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Author: J. Mobley
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137428945
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 213
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Book Description
The fat female body is a unique construction in American culture that has been understood in various ways during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Analyzing post-WWII stage and screen performances, Mobley argues that the fat actress's body signals myriad cultural assumptions and suggests new ways of reading the body in performance.
Author: J. Mobley
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137428945
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 213
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Book Description
The fat female body is a unique construction in American culture that has been understood in various ways during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Analyzing post-WWII stage and screen performances, Mobley argues that the fat actress's body signals myriad cultural assumptions and suggests new ways of reading the body in performance.
Author: Emily Klein
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135087725
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 206
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Book Description
American adaptations of Aristophanes’ enduring comedy Lysistrata have used laughter to critique sex, war, and feminism for nearly a century. Unlike almost any other play circulating in contemporary theatres, Lysistrata has outlived its classical origins in 411 BCE and continues to shock and delight audiences to this day. The play’s "make love not war" message and bawdy humor render it endlessly appealing to college campuses, activist groups, and community theatres – so much so that none of Aristophanes’ plays are performed in the West as frequently as Lysistrata. Starting with the play’s first mainstream production in the U.S. in 1930, Emily B. Klein explores the varied iterations of Lysistrata that have graced the American stage, page, and screen since the Great Depression. These include the Federal Theatre’s 1936 Negro Repertory production, the 1955 movie musical The Second Greatest Sex and Spiderwoman Theater’s openly political Lysistrata Numbah!, as well as Douglas Carter Beane’s Broadway musical, Lysistrata Jones, and the international Lysistrata Project protests, which updated the classic in the contemporary context of the Iraq War. Although Aristophanes’ oeuvre has been the subject of much classical scholarship, Lysistrata has received little attention from feminist theatre scholars or performance theorists. In response, this book maps current debates over Lysistrata’s dubious feminist underpinnings and uses performance theory, cultural studies, and gender studies to investigate how new adaptations reveal the socio-political climates of their origins. Emily B. Klein is Assistant Professor of English and Drama at Saint Mary's College of California. Her work has appeared in Women and Performance and Frontiers as well as Political and Protest Theater After 9/11: Patriotic Dissent (Routledge, 2012).
Author: Sally Banes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134833180
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 294
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Book Description
Dancing Women: Female Bodies Onstage is a spectacular and timely contribution to dance history, recasting canonical dance since the early nineteenth century in terms of a feminist perspective. Setting the creation of specific dances in socio-political and cultural contexts, Sally Banes shows that choreographers have created representations of women that are shaped by - and that in part shape - society's continuing debates about sexuality and female identity. Broad in its scope and compelling in its argument Dancing Women: * provides a series of re-readings of the canon, from Romantic and Russian Imperial ballet to contemporary ballet and modern dance * investigates the gaps between plot and performance that create sexual and gendered meanings * examines how women's agency is created in dance through aspects of choreographic structure and style * analyzes a range of women's images - including brides, mistresses, mothers, sisters, witches, wraiths, enchanted princesses, peasants, revolutionaries, cowgirls, scientists, and athletes - as well as the creation of various women's communities on the dance stage * suggests approaches to issues of gender in postmodern dance Using an interpretive strategy different from that of other feminist dance historians, who have stressed either victimization or celebration of women, Banes finds a much more complex range of cultural representations of gender identities.
Author: Peta Tait
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134331215
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 198
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Book Description
Examining photographs, illustrations, films and live performances, Peta Tait presents an extraordinary survey of 140 years of trapeze acts and the cultural identities that are presented by bodies in fast, physical aerial movement.
Author: Christopher E. Forth
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1472520181
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209
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Book Description
"Fat". In contemporary society the word never fails to elicit powerful emotions, especially as it relates to bodily health and appearance. But fat is a noun as well as an adjective and has a cultural life outside of its relationship with the human body. By focusing on the complex physical and experiential dimensions of this problematic substance, Fat: Culture and Materiality breaks new ground in the study of the relationship between culture and the material world. With contributions from well-respected international scholars, this innovative and interdisciplinary collection will appeal to a wide range of readers interested in fat and its relationship to culture, materiality and lived experience. The volume addresses the role of fats in a variety of cultural settings. Topics include the politics of Palestinian olive oil; the allure of pig fat in heritage pork; the material sources of fat stereotypes in classical and biblical texts; the use of harvested fat in aesthetic surgery; and the status of fat in the self-narratives of anorexics.
Author: James Peck
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135020451X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
The three directors gathered in this volume all approach theatre-making in part as an act of citizenship. Jesusa Rodríguez, Peter Sellars, and Reza Abdoh differ markedly in many important respects, but they all come to the theatre as an intervention in the public sphere. Rodríguez, Sellars, and Abdoh blend a spirit of social critique with acts of democratic community building. These essays examine how theatre, for them, is not a sphere of aesthetic experience insulated from the divisions, antagonisms, and alliances of a conflicted society. It is a way to forge fleeting but consequential communities that might reverberate through that society and affect its future development. The Great North American Stage Directors series provides an authoritative account of the art of directing in North America by examining the work of twenty-four major practitioners from the late 19th century to the present. Each of the eight volumes examines three directors and offers an overview of their practices, theoretical ideas, and contributions to modern theatre. The studies chart the life and work of each director, placing his or her achievement in the context of other important theatre practitioners and broader social history. Written by a team of leading experts, the series presents the genealogy of directing in North America while simultaneously chronicling crucial trends and championing contemporary interpretation.
Author: Paola Hernández
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810143380
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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Book Description
Staging Lives in Latin American Theater: Bodies, Objects, Archives examines twenty‐first‐century documentary theater in Latin America, focusing on important plays by the Argentine director Vivi Tellas, the Argentine playwright and director Lola Arias, the Mexican theater collective Teatro Línea de Sombra, and the Chilean playwright and director Guillermo Calderón. Paola S. Hernández demonstrates how material objects and archives—photographs, videos, and documents such as witness reports, legal briefs, and letters—come to life onstage. Hernández argues that present-day, live performances catalog these material archives, expanding and reinterpreting the objects’ meanings. These performances produce an affective relationship between actor and audience, visualizing truths long obscured by repressive political regimes and transforming theatrical spaces into sites of witness. This process also highlights the liminality between fact and fiction, questioning the veracity of the archive. Richly detailed, nuanced, and theoretically wide-ranging, Staging Lives in Latin American Theater reveals a range of interpretations about how documentary theater can conceptualize the idea of self while also proclaiming a new mode of testimony through theatrical practices.
Author: Jayna Brown
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822390698
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 355
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Book Description
Babylon Girls is a groundbreaking cultural history of the African American women who performed in variety shows—chorus lines, burlesque revues, cabaret acts, and the like—between 1890 and 1945. Through a consideration of the gestures, costuming, vocal techniques, and stagecraft developed by African American singers and dancers, Jayna Brown explains how these women shaped the movement and style of an emerging urban popular culture. In an era of U.S. and British imperialism, these women challenged and played with constructions of race, gender, and the body as they moved across stages and geographic space. They pioneered dance movements including the cakewalk, the shimmy, and the Charleston—black dances by which the “New Woman” defined herself. These early-twentieth-century performers brought these dances with them as they toured across the United States and around the world, becoming cosmopolitan subjects more widely traveled than many of their audiences. Investigating both well-known performers such as Ada Overton Walker and Josephine Baker and lesser-known artists such as Belle Davis and Valaida Snow, Brown weaves the histories of specific singers and dancers together with incisive theoretical insights. She describes the strange phenomenon of blackface performances by women, both black and white, and she considers how black expressive artists navigated racial segregation. Fronting the “picaninny choruses” of African American child performers who toured Britain and the Continent in the early 1900s, and singing and dancing in The Creole Show (1890), Darktown Follies (1913), and Shuffle Along (1921), black women variety-show performers of the early twentieth century paved the way for later generations of African American performers. Brown shows not only how these artists influenced transnational ideas of the modern woman but also how their artistry was an essential element in the development of jazz.
Author: Jessica Zeller
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190296712
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 217
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Book Description
In Shapes of American Ballet: Teachers and Training before Balanchine, Jessica Zeller introduces the first few decades of the twentieth century as an often overlooked, yet critical period for ballet's growth in America. While George Balanchine is often considered the sole creator of American ballet, numerous European and Russian émigrés had been working for decades to build a national ballet with an American identity. These pedagogues and others like them played critical yet largely unacknowledged roles in American ballet's development. Despite their prestigious ballet pedigrees, the dance field's exhaustive focus on Balanchine has led to the neglect of their work during the first few decades of the century, and in this light, this book offers a new perspective on American ballet during the period immediately prior to Balanchine's arrival. Zeller uses hundreds of rare archival documents to illuminate the pedagogies of several significant European and Russian teachers who worked in New York City. Bringing these contributions into the broader history of American ballet recasts American ballet's identity as diverse-comprised of numerous Euro-Russian and American elements, as opposed to the work of one individual. This new account of early twentieth century American ballet is situated against a bustling New York City backdrop, where mass immigration through Ellis Island brought the ballet from European and Russian opera houses into contact with a variety of American forms and sensibilities. Ballet from celebrated Euro-Russian lineages was performed in vaudeville and blended with American popular dance styles, and it developed new characteristics as it responded to the American economy. Shapes of American Ballet delves into ballet's struggle to define itself during this rich early twentieth century period, and it sheds new light on ballet's development of an American identity before Balanchine.
Author:
Publisher: The Library Company of Phil
ISBN: 9781422373149
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 100
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Book Description
