Download or read book Theatre activism subjectivity written by Bishnupriya Dutt and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2024-07-09 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through the lens of performance and politics, this collection zooms in on the context-specific dimensions, analogies, and micro-histories of the Left to better understand the larger picture. It proposes a search for the Left not from totalising Leftist ideological positions and partisan politics but from ethical dimensions through smaller-scale Left-leaning struggles; not from the political to the aesthetic, but from the potentiality of art to offer new political imagination and critique; not from the individual subordinated to the collective, but from the dialectics of subjectivity and collectivity. This is not an attempt at a sweeping global overview of Leftist cultures either, but a collection that brings together culture-specific and comparative perspectives. This book searches for fragments of and on the Left, past and present, through which to rethink and patch a fragmented world.
Download or read book Theatre Activism Subjectivity written by Bishnupriya Dutt and published by . This book was released on 2024-07-23 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing from both past and present, using the interdisciplinary hermeneutics of theatre, politics, and performance, this collections explores: how to do activism, make theatre, and be in the world through the Leftist paradigms and ethos? What are the political, cultural, personal, and collective dramaturgies through which to recuperate the Leftist care for commons for our time? The Left is framed here as a large umbrella term for a range of progressive cultural and political practices, as well as a way of living/being in the world. The focus on plural cultural Lefts draws attention to different histories of Leftist political and cultural practices and to the dialectics between official and unofficial Lefts--between the totalising ideological framework and its smaller-scale manifestations. The conceptual focus is on the dialectics of the macro- and the micro-plane of the Leftist histories, legacies, and current forms of resistance as they occur through different dramaturgies of activism, but also through theatre and everyday life. In our times of political confusion--when Leftist agendas and struggles often collapse or become appropriated by Right--the necessity of recovering the Leftist ethos of solidarity, social justice, and care for the commons seems more urgent than ever. How to grapple with the complexities of the Left: its theatres and theatricalities, its modes of activism, its subjects and subjectivities?
Download or read book Staging Social Justice written by Norma Bowles and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2013-06-03 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fringe Benefits, an award-winning theatre company, collaborates with schools and communities to create plays that promote constructive dialogue about diversity and discrimination issues. Staging Social Justice is a groundbreaking collection of essays about Fringe Benefits’ script-devising methodology and their collaborations in the United States, Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom. The anthology also vividly describes the transformative impact of these creative initiatives on participants and audiences. By reflecting on their experiences working on these projects, the contributing writers—artists, activists and scholars—provide the readerwith tools and inspiration to create their own theatre for social change. “Contributors to this big-hearted collection share Fringe Benefits’ play devising process, and a compelling array of methods for measuring impact, approaches to aesthetics (with humor high on the list), coalition and community building, reflections on safe space, and acknowledgement of the diverse roles needed to apply theatre to social justice goals. The book beautifully bears witness to both how generative Fringe Benefits’ collaborations have been for participants and to the potential of engaged art in multidisciplinary ecosystems more broadly.”—Jan Cohen-Cruz, editor of Public: A Journal of Imagining America
Download or read book Playing Boal written by Jan Cohen-Cruz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-09-11 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Playing Boal examines the techniques in application of Augusto Boal, creator of Theatre of the Oppressed, Brazilian theatre maker and political activist. This text looks at the use of the Theatre of the Oppressed exercises by a variety of practitioners and scholars working in Europe, North America and Canada. It explores the possibilities of these tools for "active learning and personal empowerment; co-operative education and healing; participatory theatre and community action." This collection is designed to illuminate and invigorate discussion about Augusto Boal's work and the transformative potential of theatre. It includes two interviews with Boal, and two pieces of his own writing.
Download or read book Performance Subjectivity Cosmopolitanism written by Yana Meerzon and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-08-07 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book looks at the connection between contemporary theatre practices and cosmopolitanism, a philosophical condition of social behaviour based on our responsibility, respect, and healthy curiosity to the other. Advocating for cosmopolitanism has become a necessity in a world defined by global wars, mass migration, and rise of nationalism. Using empathy, affect, and telling personal stories of displacement through embodied encounter between the actor and their audience, performance arts can serve as a training ground for this social behavior. In the centre of this encounter is a new cosmopolitan: a person of divided origins and cultural heritage, someone who speaks many languages and claims different countries as their place of belonging. The book examines how European and North American theatres stage this divided subjectivity: both from within, the way we tell stories about ourselves to others, and from without, through the stories the others tell about us.
Download or read book Contemporary Black Theatre and Performance written by DeRon S. Williams and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-04-06 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How are Black artists, activists, and pedagogues wielding acts of rebellion, activism, and solidarity to precipitate change? How have contemporary performances impacted Black cultural, social, and political struggles? What are the ways in which these acts and artists engage varied Black identities and explore shared histories? Contemporary Black Theatre and Performance investigates these questions to illuminate the relationship between performance, identity, intersectionality, and activism in North America and beyond. It features contributions from scholars, artists, and activists from across disciplines who explore the nuances and varied forms of Black performance in the 21st century while incorporating performance-based methodologies and queer and black feminist theories. Among the many topics addressed by contributors are antiracist pedagogy, Black queer identity formation in Black playwriting, digital blackface, and Black women's subversive practices within contemporary popular culture. It encompasses dramatic analysis of Lynn Nottage's Sweat, Tarell Alvin McCraney's Choir Boy, and acts of resistance during the Black Lives Matter summer 2020 highway protests. A series of conversations with artists and scholars are woven throughout the book's three sections, including with playwrights Christina Anderson and Donja R. Love, and Willa Taylor, Director of Education and Community Engagement at the Goodman Theatre, Chicago.
Download or read book Stage for Action written by Chrystyna Dail and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2016-11-09 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on underexplored and only recently available archives, author Chrystyna Dail examines the influence of Stage for Action, a theatre group founded in 1943, on social activist theatre in the 1940s, early 1950s, and beyond. The group embraced subjects not taken up by earlier activist theatre companies—advocating for the rights of Puerto Ricans, calling attention to the lack of child care for working mothers, and demanding the cessation of all nuclear warfare. Exploring the intersection between performance and politics and the direct impact of the arts on social activism, Dail argues Stage for Action is a theatrical reflection of progressivism and the pro-working-class theatrical aesthetic of the 1940s. The theatre group, which used performance to encourage direct action and personal responsibility for change, eventually would function as the theatrical voice of the United States Progressive Party in the failed presidential campaign of former vice president Henry A. Wallace. Calling into question the widely held belief that U.S. theatre in the early years of the Cold War was indifferent to activism, Stage for Action offers historians a new interpretation of social activist performance at midcentury.
Download or read book Rethinking Character in Contemporary British Theatre written by Cristina Delgado-García and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-11-13 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The category of theatrical character has been swiftly dismissed in the academic reception of no-longer-dramatic texts and performances. However, claims on the dissolution of character narrowly demarcate what a subject is and how it may appear. This volume unmoors theatre scholarship from the regulatory ideals of liberal humanism, stretching the notion of character to encompass and illuminate otherwise unaccounted-for subjects, aesthetic strategies and political gestures in recent theatre works. To this aim, contemporary philosophical theories of subjectivation, European theatre studies, and experimental, script-led work produced in Britain since the late 1990s are mobilised as discussants on the question of subjectivity. Four contemporary playtexts and their performances are examined in depth: Sarah Kane’s Crave and 4.48 Psychosis, Ed Thomas’s Stone City Blue and Tim Crouch’s ENGLAND. Through these case studies, Delgado-García demonstrates alternative ways of engaging theoretically with character, and elucidating a range of subjective figures beyond identity and individuality. Alongside these analyses, the book traces a large body of work that has experimented with speech attribution since the early twentieth-century. This is a timely contribution to contemporary theatre scholarship, which demonstrates that character remains a malleable and politically-salient notion in which understandings of subjectivity are still being negotiated.
Download or read book Actors and Activists written by David Schlossman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-25 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This scholarly work looks at the issue of politics and performance in America today with particular attention paid to performances produced by activists, the NEA Four, and "Miss Saigon".
Download or read book World Political Theatre and Performance written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-06-22 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: World Political Theatre and Performance brings together scholars and practitioners from multiple locations to analyse counter-hegemonic theatre and performance. International case studies are framed by a common reflection on the meaning of radical practice in the face of global neoliberalism.
Download or read book Postdramatic Theatre and the Political written by Karen Jürs-Munby and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-12-19 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is postdramatic theatre political and if so how? How does it relate to Brecht's ideas of political theatre, for example? How can we account for the relationship between aesthetics and politics in new forms of theatre, playwriting, and performance? The chapters in this book discuss crucial aspects of the issues raised by the postdramatic turn in theatre in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century: the status of the audience and modes of spectatorship in postdramatic theatre; the political claims of postdramatic theatre; postdramatic theatre's ongoing relationship with the dramatic tradition; its dialectical qualities, or its eschewing of the dialectic; questions of representation and the real in theatre; the role of bodies, perception, appearance and theatricality in postdramatic theatre; as well as subjectivity and agency in postdramatic theatre, dance and performance. Offering analyses of a wide range of international performance examples, scholars in this volume engage with Hans-Thies Lehmann's theoretical positions both affirmatively and critically, relating them to other approaches by thinkers ranging from early theorists such as Brecht, Adorno and Benjamin, to contemporary thinkers such as Fischer-Lichte, Rancière and others
Download or read book Performances that Change the Americas written by Stuart Alexander Day and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-09-16 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays explores activist performances, all connected to theater or performance training, that have changed the Americas—from Canada to the Southern Cone. Through the study of specific examples from numerous countries, the authors of this volume demonstrate a crucial, shared outlook: they affirm that ordinary people change the direction of history through performance. This project offers concrete, compelling cases that emulate the modus operandi of people like historian Howard Zinn. In the same spirit, the chapters treat marginal groups whose stories underscore the potentially unstoppable and transformative power of united, embodied voices. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre, performance, art and politics.
Download or read book Creative Activism Research Pedagogy and Practice written by Elspeth Tilley and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2022-03-10 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection explores the growing global recognition of creativity and the arts as vital to social movements and change. Bringing together diverse perspectives from leading academics and practitioners who investigate how creative activism is deployed, taught, and critically analysed, it delineates the key parameters of this emerging field.
Download or read book Performance Politics and Activism written by P. Lichtenfels and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-04-09 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Considering both making political performance and making performance politically, this collection explores engagements of political resistance, public practice and performance media, on various scales of production within structures of neoliberal and liberal government and power.
Download or read book A Boal Companion written by Jan Cohen-Cruz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-05-02 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This carefully constructed and thorough collection of theoretical engagements with Augusto Boal’s work is the first to look ’beyond Boal’ and critically assesses the Theatre of the Opressed (TO) movement in context. A Boal Companion looks at the cultural practices which inform TO and explore them within a larger frame of cultural politics and performance theory. The contributors put TO into dialogue with complexity theory – Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, race theory, feminist performance art, Deleuze and Guattari, and liberation psychology – to name just a few, and in doing so, the kinship between Boal’s project and multiple fields of social psychology, ethics, biology, comedy, trauma studies and political science is made visible. The ideas generated throughout A Boal Companion will: expand readers' understanding of TO as a complex, interdisciplinary, multivocal body of philosophical discourses provide a variety of lenses through which to practice and critique TO make explicit the relationship between TO and other bodies of work. This collection is ideal for TO practitioners and scholars who want to expand their knowledge, but it also provides unfamiliar readers and new students to the discipline with an excellent study resource.
Download or read book The Politics of New Media Theatre written by Gabriella Giannachi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-11-22 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book in the field to explore the links between theories of globalization and surveillance, bipower and biopolitics, performance and theatre, computer arts and politics, "The Politics of New Media Theatre" is an investigation into the political role played by the new media theatre. Gabriella Giannachi explores how new media arts constitute themselves as a radical political movement, and presents an analysis of both the role of virtuality in radical performance and politics in virtual and mixed reality practices. This outstanding new work offers an analysis of leading political, philosophical and artistic texts and artworks, and represents a milestone for anyone interested in new technologies, theatre and politics.
Download or read book Political and Protest Theatre after 9 11 written by Jenny Spencer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-12-22 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection documents and examines political and protest theatre produced between the 9/11 attacks in 2001 and Obama’s election in 2008 by British and American artists responding to their own governments’ actions and policies during this time. The plays take up topics such as the ongoing wars on terror, Blair’s support of U.S. policies, the flawed intelligence that led to the Iraq war, and illegal detentions and torture at Abu Ghraib. The authors argue that engaged artists faced a radically different sociopolitical context for their work after 9/11 compared to earlier social protest movements and new forms of theatre, and different emotional strategies were necessary to meet the challenges. The subtitle Patriotic Dissent suggests the double stance of many artists-- influenced by patriotic expressions of national solidarity, yet critical of the ways that patriotic language was put to use against others. The articles represent a broad range of theatre: Broadway musicals, documentary theatre, adaptations of classical theatre, new plays by British playwrights, street performances and installations, and musical concerts. The contributors’ case studies evaluate the effectiveness of important instances of political theatre and protest from this decade, arguing for the significance, relevance, and continuing necessity for evolving forms of political theatre today.
