Bertie Ferdman – författare

Curating Dramaturgies investigates the transformation of art and performance and its impact on dramaturgy and curatorship. Addressing contexts and processes of the performing arts as interconnecting with visual arts, this book features interviews with leading curators, dramaturgs and programmers who are at the forefront of working in, with, and negotiating the daily practice of interdisciplinary live arts.The book offers a view of praxis that combines perspectives on theory and practice and looks at the way that various arts institutions, practitioners and cultural agents have been working to change the way that art and performance have developed and experienced by spectators in the last decade.Curating Dramaturgies argues that cultural producers and scholars are becoming more cognizant of this overlapping and transforming field. The introductory essay by the editors explores the rise of interdisciplinary live arts and its ramifications in cultural and political terms. This is further elaborated in the interviews with 15 diversely placed arts professionals who are at the forefront of rethinking and consolidatingthe ever-evolving field of the visual arts and performance.

Curating Dramaturgies investigates the transformation of art and performance and its impact on dramaturgy and curatorship. Addressing contexts and processes of the performing arts as interconnecting with visual arts, this book features interviews with leading curators, dramaturgs and programmers who are at the forefront of working in, with, and negotiating the daily practice of interdisciplinary live arts.The book offers a view of praxis that combines perspectives on theory and practice and looks at the way that various arts institutions, practitioners and cultural agents have been working to change the way that art and performance have developed and experienced by spectators in the last decade.Curating Dramaturgies argues that cultural producers and scholars are becoming more cognizant of this overlapping and transforming field. The introductory essay by the editors explores the rise of interdisciplinary live arts and its ramifications in cultural and political terms. This is further elaborated in the interviews with 15 diversely placed arts professionals who are at the forefront of rethinking and consolidatingthe ever-evolving field of the visual arts and performance.

Off Sites: Contemporary Performance beyond Site-Specific rethinks current definitions of “site-specific performance”—a genre of theatre that adopts spaces outside of traditional theatre buildings and uses the experience of space, place, and situation as an integral component to the structure and content of a theatrical work. This book looks at key productions of artists working in this genre, including Private Moment by David Levine and Geyser Land, conceived and directed by video artist Mary Ellen Strom and choreographer Ann Carlson.This incredibly rich and vital part of theatre in the past several decades has become diverse enough that the term “site-specific” has ceased to adequately describe it. Contextualizing site-specific practices in both visual and performing arts discourses, author Bertie Ferdman traces the evolution of that term from an experimental staging practice to an engaged situational event. Substituting the term “off-site,” she illustrates the ways in which a new generation of artists have challenged the disciplinary frameworks of site-specific theatre. She focuses on five distinct ways in which these artists do that: 1) blurring the traditional boundaries between the fictional and the real; 2) changing how the audience and actor interact with each other and whether they are physically together or apart; 3) fabricating sites from physically bound, conceptually constructed, or virtual spaces; 4) establishing live situations in real vs. fiction; and 5) challenging our preconceived notions of time and space. The first chapter outlines the book’s primary goals, traces the genealogy of site-based work through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and presents the theoretical groundwork for the book. Each subsequent chapter focuses on a particular type of “off-site”: Disciplinary Sites, Spectator Sites, Temporal Sites, Urban Sites, and contains several case studies.Main questions asked by this study include: How are artists and performances engaging with site? What sites do contemporary theatre practices engender? How does live performance negotiate such sites?

The Methuen Drama Companion to Performance Art offers a comprehensive guide to the major issues and interdisciplinary debates concerning performance in art contexts that have developed over the last decade. It understands performance art as an institutional, cultural, and economic phenomenon rather than as a label or object. Following the ever-increasing institutionalization and mainstreaming of performance, the book’s chapters identify a marked change in the economies and labor practices surrounding performance art, and explore how this development is reflective of capitalist approaches to art and event production. Embracing what we perceive to be the 'oxymoronic status' of performance art—where it is simultaneously precarious and highly profitable—the essays in this book map the myriad gestures and radical possibilities of this extreme contradiction.This Companion adopts an interdisciplinary perspective to present performance art’s legacies and its current practices. It brings together specially commissioned essays from leading innovative scholars from a wide range of approaches including art history, visual and performance studies, dance and theatre scholarship in order to provide a comprehensive and multifocal overview of the emerging research trends and methodologies devoted to performance art.