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15 books about Performances
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15 books about Performances
1001 Beds
Performances, Essays, and Travels
Tim Miller; Edited by Glen Johnson
University of Wisconsin Press, 2006
For a quarter century, Tim Miller has worked at the intersection of performance, politics, and identity, using his personal experiences to create entertaining but pointed explorations of life as a gay American man—from the perils and joys of sex and relationships to the struggles of political disenfranchisement and artistic censorship. This intimate autobiographical collage of Miller's professional and personal life reveals one of the celebrated creators of a crucial contemporary art form and a tireless advocate for the American dream of political equality for all citizens.
Here we have the most complete Miller yet—a raucous collection of his performance scripts, essays, interviews, journal entries, and photographs, as well as his most recent stage piece Us. This volume brings together the personal, communal, and national political strands that interweave through his work from its beginnings and ultimately define Miller's place as a contemporary artist, activist, and gay man.
Here we have the most complete Miller yet—a raucous collection of his performance scripts, essays, interviews, journal entries, and photographs, as well as his most recent stage piece Us. This volume brings together the personal, communal, and national political strands that interweave through his work from its beginnings and ultimately define Miller's place as a contemporary artist, activist, and gay man.
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Baseball as Mediated Latinidad
Race, Masculinity, Nationalism, and Performances of Identity
Jennifer Domino Rudolph
The Ohio State University Press, 2020
In her incisive study Baseball as Mediated Latinidad: Race, Masculinity, Nationalism, and Performances of Identity, Jennifer Domino Rudolph analyzes major league baseball’s Latin/o American players—who now make up more than twenty-five percent of MLB—as sites of undesirable surveillance due to the historical, political, and sociological weight placed on them via stereotypes around immigration, crime, masculinity, aggression, and violence. Rudolph examines the perception by media and fans of Latino baseball players and the consumption of these athletes as both social and political stand-ins for an entire culture, showing how these participants in the nationalist game of baseball exemplify tensions over race, nation, and language for some while simultaneously revealing baseball as a practice of latinidad, or pan-Latina/o/x identity, for others. By simultaneously exploring the ways in which Latino baseball players can appear both as threats to American values and the embodiment of the American Dream, and engaging with both archival research and new media representations of MLB players, Rudolph sheds new light on the current ambivalence of mainstream American media and fans towards Latin/o culture.
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A Body in the O
Performances and Stories
Tim Miller
University of Wisconsin Press, 2019
From London to DC to Australia to Los Angeles, Tim Miller has sold out shows in which he addresses issues of gender, immigration, homophobia, and censorship. As one of the “NEA Four,” who successfully sued the federal government for violating their First Amendment rights when their funding was rescinded in the early 1990s, Miller has always played an important role in defending queer artistic expression on stage. His autobiographical explorations into identity, politics, and art through the lens of his own experiences lead to visceral, humorous, and poignant performances. His activism and experiences inform his newest collection of performance scripts and writings, which represent the culmination of the many struggles for rights and equality that Miller has documented, and performed, over the course of his career. A Body in the O is an important addition to Miller’s existing body of work, picking up from his show Lay of the Land and moving into his more recent piece, Rooted.
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Claiming Brazil
Performances of Citizenship in the Centenary of Independence
Gregg Bocketti
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022
Brazil marked its centennial as an independent country in 1922. Claiming Brazil explores how Brazilians from different walks of life commemorated the event, and how this led to conflicting ideas of national identity. Civic rituals hold enormous significance, and Brazilian citizens, immigrants, and visitors employed them to articulate and perform their sense of what Brazil was, stood for, and could be. Gregg Bocketti argues that these celebrations, rather than uniting the country, highlighted tensions between modernity and tradition, over race and ethnicity, and between nation and region. Further, the rituals contributed to the collapse of the country’s social and political status quo and gave substance to the debates and ideas that characterized Brazilian life in the 1920s and then under the transformative rule of Getúlio Vargas (1930–1945). Now, at the bicentennial of Brazil’s independence, which itself unfolds in a period of political crisis and economic dislocation, and in the aftermath of several large civic events, it is an opportune moment to consider how Brazilians used civic rituals to engage with questions of identity, belonging, and citizenship one hundred years ago.
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Divas and Scholars
Performing Italian Opera
Philip Gossett
University of Chicago Press, 2006
Winner of the 2007 Otto Kinkeldey Award from the American Musicological Society and the 2007 Deems Taylor Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers.
Divas and Scholars is a dazzling and beguiling account of how opera comes to the stage, filled with Philip Gossett’s personal experiences of triumphant—and even failed—performances and suffused with his towering and tonic passion for music. Writing as a fan, a musician, and a scholar, Gossett, the world's leading authority on the performance of Italian opera, brings colorfully to life the problems, and occasionally the scandals, that attend the production of some of our most favorite operas.
Gossett begins by tracing the social history of nineteenth-century Italian theaters in order to explain the nature of the musical scores from which performers have long worked. He then illuminates the often hidden but crucial negotiations opera scholars and opera conductors and performers: What does it mean to talk about performing from a critical edition? How does one determine what music to perform when multiple versions of an opera exist? What are the implications of omitting passages from an opera in a performance? In addition to vexing questions such as these, Gossett also tackles issues of ornamentation and transposition in vocal style, the matters of translation and adaptation, and even aspects of stage direction and set design.
Throughout this extensive and passionate work, Gossett enlivens his history with reports from his own experiences with major opera companies at venues ranging from the Metropolitan and Santa Fe operas to the Rossini Opera Festival at Pesaro. The result is a book that will enthrall both aficionados of Italian opera and newcomers seeking a reliable introduction to it—in all its incomparable grandeur and timeless allure.
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"Don Giovanni" Captured
Performance, Media, Myth
Richard Will
University of Chicago Press, 2022
“Don Giovanni” Captured considers the life of a single opera, engaging with the entire history of its recorded performance.
Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni has long inspired myths about eros and masculinity. Over time, its performance history has revealed a growing trend toward critique—an increasing effort on the part of performers and directors to highlight the violence and predatoriness of the libertine central character, alongside the suffering and resilience of his female victims.
In “Don Giovanni” Captured, Richard Will sets out to analyze more than a century’s worth of recorded performances of the opera, tracing the ways it has changed from one performance to another and from one generation to the next. Will consults audio recordings, starting with wax cylinders and 78s, as well as video recordings, including DVDs, films, and streaming videos. As Will argues, recordings and other media shape our experience of opera as much as live performance does. Seen as a historical record, opera recordings are also a potent reminder of the refusal of works such as Don Giovanni to sit still. By choosing a work with such a rich and complex tradition of interpretation, Will helps us see Don Giovanni as a standard-bearer for evolving ideas about desire and power, both on and off the stage.
Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni has long inspired myths about eros and masculinity. Over time, its performance history has revealed a growing trend toward critique—an increasing effort on the part of performers and directors to highlight the violence and predatoriness of the libertine central character, alongside the suffering and resilience of his female victims.
In “Don Giovanni” Captured, Richard Will sets out to analyze more than a century’s worth of recorded performances of the opera, tracing the ways it has changed from one performance to another and from one generation to the next. Will consults audio recordings, starting with wax cylinders and 78s, as well as video recordings, including DVDs, films, and streaming videos. As Will argues, recordings and other media shape our experience of opera as much as live performance does. Seen as a historical record, opera recordings are also a potent reminder of the refusal of works such as Don Giovanni to sit still. By choosing a work with such a rich and complex tradition of interpretation, Will helps us see Don Giovanni as a standard-bearer for evolving ideas about desire and power, both on and off the stage.
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Listening in Detail
Performances of Cuban Music
Alexandra T. Vazquez
Duke University Press, 2013
Listening in Detail is an original and impassioned take on the intellectual and sensory bounty of Cuban music as it circulates between the island, the United States, and other locations. It is also a powerful critique of efforts to define "Cuban music" for ethnographic examination or market consumption. Contending that the music is not a knowable entity but a spectrum of dynamic practices that elude definition, Alexandra T. Vazquez models a new way of writing about music and the meanings assigned to it. "Listening in detail" is a method invested in opening up, rather than pinning down, experiences of Cuban music. Critiques of imperialism, nationalism, race, and gender emerge in fragments and moments, and in gestures and sounds through Vazquez's engagement with Alfredo Rodríguez's album Cuba Linda (1996), the seventy-year career of the vocalist Graciela Pérez, the signature grunt of the "Mambo King" Dámaso Pérez Prado, Cuban music documentaries of the 1960s, and late-twentieth-century concert ephemera.
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The Magic of Beverly Sills
Nancy Guy
University of Illinois Press, 2015
With her superb coloratura soprano, passion for the world of opera, and down-to-earth personality, Beverly Sills made high art accessible to millions from the time of her meteoric rise to stardom in 1966 until her death in 2007. An unlikely pop culture phenomenon, Sills was equally at ease on talk shows, on the stage, and in the role of arts advocate and administrator. Merging archival research with her own love of Sills's music, Nancy Guy examines the singer-actress's artistry alongside the ineffable aspects of performance that earned Sills a passionate fandom. Guy mines the memories of colleagues, critics, and aficionados to recover something of the spell Sills wove for people on both sides of the footlights during the hot moments of onstage performance. At the same time, she analyzes essential questions raised by Sills's art and celebrity. How did Sills challenge the divide between elite and mass culture and build a fan base that crossed generations and socio-economic lines? Above all, how did Sills capture the unnameable magic that joins the members of an audience to a performer--and to one-another? Intimate and revealing, The Magic of Beverly Sills explores the alchemy of art, magnetism, community, and emotion that produced an American icon.
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Performances
Greg Dening
University of Chicago Press, 1996
With elegance and candor, Greg Dening offers a panoramic collection of rich and densely textured essays that demonstrate how we can only understand our present through our consciousness of the past and how in thinking about the past we mirror the time and place of our own living.
For Dening, history saturates every moment of our cultural and personal existence. Yet he is keenly aware that the actual past remains fundamentally irreplicable. All histories are culturally crafted artifacts, commensurate with folk tales, stage plays, or films. Whether derived from logbooks and letters, or displayed on music hall stages and Hollywood back lots, history is in essence our making sense of what has and continues to happen, creating for us a sense of our cultural and individual selves.
Through juxtapositions of actual events and creative reenactments of them—such as the mutiny on the Bounty in 1787 and the various Hollywood films that depict that event—Dening calls attention to the provocative moment of theatricality in history making where histories, cultures, and selves converge. Moving adeptly across varied terrains, from the frontiers of North America to the islands of the South Pacific, Dening marshals a striking array of diverse, often recalcitrant, sources to examine the tangled histories of cross-cultural clash and engagement. Refusing to portray conquest, colonization, and hegemony simply as abstract processes, Dening, in his own culturally reflexive performance, painstakingly evokes the flesh and form of past actors, both celebrated and unsung, whose foregone lives have become our history.
For Dening, history saturates every moment of our cultural and personal existence. Yet he is keenly aware that the actual past remains fundamentally irreplicable. All histories are culturally crafted artifacts, commensurate with folk tales, stage plays, or films. Whether derived from logbooks and letters, or displayed on music hall stages and Hollywood back lots, history is in essence our making sense of what has and continues to happen, creating for us a sense of our cultural and individual selves.
Through juxtapositions of actual events and creative reenactments of them—such as the mutiny on the Bounty in 1787 and the various Hollywood films that depict that event—Dening calls attention to the provocative moment of theatricality in history making where histories, cultures, and selves converge. Moving adeptly across varied terrains, from the frontiers of North America to the islands of the South Pacific, Dening marshals a striking array of diverse, often recalcitrant, sources to examine the tangled histories of cross-cultural clash and engagement. Refusing to portray conquest, colonization, and hegemony simply as abstract processes, Dening, in his own culturally reflexive performance, painstakingly evokes the flesh and form of past actors, both celebrated and unsung, whose foregone lives have become our history.
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The Performances of Sacred Spaces
Crossing, Breathing, Resisting
Edited by Silvia Battista
Intellect Books, 2021
This collection offers a multi-layered, contemporary analysis of sacred sites and their practices, politics, and ecologies. Presenting practice-as-research accounts alongside theoretical analysis, this multidisciplinary volume brings together religious studies, philosophy, anthropology, and performance studies. By focusing on practice and performance rather than theology, it also expands the notion of sacred places to contexts beyond institutionalized religion.
The questions investigated are: what is a sacred place? Is a place inherently sacred or does it become sacred? Is it a paradigm, a real location, an imaginary place, a projected condition, a charged setting, an enhanced perception? What kind of practices and processes allow the emergence of a sacred place in human perception? And what is its function in contemporary societies?
In exploring these questions and more, Silvia Battista challenges the conventional understanding of sacred places in contemporary contexts and sparks lively new debate on the roles of religiosity and spirituality.
The questions investigated are: what is a sacred place? Is a place inherently sacred or does it become sacred? Is it a paradigm, a real location, an imaginary place, a projected condition, a charged setting, an enhanced perception? What kind of practices and processes allow the emergence of a sacred place in human perception? And what is its function in contemporary societies?
In exploring these questions and more, Silvia Battista challenges the conventional understanding of sacred places in contemporary contexts and sparks lively new debate on the roles of religiosity and spirituality.
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Performances of Violence
Austin Sarat
University of Massachusetts Press, 2011
From acts of terrorism to war, from arson to capital punishment, from sadism to torture, performances of violence are all around us. Sometimes they grab headlines and rivet our attention, sometimes they are barely noticed, constituting part of our taken-for-granted world. Yet whether dramatic or barely noticed, violence seems everywhere to be on the rise. The essays in this volume explore the relationship between selfhood, agency, and violence, focusing on the psychic life of violence and its expression in the performances of particular individuals. At the same time, they look more closely at the way political contexts and ideologies shape both particular performances of violence and the way they are understood. By drawing on the expertise of scholars in a variety of fields—anthropology, history, political theory, law, and social thought—this book seeks to expose some of the subterranean cross currents of the cultural lives of violence and, in so doing, to reveal their connections. In addition to the editors, contributors include criminal justice scholar Mary Welek Atwell, anthropologist Veena Das, historian Ruth Miller, political scientist Anne Norton, political scientist Corey Robin, and historian Paul Steege.
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Pleasures Taken
Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs
Carol Mavor
Duke University Press, 1995
An intimate look into three Victorian photo-settings, Pleasures Taken considers questions of loss and sexuality as they are raised by some of the most compelling and often misrepresented photographs of the era: Lewis Carroll’s photographs of young girls; Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs of Madonnas; and the photographs of Hannah Cullwick, a "maid of all work," who had herself pictured in a range of masquerades, from a blackened chimney sweep to a bare-chested Magdalene. Reading these settings performatively, Carol Mavor shifts the focus toward the subjectivity of these girls and women, and toward herself as a writer.
Mavor’s original approach to these photographs emphatically sees sexuality where it has been previously rendered invisible. She insists that the sexuality of the girls in Carroll’s pictures is not only present, but deserves recognition, respect, and scrutiny. Similarly, she sees in Cameron’s photographs of sensual Madonnas surprising visions of motherhood that outstrip both Victorian and contemporary understandings of the maternal as untouchable and inviolate, without sexuality. Finally she shows how Hannah Cullwick, posing in various masquerades for her secret paramour, emerges as a subject with desires rather than simply a victim of her upper-class partner. Even when confronting the darker areas of these photographs, Mavor perseveres in her insistence on the pleasures taken—by the viewer, the photographer, and often by the model herself—in the act of imagining these sexualities. Inspired by Roland Barthes, and drawing on other theorists such as Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, Mavor creates a text that is at once interdisciplinary, personal, and profoundly pleasurable.
Mavor’s original approach to these photographs emphatically sees sexuality where it has been previously rendered invisible. She insists that the sexuality of the girls in Carroll’s pictures is not only present, but deserves recognition, respect, and scrutiny. Similarly, she sees in Cameron’s photographs of sensual Madonnas surprising visions of motherhood that outstrip both Victorian and contemporary understandings of the maternal as untouchable and inviolate, without sexuality. Finally she shows how Hannah Cullwick, posing in various masquerades for her secret paramour, emerges as a subject with desires rather than simply a victim of her upper-class partner. Even when confronting the darker areas of these photographs, Mavor perseveres in her insistence on the pleasures taken—by the viewer, the photographer, and often by the model herself—in the act of imagining these sexualities. Inspired by Roland Barthes, and drawing on other theorists such as Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, Mavor creates a text that is at once interdisciplinary, personal, and profoundly pleasurable.
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The Sarah Siddons Audio Files
Romanticism and the Lost Voice
Judith Pascoe
University of Michigan Press, 2013
English actress Sarah Siddons (1755–1831) was an international celebrity widely acclaimed for her performances of tragic heroines.We know what Siddons looked like—an endless number of artists asked her to sit for portraits and sculptures—but what of her famous voice? In lively and engaging prose, Judith Pascoe journeys to discover how the celebrated romantic actor’s voice sounded and to understand its power to move audiences to a state of emotional collapse. The author’s quixotic endeavor leads her to enroll in a “Voice for Actors” class, to collect Lady Macbeth voice prints, and to listen more carefully to the soundscape of her own life.
The Sarah Siddons Audio Files is the first full-scale attempt to address the importance of the voice in romantic culture. Bringing together archival discoveries, sound recording history, and media theory, the book shows how the romantic poets’ preoccupation with voices is linked to a larger cultural anxiety about the voice’s ephemerality. The Sarah Siddons Audio Files contributes to a growing body of work on the fascinating history of sound, and will engage a broad audience interest in how recording technology has altered human experience.
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Shakespeare and the Legacy of Loss
Emily Hodgson Anderson
University of Michigan Press, 2018
How do we recapture, or hold on to, the live performances we most love, and the talented artists and performers we most revere? Shakespeare and the Legacy of Loss tells the story of how 18th-century actors, novelists, and artists, key among them David Garrick, struggled with these questions through their reenactments of Shakespearean plays. For these artists, the resurgence of Shakespeare, a playwright whose works just decades earlier had nearly been erased, represented their own chance for eternal life. Despite the ephemeral nature of performance, Garrick and company would find a way to make Shakespeare, and through him the actor, rise again.
In chapters featuring Othello, Richard III, Hamlet, The Winter’s Tale, and The Merchant of Venice, Emily Hodgson Anderson illuminates how Garrick’s performances of Shakespeare came to offer his contemporaries an alternative and even an antidote to the commemoration associated with the monument, the portrait, and the printed text. The first account to read 18th-century visual and textual references to Shakespeare alongside the performance history of his plays, this innovative study sheds new light on how we experience performance, and why we gravitate toward an art, and artists, we know will disappear.
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The Unknown Theatre of Jerzy Grotowski
Performances in the Theatre of 13 Rows, 1959–1964
Dariusz Kosinski and Wanda Swiatkowska
Seagull Books, 2022
Examines the previously unresearched formative years of Polish director Jerzy Grotowski’s career.
Polish director Jerzy Grotowski (1933–1999) was an international leader in experimental theater who became famous in the late 1960s for his revolutionary approach to audience involvement. This volume is devoted to Grotowski’s early work—the performances he directed in the Theatre of 13 Rows (later Laboratory Theatre of 13 Rows) between 1959 and 1964 when the theater was working in the provincial town Opole in south-western Poland. Having decided to work in his own independent theater, Grotowski moved to Opole in September 1956 and developed his ideas with young, inexperienced actors, creating important performances that foreshadowed his renowned masterpieces of the late 1960s.
In The Unknown Theatre of Jerzy Grotowski, Dariusz Kosiński and Wanda Świątkowska reconstruct, analyze, and interpret each of the nine performances directed by Grotowski over this period: from Orpheus based onJean Cocteau (1959) to Hamlet Study based on Stanisław Wyspiański (1964). Previously mentioned mainly in the context of the development of Grotowski’s method, these performances dealt with important social, political, and philosophical problems of postwar and post-Holocaust Poland. Grotowski also used these performances to experiment with the forces and problems that he later tried to be discreet about, such as sexuality.
Revealing unnoticed and forgotten aspects of Grotowski’s theater, this landmark book presents new materials and perspectives that give fresh life to the study of a genius of twentieth-century theater.
Polish director Jerzy Grotowski (1933–1999) was an international leader in experimental theater who became famous in the late 1960s for his revolutionary approach to audience involvement. This volume is devoted to Grotowski’s early work—the performances he directed in the Theatre of 13 Rows (later Laboratory Theatre of 13 Rows) between 1959 and 1964 when the theater was working in the provincial town Opole in south-western Poland. Having decided to work in his own independent theater, Grotowski moved to Opole in September 1956 and developed his ideas with young, inexperienced actors, creating important performances that foreshadowed his renowned masterpieces of the late 1960s.
In The Unknown Theatre of Jerzy Grotowski, Dariusz Kosiński and Wanda Świątkowska reconstruct, analyze, and interpret each of the nine performances directed by Grotowski over this period: from Orpheus based onJean Cocteau (1959) to Hamlet Study based on Stanisław Wyspiański (1964). Previously mentioned mainly in the context of the development of Grotowski’s method, these performances dealt with important social, political, and philosophical problems of postwar and post-Holocaust Poland. Grotowski also used these performances to experiment with the forces and problems that he later tried to be discreet about, such as sexuality.
Revealing unnoticed and forgotten aspects of Grotowski’s theater, this landmark book presents new materials and perspectives that give fresh life to the study of a genius of twentieth-century theater.
[more]
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