310 books match the query 'Performance' and 14 start with i

cover of Immersions in Cultural Difference: Tourism, War, Performance

Immersions in Cultural Difference

Tourism, War, Performance

Natalie Alvarez

University of Michigan Press, 2018

In a time of intensifying xenophobia and anti-immigration measures, this book examines the impulse to acquire a deeper understanding of cultural others. Immersions in Cultural Difference takes readers into the heart of immersive simulations, including a simulated terrorist training camp in Utah; mock Afghan villages at military bases in Canada and the UK; a fictional Mexico-US border run in Hidalgo, Mexico; and an immersive tour for settlers at a First Nations reserve in Manitoba, Canada. Natalie Alvarez positions the phenomenon of immersive simulations within intersecting cultural formations: a neoliberal capitalist interest in the so-called “experience economy” that operates alongside histories of colonization and a heightened state of xenophobia produced by War on Terror discourse. The author queries the ethical stakes of these encounters, including her own in relation to the field research she undertakes. As the book moves from site to site, the reader discovers how these immersions function as intercultural rehearsal theaters that serve a diverse set of strategies and pedagogical purposes: they become a “force multiplier” within military strategy, a transgressive form of dark tourism, an activist strategy, and a global, profit-generating practice for a neoliberal capitalist marketplace.
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cover of In Concert: Performing Musical Persona

In Concert

Performing Musical Persona

Phillip Auslander

University of Michigan Press, 2021

The conventional way of understanding what musicians do as performers is to treat them as producers of sound; some even argue that it is unnecessary to see musicians in performance as long as one can hear them.  But musical performance, counters Philip Auslander, is also a social interaction between musicians and their audiences, appealing as much to the eye as to the ear. In Concert: Performing Musical Persona he addresses not only the visual means by which musicians engage their audiences through costume and physical gesture, but also spectacular aspects of performance such as light shows.

Although musicians do not usually enact fictional characters on stage, they nevertheless present themselves to audiences in ways specific to the performance situation.  Auslander’s term to denote the musician’s presence before the audience is musical persona.  While presence of a musical persona may be most obvious within rock and pop music, the book’s analysis extends to classical music, jazz, blues, country, electronic music, laptop performance, and music made with experimental digital interfaces. The eclectic group of performers discussed include the Beatles, Miles Davis, Keith Urban, Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj, Frank Zappa, B. B. King, Jefferson Airplane, Virgil Fox, Keith Jarrett, Glenn Gould, and Laurie Anderson.

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cover of In the Course of Performance: Studies in the World of Musical Improvisation

In the Course of Performance

Studies in the World of Musical Improvisation

Edited by Bruno Nettl and Melinda Russell

University of Chicago Press, 1998

In the Course of Performance is the first book in decades to illustrate and explain the practices and processes of musical improvisation. Improvisation, by its very nature, seems to resist interpretation or elucidation. This difficulty may account for the very few attempts scholars have made to provide a general guide to this elusive subject. With contributions by seventeen scholars and improvisers, In the Course of Performance offers a history of research on improvisation and an overview of the different approaches to the topic that can be used, ranging from cognitive study to detailed musical analysis. Such diverse genres as Italian lyrical singing, modal jazz, Indian classical music, Javanese gamelan, and African-American girls' singing games are examined. The most comprehensive guide to the understanding of musical improvisation available, In the Course of Performance will be indispensable to anyone attracted to this fascinating art.

Contributors are Stephen Blum, Sau Y. Chan, Jody Cormack, Valerie Woodring Goertzen, Lawrence Gushee, Eve Harwood, Tullia Magrini, Peter Manuel, Ingrid Monson, Bruno Nettl, Jeff Pressing, Ali Jihad Racy, Ronald Riddle, Stephen Slawek, Chris Smith, R. Anderson Sutton, and T. Viswanathan.
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cover of In-action: Viennese Actionism and the Passivities of Performance Art

In-action

Viennese Actionism and the Passivities of Performance Art

Caroline Lillian Schopp

University of Chicago Press, 2025

A novel approach to performance art and its history that revisits Viennese Actionism, one of the most controversial episodes of the 1960s.
 
Viennese Actionism represents a notorious case within art history, often cited but little studied, especially in the United States. By carefully looking at the unsettling performances that define this movement, Caroline Lillian Schopp offers a vital corrective to the narrative. Schopp observes that contrary to the reception of their graphic violence, many performances explore passivity, vulnerability, and dependence in gestures of “in-action.” Viennese Actionism registers hesitations about the liberatory ethos of the 1960s, amplified by Austria’s marginalized postwar social and artistic culture. In dialogue with feminist theory, In-action assembles a vocabulary for performance art without the standards of self-assertion, emancipation, and expressive action that continue to inform how art and politics are understood today.
 
Decentering the traditional focus on the male protagonists of Viennese Actionism—Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler—Schopp draws attention to women who performed with them, including Anna Brus, Hanel Koeck, and Ingrid Wiener. Doing so brings into view how these performances scrutinize intimate relationships like marriages, partnerships, and friendships, as well as the conventions of traditional artistic media such as painting and tapestry.
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cover of Incapacity: Wittgenstein, Anxiety, and Performance Behavior

Incapacity

Wittgenstein, Anxiety, and Performance Behavior

Spencer Golub

Northwestern University Press, 2014

In this highly original study of the nature of performance, Spencer Golub uses the insights of Ludwig Wittgenstein into the way language works to analyze the relationship between the linguistic and the visual in the work of a broad range of dramatists, novelists, and filmmakers, among them Richard Foreman, Mac Wellman, Peter Handke, David Mamet, and Alfred Hitchcock. Like Wittgenstein, these artists are concerned with the limits of language’s representational capacity. For Golub, it is these limits that give Wittgenstein’s thought a further, very personal significance—its therapeutic quality with respect to the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder from which he suffers.

Underlying what Golub calls “performance behavior” is Wittgenstein’s notion of “pain behavior”—that which gives public expression to private experience. Golub charts new directions for exploring the relationship between theater and philosophy, and even for scholarly criticism itself.

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cover of Incarceration Games: A History of Role-Play in Psychology, Prisons, and Performance

Incarceration Games

A History of Role-Play in Psychology, Prisons, and Performance

Stephen Scott-Bottoms

University of Michigan Press, 2024

Revisiting the Stanford Prison Experiment and other psychological experiments as performance and theater
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cover of Incense and Performance: The Lives of Mexica Ritual Specialists

Incense and Performance

The Lives of Mexica Ritual Specialists

Sánchez-Perry, Josefrayn

University of Arizona Press, 2026

At the time of the conquest of Mexico, the anonymous authors of the Anales de Tlatelolco (1560s) recorded the deaths of two Mexica ritual specialists. During the tumultuous events of the times, Quauhnochtli (a telpochcalli specialist) and Quauhcoatl (a calmecac specialist) died protecting the temple of Huitzilopochtli and his bundled embodiement in the neighborhood of Huitznahuac. 

Scholar Josefrayn Sánchez-Perry reconstructs the lives and labors of the two specialists, articulated through Nahuatl-language texts, material culture from neighborhood and temple spaces, and the academic study of religion. The book expands on known theories on Mexica ritual specialists by providing new insights about telpochcalli and calmecac duties, their interrelated educational models, and the collective practices that brought people, animals, flora, specialists, and teteo (more-than-human forces) together. The book demonstrates that telpochcalli and calmecac specialists shared the ritual responsibilities of collective and elective practices.

Giving care to teteo, giving life, and giving offerings were balanced with giving war, giving council, and giving music and dance. As Quauhnochtli and Quauhcoatl ensured the safety of the bundled Huitzilopochtli, they characterized how a Mexica ritual specialist lived and what they did.

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cover of Increasing the Odds for High-Performance Teams: Lessons Learned

Increasing the Odds for High-Performance Teams

Lessons Learned

Arlen Leholm

Michigan State University Press, 2006

Have you ever wondered why some work teams greatly out-perform others within the same organizational settings? Have you questioned whether work teams from very different sectors of the economy and society achieved a high performance level by using similar means? Have you considered what you or others might do to help eams increase their chances of becoming truly high performing? Increasing the Odds for High-Performance Teams is written for the business leader who is inquisitive but busy—who seeks new lessons about high team performance but wants them to be succinct and efficient.
     The book is intended to assist professionals in private, public, and not-for-profit organizations who want to use teams to enhance job performance. Also, it is intended to be helpful to the team members, team leaders, mentors, coaches, and administrators across these sectors who want to diagnose their team and organizational conditions, in order to make improvements.

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cover of Innovation, Style and Spectacle in Wayang: Purbo Asmoro and the Evolution of an Indonesian Performing Art

Innovation, Style and Spectacle in Wayang

Purbo Asmoro and the Evolution of an Indonesian Performing Art

Kathryn Emerson

National University of Singapore Press, 2022

A richly illustrated study of wayang, the traditional puppet theater form of Java, based on unprecedented decades-long participatory research.
 
Wayang, the traditional puppet theater form of Java, fascinates and endures thanks to the many ways it works as a medium—bearing the weight of Javanese culture and tradition as a key component of rites of passage, as a medium of ritual and spiritual practice, as public spectacle, and as entertainment of the broadest sort, performed live, broadcast, or streamed. Over the past forty years, the form has been subject to a great deal of experimentation and innovation, pulled in many directions within an ever-changing media landscape. In this book, Kathryn Anne Emerson outlines both significant contributions by a number of key figures and the social and political influences propelling such innovations. She also describes deeper and more lasting changes in wayang, based on what the art form's most accomplished practitioners have to say about it. At the core of the book is one pivotal figure, Purbo Asmoro of the Indonesian Institute of the Arts in Surakarta, who, Emerson argues, has taken the individual and singular innovations of the era and integrated them into a new system of performance practice, one that has shaped the key Surakarta school of performance. Grounded in an unprecedented, decades-long participatory research project involving hundreds of interlocutors, the book is beautifully illustrated and will be of considerable interest in Indonesian studies.
 
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cover of Insights in Applied Theatre: The Early Days and Onwards

Insights in Applied Theatre

The Early Days and Onwards

Edited by John O'Toole, Penny Bundy, and Peter O'Connor

Intellect Books, 2023

Revelations about the theatrical practice and its evolution.

Insights in Applied Theatre offers an inside look into the advent of applied theater and its development as an area of practice and research. Much more than an archive, the texts in this collection present vivid, pertinent voices and messages from the pioneers of applied theater. The nineteen articles chosen by the editors of Applied Theatre Research represent key themes and elements from the start of the practice. The articles—many of which were influential in their own time—have much to say to the contemporary scene. They have been arranged in sections according to key themes and issues discovered, investigated, and stumbled across by the trailblazing writers in the collection. A vital new contribution to the field, the book raises questions about the contested issues of power, partnerships, and voice in applied theater.
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cover of Interpreting The Theatrical Past: Historiography Of Performance

Interpreting The Theatrical Past

Historiography Of Performance

Thomas Postlewait

University of Iowa Press, 1989

The essays in this broadly based work examine the research procedures, practices, problems, and opportunities in the field of theatre history. No single methodology or theory dominates this anthology; instead it offers various approaches to the study of the theatrical past. It is the first of its kind in theatre historiography, useful for research as well as classroom adoption.
Though these thirteen essays provide historical information on specific people, events, works, documents, institutions, and social conditions in the theatre, they aim primarily to explore theoretical and methodological issues, to review and analyze current research practices and presuppositions, and to identify and apply new theoretical orientations to theatre studies. Whatever their interpretive viewpoint and rhetorical tone, each of the essays calls for greater awareness of the problems and opportunities that face the discipline. Consequently, this collection will be valuable reading not only for theatre historians but for scholars in literary and popular studies and in all the performing arts.
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cover of Intimate Inequalities: Performing Migrant Domestic Work

Intimate Inequalities

Performing Migrant Domestic Work

Ella Parry-Davies

Northwestern University Press, 2025

Mobilizing performance to amplify migrant domestic workers’ creative expertise
 
Intimate inequalities exist where the embodied and the everyday rub up against transnational structures of power. Ella Parry-Davies conducted collaborative research with migrant domestic workers from the Philippines living in the UK and Lebanon, where migration is regulated by employer sponsorship systems, to explore how they negotiate the intimacy of the family home and the attendant inequalities of laboring within it. Intimate Inequalities: Performing Migrant Domestic Work brings these conditions into focus while articulating a methodological inquiry into the dynamics of collaborative performance research. Parry-Davies examines site-specific soundwalks, recorded and coedited with domestic workers, which steer the book between church choirs in Beirut and activist gatherings in London, and from urban performances in Lebanon’s 2019 revolution to mutual aid organizing amid COVID-19 in the UK. Breaking with prevalent depictions of migrant domestic workers as voiceless and victimized, Intimate Inequalities mobilizes performance as both an analytic lens and a practical methodology, amplifying its subjects’ expertise while reckoning with the intimate yet unequal dynamics of research itself.
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cover of Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York

Into Performance

Japanese Women Artists in New York

Yoshimoto, Midori

Rutgers University Press, 2005

The 1960s was a time of incredible freedom and exploration in the art world, particularly in New York City, which witnessed the explosion of New Music, Happenings, Fluxus, New Dance, pop art, and minimalist art. Also notable during this period, although often overlooked, is the inordinate amount of revolutionary art that was created by women.

Into Performance fills a critical gap in both American and Japanese art history as it brings to light the historical significance of five women artists-Yoko Ono, Yayoi Kusama, Takako Saito, Mieko Shiomi, and Shigeko Kubota. Unusually courageous and self-determined, they were among the first Japanese women to leave their country-and its male-dominated, conservative art world-to explore the artistic possibilities in New York. They not only benefited from the New York art scene, however, they played a major role in the development of international performance and intermedia art by bridging avant garde movements in Tokyo and New York.

This book traces the pioneering work of these five women artists and the socio-cultural issues that shaped their careers. Into Performance also explores the transformation of these artists' lifestyle from traditionally confined Japanese women to internationally active artists. Yoshimoto demonstrates how their work paved the way for younger Japanese women artists who continue to seek opportunities in the West today.

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cover of Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance

Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance

Edited by Judith Rugg and Michèle Sedgwick

Intellect Books, 2007

To stay relevant, art curators must keep up with the rapid pace of technological innovation as well as the aesthetic tastes of fickle critics and an ever-expanding circle of cultural arbiters. Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance argues that, despite these daily pressures, good curating work also requires more theoretical attention.

In four thematic sections, a distinguished group of contributors consider curation in light of interdisciplinary and emerging practices, examine conceptions of curation as intervention and contestation, and explore curation’s potential to act as a reconsideration of conventional museum spaces. Against the backdrop of cutting-edge developments in electronic art, art/science collaboration, nongallery spaces, and virtual fields, contributors propose new approaches to curating and new ways of fostering critical inquiry. Now in paperback, this volume is an essential read for scholars, curators, and art enthusiasts alike.

 
 
 
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