442 research outputs found
Performing care
The book advances our understanding of performance as a mode of caring and explores the relationship between socially engaged performance and care. It creates a dialogue between theatre and performance, care ethics and other disciplinary areas such as youth and disability studies, nursing, criminal justice and social care. Challenging existing debates in this area by rethinking the caring encounter as a performed, embodied experience and interrogating the boundaries between care practice and performance, the book engages with a wide range of different care performances drawn from interdisciplinary and international settings. Drawing on interdisciplinary debates, the edited collection examines how the field of performance and the aesthetic and ethico-political structures that determine its relationship with the social might be challenged by an examination of inter-human care. It interrogates how performance might be understood as caring or uncaring, careless or careful, and correlatively how care can be conceptualised as artful, aesthetic, authentic or even ‘fake’ and ‘staged’. Through a focus on care and performance, the contributors in the book consider how performance operates as a mode of caring for others and how dialogical debates between the theory and practice of care and performance making might foster a greater understanding of how the caring encounter is embodied and experienced
Acting Beckett : towards a poetics of performance
Samuel Beckett’s writing stalks the progress of twentieth century art and culture. Seen as both symptomatic of the practices of high Modernism, as well as influential within the fragmented tropes of postmodernity, his drama is often referred to as exploring the limits of an incrementally reductive approach to performance in which fine margins – through time and space; sound and image – are used in the determination of an authentic rendering of his work. This study argues that it is the figure of the actor, in all its rich signifying complexity, which provides us with a lens through which we can evaluate Beckett’s work for theatre and other media.In considering the Beckettian actor, the study grounds a poetics of performance in a principally phenomenological discourse in which theatre history and popular culture throughout the twentieth century is seen as a key factor both in Beckett’s writing and theatre directing, as well as in the often contested development of the actor’s craft. Throughout, it is the theme of music and musicality that provides the actor with a starting point, or modus vivendi, in which the individual self or personality of the actor is valorized alongside other practices based on acquired technique and its application.This study does not propose instruction or a range of techniques for the actor to pursue in furthering their understanding of Beckett’s canon. Instead, this work establishes an understanding of the Beckettian actor in which strategies of implication, born out of sometimes paradoxical representations of silence, absence and abstraction, subordinate acting pedagogies based on programmed curricula. This examination of an implied actor illustrates the various ways in which notable, as well as relatively unknown, actors have sought to reconcile some of these issues. In doing so, the study also interrogates my own creative practice as a director and performer of Beckett’s drama over a fifteen-year period
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Playing the Crowd: Mass Pageantry in Europe and the United States, 1905-1935
This dissertation brings to light a theatrical and political genre I call "mass pageantry," which emerged in England, the United States, Russia and Germany during the early twentieth century. Performed out-of-doors, often with thousands of amateur local performers in costume, these vast mytho-historical spectacles emerged from unusual alliances between playwrights and directors seeking to transform theater as a cultural practice, and political organizations seeking new ways to gain the allegiance of the working classes. Because mass pageants arose in significantly different political contexts, they have been primarily discussed in single-nation studies by historians of culture and politics. This trend has inadvertently led to a general neglect of their status as theatrical events and to a false distinction between American and British "pageants," which are frequently dismissed as nostalgia, and Soviet and German "spectacles," which are often reduced to propaganda.
This dissertation demonstrates that despite significant differences in the political impulses behind these events, they together represent a complex and imaginative transnational theatrical genre defined by shared techniques and a common purpose. It argues that the emergence of mass pageantry points to a shared cultural goal--to reinvent theater as an art form created for and by "the people"--as well to a common social problem for which pageants were seen as a promising solution: how to reconstitute "peoples" from the "crowds" produced by mass culture, industrialization and political upheaval.
Chapter One locates the emergence of mass pageantry at the intersection of two nineteenth-century intellectual currents: the development of "crowd theory" and the growth of people's theater movements. Chapters Two, Three and Four each focus on a single pageant: The Sherborne Pageant (England, 1908), written and directed by Louis Napoleon Parker; The Masque of St. Louis (US, 1914), written by Percy MacKaye; and Towards a World Commune (RSFSR, 1920), created by a team of five directors. To demonstrate the ways in which mass pageants competed with one another for the attention of audiences, as well as how theories and techniques of mass pageantry were adapted for a new medium, Chapter Five surveys mass pageants of the Weimar period in Germany and examines Leni Riefenstahl's 1935 film, Triumph of the Will, through the lens of mass pageantry.
This dissertation demonstrates that pageant-devisers, influenced as often by transnational artistic movements and socio-theatrical reform efforts as by the political agenda of pageant sponsors, generated their own visions of collective life through the mass pageants they created. Although their ideas were in varying degrees informed by theories emerging from the burgeoning field of "crowd theory," I argue that pageants are best understood as contributing performative ideas of their own making to an ongoing debate rather than as stagings of crowd theories already in existence. Together they articulate a consensus about the role theater can and should play in the representation and transformation of actual crowds, and by extension, in the transformation of social life and culture more broadly
The novelty of improvisation: towards a genre of embodied spontaneity
Improvisation has often been viewed and valued in terms of its service and resemblance to scripted traditions of theatre. Such a stance seriously undermines the significance and impact of this global performance modality, and has resulted in improvisatory modes being largely ignored or downplayed in modern historical accounts of theatre. This dissertation examines improvisation on its own terms, seeking to understand its unique features, functions and potentials, while freeing it from the heavy shadow of its scripted counterpart. To this end, the theories of literary critic, Mikhail Bakhtin, provide important methodological guideposts and allow the silhouette of the improvisational impetus to take form. Through the application of Bakhtin\u27s concepts of the chronotope, prosaics, polyphony and the carnivalesque, and his overarching schema of the genre as a way of seeing and experiencing the world, the communicative event of improvisation is revealed to be strikingly similar to Bakhtin\u27s preferred model, the modern novel. In this manner, the novelty of embodied spontaneity is uncovered. This heightened understanding of the improvisational impetus is considerably enriched through a detailed consideration of a diverse field of spontaneous movements that span numerous regions, periods and socio-political contexts. In addition to more widely recognized theatrical movements, such as the Roman mime, Italian Commedia dell\u27Arte, Augusto Boal\u27s Theatre of the Oppressed, Viola Spolin\u27s Theatre Games and Keith Johnstone\u27s Theatresports, the inclusion of lesser known (and marginal) practices, such as Japanese renga, Nigerian Apidan and Jacob Levy Moreno\u27s psychodrama, further elucidates and complicates improvisation\u27s generic qualities
Pan European Voice Conference - PEVOC 11
The Pan European VOice Conference (PEVOC) was born in 1995 and therefore in 2015 it celebrates the 20th anniversary of its establishment: an important milestone that clearly expresses the strength and interest of the scientific community for the topics of this conference. The most significant themes of PEVOC are singing pedagogy and art, but also occupational voice disorders, neurology, rehabilitation, image and video analysis. PEVOC takes place in different European cities every two years (www.pevoc.org). The PEVOC 11 conference includes a symposium of the Collegium Medicorum Theatri (www.comet collegium.com
Sandspur, Vol. 38 No. 28, April 18, 1934
Rollins College student newspaper, written by the students and published at Rollins College. The Sandspur started as a literary journal.https://stars.library.ucf.edu/cfm-sandspur/1395/thumbnail.jp
Representations of screen heterosexuality in the musicals of Fred Astaire and Vincente Minnelli
This thesis examines the ways in which heterosexuality
is rendered in the Hollywood genre where its existence
is most privileged: musicals of the studio era (c. 1930 -
c. 1960). In this popular film category, heterosexuality
is expressed in a framework of "boy-meets-girl" amatory
coupling that is remarkably amplified and insistent. In
analysis that is at once sympathetic and critical of the
subject matter, I show that heterosexuality in the
Hollywood musical is constructed in a way that is far
from monolithic. On the contrary, I find that there are
in fact varieties of heterosexual identity that exist in
the genre, and that they are most succinctly revealed
through romantic engagement. Yet heterosexuality is
depicted along divergent formulations owing to
contrasting relational aims and assumptions. Building on
Richard Dyer's 1993 essay, "'I Seem to Find the
Happiness I Seek': Heterosexuality and Dance in the
Musical," I will discuss how the basis of these separate
models is traceable to different approaches related to
power distributions between men and women. These
processes, in turn, arise from different notions
concerning masculinity and femininity. In this way, a
mix of gender expressions inhabit the Hollywood musical
leading to an assortment of heterosexual models. Textually these models become visible not only through
an analysis of characterization and the position of the
man and woman within the narrative, but in the camera
work, all aspects of the mise-en-scene, and most
cogently, in the arrangement of the central heterosexual
couple in the song-and-dance sequences.
For my examination of heterosexuality in the Hollywood
musical, I will concentrate on the work of two of its
greatest auteurs: Fred Astaire (star) and Vincente
Minnelli (director). The impact each man made on this
genre is hard to overestimate. In terms of methodology
I divide my analysis between these two artists, and
ascertain what model(s) of heterosexual identity are
communicated by them. Then after establishing what
design(s) of heterosexual life each one suggests (for
Astaire I analyse Top Hat (1935] as well as Carefree
[1938] and The Sky's the Limit [1943], while for
Minnelli I look at Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) and The
Pirate (1948]), I conclude this thesis by examining
their most acclaimed joint effort (The Band Wagon
(1953]) to discern what, if any, change one might have
had on the other. A phenomenon tied to the US musical
(whether stage or screen) is that although it is the
most heterosexual of genres, it is also one
traditionally both crafted and appreciated by gay men. Though it does not fall within the scope of this thesis,
it is worth speculating for future work if Astaire's
heterosexuality and Minnelli's homosexuality had any
significant bearing on the way they represented the
standard boy meets-girl plot device upon which the
Hollywood musical relies
A Deweyan-Based Curriculum for Teaching Ethical Inquiry in the Language Arts
Informed by Dewey’s account of ethical experience and the nature of philosophical inquiry, my theory of ethical inquiry has four components: body-based reasonableness, moral imagination, emotions as judgments, and ethical content. Bodybased reasonableness is thinking that is critical, creative, committed, contextual, and embodied (Sprod, 2001). Exercising embodied reasonableness in aesthetic education means that we pay critical attention and seek to address the ethical and social aspects of art. We pay attention to fiction that will potentially engage students in a constant process of ethical judgment, depicting characters and situations that call for our moral evaluation. In a similar vein, exposure to certain art can sensitize us to the right reasons and objects for our emotions. Vehicles for ethical inquiry are those by which human situations can be understood and are found in the English Language Arts curriculum and the arts, such as: The Odyssey by Homer, Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare, Prokofiev, and Tchaikovsky, The Joy Luck Club by Tan, and works by the artists Frida Kahlo and Kiki Smith. Highlighted are the issues of body, sexuality and gender, principal areas of ethical concern and central to adolescence. The pedagogy by which students can adequately address ethical concerns is Philosophy for Children, where characters in a narrative text exemplify discursive modes of thought and the conduct of ethical inquiry
Theatre and Adaptation: Return, Rewrite, Repeat
Contemporary theatrical productions as diverse in form as experimental performance, new writing, West End drama, musicals and live art demonstrate a recurring fascination with adapting existing works by other artists, writers, filmmakers and stage practitioners. Featuring seventeen interviews with internationally-renowned theatre and performance artists, Theatre and Adaptation provides an exceptionally rich study of the variety of work developed in recent years. First-hand accounts illuminate a diverse range of approaches to stage adaptation, ranging from playwriting to directing, Javanese puppetry to British children's theatre, and feminist performance to Japanese Noh.
The transition of an existing source to the stage is not a smooth one: this collection examines the practices and the complex set of negotiations each work of transition and appropriation involves. Including interviews with Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, Handspring Puppet Company, Katie Mitchell, Rimini Protokoll, Elevator Repair Service, Simon Stephens, Ong Keng Sen and Toneelgroep Amsterdam, the volume reveals performance's enduring desire to return, rewrite and repeat
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