Haircuts by Children, and Other Evidence for a New Social Contract

Haircuts by Children, and Other Evidence for a New Social Contract PDF Author: Darren O'Donnell
Publisher: Coach House Books
ISBN: 1770564772
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
We live in an "adultitarian" state, where the rules are based on very adult priorities and understandings of reality. Young people are disenfranchised and powerless; they understand they're subject to an authoritarian regime, whether they buy into it or not. But their unique perspectives also offer incredible potential for engagement and innovation. Cultural planner and performance director Darren O'Donnell has been collaborating with children for years through his theatre company, Mammalian Diving Reflex; their most well-known piece, Haircuts by Children (exactly what it sounds like) has been performed internationally. O'Donnell suggests that that working with children in the cultural industries in a manner that maintains a large space for their participation can be understood as a pilot for a vision of a very different role for young people in the world – one that the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child considers a "new social contract." Seen and Heard is a practical proposal for the inclusion of children in as many realms as possible, not only as an expression of their rights, but as a way to intervene in the world and to disrupt the stark economic inequalities perpetuated by the status quo. Deeply practical and wildly whimsical, Seen and Heard might actually make total sense. Darren O'Donnell is an urban cultural planner, novelist, essayist, playwright, director, designer, performer, and the artistic director of the Mammalian Diving Reflex theater company. O'Donnell currently resides in Toronto, Ontario.

Haircuts by Children, and Other Evidence for a New Social Contract

Haircuts by Children, and Other Evidence for a New Social Contract PDF Author: Darren O'Donnell
Publisher: Coach House Books
ISBN: 1770564772
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 238

Get Book Here

Book Description
We live in an "adultitarian" state, where the rules are based on very adult priorities and understandings of reality. Young people are disenfranchised and powerless; they understand they're subject to an authoritarian regime, whether they buy into it or not. But their unique perspectives also offer incredible potential for engagement and innovation. Cultural planner and performance director Darren O'Donnell has been collaborating with children for years through his theatre company, Mammalian Diving Reflex; their most well-known piece, Haircuts by Children (exactly what it sounds like) has been performed internationally. O'Donnell suggests that that working with children in the cultural industries in a manner that maintains a large space for their participation can be understood as a pilot for a vision of a very different role for young people in the world – one that the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child considers a "new social contract." Seen and Heard is a practical proposal for the inclusion of children in as many realms as possible, not only as an expression of their rights, but as a way to intervene in the world and to disrupt the stark economic inequalities perpetuated by the status quo. Deeply practical and wildly whimsical, Seen and Heard might actually make total sense. Darren O'Donnell is an urban cultural planner, novelist, essayist, playwright, director, designer, performer, and the artistic director of the Mammalian Diving Reflex theater company. O'Donnell currently resides in Toronto, Ontario.

Working with Children in Contemporary Performance

Working with Children in Contemporary Performance PDF Author: Sarah Austin
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 104004199X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
This book outlines how an innovative ‘rights-based’ model of contemporary performance practice can be used when working with children and young people. This model, framed by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), challenges the idea of children as vulnerable and in need of protection, argues for the recognition of the child’s voice, and champions the creativity of children in performance. Sarah Austin draws on rich research and practitioner experience to analyse Youth Arts pedagogies, inclusive theatre practice, models of participation, the symbolic potential of the child in performance, and the work of contemporary theatre practitioners making work with children for adult audiences. The combined practical and written research reflected in this book offers a new, nuanced understanding of children as cultural agents, raising the prospect of a creative process that foregrounds deeper considerations of the strengths and capacities of children. This book would primarily appeal to scholars of theatre and performance studies, specifically those working in the field of applied theatre and theatre for children and young people. Additionally, the practice-based elements of the book are likely to appeal to theatre professionals working in youth arts or theatre for young audiences or associated fields.

A Beginner's Guide to Devising Theatre

A Beginner's Guide to Devising Theatre PDF Author: Jess Thorpe
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135002595X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Winner of the 2021 Music & Drama Education Award for Outstanding Drama Education Resource Much of the theatre we make starts with a script and a story given to us by someone else. But what happens when we're required to start from scratch? How do we begin to make theatre using our own ideas, our own perspective, our own stories? A Beginner's Guide to Devising Theatre, written by the artistic directors of the award-winning young people's performance company Junction 25 and is aimed at those new to devising or wanting to further develop their skills. It explores creative ways to create original theatre from a contemporary stimulus. It offers a structure within which to approach the creative process, including ideas on finding a starting point, generating material, composition and design; it offers practical ideas for use in rehearsal; and it presents grounding in terminology that will support a confident and informed approach to production. The book features contributions from some of the young performers who have been a part of Junction 25's work to date, as well as key artists and companies that work professionally in devised theatre, including case studies from Quarantine, the Team, Mammalian Diving Reflex, Nic Green and Ontroerend Goed. The work of Junction 25 is used to illustrate the concepts and ideas set out in the book. Ideal for any student faced with the challenge of creating work from scratch, A Beginner's Guide to Devising Theatre offers constructive guidance, which supports the requirements of students taking Drama and Theatre Studies courses. The book includes a foreword by theatre critic Lyn Gardner.

Beyond Innocence

Beyond Innocence PDF Author: Adele Senior
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 104012187X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
On a global platform we are witnessing the increased visibility of the people we call children and teenagers as political activists. Meanwhile, across the contemporary performance landscape, children are participating as performers and collaborators in ways that resonate with this figure of the child activist. Beyond Innocence: Children in Performance proposes that performance has the ability to offer alternatives to hegemonic perceptions of the child as innocent, in need of protection, and apolitical. Through an in-depth analysis of selected performances shown in the UK within the past decade, alongside newly gathered documentation on children’s participation in professional performance in their own words, this book considers how performance might offer more capacious representations of and encounters with children beyond the nostalgic and protective adult gaze elicited within mainstream contexts. Motivated by recent collaborations with children on stage that reimagine the figure of the child, the book offers a new approach to both reading age in performance and also doing research with children rather than on or about them. By redressing the current imbalance between the way that we read children and adults’ bodies in performance and taking seriously children’s cultures and experiences, Beyond Innocence asks what strategies contemporary performance has to offer both children and adults in order to foster shared spaces for social and political change. As such, the book develops an approach to analysing performance that not only recognises children as makers of meaning but also as historically, politically, and culturally situated subjects and bodies with lived experiences that far exceed the familiar narratives of innocence and inexperience that children often have to bear.

Bauhaus Futures

Bauhaus Futures PDF Author: Laura Forlano
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262042916
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
Essays, photo-essays, interviews, manifestos, diagrams, and a play explore the varied legacies, influences, and futures of the Bauhaus. What would keep the Bauhaus up at night if it were practicing today? A century after its founding by Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany, as an “experimental laboratory of the future,” who are the pioneering experimentalists who reinscribe or resist Bauhaus traditions? This book explores the varied legacies, influences, and futures of the Bauhaus. Many of the animating issues of the Bauhaus—its integration of research, teaching, and practice; its experimentation with materials; its democratization of design; its open-minded, heterogeneous approach to ideas, theories, methods, and styles—remain relevant. The contributors to Bauhaus Futures address these but go further, considering issues that design has largely ignored for the last hundred years: gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and disability. Their contributions take the form of essays, photo-essays, interviews, manifestos, diagrams, and even a play. They discuss, among other things, the Bauhaus curriculum and its contemporary offshoots; Bauhaus legacies at the MIT Media Lab, Black Mountain College, and elsewhere; the conflict between the Bauhaus ideal of humanist universalism and current approaches to design concerned with race and justice; designed objects, from the iconic to the precarious; textile and weaving work by women in the Bauhaus and the present day; and design and technology. Contributors Alice Arnold, Jeffrey Bardzell, Shaowen Bardzell, Karen Kornblum Berntsen, Marshall Brown, Stuart Candy, Jessica Charlesworth, Elizabeth J. Chin, Taeyoon Choi, B. Coleman, Carl DiSalvo, Michael J. Golec, Kate Hennessy, Matthew Hockenberry, Joi Ito, Denisa Kera, N. Adriana Knouf, Silvia Lindtner, Shannon Mattern, Ramia Mazé, V. Mitch McEwen, Oliver Neumann, Paul Pangaro, Tim Parsons, Nassim Parvin, Joanne Pouzenc, Luiza Prado de O. Martin, Daniela K. Rosner, Natalie Saltiel, Trudi Lynn Smith, Carol Strohecker, Alex Taylor, Martin Thaler, Fred Turner, Andre Uhl, Jeff Watson, Robert Wiesenberger

The Cambridge Companion to International Theatre Festivals

The Cambridge Companion to International Theatre Festivals PDF Author: Ric Knowles
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108559301
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 371

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Book Description
The global rise of festival culture and experience has taken over that which used to merely be events. The Cambridge Companion to International Theatre Festivals provides an up-to-date, contextualized account of the worldwide reach and impact of the 'festivalization' of culture. It introduces new methodologies for the study of the global network of theatre production using digital humanities, raises questions about how alternative origin stories might impact the study of festivals, investigates the festivalized production of space in the world's 'Festival Cities', and re-examines the social role and cultural work of twenty-first-century theatre, performance, and multi-arts festivals. With chapters on festivals in Africa, Asia, Australia, the Arab world, the francophone world, Europe, North America, and Latin America it analyses festivals as sites of intercultural negotiation and exchange.

Social Acupuncture

Social Acupuncture PDF Author: Darren O'Donnell
Publisher: Coach House Books
ISBN: 9781552451700
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
College and Lansdowne in Toronto? That's where I live. Honestly, I don't really like it. At Lansdowne you have the first evidence of suburbia; I live above a small proto-stripmall which houses a Harvey's, a Domino's Pizza and a 7-11. I buy cream and newspapers at the 7-11, the occasional veggie burger at Harvey's and the very very occasional pizza from Domino's. For some reason, pizza just doesn't hold the thrill it used to. Nothing does. Theatre doesn't have much relevance anymore. Or so acclaimed playwright Darren O'Donnell tells us. The dynamics of unplanned social interaction, he says, are far more compelling than any play he could produce. So his latest show, A Suicide-Site Guide to the City , isn't really a show; it's an interactive chitchat about memory, about depression, about 9/11. And it's hilarious. O'Donnell's artistic practice has evolved into 'something as close to hanging out as you can come and still charge admission.' With his theatre company, Mammalian Diving Reflex, O'Donnell has generated a series of ongoing events that induce interactions between strangers in public; the Talking Creature, Q&A, Home Tours, the Toronto Strategy Meetings and Diplomatic Immunities bring people together in odd configurations, ask revealing questions and prove the generosity, abundance and power of the social sphere. Social Acupuncture includes the full text of A Suicide-Site Guide to the City and an extensive essay on the waning significance of theatre and the notion of civic engagement and social interaction as an aesthetic. 'No other playwright working in Toronto right now has O'Donnell's talent for synthesizing psychosocial, artistic and political random thoughts and reflections into compelling analyses ... The world (not to mention the theatre world) could use more of this, if only to get us talking and debating.' - The Globe and Mail

The Milk Chicken Bomb

The Milk Chicken Bomb PDF Author: Andrew Wedderburn
Publisher: Coach House Books
ISBN: 9781552451809
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
The kid sells lemonade. Not a lot of people buy lemonade, especially now that it's winter, but the kid makes good lemonade, even if his friend Mullen thinks it ought to be sweeter. They don't talk much with the other ten-year-olds - most of the others are Dead Kids anyway. Except for Jenny Tierney, but she's busy breaking kids' faces with her math book. Besides, the Russians from the meat-packing plant are a lot cooler, and they always win at curling. But in small-town Alberta, there are just too many roman-candle fights, bonspiels, retaliatory river diversions, black-market submarines, exploding boilers, meat-packing-plant suicides and recess-time lightning strikes for one lonely kid to get any attention. He might as well go to Kazakhstan. Then the adults in his life start disappearing down tunnels and into rendering vats. Being ten is hard enough without all that, especially when your best friend is ruining the lemonade. But the Milk Chicken Bomb should change everything. Frenetic, hilarious and gently heartrending, The Milk Chicken Bomb takes us inside the mind of a troubled ten-year-old who is just beginning to understand that the adults around him are as lonely and bewildered as he is in the face of the slapstick demands of the world.

Fighting for Space

Fighting for Space PDF Author: Travis Lupick
Publisher: arsenal pulp press
ISBN: 1551527138
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
North America is in the grips of a drug epidemic; with the introduction of fentanyl, the chances of a fatal overdose are greater than ever, prompting many to rethink the war on drugs. Public opinion has slowly begun to turn against prohibition, and policy-makers are finally beginning to look at addiction as a health issue as opposed to one for the criminal justice system. While deaths across the continent continue to climb, Fighting for Space explains the concept of harm reduction as a crucial component of a city’s response to the drug crisis. It tells the story of a grassroots group of addicts in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside who waged a political street fight for two decades to transform how the city treats its most marginalized citizens. Over the past twenty-five years, this group of residents from Canada's poorest neighborhood organized themselves in response to the growing number of overdose deaths and demanded that addicts be given the same rights as any other citizen; against all odds, they eventually won. But just as their battle came to an end, fentanyl arrived and opioid deaths across North America reached an all-time high. The "genocide" in Vancouver finally sparked government action. Twenty years later, as the same pattern plays out in other cities, there is much that advocates for reform can learn from Vancouver's experience. Fighting for Space tells that story—including case studies in Ohio, Florida, New York, California, Massachusetts, and Washington state—with the same passionate fervor as the activists whose tireless work gave dignity to addicts and saved countless lives. This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A Simple book with few images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.

The Michigan Murders

The Michigan Murders PDF Author: Edward Keyes
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504025598
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Edgar Award Finalist: The true story of a serial killer who terrorized a midwestern town in the era of free love—by the coauthor of The French Connection. In 1967, during the time of peace, free love, and hitchhiking, nineteen-year-old Mary Terese Fleszar was last seen alive walking home to her apartment in Ypsilanti, Michigan. One month later, her naked body—stabbed over thirty times and missing both feet and a forearm—was discovered, partially buried, on an abandoned farm. A year later, the body of twenty-year-old Joan Schell was found, similarly violated. Southeastern Michigan was terrorized by something it had never experienced before: a serial killer. Over the next two years, five more bodies were uncovered around Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, Michigan. All the victims were tortured and mutilated. All were female students. After multiple failed investigations, a chance sighting finally led to a suspect. On the surface, John Norman Collins was an all-American boy—a fraternity member studying elementary education at Eastern Michigan University. But Collins wasn’t all that he seemed. His female friends described him as aggressive and short tempered. And in August 1970, Collins, the “Ypsilanti Ripper,” was arrested, found guilty, and sentenced to life in prison without chance of parole. Written by the coauthor of The French Connection, The Michigan Murders delivers a harrowing depiction of the savage murders that tormented a small midwestern town.