Redefining the performing arts archive

This paper investigates representations of performance and the role of the archive. Notions of record and archive are critically investigated, raising questions about applying traditional archival definitions to the performing arts. Defining the nature of performances is at the root of all difficulties regarding their representation. Performances are live events, so for many people the idea of recording them for posterity is inappropriate. The challenge of creating and curating representations of an ephemeral art form are explored and performance-specific concepts of record and archive are posited. An open model of archives, encouraging multiple representations and allowing for creative reuse and reinterpretation to keep the spirit of the performance alive, is envisaged as the future of the performing arts archive

Dance in the British South Asian diaspora: redefining classicism

This paper discusses South Asian dance forms and genres in Britain, one of the major locations of the South Asian diaspora. It addresses issues of "classicism," "neoclassicism" and "contemporaneity" in South Asian dancing, particularly important as in the British context availability of public funding depends on the artists demonstrating an innovative engagement with their own practice. The author focuses, as a specific case study, on the work, Moham, choreographed and danced as a solo by bharatanatyam artist Chitra Sundaram in 2002 and argues for the need to address issues of difference and cultural specificity, questioning the underlying assumptions of western notions of classicism, as these impinge on South Asian dance praxes in the British context

Youth and intimate media cultures: gender, sexuality, relationships, and desire as storytelling practices in social networking sites

This paper investigates how young people give meaning to gender, sexuality, relationships, and desire in the popular social networking site (SNS) Netlog. In arguing how SNSs are important spaces for intimate politics, the extent to which Netlog is a space that allows contestations of intimate stories and a voicing of difference is questioned. These intimate stories should be understood as self-representational media practices; young people make sense of their intimate stories in SNSs through media cultures. Media cultures reflect how audiences and SNS institutions make sense of intimacy. This paper concludes that intimate stories as media practices in the SNS Netlog are structured around creativity, anonymity, authenticity, performativity, bricolage and intertextuality. The intimate storytelling practices focusing on creativity, anonymity, bricolage and intertextuality are particularly significant for a diversity of intimacies to proliferate

Redefining Classical Music Literacy: A Study of Classical Orchestras, Museum Anthropology, and Game Design Theory

The current state of declining audiences for the performing arts in the United States is cause for concern for those musicians and ensembles interested in the continuation of the art forms. The previous model of using audience numbers as the sole or primary measure of an orchestra\u27s success is no longer sufficient in an era of participatory design and interactive experiences. Through observation and analysis of the culture of classical music, this study focuses on the emerging visions of participatory culture and the ways in which museum anthropology and game design theory can be used to redefine classical music literacy and audience development in terms of interaction and participatory design

The use value of real-world projects: Children and community-based experts connecting through school work

In this paper we discuss how the products of student work during long-term, interdisciplinary curricular units at King Middle School, a grades 6-8 public school in Portland, Maine, through their aesthetic qualities, transformed people’s understanding of what children were capable of. We argue that, to effectively understand student work of this type, ‘cognitive’ and ‘practical’ criteria for evaluation – i.e., as a supposed indicator of what students need to know and be able to do – fail to convey the actual, substantive value of the work, rendering it relatively static and meaningless like much conventional schoolwork. Instead, we argue that aesthetic criteria can help to adequately understand and assess community-based, project work. Moreover, focusing only on student learning throughout the production process occludes the importance of collaboration, communication, and dialogue with an audience: in this case, community experts whose goals and interests must be accommodated as students do their work. The aim of the article is twofold: 1) to present a coherent picture of student project work that adequately captures its complexity both in the process of its production, and in its use-value upon completion; and 2) to argue for the importance of aesthetic criteria in planning and assessing student projects

Militant training camp and the aesthetics of civil disobedience

This paper examines the current interest in ‘art activism’ (Grindon 2010), and the relationship between artistic expression and civil disobedience. Boris Groys has argued that the lack of political dissidence within contemporary art is not down to the ineffectiveness of the aesthetic, but the far more effective intrusion of the aesthetic by the political (Groys 2008). As such, the political question of civil disobedience is necessarily an aesthetic one. At the same time, this raises problems for how politically effective artistic dissidence can be. As Grindon argues, if art activism often only mimics ‘real’ social activism, it remains within the boundaries of the gallery system with no real consequences (2010: 11). Most art activism fails to be effective civil disobedience, in this sense, as it already operates within the confines of pre-established curatorial spaces. As such, the use of art for the purposes of civil disobedience cannot be, then, mere aestheticism, but rather must act as ‘an insight into the transformed mechanisms of conquest’ (Groys, in Abdullah & Benzer 2011: 86): a conflict over the topology of disobedience which exposes the interrelation of aesthetics and politics through medium, space and archive. This paper critically assesses attempts in contemporary art to re-appropriate the symbolic dimension of dissidence as an aesthetic; in particular the use of militancy, asceticism and dissidence as an attempt to move beyond mere counter-political protest and towards a reclaiming of aesthetics from the intrusions of politics. It uses as a specific case example Militant Training Camp, a social experimental performance camp held at Arcadia Missa Gallery in London, March 2012. This weeklong performance piece was designed to explore the activity and mind-set of militant groups and the idea of non-pacifist activity within wider social movements. Engaging with not only the tradition of anarchist activism, but also more recent artistic engagements with civil disobedience (such as the Yes Men; Avaaz.org; Bike Bloc), the camp involved a residential ascetic ‘training programme’ followed by a series of violent performances open to the public, often disturbing other sites of protest such as Anarchist theatres and Occupy sites in the process. The paper uses first-hand documentary evidence and critical reflection on the event in order to argue that, as both an act of civil disobedience, and an exploration of the limits of its aesthetic treatment, the event raises two specific issues surrounding the notion of disobedience and its conceptual possibilities. The first issue is the representation of rage within the context of art activism. Here, the performance is discussed with particular reference to Sloterdijk’s arguments that argues that militancy and revolt operate under a ‘thymotic economy’ (2010: 58). However, Sloterdijk’s re-appropriation of the thymotic – a conceptualising of ‘rage’ which is not absorbed within the sublimination of psychology or Habermasian symbolism – is not as simple as offering an alternative, ‘non-symbolic’ rage. Given that modern militancy is always subject to containment (the ‘civility’ of civil disobedience), the second issue raised is the formative role of ‘curating’ acts of disobedience. Using the work of Groys on aesthetics and power, the paper assesses how ‘events’ of civil disobedience such as Militant Training Camp are located, represented, circulated and even stored, and the ways in which they might resist their reduction to or supplementing of a further economy (be it symbolic, banal or simply pious) which conceals the formative ‘rage’ of disobedience

Site specific performance and the mechanics of becoming social

This thesis offers a body of practice that includes video documentation of one to one performances, performance lectures, critical writings and first person reflective narratives that give new insights into the potential of site-specific performance art and social space. Key themes, questions and concerns across performance studies and the social sciences are explored through a practice as research trajectory. From performance studies Nick Kaye’s (2000) writing on site-specificity provides a point of departure for methods of making and writing about performance that I refer to as ‘mechanics’; the term mechanics is posited within a process of what is described in the thesis as ‘becoming social’ and articulates a sense of what social scientist Doreen Massey might describe as ‘throwntogetherness’ (Massey, 2005). Anthropologist Marc Augé’s (1995) concerns around the prevalence of non-place are challenged and interwoven with Massey’s optimistic calls for spatial rethinking to answer the key research question: how can becoming social be framed as a site-specific process when realised through particular performance mechanics? The thesis speaks broadly to this question whilst exploring subthemes, questions and concepts. The confessional potential of body language (Howells, 2011) is explored as personal histories are exchanged between strangers in an exploration of ‘autobiographical’ (Heddon, 2010) performance that encourages the materialisation of what psychologist Charles Fernyhough (2016) refers to as the voices within. Interrelationality, intimacy, proximity, place and social space are explored, with concepts of hosting, caretaking and hospitality mobilised in performance materials that are both positioned as experiments and research findings. These findings give new insights into performance art and offer a timely alternative way of becoming social that performs and practices space as a ‘simultaneity of stories-so-far’ (Massey, 2005: 9)

Functionality and history of electronics in regards to the performance practice of the following works: Temazcal (1984), Javier Álvarez, and Memory Palace (2012), Christopher Cerrone

Master's Project (M.Mu.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2016The Electroacoustic pieces; Temazcal (1984), by Javier Alvarez (b.1956), and Memory Palace (2012) by Christopher Cerrone (b.1984), each employ different types of electronic technologies in their realization through performance. This paper will discuss the origin and history of the technology applied respectively in the works. I will examine the role of percussion within the works, specifically in regards to learning and problem solving through technological challenges in order to effectively perform the compositions. By looking at Temazcal and Memory Palace through the context of their historical significance as electroacoustic works, the inherent functionality of the technology employed in each, and the resultant performance practices that have subsequently developed, a greater musical appreciation and understanding of electroacoustic works, in general, is possible

The Means to Escape

This research interrogates what it means to utilize escapism, transforming it from passive to active consumption, drawing strong ties between performance and social media. Through audience awareness and participation, this research aims to cultivate a social collective within performance viewing and social media. Framing escapism as a social collective experience resists contemporary notions suggesting that escapism is an individual experience. This work argues that social media and performance have become a space allowing for social collective awareness. Thus, escaping together is the only way to move forward