Product Description: This book offers a timely discussion about the interventions and tensions between two contested and contentious fields, performance and phenomenology, with international case studies that map an emerging 21st century terrain of critical and performance practice...read more

The field of performance studies analyses the production and impact of on-stage performance, such as in a theatre or circus, and off-stage performance, such as cultural rituals and political protests. Performance Studies: Key Words, Concepts and Theories introduces students to 34 key topics seen as paramount to the future of performance studies in a series of short, engaging essays by an international team of distinguished scholars. Each essay contributes to the wide-ranging, adventurous and conscientious nature that makes performance studies such an innovative, valuable and exciting field.

In this collection of essays, performance studies scholar and artist Richard Schechner brings his unique perspective to bear upon some of the key themes of society in the 21st century. Schechner connects the avantgarde and terror, the counter-cultural movement of the 1960s/70s and the Occupy movement; self-wounding art, popular culture, and ritual; the Ramlila cycle play of India and the way imagination structures reality; the corporate world and conservative artists. Schechner asks artists to redeploy Nehru's Third World as a movement not of nations but of like-minded culture workers who must propose counter-performances to war, violence, and the globalized corporate empire. With characteristic brio, Schechner urges us to play for keeps. "Playing deeply is a way of finding and embodying new knowledge", he writes. Performed Imaginaries ranges through some of the key moves within Schechner’s oeuvre, and challenges today’s experimental artists, activists, and scholars to generate a new, third world of performance.

Product Description: Adorno and Performance offers the first comprehensive examination of the vital role of performance within the philosophy of Theodor W. Adorno. Capacious in its ramifications for contemporary life, the term 'performance' here unlocks Adorno's dialectical thought process, which aimed at overcoming the stultifying uniformity of instrumental reason...read more

Product Description: Performance uses the alphabet as an organizational device to present a series of short pieces that approach performance from multiple perspectives and various compositional strategies. Pelias’s essays, poetry, dialogue, personal narratives, quick speculations, and other literary genres explore the key themes in this field, encapsulating the essence of performance studies for the novice and providing food for thought for the expert...read more

Product Description: Theatres of Immanence: Deleuze and the Ethics of Performance is the first monograph to provide an in-depth study of the implications of Deleuze's philosophy for theatre and performance. Drawing from Goat Island, Butoh, Artaud and Kaprow, as well from Deleuze, Bergson and Laruelle, the book conceives performance as a way of thinking immanence...read more

Product Description: This book gives a new view on the legacy of Jerzy Grotowski (1933-1999), one of the central, and yet misunderstood, figures who shaped 20th-century theatre, focusing on his least known last phase of work on ancient songs and the craft of the performer...read more

Product Description: This book provides an accessible yet sophisticated introduction to the significant philosophical issues concerning the performing arts. Presents the significant philosophical issues concerning the performing arts in an accessible style, assuming no prior knowledge Provides a critical overview and a comprehensive framework for thinking about the performing arts Examines the assumption that classical music provides the best model for thinking about artistic performance across the performing arts Explores ways in which the ‘classical paradigm’ might be extended to other musical genres, to theatre, and to dance Applies the thinking on performing arts to the issue of ‘performance art’ ...read more

Product Description: Exploring the themes of the event, ephemerality and democracy that mark the encounter between performance and philosophy, this original study elaborates fresh perspectives on the experiences of undoing, fiasco and disaster that shadow both the both stage and everyday life.

Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: Theory for Performance Studies: A Student's Guide is a clear and concise handbook to the key connections between performance studies and critical theory since the 1960s. Philip Auslander looks at the way the concept of performance has been engaged across a number of disciplines...read more

Product Description: Oddey questions the role of the spectator and director, and the nature of art works and performance. She provocatively demonstrates the spectator as centre of the artistic experience, a new kind of making theatre-art, revealing its spirit and nature; searching for space and contemplation in a hectic twenty-first century landscape...read more

Product Description: The fifteen original essays in Staging Philosophy make useful connections between the discipline of philosophy and the fields of theater and performance and use these insights to develop new theories about theater. Each of the contributors—leading scholars in the fields of performance and philosophy—breaks new ground, presents new arguments, and offers new theories that will pave the way for future scholarship...read more

Product Description: Gathers the voices of unique artists from the worlds of theatre, music and performance to discuss process and the making of interdisciplinary work.Gathers the voices of unique artists from the worlds of theatre, music and performance to discuss process and the making of interdisciplinary work...read more

Product Description: This book provides a forum for a wide range of theatre, music and performance artists to talk about where they stand in relation to new technologies, intercultural collaborations, and the making of interdisciplinary work. Looking at how time, space and memory play an active role in shaping different artistic visions, editor Caridad Svich has gathered the voices of unique and dynamic artists including Tim Etchells, Rinde Eckert, Richard Foreman, Peter Gabriel, David Greig, Guillermo Gomez-Peña, Phelim McDermott and Peter Sellars as a way to examine the impact of globalisation on the creation and development of new work...read more

Product Description: This collection offers a uniquely comprehensive guide to the sociology of the body. With a strong historical scope and conceptual framework, it provides an indispensable reference for undergraduate and postgraduate students, and a robust source for scholars working in the area...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Analyzing Performance provides conceptual tools for understanding a range of performance, including theater, dance, cinema, other audiovisual media, and mime. This richly illustrated book develops protocols for the analysis of performance at every level -- from the minute gestures and facial expressions of an actor to the social network in which theater is embedded -- and respects the importance of every aspect of performance, including actor, costume, space, time, music, and lighting. With a keen awareness of the roles of social context in the interpretation of performance, Patrice Pavis leads the reader from a purely formal analysis to a semiology and anthropology of performance, where spectator and actor are equally objects of study. Drawn from performance traditions and innovations all over the world, the book's many examples make critical techniques vivid and concrete. Analyzing Performance will be essential reading for critics, scholars, students, and practitioners of theater, who will find that David Williams's elegant translation brings Pavis's insights within reach of English-language readers.Patrice Pavis, Professor of Theater at Paris-VIII University, has written extensively and influentially on performance.David Williams is Professor of Theater, Dartington College of Arts, Devon, England. (view table of contents)