the global shift toward the visual and the virtual in all areas of textuality: the printed, verbal text is increasingly joined with the visual, often electronic, text. This shift has opened up new domains of human achievement in art and culture. The international roster of 24 contributors to this volume pursue a broad range of issues under four sets of questions that allow a larger conversation to emerge, both inside the volume’s sections and between them. The four sections cover, 1) Multimedia Productions in Theoretical and Historical Perspective; 2) Regional and Intercultural Projects; 3) Forms and Genres; and, 4) Readers and Rewriters in Multimedia Environments. The essays included in this volume are examples of the kinds of projects and inquiries that have become possible at the interface between literature and other media, new and old. They emphasize the extent to which hypertextual, multimedia, and virtual reality technologies have enhanced the sociality of reading and writing, enabling more people to interact than ever before. At the same time, however, they warn that, as long as these technologies are used to reinforce old habits of reading/ writing, they will deliver modest results. One of the major tasks pursued by the contributors to this volume is to integrate literature in the global informational environment where it can function as an imaginative partner, teaching its interpretive competencies to other components of the cultural landscape.
