In Liveness Philip Auslander addresses what may be the single most important question facing all kinds of performance today: What is the status of live performance in a culture dominated by mass media? By looking at specific instances of live performance such as theatre, rock music, sport and courtroom testimony, Liveness offers penetrating insights into media culture. This provocative book tackles some of the enduring 'sacred truths' surrounding the high cultural status of the live event.

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

"A testament to the synergy of two evolving fields. From the study of staged performances to examinations of the performing body in everyday life, this book demonstrates the enormous profitability of moving beyond disability as metaphor. . . . It's a lesson that many of our cultural institutions desperately need to learn."-Martin F. Norden, University of Massachusetts-AmherstThis groundbreaking collection imagines disabled bodies as "bodies in commotion"-bodies that dance across artistic and discursive boundaries, challenging our understanding of both disability and performance. In the book's essays, leading critics and artists explore topics that range from theater and dance to multi-media performance art, agit-prop, American Sign Language theater, and wheelchair sports. Bodies in Commotion is the first collection to consider the mutually interpretive qualities of these two emerging fields, producing a dynamic new resource for artists, activists, and scholars.

Over the past twenty years, 'performance' has emerged as a central analytical and critical concept. Now the focus of a burgeoning academic discipline, performance studies, it is also crucial to many other fields, including anthropology, sociology, communications, art history, cultural studies, linguistics and rhetoric. This collection brings together major texts articulating perspectives on performance and performativity.The multi-disciplinary approach of this collection reflects the growing importance of the concept of performance across a variety of disciplines. With a new introduction contextualising the concept's rise, and a full index to guide the reader through the work, this will be an invaluable reference tool for students and researchers alike.

From Acting to Performance collects for the first time major essays by performance theorist and critic Philip Auslander. Together these essays provide a survey of the changes in acting and performance during the crucial transition from the ecstatic theatre of the 1960s to the ironic postmodernism of the 1980s. Auslander examines performance genres ranging from theatre and dance to performance art and stand-up comedy. In doing so he discusses an impressive line-up of practitioners including Antonin Artaud, Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Brook, Willem Dafoe, the Wooster Group, Augusto Boal, Kate Bornstein, and Orlan. From Acting to Performance is a must for all students and scholars interested in contemporary theatre and performance.

Product Description: From Acting to Performance collects for the first time major essays by performance theorist and critic Philip Auslander. Together these essays provide a survey of the changes in acting and performance during the crucial transition from the ecstatic theatre of the 1960s to the ironic postmodernism of the 1980s...read more

Examines performance art in the 1980s and new modes of political art in a media-saturated culture

Product Description: The New York School Poets as Playwrights is a critical introduction to a little-known body of drama by four preeminent American poets. In this interdisciplinary study, Philip Auslander draws on the methods of art history, theatre history, and literary criticism...read more