Download or read book Rachel s Brain and Other Storms written by Rachel Rosenthal and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2001-10-23 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rachel Rosenthal is an internationally recognised pioneer in the field of feminist and ecological performance art. Her revolutionary performance technique integrates text, movement, voice, choreography, improvisation, inventive costuming, dramatic lighting and wildly imaginative sets into an unforgettable theatre experience. In the last twenty years she has presented over thirty-five pieces nationally and internationally. She has been called 'a monument and a marvel' and critically ranked with Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman, Ping Chong, Meredith Monk and Laurie Anderson. Her work is passionately dedicated to interrogating, illuminating and improving the relationship between human beings and the planet we share with so many other species. Her performances explore and embody the long history and urgent future of this deeply troubled relationship, and use viscerally compelling performance to draw us into a direct experience of the beauty and power of our lives in nature.
Download or read book Performing Animality written by Jennifer Parker-Starbuck and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-04-08 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Performing Animality provides theoretical and creative interventions into the presence of the animal and ideas of animality in performance. Animals have always played a part in human performance practices. Maintaining a crucial role in many communities' cultural traditions, animal-human encounters have been key in the development of performance. Similarly, performance including both living animals and/or representations of animals provides the context for encounters in which issues of power, human subjectivity and otherness are explored. Crucially, however, the inclusion of animals in performance also offers an opportunity to investigate ethical and moral assumptions about human and non-human animals. This book offers a historical and theoretical exploration of animal presence in performance by looking at the concept of animality and how it has developed in theatre and performance practices from the eighteenth century to today. Furthermore, it points to shifts in political, cultural, and ethical animal-human relations emerging within the context of animality and performance.
Download or read book Choreographies of the Living written by Carrie Rohman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-09 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Choreographies of the Living explores the implications of shifting from viewing art as an exclusively human undertaking to recognizing it as an activity that all living creatures enact. Carrie Rohman reveals the aesthetic impulse itself to be profoundly trans-species, and in doing so she revises our received wisdom about the value and functions of artistic capacities. Countering the long history of aesthetic theory in the West--beginning with Plato and Aristotle, and moving up through the recent claims of "neuroaesthetics"--Rohman challenges the likening of aesthetic experience to an exclusively human form of judgment. Turning toward the animal in new frameworks for understanding aesthetic impulses, Rohman emphasizes a deep coincidence of humans' and animals' elaborations of fundamental life forces. Examining a range of literary, visual, dance, and performance works and processes by modernist and contemporary figures such as Isadora Duncan, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and Merce Cunningham, Rohman reconceives the aesthetic itself not as a distinction separating humans from other animals, but rather as a framework connecting embodied beings. Her view challenges our species to acknowledge the shared status of art-making, one of our most hallowed and formerly exceptional activities.
Download or read book Brain Storm written by Richard Dooling and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-12-19 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Attorney Joe Watson had never been to court except to be sworn in. He did legal research, investigating copyright infringement in video games (addressing such matters as: Did CarnageMaster plagiarize their beheading sequence from Greek SlaughterHouse?). He was a Webhead, a cybernerd doing support work for the lawyers in his firm who did go to court. And he was good at it. He was on track to become one of the youngest partners in the firm, and he was able--by a hair--to support his wife and children in an affluent neighborhood. Then he got notice that the tyrannical Judge Whittaker J. Stang had appointed him to defend James Whitlow, a small-time lowlife with a long rap sheet accused of a double hate crime: killing his wife's deaf black lover. When Watson stubbornly decides not to plead out his client, he is soon evicted from his comfortable life: His boss fires him, his wife leaves him and takes the children, and the Whitlow case begins to consume all of his time. He has only two allies--Rachel Palmquist, a beautiful, brainy neuroscientist with her own designs on his client and on Watson himself, and Myrna Schweich, a punk criminal-defense lawyer with orange hair who swears like a trooper and definitely inhales. Watson's finished. Or is he?To answer that question requires, among many other things, a brain scan for Watson in a state of strapped-down arousal, a Voice Transcription Device to eavesdrop on a dead deaf man's conversation, two chimpanzees who have no choice but to love each other, and a blind news vendor who demonstrates a real touch when it comes to making money. For all the Dickensian energy and humor of this ingenious story, Brain Storm also stands at the center of many modern controversies, from the death penalty and the circus atmosphere of criminal trials to neuroscientific and moral quandaries about sex, crime, and religion. Rachel tells Watson that free will is a fiction: "There's not much you can do about it if you're biologically predisposed to violence or sexual misbehavior. You just have to make the best of it, and try not to get caught." Once a deliberate yes-man at home and in the office, Joe Watson finds himself fighting not only to save his marriage and his career but also to hold intact his conviction that a person is more than a series of chemical reactions.
Download or read book Female Body Image in Contemporary Art written by Emily L. Newman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-23 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Numerous contemporary artists, particularly female artists, have chosen to examine the idealization of the female body. In this crucial book, Emily L. Newman focuses on a number of key themes including obesity, anorexia, bulimia, dieting, self-harm, and female body image. Many artists utilize their own bodies in their work, and in the act of trying to critique the diet industry, they also often become complicit, as they strive to lose weight themselves. Making art and engaging eating disorder communities (in real life and online) often work to perpetuate the illnesses of themselves or others. A core group of artists has worked to show bodies that are outside the norm, paralleling the rise of fat activism in the 1990s and 2000s. Interwoven throughout this inclusive study are related interdisciplinary concerns including sociology, popular culture, and feminism.
Download or read book Beautiful Bright and Blinding written by H. Peter Steeves and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2017-10-27 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Phenomenological analysis of beauty and art across various aspects of lived experience and culture. Through a careful analysis of concrete examples taken from everyday experience and culture, Beautiful, Bright, and Blinding develops a straightforward and powerful aesthetic methodology founded on a phenomenological approach to experience—one that investigates how consciousness engages with the world and thus what it means to take such things as tastes, images, sounds, and even a life itself as art. H. Peter Steeves begins by exploring what it means to see, and considers how disruptions of sight can help us rethink how perception works. Engaging the work of Derrida, Heidegger, and Husserl, he uses these insights about “seeing” to undertake a systematic phenomenological investigation of how we perceive and process a range of aesthetic objects, including the paintings of Arshile Gorky, the films of Michael Haneke, Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, zombie films, The Simpsons, the performance art of Rachel Rosenthal and Andy Kaufman, and even vegan hot dogs. Refusing hierarchical distinctions between high and low art, Steeves argues that we must conceptualize the whole of human experience as aesthetic: art is lived, and living is an art. H. Peter Steeves is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University. He is the author of The Things Themselves: Phenomenology and the Return to the Everyday and the editor of Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and Animal Life, both also published by SUNY Press.
Download or read book A Gathering Storm written by Rachel Hore and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-09-15 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the million-copy Sunday Times bestseller comes a gripping story of family secrets, all-consuming love and the chaos of war. 2011. When Lucy’s troubled father Tom passes away, she travels to Cornwall to visit his childhood home – the once-beautiful Carlyon Manor. Before he died, Tom had been researching an uncle she never knew he had. Determined to find out why, Lucy tracks down Beatrice Ashton, a local woman who seems to know more than she lets on, and has an extraordinary story to tell . . . 1935. Growing up in Cornwall, Beatrice plays with the children of Carlyon Manor – especially pretty, blonde Angelina Wincanton. Then, one summer at the age of fifteen, she falls in love with a young visitor to the town: Rafe, whom she rescues from a storm-tossed sea. On the surface, her life seems idyllic. But the dark clouds of war are gathering, and nobody, not even the Wincantons, will be left untouched. A Gathering Storm is a powerful tale of courage and betrayal, spanning from Cornwall to London and Occupied France, in which friendship and love are tested, and the consequences span generations. Praise for Rachel Hore's novels: 'Compelling, engrossing and moving' SANTA MONTEFIORE 'Simply stunning . . . I savoured every moment’ DINAH JEFFERIES 'A story that stirs the deepest emotions' WOMAN & HOME ‘An emotive and thought-provoking read’ ROSANNA LEY ‘Hore tackles difficult subjects with a clever, light touch and a sunny positivity. Her women are brave and good and you desperately want them to win’ DAILY MAIL ‘An elegiac tale of wartime love and secrets’ TELEGRAPH ‘A tender and thoughtful tale' SUNDAY MIRROR
Download or read book Performance Embodiment and Cultural Memory written by Colin Counsell and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-10-02 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The subject of cultural memory, and of the body’s role in its creation and dissemination, is central to current academic debate, particularly in relation to performance. Viewed from a variety of theoretical positions, the actions of the meaning-bearing body in culture and its capacity to reproduce, challenge or modify existing formulations have been the focus of some of the most influential studies to emerge from the arts and humanities in the last two and a half decades. The ten essays brought together in Performance, Embodiment and Cultural Memory address this subject from a unique diversity of perspectives, focusing on topics as varied as live art, puppetry, memorial practice, ‘cultural performance’ and dance. Dealing with issues ranging from modern nation building to the formation of diasporic identities, this volume collectively considers the ways in which the human soma functions as a canvas for cultural meaning, its forms and actions a mnemonics for constructions of a shared past. This volume is required reading for those interested in how bodies, both on stage and in everyday life, 'perform' meaning.
Download or read book Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene written by Ina Batzke and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-01-01 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene is a timely collection of insightful contributions that negotiate how the genre of life writing, traditionally tied to the human perspective and thus anthropocentric qua definition, can provide adequate perspectives for an age of ecological disasters and global climate change. The volume’s eight chapters illustrate the aptness of life writing and life writing studies to critically reevaluate the role of “the human” vis-à-vis non-human others while remaining mindful of persisting inequalities between humans regarding who causes and who suffers damage in the Anthropocene age. The authors in this collection not only expand the toolbox of life writing studies by engaging with critical insights from the fields of posthumanism and ecocriticism, but, in turn, also enrich those fields by offering unique approaches to contemplate the responsibility of humans for as well as their relational existence in the posthuman Anthropocene.
Download or read book The Color of Theater written by Roberta Uno and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Color of Theater presents a range of essays, interviews and performance texts that illustrate and examine the process, evolution and dynamics of making theater in the dawning moments of the 21st century. It brings together writings by artists, intellectuals and art activists exploring contemporary practices within multicultural, intercultural and ethnically specific theaters. This provocative and dynamic resource brings forth critical issues of cultural aesthetics engaging theater as a crucial site for examining the intricate intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality and national and global politics.Contributors include: Rustom Bharucha, Thulani Davis, Harry Elam, Guillermo Gomez-Pea, Velina Hasu Huston, Cherrfe Moraga, David Romn, Sekou Sundiata, Diana Taylor, Una Chaudhuri, Alberto Sandoval-Snchez and lO thi diem thy.
Download or read book Brain Storm a Journey of Faith Through Brain Injury written by Laura Allen and published by WestBow Press. This book was released on 2012-02-03 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brain Storm is the story of Bruce and Laura Allen who, when confronted with the immeasurable challenges of brain injury, found courage, determination, and strength from God to forge through the seemingly insurmountable obstacles of Bruces intense and often heartbreaking recovery. The overwhelming struggles that consumed the next year changed their lives forever. Brain Storm views these incredible hurdles through the separate eyes of both the survivor and the caregiver. It recounts how God miraculously led them through each step of the journey. This candid, intimate, and often humorous approach to recovery from brain injury will encourage and inspire readersespecially those who are currently traveling a similar path. You will learn why Bruce decided, This has been the best year of my life. Brain Storm is not just the story of a mans experience recovering from brain injury, but it is also one of loss, grief, acceptance, and transcendence to find ones purpose in life. This is a true testament to how fragile our lives are and how resilient we can be in the face of adversity. Bruces story is an inspiration to me, his physician and friend, and will be to you as well. Darryl L. Kaelin, MD Bruce and Laura Allen have allowed us to journey with them in their remarkable, honest, painful, and miraculous story of faith, hope, and love. This is a must-read for anyone walking through extended physical suffering either as a patient, caregiver, or family member. You will laugh, cry, and rejoicebut most of all you will experience God. Dr. Mark L. Walker
Download or read book Performance A Critical Introduction written by Marvin Carlson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-16 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensively revised, illustrated edition discusses recent performance work and takes into consideration changes that have taken place since the book's original publication in 1996. Marvin Carlson guides the reader through the contested definition of performance as a theatrical activity and the myriad ways in which performance has been interpreted by ethnographers, anthropologists, linguists, and cultural theorists. Topics covered include: *the evolution of performance art since the 1960s *the relationship between performance, postmodernism, the politics of identity, and current cultural studies *the recent theoretical developments in the study of performance in the fields of anthropology, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and technology. With a fully updated bibliography and additional glossary of terms, students of performance studies, visual and performing arts or theatre history will welcome this new version of a classic text.
Download or read book Communities of Sense written by Beth Hinderliter and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2009-09-18 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Communities of Sense argues for a new understanding of the relation between politics and aesthetics in today’s globalized and image-saturated world. Established and emerging scholars of art and culture draw on Jacques Rancière’s theorization of democratic politics to suggest that aesthetics, traditionally defined as the “science of the sensible,” is not a depoliticized discourse or theory of art, but instead part of a historically specific organization of social roles and communality. Rather than formulating aesthetics as the Other to politics, the contributors show that aesthetics and politics are mutually implicated in the construction of communities of visibility and sensation through which political orders emerge. The first of the collection’s three sections explicitly examines the links between aesthetics and social and political experience. Here a new essay by Rancière posits art as a key site where disagreement can be staged in order to produce new communities of sense. In the second section, contributors investigate how sense was constructed in the past by the European avant-garde and how it is mobilized in today’s global visual and political culture. Exploring the viability of various models of artistic and political critique in the context of globalization, the authors of the essays in the volume’s final section suggest a shift from identity politics and preconstituted collectivities toward processes of identification and disidentification. Topics discussed in the volume vary from digital architecture to a makeshift museum in a Paris suburb, and from romantic art theory in the wake of Hegel to the history of the group-subject in political art and performance since 1968. An interview with Étienne Balibar rounds out the collection. Contributors. Emily Apter, Étienne Balibar, Carlos Basualdo, T. J. Demos, Rachel Haidu, Beth Hinderliter, David Joselit, William Kaizen, Ranjanna Khanna, Reinaldo Laddaga, Vered Maimon, Jaleh Mansoor, Reinhold Martin, Seth McCormick, Yates McKee, Alexander Potts, Jacques Rancière, Toni Ross
Download or read book Reading Autobiography written by Sidonie Smith and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: projects, and an extensive bibliography. --Book Jacket.
Download or read book American Shame written by Myra Mendible and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-29 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays examining the role of shame as an American cultural practice and how public shaming enforces conformity and group coherence. On any given day in America’s news cycle, stories and images of disgraced politicians and celebrities solicit our moral indignation, their misdeeds fueling a lucrative economy of shame and scandal. Shame is one of the most coercive, painful, and intriguing of human emotions. Only in recent years has interest in shame extended beyond a focus on the subjective experience of this emotion and its psychological effects. The essays collected here consider the role of shame as cultural practice and examine ways that public shaming practices enforce conformity and group coherence. Addressing abortion, mental illness, suicide, immigration, and body image among other issues, this volume calls attention to the ways shaming practices create and police social boundaries; how shaming speech is endorsed, judged, or challenged by various groups; and the distinct ways that shame is encoded and embodied in a nation that prides itself on individualism, diversity, and exceptionalism. Examining shame through a prism of race, sexuality, ethnicity, and gender, these provocative essays offer a broader understanding of how America’s discourse of shame helps to define its people as citizens, spectators, consumers, and moral actors. “An eclectic anthology, it offers the readers more than one argument and perspective, which makes the volume itself lively and rich.” —Ron Scapp, coeditor of Fashion Statements: On Style, Appearance, and Reality
Download or read book Art of Engagement written by Peter Selz and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2006-01-09 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Art of Engagement' focuses on the key role of California's art and artists in politics and culture since 1945. The book showcases many types of media, including photographs, found objects, drawings and prints, murals, painting, sculpture, ceramics, installations, performance art, and collage.
Download or read book Brain Storm written by Rebecca M. Jordan-Young and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-07 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Female and male brains are different, thanks to hormones coursing through the brain before birth. That’s taught as fact in psychology textbooks, academic journals, and bestselling books. And these hardwired differences explain everything from sexual orientation to gender identity, to why there aren’t more women physicists or more stay-at-home dads. In this compelling book, Rebecca Jordan-Young takes on the evidence that sex differences are hardwired into the brain. Analyzing virtually all published research that supports the claims of “human brain organization theory,” Jordan-Young reveals how often these studies fail the standards of science. Even if careful researchers point out the limits of their own studies, other researchers and journalists can easily ignore them because brain organization theory just sounds so right. But if a series of methodological weaknesses, questionable assumptions, inconsistent definitions, and enormous gaps between ambiguous findings and grand conclusions have accumulated through the years, then science isn’t scientific at all. Elegantly written, this book argues passionately that the analysis of gender differences deserves far more rigorous, biologically sophisticated science. “The evidence for hormonal sex differentiation of the human brain better resembles a hodge-podge pile than a solid structure...Once we have cleared the rubble, we can begin to build newer, more scientific stories about human development.”
