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Performance Remains
... The places of prisons, as these geographers articulate, are seeded within the perception of delineated boundaries between public and private/privatised life. We require decarceral and abolitionist research methodologies that are similarly embodied, dialogic, and porous: epistolary forms, particularly those performed, and whose 'performance remains' (Schneider 2001) aggregate in archives, offer breakdowns of the sensory rubrics of public/privatised life. (De)carcerally enfleshed in the archive, these fragments of experience are vital to countering the material virulence of carceral logics. ...
... .] [S]tates use the archive to write history over and against the lived experience of marginalized people' (Arjomand 2018, p. 171). Positioning Phelan's concept of ephemerality of performance in direct relation to this power matrix of the archive/state, performance studies scholar Rebecca Schneider (2001) examines western constructs of the archive via its Greek root archon, meaning the house of the Head of State. In determining what is housable, the archive determines what histories and identities are valid and in what ways, and how these may be accessed, and by whom. ...
... Due to its core quality of ephemerality and disappearance, performance practice resists the archive; yet because the archive operates via processes of exclusion, it requires the disappearance of what is not allowed to be held within it, in order to exist. Therefore, Schneider suggests, the archive becomes itself through a materialisation of disappearance: she terms this 'performance remains' (Schneider 2001). Recognising and accessing performance remains can illuminate how we construct memories of the past; even further, performance 'remains differently' in such a way that it generates knowledge against fetishised materialities of the archive. ...
In this article, I explore performances of letter writing within the archives of the London-based theatre company Clean Break, who work with justice-experienced women and women at risk. Clean Break’s archive at the Bishopsgate Institute in London contains an extensive collection of production ephemera and letters. Charting the company’s development across forty years of theatre productions, public advocacy, and work in prisons and community settings, these materials of the archive—strategic documents, annotated playscripts and rehearsal notes, production photography and correspondence—reveal the acute importance of the letter to people living on the immediate borderlands of the prison. Despite these generative resonances, however, the epistolary form is very rarely used in Clean Break’s theatre: as the archive reveals, since the company was founded by two women in HM Prison Askham Grange in 1979, stagings of letters have occurred in only a handful of instances. In this archival exploration of the epistolary in three works by Clean Break—a film broadcast by the BBC, a play staged at the Royal Court, and a circular chain-play written by women in three prisons—I investigate what lifeworlds beyond prison epistolary forms in performance propose.
... Bernstein refers to these dances with things as "performative," meaning a performance that produces something, that is fundamentally efficacious. Coming from J.L. Austin and John R. Searle and then traveling through thinkers on gender ( Judith Butler [(1990) 1999]), cognitive linguistics (Eve Sweetser [2000]), and performance studies (Richard Schechner [2013], Joseph Roach [1996], Rebecca Schneider [2000], Diana Taylor [2003], and others), performativity continues to have tremendous potential for helping us make different sense of the ways in which our actions change us-socially, cognitively, fundamentally. I love the idea of the performative: the idea that some actions generate leftovers, they do something. ...
We perceive loss by tracing the contours of what we invent in its place. When a work of art invites spectators to engage with it, it offers them an opportunity to process loss. Such artworks can be theatrical, visual, or architectural—like a public memorial; what unites them is the experience of the spectator. Individual and personal experiences of grief connect with the social expressions of large-scale loss when the one shows up, fractal-like, in the details of the other.
... This idea could be in line with the concept of artworks as event presented by Hanna Hölling. It is not a product-art (traditional artworks), but a process-art (artworks after the temporal turn in the sense of both the 1960s temporal shift and the temporal theories proposed) implies the concerns with that which remains (Hölling, H., 2016, p.21;Schneider, R. 2001). Hölling also talks about relative durations things instead of ephemeral or permanent artworks. ...
In an era of technology-based life, we might understand the language but not pay attention to the message. Conservators, historians, curators, collectors have been focusing their efforts on finding strategies to preserve, document, exhibit, sell and maintain the idea of authenticity. It is essential to discuss and re-define our limits, the ethics that concern these “new” languages. Languages have been around for almost half a century, but we still think they are new technologies. From the Performance Art, art-related professionals learned that sometimes art is like a smell; it is there, you can feel it, you can store it in your inner brain, describe it, and remake it, but it is not there. We accept strategies that help the market, the history, the institutions, the collectors. We all play the same game with different hats. However, what when the artist explicitly says no. In a previous Ph.D. research, a study on the use of the artist’s interview; the aim of this research was not to show how good the artist’s interview was, as it had been long proved, but to collect and compare the results, the mistakes, the human part of the creative process and the conservation field. Making questions is one of the essential parts of the research, and most of the time, not an answer can be found, not even the shadow of an academically accepted answer, but some other smells were found. This abstract wants to expose the case study of a piece made to stay for the period that technology and life permitted; an image made with an old technology telephone, one printed copy, on a low-quality paper, framed with an Ikea frame. No replacement is allowed, no treatments, no migration or storage of the file. The interview helped to understand the idea of deterioration. An idea linked to the durability and acceptance of its death. Are we ready to accept the real ephemerality? Do we understand the preservation of the idea of deterioration? Is the collector, the institution, ready to enjoy while it lasts? This presentation can be delivered as a talk or as a conversation with the artist involved in the study case.
... She was surprised and able to laugh at herself. The experience generated through this performance remained differently (Schneider, 2001) in bodily consciousness. ...
As part of a larger research study investigating humour in music therapy with persons with dementia, this article details how music therapists perceive, embody and experience humour in their practice. Three focus groups with music therapists ( N = 9) were organised and resulting data analysed through arts-based reflexive methods.
Building on Schenstead’s (2012) articulation of arts-based reflexivity, two distinct and overlapping forms of thinking through improvisation are highlighted; self-reflexivity and collaborative-reflexivity. Finlay’s (2011) phenomenological lifeworld-oriented questions are used to explicate dimensions of experiences of humour and frame broad thematic reflections. Particular correspondence between improvisation as a way of being and humour in music therapy are explored performatively through a group improvisation involving the first author.
The findings from this synthesis offer insight into how music therapists conceive of humour in their work as supportive of relational bonding, and also experience humour as distancing and defensive behaviour. Along with the perceived risks of humour in relational therapeutic work, an intricate balance between playfulness and professionalism surfaced as part of a music therapy identity. Improvisation, while seemingly taken for granted as a part of spontaneous humour, is also problematised through the perceived seriousness of learning how to improvise as a music therapist aligning with a psychodynamic approach. The consequences of these findings are discussed in relation to music therapy pedagogy and practice along with methodological implications of thinking through improvisation.
Dragging the Archive: A Personal Re:encounter with Franklin Furnace’s Cyber Beginnings was an exhibition I curated in the Victorian Library at Pratt Institute in New York that showed a range of materials relating to the ‘cyber turn’ the organization took in the mid-1990s and the first few years of Franklin Furnace’s decade-long performance series of work presented online entitled The Future of the Present . Keen to highlight the labour involved with maintaining such an archive, my curatorial approach included weaving in my own personal diary entries from that time to provide a 22-year-old’s perspective of New York at that time; my own photographs of both the archive and the people involved in it; a video I made of never before shown slides of the first two years of the Netcasts, and e-mails revealing the pushback founding director Martha Wilson and her team encountered in this decision to move from being a physical arts organization with a space in downtown Tribeca, to an online organization. A fax from Laurie Anderson expresses dismay at this new mode of presenting work, whilst negotiations with Pseudo Studios revealed how much money was being charged for this pixilated vision of the present moving into the future. This article is a poetic reflection on the personal approach I took to putting this show together a year on, incorporating where I am (was) now (then) as I wrote/write, not very well with lingering COVID-19, feeling myself to be archived, as the digital version of the show lives on. My own labour (for the time being) exhausted.
Artistic appropriation, the notion of purposely combining pre-existing materials into wholes not known before, is the subject of this chapter. It will examine the political implications of the conscious appropriation of material from visual art into contemporary dance. As Walter Benjamin argues, when “the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice—politics” (“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” in Illumination, 166–195. ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1969, p. 6). It will focus on two choreographers appropriating movement from visual art to dance. The exact movements, gestures, and poses of models drawn by the Viennese painter Egon Schiele that some were characterized as pornographic are appropriated by Lea Anderson for her dance The Featherstonehaughs Draw on the Sketch Books of Egon Schiele (1998). With her all-male company, she plays with and deconstructs his gender and desire representations, thus elaborating on discourses of feminist critique of her era. Arkadi Zaides’ solo Archive (2014) was created from violent materials filmed by Palestinian volunteers of Israeli settlers in the West Bank, for the Camera Distribution Project B’Tselem (the Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights). Zaides performs the movements and gestures of the Israelis and their reactions in a variety of situations, captured by the cameras. At the same time, he focuses the viewers’ attention on the movements, voices, and perspectives of the Palestinians behind the camera. In doing so, Zaides confronts and identifies with the archival materials, but when reviving it through his body, he raises questions dealing with his responsibility and participation in what is happening.
El presente artículo parte de investigar las relaciones entre archivo y performance, desde la postura de Jorge Blasco en la introducción de Archivar (2017) y el ensayo «Performance remains» de Rebecca Schneider (2001), en cuanto buscan aproximarse a las formas materiales en las que la práctica artística se produce y funciona como epistemología a través de su performatividad. La investigación destaca los procedimientos que posicionan a los archivos de arte contemporáneo como dispositivos sociopolíticos. Si en la actualidad la conservación emplea la documentación audiovisual para la preservación de arte de performance, consideramos necesario reestudiar este procedimiento como una mediación entre el gesto artístico y su potencial social. Por lo tanto, en el ensayo se examinó el caso de la plataforma audiovisual Hamaca. Especialmente, las activaciones realizadas a las piezas audiovisuales que alberga su archivo y que generan formas de bienestar común desde la intervención de colectivos y agentes de mediación cultural.
Anke Charton takes the backstory of the canario, a baroque court dance, as an example to consider mixed methods in historiographic work. Marginalized knowledges, in particular, benefit from such an approach. Performance practices that have left few conventional traces behind can be explored more thoroughly if those traces are queried from different perspectives: reading archival sources against the grain, drawing on positionality, and engaging multiple temporal frameworks. The case of the canario illustrates the additional challenge – true for much of early modern Western theatre history – of working with a later, superimposed narrative that obscures an earlier, less-documented practice.
Worldwide interest in understanding art and creative practices as valid forms of knowledge production has led to the establishment of research-creation as an interdisciplinary academic field in the last twenty years in Canada as elsewhere. Its establishment relates to a growing interest in critical making and technological innovation and to the legacies of feminism(s) and its critique of the power dynamics of knowledge production within academia. This article outlines a series of interactive projects that bring visibility to Latin American women in art, science and technology and speculates on the legacies of feminism(s) in the emergence of research-creation. The four projects discussed build on each other and explore re-mediation, re-activation and re-enactment as part of a collaborative feminist research-creation methodology. I theorize their potential to activate political memory by highlighting how these three approaches to creation share a preoccupation for revisiting the past through repetition, iteration and the facilitation of intergenerational encounters among humans, non-humans and across media and technologies. While discussing the feminist orientation of these approaches, I suggest a critique of dominant modes of knowledge production that have obscured the contributions of Latin American women and offer four research-creation interventions in the media arts archive.
This article discusses the complexities around movement dynamics and how the term ‘dynamic archive’ is understood in dance. Drawing from Andre Lepecki’s ‘The body as archive’ (2010), Rudolf Laban and F. C. Lawrence’s Effort theory (1947) and a choreological perspective to investigate the complexities of dynamics as an embodied phenomenon, I discuss the body as a dynamic archive of embodied experience. This article provides debate about how dynamics are learnt and recalled for the purposes of re-staging and how movement dynamics are stored by the dancer as a dynamic archive.
This book charts the ways in which intermediality—the crossing of borders between film and other arts and media—can provide an encompassing, inclusive, and nonteleological understanding of film history. Moving across diverse approaches, technologies, national contexts, and artistic styles, the collection depicts a clear and complex trajectory of cinematic phenomena according to the medial and artistic interactions they require and produce. Visions of the “evolution” of cinema have traditionally hinged on the axis of World War II that separates so-called classical Hollywood cinema from a purported modern European-style production, a scheme that subjects the entire world to the cinematic history of two hegemonic centres. In turn, histories of film as a technological medium have focused on the specificity of cinema as it gradually separated from the other art and medial forms at its base: theatre, dance, fairground spectacle, painting, literature, still photography, and other pre-cinematic modes. Taking an ambitious step forward with relation to these theories, this book places its bet on the fluid quality of the film form itself. In so doing, it opens up to an array of exciting and often neglected artistic expressions worldwide as they permeate and interconnect films across temporal, geographical, and cultural borders. By observing the ebb and flow of film’s contours within the bounds of other artistic and medial expressions, this collection aspires to establish a flexible historical platform for the moving form of film, posited, from production to consumption, as a transforming and transformative medium.
‘Nightgown parties’ is an experimental visual essay featuring a new fairy tale and previously unpublished images, a three-way collaborative ‘party’ between an artist, writer and curator. The curator, Catriona McAra, begins with a compact, comparative preface for the imaginative practices of the artist and writer which intersect at the lost moment of fairy-tale costume. Writer Kate Bernheimer has prepared a new story, ‘The Crown of Stars’ about a found photograph from artist Samantha Sweeting’s childhood, Golden Crown , in which the 4-year-old artist wears fancy dress and appears to be dancing with abandon. McAra argues that, for both, the fairy-tale costume functions as primary matter, with close reference to well-known tales that feature articles of clothing such as Charles Perrault’s ‘Peau d’Âne’ (‘Donkeyskin’), ‘Cinderella’, and ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. McAra’s context for this new tale and image brings together fairy-tale scholarship and costume studies.
Using two of my performance pieces as case studies, this paper analyses the use of oral testimony and listening in contemporary performance to activate a narrative reaction from the public. Describing how unique spaces of participatory art for activating individual and collective remembering among witnesses and listeners were created, it highlights the potentialities of artistic practice in dealing with memorialisation issues and expanding the authorship of a narrative and the group of people it represents. Furthermore, it contributes to the understanding of memory-making as a dialogic process. In the first case study, Un lavoro per Camporovere (2014), the public listening to a sound installation – comprised of interviews – brings together the two halves of a village divided by Nazi arson in 1944 and helps the citizens to create a new collective narration of the event. In the second intervention, the collective performance Mellah (2017), the creation of a safe, symbolic and dedicated space favours the telling of the unshared memories of Moroccan Jews who migrated to Paris. This paper illustrates in both examples, the role that public reaction and stories play in making heritage as always in a state of becoming.
This article focuses on the affective and performative capacities involved in waterfowl hunting. I analyze my own performance as a researcher, disguised as a hunter, shooting videos and photos, capturing audio, and consuming wild birds. Camouflaged in cypress boughs, nestled into phragmites and surrounded by Canada goose and mallard decoys, I study the art of mimesis enacted by my hunter guides.
Food studies are limited if approached only through dishes (products) and their representation (images, words). Performance theory provides helpful ways of understanding what is missing if we try to apprehend cuisine strictly through documents, records, and material remains. In this piece, I revisit my video and photo documentation from a morning spent on the St Lawrence River in Montreal with two lifelong hunters. These archives breathe new life into my reflections of that day. Through sensory ethnography I peel back layers of deception and disguise that ultimately obscure the complex inter-species relations at play in the production of wild cuisine.
GPS Embroidery is a participatory walking project that responds to the conflation of the ‘good‘ mother with the Romantic English landscape. This commentary considers the politics articulated through walking ‘as a mother‘; exploring GPS as a means to locate the maternal walking artist within maternalised landscapes, give voice to a traditionally silenced subject position, and reposition ongoing Romantic understandings of the singularity of the artist in relation to conceptions of the scribe. Contextualised through their relationship to earlier collaborative feminist practices, I consider GPS Embroideries as a tool with which to redefine ‘selflessness’ in relation to 21st-century mothering and art-making.
Between 1947 and 1960, choreographer Katherine Dunham spent over 5,000 days in hundreds of cities on six continents. During that time, almost 200 dancers, drummers, and singers traveled with her, performing 166 repertory pieces. Dunham’s expansive work lends itself to digital approaches that illuminate the complex ways history is iterated across bodies, and how the specific questions raised by dance history underpin a visceral approach to the digital humanities.
Performing the role of media educator. Performative tools for media literacy from the TESEO project
Our reflection intends to probe, in a preliminary form, the theoretical and practical scope of the use of tools derived from theater and performance for the educational practices of the media educator, as this figure emerged from the research of the European Erasmus+ project "TESEO – Arianna's Strands in the Digital Age." This work, starting from some basic theoretical assumptions, aims to highlight some useful practices for media literacy and the new challenges of digital education.
When People Dancing’s 2013 ‘11 Million Reasons’ (11MR) project was first advertised, the vision for the photography exhibition was to ‘recreate iconic dance moments in film’. ¹ When the 2016 follow-on project ‘11 Million Reasons to Dance’ (11MRTD) was conceptualised, the exhibition’s premise was described as commissioning ‘images of iconic dance moments from film, all reimagined by Deaf, sight impaired and disabled dancers’. ² This shift from ‘recreated’ to ‘reimagined’, as well as the decision to use a RE approach at all for an intervention, was intriguing. This article explores the meaning, purpose and use of the RE prefix, evaluating its use in dance contexts, its impact when used within disability contexts and its use for the 11MRTD project, as well as considering questions raised by the project regarding the recreation of popular dance scenes in relation to the viewing of non-normative bodies by public audiences.
In 2005, officials designated Vraca Memorial Park in Sarajevo, Bosnia–Herzegovina, as a national monument. However, official disputes over responsibility for curating stalled progress on the site's restoration. In response, activists initiated two campaigns to save and restore Vraca: “Let's Save and Restore Vraca Memorial Park” and a campaign to restore the vandalized monument Ženi borac (woman fighter). Challenging the slide toward ruination, activist curators produced the site as a lively space of politics. Contributing to international political sociology scholarship on memory and its curation, the article develops the concept of activist curatorship through sustained engagement with activist practices of clearing, cleaning, and re-curating at the site between 2005 and 2020. Activist curation is an evolving and open-ended counter-memorial practice engaged by variously situated curators, both ordinary people and museum professionals. At Vraca, activist curating is held together through an alternative mnemonic community that mobilizes the legacy of anti-fascism, while curation is central to how activist interventions endure. Activist curators create space for political commentary on the past and open space for alternative forms of political community to proliferate, those which reach beyond the fragmentation of political, social, and memorial life in post-Dayton Bosnia–Herzegovina.
Between 1983 and 1987, three years after Zimbabwe gained independence from Britain, there were disturbances in the Ndebele dominated Matabeleland and Midlands provinces, resulting in the massacre of an estimated 20,000 unarmed civilians by an elite armed unit sent by the newly elected democratic (Shona dominated) government. This has become known as the Gukurahundi. The atrocities ended with the signing of the Unity Accord in 1987; however, the Gukurahundi issue has remained sensitive, due to the official silence on this painful period, which has lasted many decades. Victims and families in this community have been given no closure. This article examines the portrayal of identity/genealogy issues by two stage plays: 1983: Years Before and After and Speak Out! The view that we take is that theatre offers a map of individual and social experience that provides a tapestry of the people’s suffering, pain, concerns, hopes, and aspirations. We observe that the plays under study grapple with issues of identity emanating from the undocumented deaths and disappearances of people during the Gukurahundi, whose effects manifest today in the lives of the survivors and children of victims, through failure to obtain birth certificates and identity documents, and through an identity crisis. We conclude that theatre has provided an avenue for the victims of the Gukurahundi to share their experiences and to protest against their continued marginalisation.
The sonidero, a landmark in the Mexican festive landscape, represents both the mobile sound system and its owner and creator. This article examines the case of El Sonidero de la Azotea and the way in which it adapted to the restrictions imposed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It does this with a view to theorizing about the place of the utopian and the affective in contemporary physical and virtual performance.
This Element offers a first-person phenomenological history of watching productions of Shakespeare during the pandemic year of 2020. The first section of the Element explores how Shakespeare 'went viral' during the first lockdown of 2020 and considers how the archival recordings of Shakespeare productions made freely available by theatres across Europe and North America impacted on modes of spectatorship and viewing practices, with a particular focus on the effect of binge-watching Hamlet in lockdown. The Element's second section documents two made-for-digital productions of Shakespeare by Oxford-based Creation Theatre and Northern Irish Big Telly, two companies who became leaders in digital theatre during the pandemic. It investigates how their productions of The Tempest and Macbeth modelled new platform-specific ways of engaging with audiences and creating communities of viewing at a time when, in the UK, government policies were excluding most non-building-based theatre companies and freelancers from pandemic relief packages.
In this article, I spend time with Cheryl Sim’s multimedia artwork The Thomas Wang Project (2015), which incorporates performance, installation, original sound recordings, and a variety of familial, documentary, and cinematic archival materials in order to explore her great-uncle’s life and death in the context of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Performing an intimate archival encounter as a form of tender touching across time and space, Sim works through collaborative practices of kinship and modes of communion in order to imagine other ways of staying in touch with absences and presences across time. Ultimately, I argue that The Thomas Wang Project is a potent minoritarian performance of closeness––one that articulates feminist forms of historical work, which both center vulnerability and refuse epistemological mastery in favor of an ethics of unknowability.
When the city of Wuhan was severely locked down on January 23, 2020 for 76 days due to the coronavirus outbreak, many residents started writing “lockdown diaries.” This article argues these diaries constitute a kind of performance art for their authors, specifically, an 'art of endurance' as described by Shalson (2018). Keeping a diary requires a plan, but the following through of the plan is a contingent process requiring efforts and endurance. The challenges become particularly daunting for authors of online diaries in pandemic times. The article analyzes multiple types of endurance associated with the Wuhan lockdown diarists, showing that in digitally-driven environments, where potential collective responses are a key context, the lockdown diaries of Wuhan, like works of endurance art, engage with meanings that reach far beyond their original experience and context. Their stories of endurance are an allegory of the endurance of the entire city of Wuhan.
To understand performance art of the past is to grapple with the fact that this art was designed to be lost. That is to say, it purposefully aspired to the condition of the lost work of art.
This thesis articulates the process of forming movement material within a solo, contemporary dance-making practice from the perspective of the dancer-maker, with the aim of giving voice to the embodied knowledge of a particular dance-making practice. Since the researcher’s dance-making practice already has deep synergies with her Authentic Movement practice, she was able to develop certain processual qualities of Authentic Movement into a methodology that speaks directly from the voice of the dance-maker and adequately captures the unique processual nature of the practice itself. Thus, the making of a solo dance work called perch and the development of the methodology and methods by which it is communicated in this thesis are two sides of the same process. In this way, this thesis seeks to fulfil the aspiration within artistic research to recognise ‘alternative ways of knowing’ and the ‘insider-experience’ of the artist (Nelson 2013), and provide an alternative to the majority of artistic research in dance, in which practice is interpreted through the lens of an extrinsic theory.
The thesis references core debates and research imperatives within the field of artistic research, as well as contextualising the making of perch in relation to North American and European somatically-informed contemporary dance, the dance-historical context of Authentic Movement, and the work of other dance-makers who also draw upon Authentic Movement.
This project offers several contributions to knowledge which will be of value to contemporary dancers and dance-makers, Authentic Movement practitioners and artist-researchers with an interest in embodied creative practice. First, it articulates the activity of forming movement material from the perspective of the dancer-maker. Second, it addresses the need for more research exploring the relationship between dance-making and Authentic Movement. Third, it presents the development of a methodology for dance-making that is based in dance/movement principles (the processual qualities of Authentic Movement). The final contribution is the detailed account of dance-making as an attentional, processual pursuit which takes place between the dance-maker and the dance that is being made.
Since the publication of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man in 1952, invisibility and hypervisibility have ranked among the central metaphors of black cultural production and the critical discourse on blackness. This article takes Tarell Alvin McCraney’s The Brothers Size (2007) and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview (2018) as case studies for discussion of the ways in which contemporary African-American dramatists engage the familiar (and co-constitutive) poles of invisibility and hypervisibility to advance a new, more relational model for visualizing blackness. The article argues that pairing the plays uncovers an under-examined resonance between longstanding conversations in theatre and performance studies about disappearance and recent ones across disciplines on opacity.
Perazzo Domm conceptualises Jonathan Burrows’ work as danced poetry and investigates the performance poetics his choreography has articulated through three decades of choreographing, dancing, collaborating, researching, mentoring and writing. Crucially, she proposes that Burrows’ work resists established artistic and social paradigms, reconceptualising individuation and community through process and performance. Introducing the monograph, the chapter also outlines the structure and theoretical framework of the study.
This article explores the challenges and benefits of using theatre as a research method. It questions certain claims and assumptions underlying Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed and more recent literature on theatre-based research. In particular, it investigates the notion that theatre enables participants to address issues of oppression and create socio-political change. Based on a case study with migrant youth in South Africa, the article firstly argues that certain challenges specific to working with migrants such as differing language skills and a lack of trust may impede genuine dialogic exchange as envisioned by Boal. Secondly, it shows how these challenges can be overcome by incorporating writing exercises, video recordings and embodied communication. Finally, the article argues that theatre-based research can indeed create individual transformations in the form of increased displays of ownership, confidence and hope. These insights contribute to the growing literature on theatre-based research and will be useful for others using similar arts-based approaches.
Breath builds intimate and physical connections beyond the individual, at the same time as it also poses challenges to sharing experience with others. However, performance has the capacity to archive multidimensional sensory experience and recompose it in a manner that is palpable to an audience. This essay addresses the problem of collecting, re-accessing, and sharing breath, from the indexing of breath as biodata to the use of ‘breath media’ in performance. The phenomenology of breath is interwoven with critical theorization of contemporary interactive biofeedback techniques, and grounded in reflexive analysis of creative practice, specifically the practice research project Breath Catalogue, in which experimental choreography and technology create a cabinet of breath curiosities in performance. This living catalogue – distributed between bio-media and somatic tasks of embodied memory – is contextualized within medical humanities, archive theory, choreographic practices, digital performance, and feminist technology studies.
As second wave feminisms emerged throughout the world, diverse collectives and consciousness-raising groups were established in Mexico City as early as 1971. These activities gave rise to various networks of female artists who explored and politicized conceptions of the female body, making inroads in photography, performance, film and conceptual art. In this paper, I discuss the network established by Ana Victoria Jiménez, Rosa Martha Fernández and Mónica Mayer, who produced collaborative films and performances. Using gender as category of analysis, I discuss how their practices destabilized the patriarchal structures that governed art institutions in the city and defined parameters of art- making while simultaneously disrupting hegemonic visual conventions.
Note: This chapter was first published as ‘Patricidal Memory and the Passerby’ in 2003 in Scholar and Feminist Online. At that time, the events that inaugurated Bush’s so-called War on Terror were recent. Working on the revision of this essay for this publication, I am performing a ‘Return Visit’ to the sentiments of those days. Bush’s invasion of Iraq had resulted in telecast images from journalists ‘embedded’ in the field, images of the statue of Saddam Hussein being dragged down in a public square in Baghdad, and images, ridiculously, of Bush declaring victory and announcing the war ‘over’ while standing on an aircraft carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln, on 1 May 2003. After the bogus declaration of the end of the war (a war that had never officially been declared ‘on’ and when officially declared ‘off’, continued without respect to protocols of the Geneva Convention), it was immediately apparent that the only thing that had ended was the war as media spectacle, continually given to be seen.1Another way to say it, with some irony: The constant stream of images from the embedded reality show War on Terror had ended, but the war in the theatre, on the ground in the theatre of war that is Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine continued and continues as of this rewriting. This chapter is in some senses historically specific to the years prior to Bush’s bogus declaration of its end, but I find that though some of the stories have aged, the questions raised by the stories, and by the attempt to track the monumentalizing agendas of war through the analysis of minor or stray or inconsequential details remain pertinent.
Just after 9am, we left a modest hotel on William Street in the middle of New York City’s financial district. We walked up narrow streets made to seem even more narrow by the hulking stone buildings that consume the blocks, nearly crowding out the sidewalks. We wound our way single file, hugging the stone along Pine Street, and passed behind the New York Stock Exchange. A couple of blocks later we came upon the propert y of Trinity Church: an open area with a large, neo-gothic house of worship and a graveyard, whose beautiful, crumbling tombstones are among the oldest objects on public display in Manhattan. The oldest legible gravestones in Manhattan’s Trinity Churchyard date to 1681, more than 15 years before the completion of the church from which the graveyard now takes its name. The eastern edge of Trinity Churchyard abuts Lower Broadway. Enclosed behind an imposing black metal gate, the churchyard struck us as a place — even a time — set apart from the bustle of pedestrians, cabs, and street vendors.
In an influential essay on the place of autobiography in theatre history, Thomas Postlewait puts Fanny Kemble's memoirs at the crux of a historiographical problem. The literary sensibility of Kemble's work appears to Postlewait an instance of both the theatrical memoir's cultural richness and its limitations as biographical evidence: although Kemble's “epistolary mode of self-representation” gives her autobiography Records of a Girlhood “a documentary quality,” for example, even her “earliest letters reveal a calculated literary style” that signals her awareness of the “traits and conventions” of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels. In her consciousness of narrative trends, Kemble stands out as a particularly clear example of a general tendency in theatrical autobiographies of the period. As the nineteenth century's booming print market expanded the audience for stories about theatregoing, it also drew readers who were increasingly familiar with novelistic experiments in plotting, characterization, and point of view. This shared audience encouraged an exchange of discursive conventions across fictional and historical narratives, which makes memoirs a compelling but complicated source of historical data about nineteenth-century theatre. Indeed, the two-way influence between genres is so strong that Postlewait argues scholars “need to ask to what extent these autobiographies exist not only as historical records but as epistolary fictions.”
Acts of Holding: Dance, Time and Loss
Acts of Holding is a PhD by publication, which explores the relationship between dance, time and affect, focusing on the temporality of loss. It is a portfolio submission consisting of a body of choreographic practice, working within the field of western contemporary dance, that explores the capacity for dance to generate the temporal affect of loss for the viewer. The practice, made between 2010 and 2017, includes five screendance and one site-specific work and is submitted alongside five articles that articulate and respond to the practice- based findings. Collectively the publications generate insight into the role that loss plays in the temporal affect of dance, and what dance reveals about the temporality of loss.
By ‘temporality of loss’ the research refers to the experience or anticipation of the death of another in terms of its effect on the phenomenological sense of lived-time in the one who remains. Drawing on the author’s embodied personal experience of bereavement, the research operates in reflective loops that shift between insider and outsider positions, in ways that resonate with an ethnographic model of the participant observer. These iterative cycles of making and reflection incorporate and impact psychoanalytic, philosophical and somatic discourse, concerning dance, time and loss. From this multi-modal research, responsivity, holding and precarity emerge as three key temporal qualities intrinsic to both dance and grief. These findings add to discursive and choreographic research, into the relationship between the body, affect and time, within screendance and dance studies from writers such as Phelan (1997, 2004), Lepecki (2012), Rosenberg (2012), and Bench (2016).
Keywords: dance; screendance; transience; precarity; loss; responsivity
In this paper, we describe the process and technology behind the creation of a video art piece, ‘Moderate Recursion,’ that is a by-product of the dance performance, ‘Heavy Recursion.’ The original interactive dance work was part of the Dance.Draw project and was a reflection on the role of technology in our lives. The resulting video art piece, ‘Moderate Recursion,’ uses a combination of recorded videos of the projected visualizations and of the dancers on the stage. This paper presents the emergence of this new visual art piece. This demonstrates how ephemeral instances of interactive performance art can be captured for broader audiences to experience, through a permanent video artifact.
This article focuses on decolonising exhibition practices and colonial archives. It begins with a survey of literature on nineteenth-century colonial exhibitions and world’s fairs as a cultural practice and the complicity of academic disciplines such as anthropology and ethnology in promoting violent forms of pedagogy. Next, the article examines the failed Liberty’s 1885 exhibition in London, specifically analyzing the nautch dancers whose moving bodies both engaged and disrupted the scopophilia framing such live human exhibits. In the final section, the article examines how re-imagining the Liberty’s nautch experiences by embodying archival slippages might be a usefully anarchic way of exhuming the memories of those dancers forgotten by both British and Indian nationalist history. The article delineates the structural limitations of reenactments, a current trend in contemporary Euro-American dance, and it argues that historical fiction as a corporeal methodology might be a viable decolonising strategy for dance studies.
This book explores the role of written and oral communication in Greece and is the first systematic and sustained treatment at this level. It examines the recent theoretical debates about literacy and orality and explores the uses of writing and oral communication, and their interaction, in ancient Greece. It is concerned to set the significance of written and oral communication as much as possible in their social and historical context, and to stress the specifically Greek characteristics in their use, arguing that the functions of literacy and orality are often fluid and culturally determined. It draws together the results of recent studies and suggests further avenues of enquiry. Individual chapters deal with (among other things) the role of writing in archaic Greece, oral poetry, the visual and monumental impact of writing, the performance and oral transmission even of written texts, and the use of writing by the city-states; there is an epilogue on Rome. All ancient evidence is translated.
This theatre has attracted little but unfavorable notice: it is slovenly, amateurish, silly, just boring; a put-on, really an actors’ lark; not art, certainly not serious art; a coterie occasion for a pariah in-group; by & for queers (not the nice kind, but drag queens & dykes & leather/motorbike/S&M hard trade); a display case for transvestites, pure camp, devoted to movie fetishism; anyhow just adolescent pornography; ritual enactment of an impotent humiliation of women (vicious, loveless); pointless, emotionally impactless, untheatrical; certainly devoid of social relevance; in sum, stupid & immoral.
The theatre of the ridiculous is an important theatre and theatre form.
I want to interpret here my impression of the theatre's theatrical impact, in the light of interviews with John Vaccaro, Charles Ludlam, Mary Woronow & some written pieces of Ronald Tavel's & Jack Smith's—keeping Freud, Sartre, Artaud, de Sade, Genet, Warhol & la pataphysique out of it.
Performing the past: living history and cultural memory
- Marvin Carlson
Ritual/Theatre: an exploration in collective memory through African Eyes
- Kenneth Bowman