Butoh, as Heard by a Dancer

This monograph explores the origins of Butoh in post-war Japan through orality and transmission, in conjunction with an embodied research approach. The book is a gathering of seminal artistic voices – Yoshito Ohno, Natsu Nakajima, Yukio Waguri, Moe Yamamoto, Masaki Iwana, Ko Murobushi, Yukio Suzuki, Takao Kawaguchi, Yuko Kaseki, and the philosopher, Kuniichi Uno. These conversations happened during an extended research trip I made to Japan to understand the context and circumstances that engendered Butoh. Alongside these exchanges are my reflections on Butoh’s complex history. These are primarily informed by my pedagogical and performance encounters with the artists I met during this time, rather than a theoretical analysis. Through the words of these dancers, I investigate Butoh’s tendency to evade categorization. Butoh’s artistic legacy of bodily rebellion, plurality of authorship, and fluidity of form seems prescient and feels more relevant in contemporary times than ever before. This book is intended as a practitioner's guide for dancers, artists, students, and scholars with an interest in non-Western dance and dance history, postmodern performance, and Japanese arts and culture

Teaching music theory in UK higher education today: contexts and commentaries

This multi-authored article offers accounts of how programmes for teaching music theory within the Western-notated tradition were created in two UK higher education institutions. These accounts are followed by two more discursive reflections on the nature and purpose of music education today, advocating the importance of listening skills and inclusive pedagogies. The article is framed by an introduction and conclusion contextualising the issues raised in relation to a selection of prior contributions to Music Education Research and comparing approaches to music literacy and theory teaching as represented in recent music theory conferences in the UK and the United States

A Bran Nue Dae? Decolonising the Musical Theatre Curriculum in The Oxford Handbook of the Global Stage Musical

Decolonising the musical theatre curriculum in higher education is much more radical and comprehensive than exposing students to a greater volume of commercially-celebrated work featuring Black, Indigenous and Asian artists. The process of decolonisation begins by understanding how we could make universities accountable to the circumstances of the real artists who create the work. The challenge for academic leads in musical theatre is that they are preparing students for an industry that does not see decolonisation as an aim. For the globalised musical, the nexus of Broadway-West End is the cornerstone of an unyielding power structure that relies upon multiple canons of work enabled by a network of capitalist-colonialist nation-states whose social, economic and cultural structures depend upon the centrality of these canons. This chapter will consider how a very grounded story about a very particular set of lived circumstances, namely in Jimmy Chi and Kuckles’ Bran Nue Dae, is instructive as to how we begin to decolonise our understanding of commercial musical theatre globally and within the university sector. Entailed in this are matters of: who curates and theorises this material, who performs it as part of an educational curriculum, how we decolonise the training of skills in both analysing and performing the genre, and the productions we stage

Ray of Light

Expanded version of paper given at the colloquium celebrating the work of Nicholas Royle on the occasion of his retirement

No escape from the No.10. bunker? UK government news management under siege: John Major (1990-97) and Boris Johnson (2019-2022)

The UK Prime Minister John Major (1990-97) admitted to a judicial public inquiry that his failure to develop a “close relationship with any part of the media may have been a contributory factor to the hostile media the 1990-97 government often received” (Major, 2012). This paper argues that news management during the Major premiership is worth serious scrutiny, not just as an interlude between two media-friendly Prime Ministers, Thatcher and Blair, but in comparison to Boris Johnson’s struggle to contain the news narrative between 2019 and 2022. Both administrations tried and failed to defend themselves against terminal reputational crises during their closing years. Do their attempts illustrate a systemic dysfunction in government-media relations and, if so, what is and should be the role of government PR in these circumstances? As part of a wider study into government communications from 1979 to date, this paper draws on evidence from government archives from the 1990s, as well as contemporary accounts, official documents, media accounts, memoirs and biographies, to examine the PR record of both administrations. It draws parallels between the Major and Johnson eras to identify obstacles to the achievement of government communication that considers the needs of citizens

Introduction: The digital self(ie) and world-making.

The book examines the social and cultural role of selfies in India. It looks at how the selfie, unlike the photograph, which was a gesture towards an external reality, remains intimately self-referential, yet reconfigures social ordering, identity formation, agency, and spaces in curious ways. This volume approaches questions about the construction and performance of the self through the digital selfie and uses this situated, contextualized, and culturally specific phenomenon as a site to explore the themes of self-making, place-making, gender, subjectivity, and power. Highlighting the specific contexts of production, the authors examine the array of self-expressive capabilities realized in a multitude of uses of the selfie that simultaneously reconfigure the self, the space, and the world. An important study of visual social media culture, the volume will be useful for interpreting everyday media experiences and will be of interest to students and researchers of image studies, visual studies, photography studies, visual culture, media studies, culture studies, cultural anthropology, digital humanities, popular culture, sociology of technology, and South Asian studies

Discourses of COVID-19 Vaccination in China: Public Response to Government Domination and the Emergence of ‘Vaccine Citizenship’

Using online discourse-centred ethnography and focus group discussions, this paper explores evolving discourses of COVID-19 vaccination in China and corresponding public responded. In addition to the state’s intensive control of COVID-19 outbreaks, China initiated independent research and the development of vaccines from the spring of 2020. In line with the state’s emphasis on success in controlling the outbreaks, government propaganda aimed to shape and disseminate successful images of the vaccines developed. Correspondingly, the public showed a supportive attitude when the first two domestically produced vaccines received Emergency Use Authorisation (EUA) by China's authorities. In contrast, vaccine hesitancy emerged when the government claimed its initial success in pandemic control and tried to communicate the vaccine’s safety and effectiveness. Importantly, COVID-19 outbreaks have never disappeared in China. As new domestic outbreaks emerged and the administration started to promote vaccination more vigorously, more people were forced to accept vaccination. When the government endowed vaccine discourse with the responsibility of protecting the general population’s health, the implementation of the vaccination programme became even more constraining. This paper examines empirical data on the government’s and individuals’ discursive practices through a focus on subjectivity as part of China’s biopolitical governance of COVID-19 which presents vaccination as an individual ‘technology of the self’. In this complex context of top-down governance, I analyse how the exercise of biopower and a sense of governance emerged and changed during China’s efforts at COVID-19 control

Out of the Frying Pan and into the Fire: Music Education, Mental Health, and Our Students’ Futures

Recent studies have highlighted high incidences of anxiety and depression amongst working musicians (Jacukowicz, 2016; Vaag et.al, 2016; Detari et.al, 2020), with psychosocial features of the contemporary working environment cited by some as a key contributory factor (Gross and Musgrave, 2016, 2017, 2020; Loveday et.al, 2022). Despite these reported challenges of musical work, music education within Higher Education (HE) has never been more popular, evidenced in the growth of courses dedicated to music, music production and music business management (Born and Devine, 2015). This popularity has consequently led to an increased interest in how music graduates manage their transition from education into the music industries (Bartleet et.al, 2019; Bennett et.al, 2018; Ghazali and Bennett, 2017). This chapter builds on this literature by asking; how meaningfully are music graduates being prepared for the emotional challenges they might face in their careers? By presenting personal reflections as an educator working within music and entrepreneurship education in HE in the United Kingdom, this chapter offers thoughts around how to best prepare students to enter a working environment typified by poor mental health outcomes. By considering curriculum-based opportunities and challenges – and asking questions as much as promising to answer them - this chapter contributes towards existing scholarship concerned with graduate transitions into the creative industries as well as pedagogical developments within music education

Textart, identity and the creative process: a case study with Arabic heritage language learners

Informed by a postmodern perspective on language, culture and visual art education this article examines what a creative, visual art focus can bring to the experience of language-and-culture learning for secondary-age students of Arabic as a heritage language (HL). It builds on our previous research focussing on student interactions with works by renowned artist, Ali Omar Ermes, which sets text in the form of Arabic letter shapes and short poetic inscriptions against a painted background. Here we seek to gain a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the process involved through an in-depth study of the thoughts, feelings and emotions experienced by three intermediate-level students as they engage with works by Ermes and then creatively transform them into ‘textart’ pieces of their own. Methodologically we adopt an ethnographic case study design focussing strongly on process but also incorporating principles of arts-based research. Our findings demonstrate how the approach can extend possibilities for meaning-making and affirmation of identity by connecting with personal experience, by leveraging multiple semiotic resources rhizomically and intertextually, and by making space for affective, spiritual, aesthetic and multisensory dimensions. For heritage language learners this brings a deeper engagement with learning and a strong sense of empowerment as multicompetent speakers