Results by title
3258 books match the query 'Performing Arts' and 306 start with s
Swim Pretty
Aquatic Spectacles and the Performance of Race, Gender, and NatureJennifer A. Kokai
Southern Illinois University Press, 2017
Examining dramatic works in water and performances at four water parks, Kokai shows that the evolution of these works and performances helps us better understand our ever-changing relationship with the oceans and their inhabitants. Kokai sorts the regard for and harnessing of water in aquatic spectacles into three categories—natural, tamed, and domesticated—and discusses the ways in which these modes of water are engaged in the performances throug an aesthetics of descension. Ultimately, this study links the uncritical love of aquatic spectacles to a disregard for the rights of marine animals and lack of concern for the marine environment.
Swinging the Machine
Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture between the World WarsJoel Dinerstein
University of Massachusetts Press, 2003
In any age and any given society, cultural practices reflect the material circumstances of people's everyday lives. According to Joel Dinerstein, it was no different in America between the two World Wars—an era sometimes known as the “machine age”—when innovative forms of music and dance helped a newly urbanized population cope with the increased mechanization of modern life. Grand spectacles such as the Ziegfeld Follies and the movies of Busby Berkeley captured the American ethos of mass production, with chorus girls as the cogs of these fast, flowing pleasure vehicles.
Yet it was African American culture, Dinerstein argues, that ultimately provided the means of aesthetic adaptation to the accelerated tempo of modernity. Drawing on a legacy of engagement with and resistance to technological change, with deep roots in West African dance and music, black artists developed new cultural forms that sought to humanize machines. In “The Ballad of John Henry,” the epic toast “Shine,” and countless blues songs, African Americans first addressed the challenge of industrialization. Jazz musicians drew on the symbol of the train within this tradition to create a set of train-derived aural motifs and rhythms, harnessing mechanical power to cultural forms. Tap dance and the lindy hop brought machine aesthetics to the human body, while the new rhythm section of big band swing mimicked the industrial soundscape of northern cities. In Dinerstein's view, the capacity of these artistic innovations to replicate the inherent qualities of the machine-speed, power, repetition, flow, precision-helps explain both their enormous popularity and social function in American life.
Switching to Digital Television
UK Public Policy and the MarketMichael Starks
Intellect Books, 2007
Symptoms of the Self
Tuberculosis and the Making of the Modern StageRoberta Barker
University of Iowa Press, 2022
Symptoms of the Self offers the first full study of the stage consumptive. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in France, Britain, and North America, tuberculosis was a leading killer. Its famous dramatic and operatic victims—Marguerite Gautier in La Dame aux Camélias and her avatar Violetta in La Traviata, Mimì in La Bohème, Little Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Edmund Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey into Night, to name but a few—are among the most iconic figures of the Western stage. Its classic symptoms, the cough and the blood-stained handkerchief, have become global performance shorthand for life-threatening illness.
The consumptive character became a vehicle through which standards of health, beauty, and virtue were imposed; constructions of class, gender, and sexuality were debated; the boundaries of nationhood were transgressed or maintained; and an exceedingly fragile whiteness was held up as a dominant social ideal. By telling the story of tuberculosis on the transatlantic stage, Symptoms of the Self uncovers some of the wellsprings of modern Western theatrical practice—and of ideas about the self that still affect the way human beings live and die.
Sync
Stylistics of Hieroglyphic TimeAuthored by James Tobias
Temple University Press, 2010
In Sync, James Tobias examines the development of musical sound and image in cinema and media art, indicating how these elements define the nature and experience of reception. Placing musicality at the center of understanding streaming media, Tobias presents six interwoven stories about synchronized audiovisual media—from filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky to today’s contemporary digital art and computer games—to show how these effects are never merely "musical" in the literal sense of organized sound.
Systemic Dramaturgy
A Handbook for the Digital AgeMichael Mark Chemers and Mike Sell
Southern Illinois University Press, 2022
Systemic Dramaturgy offers an invigorating, practical look at the daunting cultural problems of the digital age as they relate to performance. Authors Michael Mark Chemers and Mike Sell reject the incompatibility of theatre with robots, digital media, or video games. Instead, they argue that technology is the original problem of theatre: How can we tell this story and move this audience with these tools? And if we have different tools, how can that change the stories we tell?
This volume attunes readers to “systemic dramaturgy”—the recursive elements of signification, innovation, and history that underlie all performance—arguing that theatre must be understood as a system of systems, a concatenation of people, places, things, politics, feelings, and interpretations, ideally working together to entertain and edify an audience. The authors discuss in-depth the application of time-tested dramaturgical skills to extra-theatrical endeavors, including multi-platform performance, installations, and videogames. And they identify the unique interventions that dramaturgs can and must make into these art forms.
More than any other book that has been published in the field, Systemic Dramaturgy places historical dramaturgy in conversation with technologies as old as the deus ex machina and as new as artificial intelligence. Spirited and playful in its approach, this volume collates histories, transcripts, and case studies and applies the concepts of systemic dramaturgy to works both old and avant-garde. Between chapters, Chemers and Sell talk with with some of the most forward-thinking, innovative, and creative people working in live media as they share their diverse approaches to the challenges of making performances, games, and digital media that move both heart and mind. This volume is nothing less than a guide for thinking about the future evolution of performance.