Maaike Bleeker - Böcker

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. Building on the foundational texts of both fields that established the performativity of perception and cognition, Performance and Phenomenology continues a tradition that considers experience to be the foundation of being and meaning. Acknowledging the history and critical polemics against phenomenological methodology and against performance as a field of study and category of artistic production, the volume provides both an introduction to core thinkers and an expansion on their ideas in a wide range of case studies. Whether addressing the use of dead animals in performance, actor training, the legal implications of thinking phenomenologically about how we walk, or the intertwining of digital and analog perception, each chapter explores a world comprised of embodied action and thought. The established and emerging scholars contributing to the volume develop insights central to the phenomenological tradition while expanding on the work of contemporary theorists and performers. In asking why performance and phenomenology belong in conversation together, the book suggests how they can transform each other in the process and what is at stake in this transformation.

Technology has become fully integrated into the ecologies in which we live, including our ways of making and making sense of theater, dance, and performance.While these practices have long histories of incorporating tools and instruments in live performances, from masks, to amplification, lighting, and stagecraft, technology today can no longer be understood as a tool complementing essentially non‑technological behaviors or environments. Technologies and how they are developed and used are informed by ideas, assumptions, and practices that are culturally and historically situated and have material impacts. Whether implicitly or intentionally, we are always already operating in and requiring creative and critical means of engaging with technoscientific lifeworlds. Authors in this volume show how human‑technology intersections within the performing arts reflect developments in the world at large and how artistic inquiry might contribute to or intervene in these tendencies. Together, the chapters in this volume offer a broad view that includes diverse types of performances and a range of technologies without imposing these as categories on a field that does not operate along the lines of such categorizations.This broad view also allows us to bring together discourses and subjects that have been discussed separately in relation to different genres or aspects of performance, different types of technologies, or from the perspective of different technology‑related concerns, including interactivity, immersion, inter‑, multi‑, and transmediality, equity, futurisms, archival practices, and new dramaturgies.

How can various technologies, from the more conventional to the very new, be used to archive, share and understand dance movement? How can they become part of new ways of creating dance? What does this tell us about the ways in which technology is part of how we make sense and think? Well-known choreographers and dance collectives including William Forsythe, Siohban Davis, Merce Cunningham, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and BADco. have initiated projects to investigate these questions, and in so doing have inaugurated a new era for dance archives, education, research and creation. Their work draws attention to the intimate relationship between the technologies we use and the ways in which we think, perceive, and make sense. Transmission in Motion examines these extraordinary projects ‘from the inside’, presenting in-depth analyses by the practitioners, artists and collectives involved in their development. These studies are framed by scholarly reflection, illuminating the significance of these projects in the context of current debates on dance, the (multi-media) archive, immaterial cultural heritage and copyright, embodied cognition, education, media culture and the knowledge society.

How can various technologies, from the more conventional to the very new, be used to archive, share and understand dance movement? How can they become part of new ways of creating dance? What does this tell us about the ways in which technology is part of how we make sense and think? Well-known choreographers and dance collectives including William Forsythe, Siohban Davis, Merce Cunningham, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and BADco. have initiated projects to investigate these questions, and in so doing have inaugurated a new era for dance archives, education, research and creation. Their work draws attention to the intimate relationship between the technologies we use and the ways in which we think, perceive, and make sense. Transmission in Motion examines these extraordinary projects ‘from the inside’, presenting in-depth analyses by the practitioners, artists and collectives involved in their development. These studies are framed by scholarly reflection, illuminating the significance of these projects in the context of current debates on dance, the (multi-media) archive, immaterial cultural heritage and copyright, embodied cognition, education, media culture and the knowledge society.

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 twenty-first century terrain of critical and performance practice. Building on the foundational texts of both fields that established the performativity of perception and cognition, Performance and Phenomenology continues a tradition that considers experience to be the foundation of being and meaning. Acknowledging the history and critical polemics against phenomenological methodology and against performance as a field of study and category of artistic production, the volume provides both an introduction to core thinkers and an expansion on their ideas in a wide range of case studies. Whether addressing the use of dead animals in performance, actor training, the legal implications of thinking phenomenologically about how we walk, or the intertwining of digital and analog perception, each chapter explores a world comprised of embodied action and thought. The established and emerging scholars contributing to the volume develop insights central to the phenomenological tradition while expanding on the work of contemporary theorists and performers. In asking why performance and phenomenology belong in conversation together, the book suggests how they can transform each other in the process and what is at stake in this transformation.

Published Open Access, Nonconforming Criticism examines forms of thinking at the borderlands of performance that defy, dispute and resist the category of criticism. Against the backdrop of forms of governance and regulation of thought under late liberalism, this book looks to those who refuse to reproduce colonial logics in criticism by investing in unruly experiments in thinking from, and through, performance. Focusing on the period between the early noughties and early twenty-twenties, the book analyses critical practices such as live writing, artist-led publications, zines, gatherings and experiments with video, sound and publishing from cultural workers and thinkers migrating across borders, knowledges and contexts. These practices are often peripheralized from established forms of criticism, yet they shape criticality as a form of political imagination.Unpacking the logics that shape professionalised criticism, and in dialogue with decolonial, abolitionist and feminist theorisations of politics and knowledge, the book focuses on nonconforming criticism as a practice of unlearning. Structured into three parts, the book constitutes a partial lexicon of Borders, Experiments and Practices. It moves through forms of thinking-in-public that reconfigure relations of sensing and meaning between criticism, performance and political life, against the imperial and separatist logics of criticism and its entanglements.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

Available in English for the first time, The Bodies of Others investigates, through a series of close readings of several theatrical and film productions in Europe and South America, the relationship between “representation” (including theatrical representation) and ethics (defined as an ongoing relational negotiation, as opposed to a set of universal moral laws).The main concepts are exposed through a comparative analysis of historical processes, political actions and artistic works from different periods. Thus, the dialogue between the film La carrose d'or by Jean Renoir (1952) and Rosa Cuchillo by Yuyachkani (2006) serves to address the problem of the multiple meanings of representation. The dialogue between the play El Señor Galíndez by Eduardo Pavlovsky (1973), the performance The Conquest of America by Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis (1989) and the novel 2666 (2004) by Roberto Bolaño allows the concept of an ‘ethic of the body’ to be addressed. Other key concepts such as identity, care, cruelty, violence, memory and testimony are considered through investigation of work such as Angelica Liddel’s theatre pieces, Rabih Mroué and Lina Majdalanie’s performances, Albertina Carri, Basilio Martín Patino and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s films, and Mapa Teatro’s trans-disciplinary creations.

On the eve of a global pandemic, Kathleen Gough, a theatre professor, becomes immersed in the lives of five artist-mystics, each of whom is a pioneer in her field: Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), the first known musical composer; Eleanora Duse (1858-1924), the first modern actor in the Western world; Simone Weil (1909-1943), philosopher, activist, and mystic, whom Albert Camus called “the only great spirit of our time”; Marina Abramovic (b. 1946), “the grandmother of performance art”; and Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), the first known (and belatedly acknowledged) abstract painter. Each time Gough crosses a threshold into their world, she is compelled to attend courses, seminars and workshops that are simultaneously about dying and healing.Curious to learn more about the relationships between art practice, dying, and healing, Gough imagines the five artists as wisdom teachers in a mystery school. In a series of eight lectures, she turns to performance theory to provide a framework for engaging with the unknown world. In Theatre and the Threshold of Death, Gough makes a persuasive argument for the world-making power of relational thinking in our increasingly polarized age.

On the eve of a global pandemic, Kathleen Gough, a theatre professor, becomes immersed in the lives of five artist-mystics, each of whom is a pioneer in her field: Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), the first known musical composer; Eleanora Duse (1858-1924), the first modern actor in the Western world; Simone Weil (1909-1943), philosopher, activist, and mystic, whom Albert Camus called “the only great spirit of our time”; Marina Abramovic (b. 1946), “the grandmother of performance art”; and Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), the first known (and belatedly acknowledged) abstract painter. Each time Gough crosses a threshold into their world, she is compelled to attend courses, seminars and workshops that are simultaneously about dying and healing.Curious to learn more about the relationships between art practice, dying, and healing, Gough imagines the five artists as wisdom teachers in a mystery school. In a series of eight lectures, she turns to performance theory to provide a framework for engaging with the unknown world. In Theatre and the Threshold of Death, Gough makes a persuasive argument for the world-making power of relational thinking in our increasingly polarized age.

Thinking Through Theatre and Performance presents a bold and innovative approach to the study of theatre and performance. Instead of topics, genres, histories or theories, the book starts with the questions that theatre and performance are uniquely capable of asking: How does theatre function as a place for seeing and hearing? How do not only bodies and voices but also objects and media perform? How do memories, emotions and ideas continue to do their work when the performance is over? And how can theatre and performance intervene in social, political and environmental structures and frameworks?Written by leading international scholars, each chapter of this volume is built around a key performance example, and detailed discussions introduce the methodologies and theories that help us understand how these performances are practices of enquiry into the world. Thinking through Theatre and Performance is essential for those involved in making, enjoying, critiquing and studying theatre, and will appeal to anyone who is interested in the questions that theatre and performance ask of themselves and of us.

Thinking Through Theatre and Performance presents a bold and innovative approach to the study of theatre and performance. Instead of topics, genres, histories or theories, the book starts with the questions that theatre and performance are uniquely capable of asking: How does theatre function as a place for seeing and hearing? How do not only bodies and voices but also objects and media perform? How do memories, emotions and ideas continue to do their work when the performance is over? And how can theatre and performance intervene in social, political and environmental structures and frameworks?Written by leading international scholars, each chapter of this volume is built around a key performance example, and detailed discussions introduce the methodologies and theories that help us understand how these performances are practices of enquiry into the world. Thinking through Theatre and Performance is essential for those involved in making, enjoying, critiquing and studying theatre, and will appeal to anyone who is interested in the questions that theatre and performance ask of themselves and of us.

This book explores how doing dramaturgy is informed by today’s highly diverse field of theatre, dance and performance.