Download or read book The Improvised State written by Alex Jeffrey and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2012-07-30 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Improvised State provides a highly developed account of the nature and outcomes of Bosnian state practices since the Dayton Peace Agreement. Jeffrey presents new and significant theories, based on extensive fieldwork in Bosnia, which advance understanding of state building. Provides a major contribution to recent academic debates as to the nature of the state after violent conflict, and offers invaluable insights into state building Introduces the idea of state improvisation, where improvisation refers to a process of both performance and resourcefulness Uses the theoretical framework of Pierre Bourdieu to explore how powerful agencies have attempted to present a coherent vision of Bosnia and Herzegovina following the conflict 1992-5 Advances our understanding of the Bosnian state by focusing on the practices of statecraft fostered in the post-Dayton era Research based on four periods of residential fieldwork in Bosnia, which allowed a detailed analysis of political practices in the country

Download or read book Improv for Democracy written by Don Waisanen and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2020-10-01 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While much has been written about what democracies should look like, much less has been said about how to actually train citizens in democratic perspectives and skills. Amid the social and political crises of our time, many programs seeking to bridge differences between citizens draw from the surprising field of improvisational theater. Improv trains people to engage with one another in ways that promote empathy and understanding. Don Waisanen demonstrates how improv-based teaching and training methods can forward the communication, leadership, and civic skills our world urgently needs. Waisanen includes specific exercises and thought experiments that can be used by educators; advocates for civic engagement and civil discourse; practitioners and scholars in communication, leadership, and conflict management; training and development specialists; administrators looking to build new curricula or programming; and professionals seeking to embed productive, sustainable, and socially responsible forms of interaction in and across organizations. Ultimately this book offers a new approach for helping people become more creative, heighten awareness, think faster, build confidence, operate flexibly, improve expression and governance skills, and above all, think and act more democratically.

Download or read book Improvised Lives written by AbdouMaliq Simone and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-12-05 with total page 103 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The poor and working people in cities of the South find themselves in urban spaces that are conventionally construed as places to reside or inhabit. But what if we thought of popular districts in more expansive ways that capture what really goes on within them? In such cities, popular districts are the settings of more uncertain operations that take place under the cover of darkness, generating uncanny alliances among disparate bodies, materials and things and expanding the urban sensorium and its capacities for liveliness. In this important new book AbdouMaliq Simone explores the nature of these alliances, portraying urban districts as sites of enduring transformations through rhythms that mediate between the needs of residents not to draw too much attention to themselves and their aspirations to become a small niche of exception. Here we discover an urban South that exists as dense rhythms of endurance that turn out to be vital for survival, connectivity, and becoming.

Download or read book Every Household Its Own Government written by Daniel Jordan Smith and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-08 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Empty pipes and H2O entrepreneurs: boreholes, cart pushers, and "pure water" -- Problem has changed name": electric power and consumer citizenship -- Okadas and danfos: "public transportation" in Nigeria -- "Be what you want to be": cell phones and social inequality -- "They don't know what i have not taught them": the privatization of public schooling -- "Sleeping with one eye open": infrastructural insecurity.

Download or read book Black Book Companion written by Paladin Press and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: CIA and Special Forces used the original Black Books as manuals of mayhem and sabotage. This is a further study into the dark art of improvised explosives and munitions. Learn how the guerrilla warfare specialist makes dynamite, RDX, canister grenades, antipersonnel mines and more. For information purposes only.

Download or read book Play Your Way Sane written by Clay Drinko and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-01-19 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stop negative thoughts, assuage anxiety, and live in the moment with these fun, easy games from improv expert Clay Drinko. If you’ve been feeling lost lately, you’re not alone! Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, Americans were experiencing record levels of loneliness and anxiety. And in our current political turmoil, it’s safe to say that people are looking for new tools to help them feel more present, positive, and in sync with the world. So what better way to get there than play? In Play Your Way Sane, Dr. Clay Drinko offers 120 low-key, accessible activities that draw on the popular principles of improv comedy to help you tackle your everyday stress and reconnect with the people around you. Divided into twelve fun sections, including “Killing Debbie Downer” and “Thou Shalt Not Be Judgy,” the games emphasize openness, reciprocation, and active listening as the keys to a mindful and satisfying life. Whether you’re looking to improve your personal relationships, find new meaning at work, or just survive our trying times, Play Your Way Sane offers serious self-help with a side of Second City sass.

Download or read book How to Think on Your Feet written by Mark Bergren and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Impro written by Keith Johnstone and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-11-12 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Keith Johnstone's involvement with the theatre began when George Devine and Tony Richardson, artistic directors of the Royal Court Theatre, commissioned a play from him. This was in 1956. A few years later he was himself Associate Artistic Director, working as a play-reader and director, in particular helping to run the Writers' Group. The improvisatory techniques and exercises evolved there to foster spontaneity and narrative skills were developed further in the actors' studio then in demonstrations to schools and colleges and ultimately in the founding of a company of performers, called The Theatre Machine. Divided into four sections, 'Status', 'Spontaneity', 'Narrative Skills', and 'Masks and Trance', arranged more or less in the order a group might approach them, the book sets out the specific techniques and exercises which Johnstone has himself found most useful and most stimulating. The result is both an ideas book and a fascinating exploration of the nature of spontaneous creativity.

Download or read book Thinking in Jazz written by Paul F. Berliner and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-10-05 with total page 904 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A landmark in jazz studies, Thinking in Jazz reveals as never before how musicians, both individually and collectively, learn to improvise. Chronicling leading musicians from their first encounters with jazz to the development of a unique improvisatory voice, Paul Berliner documents the lifetime of preparation that lies behind the skilled improviser's every idea. The product of more than fifteen years of immersion in the jazz world, Thinking in Jazz combines participant observation with detailed musicological analysis, the author's experience as a jazz trumpeter, interpretations of published material by scholars and performers, and, above all, original data from interviews with more than fifty professional musicians: bassists George Duvivier and Rufus Reid; drummers Max Roach, Ronald Shannon Jackson, and Akira Tana; guitarist Emily Remler; pianists Tommy Flanagan and Barry Harris; saxophonists Lou Donaldson, Lee Konitz, and James Moody; trombonist Curtis Fuller; trumpeters Doc Cheatham, Art Farmer, Wynton Marsalis, and Red Rodney; vocalists Carmen Lundy and Vea Williams; and others. Together, the interviews provide insight into the production of jazz by great artists like Betty Carter, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Coleman Hawkins, and Charlie Parker. Thinking in Jazz overflows with musical examples from the 1920s to the present, including original transcriptions (keyed to commercial recordings) of collective improvisations by Miles Davis's and John Coltrane's groups. These transcriptions provide additional insight into the structure and creativity of jazz improvisation and represent a remarkable resource for jazz musicians as well as students and educators. Berliner explores the alternative ways—aural, visual, kinetic, verbal, emotional, theoretical, associative—in which these performers conceptualize their music and describes the delicate interplay of soloist and ensemble in collective improvisation. Berliner's skillful integration of data concerning musical development, the rigorous practice and thought artists devote to jazz outside of performance, and the complexities of composing in the moment leads to a new understanding of jazz improvisation as a language, an aesthetic, and a tradition. This unprecedented journey to the heart of the jazz tradition will fascinate and enlighten musicians, musicologists, and jazz fans alike.

Download or read book Free Play written by Stephen Nachmanovitch and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1991-05-01 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Free Play is about the inner sources of spontaneous creation. It is about why we create and what we learn when we do. It is about the flow of unhindered creative energy: the joy of making art in all its varied forms. An international bestseller and beloved classic, Free Play is an inspiring and provocative book, directed toward people in any field who want to contact, honor, and strengthen their own creative powers. It reveals how inspiration arises within us, how that inspiration may be blocked, derailed or obscured, and how finally it can be liberated—how we can be liberated—to speak or sing, write or paint, dance or play, with our own authentic voice. Stephen Nachmanovitch, a pioneer in free improvisation, integrates material from a wide variety of sources among the arts, sciences, and spiritual traditions of humanity, drawing on unusual quotes, amusing and illuminating anecdotes, and original metaphors. The whole enterprise of improvisation in life and art, of recovering free play and awakening creativity, is about being true to ourselves and our visions. Free Play brings us into direct, active contact with boundless creative energies that we may not even know we had.

Download or read book The Improvising Mind written by Aaron Berkowitz and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-06-17 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ability to improvise represents one of the highest levels of musical achievement. Yet what musical knowledge is 3equired for improvisation? How does a musician learn to improvise? What are the neural correlates of improvised performance? These are some of the questions explored in this unique and fascinating new book.

Download or read book Improvising Improvisation written by Gary Peters and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-05-29 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is an ever-increasing number of books on improvisation, ones that richly recount experiences in the heat of the creative moment, theorize on the essence of improvisation, and offer convincing arguments for improvisation’s impact across a wide range of human activity. This book is nothing like that. In a provocative and at times moving experiment, Gary Peters takes a different approach, turning the philosophy of improvisation upside-down and inside-out. Guided by Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, and especially Deleuze—and exploring a range of artists from Hendrix to Borges—Peters illuminates new fundamentals about what, as an experience, improvisation truly is. As he shows, improvisation isn’t so much a genre, idiom, style, or technique—it’s a predicament we are thrown into, one we find ourselves in. The predicament, he shows, is a complex entwinement of choice and decision. The performativity of choice during improvisation may happen “in the moment,” but it is already determined by an a priori mode of decision. In this way, improvisation happens both within and around the actual moment, negotiating a simultaneous past, present, and future. Examining these and other often ignored dimensions of spontaneous creativity, Peters proposes a consistently challenging and rigorously argued new perspective on improvisation across an extraordinary range of disciplines.

Download or read book Improvised Medicine Providing Care in Extreme Environments written by Kenneth V. Iserson and published by McGraw Hill Professional. This book was released on 2012-04-05 with total page 593 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deliver quality healthcare in the most challenging field conditions Full of practical clinical pearls and proven strategies, this indispensible guide shows you how to operate outside your comfort zone and devise effective treatment solutions when the traditional tools (medications, equipment, and staff) are unavailable—or when you need to provide care outside of your specialty. Improvised Medicine is a must for anyone who plans to work in global, disaster, or other resource-poor settings. FEATURES: Simple-to-follow directions, diagrams, and illustrations describe practical techniques and the improvised equipment necessary to provide quality care during crises. Contains improvisations in anesthesia and airway management, dentistry, gynecology/obstetrics, infectious disease/laboratory diagnosis, internal medicine, otolaryngology, pediatrics and malnutrition, orthopedics, psychiatry, and surgery. Also includes basic disaster communication techniques, post-disaster forensics, a model hospital disaster plan, and innovative patient-transport methods. LEARN HOW TO: Make an endotracheal tube in seconds Perform digital-oral and blind-nasotracheal intubations Make plaster bandages for splints/casts Give open-drop ether, ketamine drips, and halothane Use subcutaneous/intraperitoneal rehydration/transfusion Make ORS and standard nutrition formulas Clean, disinfect, and sterilize equipment for reuse Warm blood units in seconds inexpensively Take/view stereoscopic x-rays with standard equipment Quickly and easily stop postpartum hemorrhage Fashion surgical equipment from common items Evacuate patients easily for high-rise hospitals Make esophageal and precordial stethoscopes Quickly improvise a saline lock Make ECG electrode/defibrillator pads and ultrasound gel

Download or read book Making It Up Together written by Leslie A. Tilley and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-12-23 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most studies of musical improvisation focus on individual musicians. But that is not the whole story. From jazz to flamenco, Shona mbira to Javanese gamelan, improvised practices thrive on group creativity, relying on the close interaction of multiple simultaneously improvising performers. In Making It Up Together, Leslie A. Tilley explores the practice of collective musical improvisation cross-culturally, making a case for placing collectivity at the center of improvisation discourse and advocating ethnographically informed music analysis as a powerful tool for investigating improvisational processes. Through two contrasting Balinese case studies—of the reyong gong chime’s melodic norot practice and the interlocking drumming tradition kendang arja—Tilley proposes and tests analytical frameworks for examining collectively improvised performance. At the micro-level, Tilley’s analyses offer insight into the note-by-note decisions of improvising performers; at the macro-level, they illuminate larger musical, discursive, structural, and cultural factors shaping those decisions. This multi-tiered inquiry reveals that unpacking how performers play and imagine as a collective is crucial to understanding improvisation and demonstrates how music analysis can elucidate these complex musical and interactional relationships. Highlighting connections with diverse genres from various music cultures, Tilley’s examinations of collective improvisation also suggest rich potential for cross-genre exploration. The surrounding discussions point to larger theories of communication and interaction, creativity and cognition that will be of interest to a range of readers—from ethnomusicologists and music theorists to cognitive psychologists, jazz studies scholars, and improvising performers. Setting new parameters for the study of improvisation, Making It Up Together opens up fresh possibilities for understanding the creative process, in music and beyond.

Download or read book Whose Improv Is It Anyway written by Amy E. Seham and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2009-10-20 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On both sides of the stage improv-comedy's popularity has increased exponentially throughout the 1980s and '90s and into the new millennium. Presto! An original song is created out of thin air. With nothing but a suggestion from the audience, daring young improvisers working without a net or a script create hilarious characters, sketches, and songs. Thrilled by the danger, the immediacy, and the virtuosity of improv-comedy, spectators laugh and cheer. American improv-comedy burst onto the scene in the 1950s with Chicago's the Compass Players (best known for the brilliant comedy duo Mike Nichols and Elaine May) and the Second City, which launched the careers of many popular comedians, including Gilda Radner, John Belushi, and Mike Myers. Chicago continues to be a mecca for young performers who travel from faraway places to study improv. At the same time, the techniques of Chicago improv have infiltrated classrooms, workshops, rehearsals, and comedy clubs across North and South America, Europe, Australia, and Japan. Improv's influence is increasingly evident in contemporary films and in interactive entertainment on the internet. Drawing on the experiences of working improvisers, Whose Improv Is It Anyway? provides a never-before-published account of developments beyond Second City's mainstream approach to the genre. This fascinating history chronicles the origins of "the Harold," a sophisticated new "long-form" style of improv developed in the '80s at ImprovOlympic and details the importance and pitfalls of ComedySports. Here also is a backstage glimpse at the Annoyance Theatre, best known on the national scene for its production of The Real Live Brady Bunch. Readers will get the scoop on the recent work of players who, feeling excluded by early improv's "white guys in ties," created such independent groups as the Free Associates and the African American troupe Oui Be Negroes. There is far more to the art of improv than may be suggested by the sketches on Saturday Night Live or the games on Whose Line Is It Anyway? This history, an insider's look at the evolution of improv-comedy in Chicago, reveals the struggles, the laughter, and the ideals of mutual support, freedom, and openness that have inspired many performers. It explores the power games, the gender inequities, and the racial tensions that can emerge in improvised performance, and it shares the techniques and strategies veteran players use to combat these problems. Improv art is revealed to be an art of compromise, a fragile negotiation between the poles of process and product. The result, as shown here, can be exciting, shimmering, magical, and not exclusively the property of any troupe or actor.

Download or read book The Triumph of Improvisation written by James Graham Wilson and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2014-02-15 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Triumph of Improvisation, James Graham Wilson takes a long view of the end of the Cold War, from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 to Operation Desert Storm in January 1991. Drawing on deep archival research and recently declassified papers, Wilson argues that adaptation, improvisation, and engagement by individuals in positions of power ended the specter of a nuclear holocaust. Amid ambivalence and uncertainty, Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan, George Shultz, and George H. W. Bush—and a host of other actors—engaged with adversaries and adapted to a rapidly changing international environment and information age in which global capitalism recovered as command economies failed. Eschewing the notion of a coherent grand strategy to end the Cold War, Wilson paints a vivid portrait of how leaders made choices; some made poor choices while others reacted prudently, imaginatively, and courageously to events they did not foresee. A book about the burdens of responsibility, the obstacles of domestic politics, and the human qualities of leadership, The Triumph of Improvisation concludes with a chapter describing how George H. W. Bush oversaw the construction of a new configuration of power after the fall of the Berlin Wall, one that resolved the fundamental components of the Cold War on Washington’s terms.

Download or read book Media Politics in China written by Maria Repnikova and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-15 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maria Repnikova offers an innovative analysis of the media oversight role in China by examining how a volatile partnership is sustained between critical journalists and the state.