Results by title

310 books match the query 'Performance' and 17 start with c

cover of Californios, Anglos, and the Performance of Oligarchy in the U.S. West

Californios, Anglos, and the Performance of Oligarchy in the U.S. West

Andrew Gibb

Southern Illinois University Press, 2018

In Californios, Anglos, and the Performance of Oligarchy in the U.S. West, author Andrew Gibb argues that the mid-nineteenth-century encounter between Anglos and californios— the Spanish-speaking elites who ruled Mexican California between 1821 and 1848—resulted not only in the Americanization of California but also the “Mexicanization” of Americans. Employing performance studies methodologies in his analysis of everyday and historical events, Gibb traces how oligarchy evolved and developed in the region.
  
This interdisciplinary study draws on performance studies, theatre historiography, and New Western History to identify how the unique power relations of historical California were constituted and perpetuated through public performances—not only traditional theatrical productions but also social events such as elite weddings and community dances—and historical events like the U.S. seizure of the city of Monterey, the feting of Commodore Stockton in San Francisco, and the Bear Flag Revolt.
 
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cover of Caribes 2.0: New Media, Globalization, and the Afterlives of Disaster

Caribes 2.0

New Media, Globalization, and the Afterlives of Disaster

Jossianna Arroyo

Rutgers University Press, 2023

In Caribes 2.0, author Jossianna Arroyo looks at the Caribbean mediasphere in the twenty-first century. Arroyo argues that we have seen a return to tropes such as blackface, brownface, cultural and ethnic stereotypes, and violent representations of the poor, the marginalized, and the racialized. Caribes 2.0 looks at these tropes as well as the work of writers, vloggers, performers, and photographers that have become media figures or have used new media platforms to promote their work and examines how they are challenging and negotiating these media representations. It analyzes contemporary Caribbean cultures to discuss, taste, guides, and actions (social and virtual) that shape Caribbean global communities today. Departing from Edouard Glissant’s insight that “Caribbean reality might not be accessed by remote control” the book considers what types of political and social agencies are created by mediation. Caribes 2.0 deviates from these historical-globalized views of subjected, colonized Caribbean bodies, and their material conditions, to examine the relationship between the local and the global in contemporary Caribbean cultures, and the role that media is playing in the invisibility or hyper-visibilty of Caribbean cultures in the islands and the U.S. diaspora.
 
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cover of Celebrity Across the Channel, 1750–1850

Celebrity Across the Channel, 1750–1850

Anaïs Pédron

University of Delaware Press, 2021

Celebrity Across the Channel, 1750-1850 is the first book to study and compare the concept of celebrity in France and Britain from 1750 to 1850 as the two countries transformed into the states we recognize today. It offers a transnational perspective by placing in dialogue the growing fields of celebrity studies in the two countries, especially by engaging with Antoine Lilti’s seminal work, The Invention of Celebrity, translated into English in 2017. With contributions from a diverse range of scholarly cultures, the volume has a firmly interdisciplinary scope over the time period 1750 to 1850, which was an era marked by social, political, and cultural upheaval. Bringing together the fields of history, politics, literature, theater studies, and musicology, the volume employs a firmly interdisciplinary scope to explore an era marked by social, political, and cultural upheaval. The organization of the collection allows for new readings of the similarities and differences in the understanding of celebrity in Britain and France. Consequently, the volume builds upon the questions that are currently at the heart of celebrity studies.
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cover of Chemical Heroes: Pharmacological Supersoldiers in the US Military

Chemical Heroes

Pharmacological Supersoldiers in the US Military

Andrew Bickford

Duke University Press, 2020

In Chemical Heroes Andrew Bickford analyzes the US military's attempts to design performance enhancement technologies and create pharmacological "supersoldiers" capable of withstanding extreme trauma. Bickford traces the deep history of efforts to biologically fortify and extend the health and lethal power of soldiers from the Cold War era into the twenty-first century, from early adoptions of mandatory immunizations to bio-protective gear, to the development and spread of new performance enhancing drugs during the global War on Terrorism. In his examination of government efforts to alter soldiers' bodies through new technologies, Bickford invites us to contemplate what constitutes heroism when armor becomes built in, wired in, and even edited into the molecular being of an American soldier. Lurking in the background and dark recesses of all US military enhancement research, Bickford demonstrates, is the desire to preserve US military and imperial power.
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cover of Chinese Theories of Theater and Performance from Confucius to the Present

Chinese Theories of Theater and Performance from Confucius to the Present

Edited and Translated by Faye Chunfang Fei

University of Michigan Press, 2002

Through the writings of noted Chinese philosophers, scholars, artists, and critics from the time of Confucius to the present, this rich compendium provides a fascinating guided tour of China's evolving conceptions of theater and performance. The book's more than sixty selections are arranged chronologically to provide a historical overview of four major periods: antiquity to the Song dynasty (fourth century B.C.E.-1279 C.E.); the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) and Ming dynasty (1368-1644); the Qing dynasty (1644-1911); and the rest of the twentieth century.
The writings collected here treat the origins, aesthetic principles, and functions of theater. Some are virtual manuals on playwriting and performance techniques; some describe the practices, conditions, and government policies concerning theatrical performance. Many of the selections forcefully dispute the myth that Chinese theater is valuable in performance but lacking in literature--the fact is that there is an equal, if not more prominent, emphasis on theme and content. What emerges from the writings in Chinese Theories of Theater and Performance from Confucius to the Present is a highly evolved and sophisticated aesthetic.
The texts are enhanced by Faye C. Fei's extensive introductions and annotative notes that provide essential background and contextual information. She has provided accurate and engagingly written translations of the texts, making the majority of them available in English for the first time. The anthology will appeal to teachers and students of theater and performance, artists interested in Chinese theater and arts, and scholars and historians of Asia. Literary critics, aestheticians, philosophers, and social scientists will also find the volume of interest, since Chinese conceptions of the theater and performance are closely connected to China's general outlook on the humanities.
Faye C. Fei is Assistant Professor of Dramatic Arts, Macalester College.
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cover of Collective Situations: Readings in Contemporary Latin American Art, 1995–2010

Collective Situations

Readings in Contemporary Latin American Art, 1995–2010

Bill Kelley Jr. and Grant H. Kester, editors

Duke University Press, 2017

In Collective Situations scholars, artists, and art collectives present a range of socially engaged art practices that emerged in Latin America during the Pink Tide period, between 1995 and 2010. This volume's essays, interviews, and artist's statements—many of which are appearing in English for the first time—demonstrate the complex relationship between moments of political transformation and artistic production. Whether addressing human rights in Colombia, the politics of urban spaces in Brazil, the violent legacy of military dictatorships in the region, or art’s intersection with public policy, health, and the environment, the contributors outline the region’s long-standing tradition of challenging ideas about art and the social sphere through experimentation. Introducing English-language readers to some of the most dynamic and innovative contemporary art in Latin America, Collective Situations documents new possibilities for artistic practice, collaboration, and creativity in ways that have the capacity to foster vibrant forms of democratic citizenship.

Contributors
Gavin Adams, Mariola V. Alvarez, Gustavo Buntinx, María Fernanda Cartagena, David Gutiérrez Castañeda, Fabian Cereijido, Paloma Checa-Gismero, Kency Cornejo, Raquel de Anda, Bill Kelley Jr., Grant H. Kester, Suzanne Lacy, Ana Longoni, Rodrigo Martí, Elize Mazadiego, Annie Mendoza, Alberto Muenala, Prerana Reddy, Maria Reyes Franco, Pilar Riaño-Alcalá, Juan Carlos Rodríguez
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cover of Competence and Character through Life

Competence and Character through Life

Edited by Anne Colby, Jacquelyn Boone James, and Daniel Hart

University of Chicago Press, 1998

Competence and character are at the heart of our notions of a mature and successful adult, yet many questions about their nature and development remain unanswered.

In this collection, leading psychologists, sociologists, and criminologists highlight the potential for positive development in different domains. By positing the possibility of multiple pathways of development rather than a single universal sequence, the contributors view the individual as potentially advancing in a wide range of interrelated and overlapping competencies. The nine essays in the book cover the years from youth to middle age, and they examine a range of social, political, and moral components of "competence and character" from teenage pregnancy and life-planning skills to voting records and educational attainment in low income households. Unlike comparable studies, this original and comprehensive volume frames issues, events, and longitudinal data through the lens of possibility rather than the pathology of defeat, stressing a positive approach to our conception of human potential.

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cover of Contemporary Censorship and Performance, Volume 38

Contemporary Censorship and Performance, Volume 38

Miriam Felton-Dansky and Tom Sellar, eds.

Duke University Press, 0

This special issue of Theater explores the political, cultural, and economic factors that have led to controversies surrounding live performance around the world. Recent global political shifts have resulted in renewed interest in questions of censorship and free expression and have demonstrated that theater has become a cultural third rail, igniting controversy and provoking attempts at suppression. Contributors explore manifestations of theater censorship—from New York to Birmingham (England) to Beirut to Tashkent (Uzbekistan)—and address both direct, state-sponsored suppression as well as the disparate cultural pressures that hamper theatrical expression, such as financial pressures and political, ethnic, and religious sensitivities.

The collection includes an essay that explores the function of live performance in recent freedom-of-expression debates, such as those featuring Janet Jackson and Don Imus, and persistent national anxieties about performers’ bodies. The issue also features an international censorship forum that brings together reports of incidents from Burma, Singapore, Germany, Italy, and the United States. A special report from Zimbabwe provides an in-depth look at the repression of oppositional theater by one of Africa’s most dictatorial regimes while another article looks at REwind: A Cantata for Voice, Tape and Testimony, a new musical composition that takes once-silenced voices recorded for South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and transforms them into a hymn for a postapartheid nation. The issue also includes the first publication of an inventive new play that is a satirical as well as chilling look at suppression and dissent in post-9/11 America.

Contributors: Howard Barker, Reverend Billy, Catherine Cole, Mike Daisey, Dean Damjanovski, Miriam Felton-Dansky, Jacob Gallagher-Ross, John Houchin, Rabih Mroué, Freddie Rokem, Tom Sellar, Fadi Toufiq, Praise Zenenga

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cover of Contours of the Theatrical Avant-Garde: Performance and Textuality

Contours of the Theatrical Avant-Garde

Performance and Textuality

James M. Harding, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 2000

Contours of the Theatrical Avant-Garde is a critical history of avant-garde performance and the problemation relationship of text to perfroamnce. The book's essays explore the development of avant-garde theater and its relation to questions of textuality, authority, and the academy. Although the canon of modern and contemporary drama would be difficult to imagine without the influential legacy of the movements and strands of the historical avant-garde, this critical history is often overlooked in courses on modern and contemporary drama and theater. Though primarily focusing on issues of textuality and performance, the essays regard the antitextualism of the avant-garde as indicative of the wide variety of anti-cultural sentiments that have characterized avant-garde performance. The volume begins with the anti-textual sentiments of the avant-garde, then offers antitextual models, explores specific performances, and ends with a critical analysis of the avant-garde. Uniting the array of opinions articulated is a belief that despite the problems that haunt the traditions of avant-garde theater, it can nonetheless offer continued valuable insights into the industries of literature, theater, scholarship, and culture.
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cover of Cormac McCarthy and Performance: Page, Stage, Screen

Cormac McCarthy and Performance

Page, Stage, Screen

By Stacey Peebles

University of Texas Press, 2017

Cormac McCarthy is renowned as the author of popular and acclaimed novels such as Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, and The Road. Throughout his career, however, McCarthy has also invested deeply in writing for film and theater, an engagement with other forms of storytelling that is often overlooked. He is the author of five screenplays and two plays, and he has been significantly involved with three of the seven film adaptations of his work. In this book, Stacey Peebles offers the first extensive overview of this relatively unknown aspect of McCarthy’s writing life, including the ways in which other artists have interpreted his work for the stage and screen.

Drawing on many primary sources in McCarthy’s recently opened archive, as well as interviews, Peebles covers the 1977 televised film The Gardener’s Son; McCarthy’s unpublished screenplays from the 1980s that became the foundation for his Border Trilogy novels and No Country for Old Men; various successful and unsuccessful productions of his two plays; and all seven film adaptations of his work, including John Hillcoat’s The Road (2009) and the Coen brothers’ Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men (2007). Emerging from this narrative is the central importance of tragedy—the rich and varied portrayals of violence and suffering and the human responses to them—in all of McCarthy’s work, but especially his writing for theater and film.

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cover of Counter-cartographies: Neurodivergence and the Errancies of Performance

Counter-cartographies

Neurodivergence and the Errancies of Performance

Leon J. Hilton

University of Minnesota Press, 2025

How to remake the world with neurodivergence at its heart


What if we embraced neurodivergent ways of being not as deviations to be corrected but as vital ways of inhabiting the world? What new realities might emerge? Bringing a much-needed humanistic perspective to the study of autism and other forms of neurodivergence, Counter-cartographies offers a bold reimagining of neurological difference, moving beyond rigid diagnostic frameworks to uncover more expansive, generative modes of existence.

 

Engaging the work of Fernand Deligny to trace how modern taxonomies of neurodivergence have hardened over time, Leon J. Hilton questions how these categories might instead serve as tools for remapping the world with neurodivergence at its center. At the heart of Counter-cartographies is an exploration of performance and performativity that reveals how the norm of neurotypical reality is continually reinforced through acts of doing, redoing, and undoing.

 

Charting the historical shift away from “mind” and toward “brain” and moving fluidly across disciplines—from digital art and documentary cinema to cybernetics and radical mental health movements—Hilton illuminates the deep interconnections between performance, perception, and the historical construction of the “neurotypical.” Through close readings of works by William Pope.L, Mel Baggs, Wu Tsang, and others, Hilton also examines how neurodivergence has been represented, embodied, and materialized in contemporary art and media. Restless, engrossing, and persistently attuned to moments of rupture when the neurotypical order falters, Counter-cartographies charts a path toward a more capacious, imaginative world.

 

 

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

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cover of Creating Our Own: Folklore, Performance, and Identity in Cuzco, Peru

Creating Our Own

Folklore, Performance, and Identity in Cuzco, Peru

Zoila S. Mendoza

Duke University Press, 2007

In Creating Our Own, anthropologist Zoila S. Mendoza explores the early-twentieth-century development of the “folkloric arts”—particularly music, dance, and drama—in Cuzco, Peru, revealing the central role that these expressive practices played in shaping ethnic and regional identities. Mendoza argues that the folkloric productions emerging in Cuzco in the early twentieth century were integral to, rather than only a reflection of, the social and political processes underlying the development of the indigenismo movement. By demonstrating how Cuzco’s folklore emerged from complex interactions between artists and intellectuals of different social classes, she challenges the idea that indigenismo was a project of the elites.

Mendoza draws on early-twentieth-century newspapers and other archival documents as well as interviews with key artistic and intellectual figures and their descendants. She offers vivid descriptions of the Peruvian Mission of Incaic Art, a tour undertaken by a group of artists from Cuzco, at their own expense, to represent Peru to Bolivia, Argentina, and Uruguay in 1923–24, as well as of the origins in the 1920s of the Qosqo Center of Native Art, the first cultural institution dedicated to regional and national folkloric art. She highlights other landmarks, including both The Charango Hour, a radio show that contributed to the broad acceptance of rural Andean music from its debut in 1937, and the rise in that same year of another major cultural institution, the American Art Institute of Cuzco. Throughout, she emphasizes the intricate local, regional, national, and international pressures that combined to produce folkloric art, especially the growing importance of national and international tourism in Cuzco.

Please visit the Web site http://nas.ucdavis.edu/creatingbook for samples of the images and music discussed in this book.

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cover of Critical Theory and Performance: Revised and Enlarged Edition

Critical Theory and Performance

Revised and Enlarged Edition

Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2007

Critical Theory and Performance presents a broad range of critical and theoretical methods and applies them to contemporary and historical performance genres—from stage plays, dance-dramas, performance art, cabaret, stand-up comedy, and jazz to circus, street theater, and shamanistic ritual. As the first comprehensive introduction to critical theory’s rich and diverse contributions to the study of drama, theater, and performance, the book has been highly influential for more than a decade in providing fertile ground for academic investigations in the lively field of performance studies.

This updated and expanded edition presents nineteen new essays by the field’s leading scholars and practitioners as well as new critical introductions by editors Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach. Reflecting recent trends in performance studies, this revised edition now includes discussions of critical race theory, postcolonial studies, gender and sexualities, and mediatized cultures. The resulting volume is a unique and indispensable tool for critics, teachers, and students that paves the way for future scholarship.

Janelle G. Reinelt is Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Warwick. Reinelt and Roach

Joseph R. Roach is Charles C. and Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of Theater and English at Yale University.

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cover of Critical University Studies and Performance

Critical University Studies and Performance

Edited by Noe Montez and Ariel Nereson

Vanderbilt University Press, 2026

Critical University Studies and Performance explores how we contend with issues of power, race, class, and gender in higher education, specifically as they relate to the complexities of theater and performance studies programs. In what ways might the fields of theater, performance, and dance studies, as they operate in institutions of higher education, support hegemonic logics as well as model reparative practices, given their perhaps unique disciplinary relationships to staging representation and their shared emphasis on embodiment as a practical and theoretical area of engagement?

Montez and Nereson bring together scholars with a diverse range of career experiences and embodied positions inside of higher learning in order to deepen the field’s theoretical inquiry using an ethnic studies framework. By participating in the interdisciplinary discourse of critical university studies, the volume aims to explore how to conduct ethical research that critiques the university while remaining mindful of our always contingent place within it. The contributors examine the ways the university commodifies minoritarian knowledge, tokenizes the arts, and reproduces inequality. This book offers strategic ways to build liberatory communities and revolutionary networks among students and faculty alike in order to envision futures within and beyond the academy.

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cover of Crossings: Creative Ecologies of Cruising

Crossings

Creative Ecologies of Cruising

João Florêncio

Rutgers University Press, 2025

It’s difficult to pinpoint the origins of cruising. While the term was used by men seeking casual encounters with other men in the parks and streets of New York City as early as the 1920s, historical records show the practice is much older. Cruising has existed for as long as anyone outside the dominant sex and gender systems has sought sexual encounters outside of sanctioned norms. This book offers a serious exploration of queer sex and sex cultures, exploring cruising as a mode of thinking with the body and communicating through sexuality. 
 
A creative dialogue between a queer artist and a queer academic reminiscing about and thinking with their cruising experiences, Crossings takes queer sex practices and cultures seriously as ways of knowing and world-making. The result is an erotic hybrid form hovering between scholarship and avant-garde experimentation, between critical manifesto and sex memoir. Here, the voices of each author, merged together in one, invite the reader to inhabit the erotic spacetime between self and other, the familiar and the strange, desire and pleasure, climax and release. That is, the spaces and temporalities of cruising itself.
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cover of Cue Tears: On the Act of Crying

Cue Tears

On the Act of Crying

Daniel Sack

University of Michigan Press, 2024

Crying holds a privileged place in conversations around emotions as an expression of authentic feeling. And yet, tears are ambiguous: they might signal the most positive and negative of affects; they might present a sincere revelation of self or be simulated to manipulate others. Unsurprisingly, tears figure prominently on stage and on screen, where actors have experimented with the mechanics of making tears. Cue Tears: On the Act of Crying uses tears as a prism through which to see some of the foundational problems and paradoxes of acting and spectatorship anew, including matters of authenticity and sincerity, the ethics of the witness, the interaction between a speech act and its affective force, liveness and documentation.

Across seven semi-autonomous essays, Cue Tears looks at the mechanisms of tear production, internal and external techniques that actors use to weep, and the effects of tears in performance situations on the stage, in the gallery, and in the classroom. The writing moves with a light touch between theory and criticism of a broad range of instances from literature, theater, performance art, visual art, and cinema, while also embracing a strong autobiographical and personal slant. Author Daniel Sack’s father was a biochemist who studied tears and collected his son’s tears for research during his childhood. These “reflex tears” were produced as a physical response to irritation—an eye stretched past the point of blinking, a cotton swab up the nose. This childhood occupation coincided with his first years taking acting classes, trying to learn how to cry “emotional tears” onstage through psychological stimulation and the recollection of memory. Cue Tears investigates these memories and methods, finding that tears both shore up and dissolve distinctions between truth and artifice, emotional and physical, private and public, sad and humorous.
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cover of Cultural Struggles: Performance, Ethnography, Praxis

Cultural Struggles

Performance, Ethnography, Praxis

Dwight Conquergood

University of Michigan Press, 2013

The late Dwight Conquergood’s research has inspired an entire generation of scholars invested in performance as a meaningful paradigm to understand human interaction, especially between structures of power and the disenfranchised. Conquergood’s research laid the groundwork for others to engage issues of ethics in ethnographic research, performance as a meaningful paradigm for ethnography, and case studies that demonstrated the dissolution of theory/practice binaries.Cultural Struggles is the first gathering of Conquergood’s work in a single volume, tracing the evolution of one scholar’s thinking across a career of scholarship, teaching, and activism, and also the first collection of its kind to bring together theory, method, and complete case studies.

The collection begins with an illuminating introduction by E. Patrick Johnson and ends with commentary by other scholars (Micaela di Leonardo, Judith Hamera, Shannon Jackson, D. Soyini Madison, Lisa Merrill, Della Pollock, and Joseph Roach), engaging aspects of Conquergood’s work and providing insight into how that work has withstood the test of time, as scholars still draw on his research to inform their current interests and methods.

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