Theatre, activism, subjectivity

Theatre, activism, subjectivity PDF Author: Bishnupriya Dutt
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526178540
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
Through the lens of performance and politics, this collection zooms in on the context-specific dimensions, analogies, and micro-histories of the Left to better understand the larger picture. It proposes a search for the Left not from totalising Leftist ideological positions and partisan politics but from ethical dimensions through smaller-scale Left-leaning struggles; not from the political to the aesthetic, but from the potentiality of art to offer new political imagination and critique; not from the individual subordinated to the collective, but from the dialectics of subjectivity and collectivity. This is not an attempt at a sweeping global overview of Leftist cultures either, but a collection that brings together culture-specific and comparative perspectives. This book searches for fragments of and on the Left, past and present, through which to rethink and patch a fragmented world.

Theatre, activism, subjectivity

Theatre, activism, subjectivity PDF Author: Bishnupriya Dutt
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526178540
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 452

Get Book Here

Book Description
Through the lens of performance and politics, this collection zooms in on the context-specific dimensions, analogies, and micro-histories of the Left to better understand the larger picture. It proposes a search for the Left not from totalising Leftist ideological positions and partisan politics but from ethical dimensions through smaller-scale Left-leaning struggles; not from the political to the aesthetic, but from the potentiality of art to offer new political imagination and critique; not from the individual subordinated to the collective, but from the dialectics of subjectivity and collectivity. This is not an attempt at a sweeping global overview of Leftist cultures either, but a collection that brings together culture-specific and comparative perspectives. This book searches for fragments of and on the Left, past and present, through which to rethink and patch a fragmented world.

Staging Social Justice

Staging Social Justice PDF Author: Norma Bowles
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 0809332396
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
Fringe Benefits, an award-winning theatre company, collaborates with schools and communities to create plays that promote constructive dialogue about diversity and discrimination issues. Staging Social Justice is a groundbreaking collection of essays about Fringe Benefits’ script-devising methodology and their collaborations in the United States, Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom. The anthology also vividly describes the transformative impact of these creative initiatives on participants and audiences. By reflecting on their experiences working on these projects, the contributing writers—artists, activists and scholars—provide the readerwith tools and inspiration to create their own theatre for social change. “Contributors to this big-hearted collection share Fringe Benefits’ play devising process, and a compelling array of methods for measuring impact, approaches to aesthetics (with humor high on the list), coalition and community building, reflections on safe space, and acknowledgement of the diverse roles needed to apply theatre to social justice goals. The book beautifully bears witness to both how generative Fringe Benefits’ collaborations have been for participants and to the potential of engaged art in multidisciplinary ecosystems more broadly.”—Jan Cohen-Cruz, editor of Public: A Journal of Imagining America

Observing Theatre

Observing Theatre PDF Author: Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9401210292
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe and co-authors take the exploration of the subjective dimension of theatre, its spiritual context, its relation to consciousness and natural law, further than ever before, thanks to the context provided by the thinking of German geobiologist Hans Binder. We present relevant aspects of Binder’s approach as precisely as possible, then take Binder’s approach for granted to tease out the implications of that approach to the issues of theatre, including nostalgia, intercultural theatre, theatre criticism, dealing with demanding roles, the canon, theatre and philosophy, digital performance, practice as research, and applied theatre. Overall, the book proposes an overarching emphasis on the importance of living in the present and the concomitant need to abandon obsolete but still powerful patterns of the past. In this context, theatre, according to Binder, has a global responsibility for the new world in which humans are liberated from the scourge of the past. Theatre has the power and thus the responsibility to be path-breaking for a new “fiction”, to show to people, in a playful and creative manner, the direction in which the new consciousness can move. Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe is Professor of Drama at the Lincoln School of Performing Arts, University of Lincoln. He has numerous publications on the topic of ‘Theatre and Consciousness’ to his credit, and is founding editor of the peer-reviewed web-journal Consciousness, Literature and the Arts and the book series of the same title with Rodopi.

Performance, Subjectivity, Cosmopolitanism

Performance, Subjectivity, Cosmopolitanism PDF Author: Yana Meerzon
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030414108
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
This book looks at the connection between contemporary theatre practices and cosmopolitanism, a philosophical condition of social behaviour based on our responsibility, respect, and healthy curiosity to the other. Advocating for cosmopolitanism has become a necessity in a world defined by global wars, mass migration, and rise of nationalism. Using empathy, affect, and telling personal stories of displacement through embodied encounter between the actor and their audience, performance arts can serve as a training ground for this social behavior. In the centre of this encounter is a new cosmopolitan: a person of divided origins and cultural heritage, someone who speaks many languages and claims different countries as their place of belonging. The book examines how European and North American theatres stage this divided subjectivity: both from within, the way we tell stories about ourselves to others, and from without, through the stories the others tell about us.

Contemporary Black Theatre and Performance

Contemporary Black Theatre and Performance PDF Author: DeRon S. Williams
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135025293X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
How are Black artists, activists, and pedagogues wielding acts of rebellion, activism, and solidarity to precipitate change? How have contemporary performances impacted Black cultural, social, and political struggles? What are the ways in which these acts and artists engage varied Black identities and explore shared histories? Contemporary Black Theatre and Performance investigates these questions to illuminate the relationship between performance, identity, intersectionality, and activism in North America and beyond. It features contributions from scholars, artists, and activists from across disciplines who explore the nuances and varied forms of Black performance in the 21st century while incorporating performance-based methodologies and queer and black feminist theories. Among the many topics addressed by contributors are antiracist pedagogy, Black queer identity formation in Black playwriting, digital blackface, and Black women's subversive practices within contemporary popular culture. It encompasses dramatic analysis of Lynn Nottage's Sweat, Tarell Alvin McCraney's Choir Boy, and acts of resistance during the Black Lives Matter summer 2020 highway protests. A series of conversations with artists and scholars are woven throughout the book's three sections, including with playwrights Christina Anderson and Donja R. Love, and Willa Taylor, Director of Education and Community Engagement at the Goodman Theatre, Chicago.

Playing Boal

Playing Boal PDF Author: Mady Schutzman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
The first book to examine the practical techniques of Augusto Boal, Playing Boal illuminates and invigorates discussion about Boal's work and the transformative potential of theatre.

Postdramatic Theatre and the Political

Postdramatic Theatre and the Political PDF Author: Karen Jürs-Munby
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408185881
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Is postdramatic theatre political and if so how? How does it relate to Brecht's ideas of political theatre, for example? How can we account for the relationship between aesthetics and politics in new forms of theatre, playwriting, and performance? The chapters in this book discuss crucial aspects of the issues raised by the postdramatic turn in theatre in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century: the status of the audience and modes of spectatorship in postdramatic theatre; the political claims of postdramatic theatre; postdramatic theatre's ongoing relationship with the dramatic tradition; its dialectical qualities, or its eschewing of the dialectic; questions of representation and the real in theatre; the role of bodies, perception, appearance and theatricality in postdramatic theatre; as well as subjectivity and agency in postdramatic theatre, dance and performance. Offering analyses of a wide range of international performance examples, scholars in this volume engage with Hans-Thies Lehmann's theoretical positions both affirmatively and critically, relating them to other approaches by thinkers ranging from early theorists such as Brecht, Adorno and Benjamin, to contemporary thinkers such as Fischer-Lichte, Rancière and others

Geographies of Learning

Geographies of Learning PDF Author: Jill Dolan
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 9780819564689
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Maps the divisions that stall the production of knowledge in theatre and performance studies, queer studies, and women's studies. Each of Jill Dolan's three academic locations — theatre and performance studies, lesbian/gay/queer studies (LGQ studies), and women's studies — is both interdisciplinary and fraught with divisions between theory and practice. As teacher, administrator, author, and performer, Dolan places her professional labor in relation to issues of community, pedagogy, public culture, administration, university missions, and citizenship. She works from the assumption that the production and dissemination of knowledge can be forms of activism, extending conversations on radical politics in the academy by other writers, such as Cary Nelson, Michael Berube, Gerald Graff, and Richard Ohmann. The five interconnected essays in Geographies of Learning map the divisions and dissensions that stall the production of progressive knowledge in theatre and performance studies, LGQ studies, and women's studies, while at the same time exploring some of the theoretical and pedagogical tools these fields have to offer one another.

A Boal Companion

A Boal Companion PDF Author: Jan Cohen-Cruz
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 9780415322935
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
This Boal companion explores performative and cultural ideas and practices which inform Boal's work by putting them alongside those from related disciplines.

Political Dramaturgies and Theatre Spectatorship

Political Dramaturgies and Theatre Spectatorship PDF Author: Liz Tomlin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474295622
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
What do we mean when we describe theatre as political today? How might theatre-makers' provocations for change need to be differently designed when addressing the precarious spectator-subject of twenty- first century neoliberalism? In this important study Liz Tomlin interrogates the influential theories of Jacques Rancière to propose a new framework of analysis through which contemporary political dramaturgies can be investigated. Drawing, in particular, on Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Lilie Chouliaraki and Judith Butler, Tomlin argues that the capacities of the contemporary and future spectator to be 'effected' or 'affected' by politically-engaged theatre need to be urgently re-evaluated. Central to this study is Tomlin's theorized figuration of the neoliberal spectator-subject as precarious, individualized and ironic, with a reduced capacity for empathy, agency and the ability to imagine better futures. This, in turn, leads to a predilection for a response to injustice that is driven by a concern for the feelings of the subject-self, rather than concern for the suffering other. These characteristics are argued to shape even those spectator-subjects towards the left of the political spectrum, thus necessitating a careful reconsideration of new and long-standing dramaturgies of political provocation. Dramaturgies examined include the ironic invitations of Made in China and Martin Crimp, the exploration of affect in Kieran Hurley's Heads Up, the new sincerity that characterizes the work of Andy Smith, the turn to the staging of the spectators' 'other' in Developing Artists' Queens of Syria and Chris Thorpe and Rachel Chavkin's Confirmation, and the community activism of Common Wealth's The Deal Versus the People.