Enactments – serie

From cannibalism to light calligraphy, from self-harming to animal sacrifice, from meat entwined with sex toys to a commodity-embedded ice wall, the idiosyncratic output of Chinese time-based art over the past twenty-five years has invigorated contemporary global art movements and conversation. In Beijing Xingwei, Meiling Cheng engages with artworks created to mark China's rapid social, economic, cultural, intellectual, and environmental transformations in the post-Deng era. Beijing Xingwei - itself a critical artwork with text and images unfolding through the author's experiences with the mutable medium - contemplates the conundrum of creating site-specific ephemeral and performance-based artworks for global consumption. Here, Cheng shows us how art can reflect, construct, confound, and enrich us. And at a moment when time is explicitly linked with speed and profit, "Beijing Xingwei" provides multiple alternative possibilities for how people with imagination can spend, recycle, and invent their own time.

Auschwitz. Hiroshima. Cambodia's killing fields. The World Trade Center. The mass graves of Rwanda. These places of violent death have become part of the landscape of tourism, an industry that is otherwise dedicated to pleasure and escape. In dark places like concentration camps, prisons, battlegrounds, and the sites of natural disasters, how are memory and trauma mediated by this thanatourism, or tourism of death? In "Death Tourism", Brigitte Sion brings together essays by some of the most trenchant voices in the field to look at the tensions created by the juxtaposition of human remains and food stands, political agendas and educational programs, economic development and architectural ambition. How does a state redefine its national identity after catastrophic trauma? And what is the role of this kind of tourism in defining their new identity? A timely volume on an irresistible subject, this inquiry exposes the intersection of leisure with the inhumane, giving insight into how people respectfully share a public space that is both free and sacred, compelling and tragic.

A dance begins beneath the out-stretched branches of the giant umunyinya tree in Rwanda. First there is drumming and clapping, then the lead dancers step into the center of the gathering. The dancing subsides and the gacaca court, the community hearings on the one hundred days of bloodshed known as the Rwandan Genocide, is called into session. This is what the ongoing process of reconciliation looks like nearly twenty years after the brutal, orchestrated murder of almost one million people in Rwanda. But this scene demands questions: How can court testimony be used to rebuild a cohesive national identity for the Hutus and Tutsis? And how is it that dance and theater help to move forward the cause of justice and reconciliation? By documenting the discourse and actions of the gacaca court and exploring the use of performance, Ananda Breed's "Performing the Nation" provides a satisfying analysis of the interplay between justice, performance, narrative, and memorialization. A crucial addition to the literature of genocide studies, this far-reaching text will also resonate with scholars of applied theater, African studies, and law.

The devil is a defiant, nefarious figure, the emblem of evil, and harbinger of the damned. However, the festive devil - the devil that dances - turns the most hideous acts into playful transgressions. Festive Devils of the Americas is the first volume to present a transnational and performance-centered approach to this fascinating, feared, and revered character of fiestas, street festivals, and carnivals in North, Central, and South America. As produced and performed in both rural and urban communities and among neighborhood groups and councils, festive devils challenge the principles of colonialism and nation-states reliant on the straight and narrow opposition between good and evil, black and white, and us and them. Each section of this volume opens with regional maps ranging from the Andes, Afro-Atlantic, and Caribbean, to Central and North America. However, festive devils defy geographical as well as moral boundaries. From Brazil's Candomble to New Mexico's dance halls, festive devils and their stories sustain and transform ancestral memory, recast historical narratives, and present political, social, and cultural alternatives in many guises.Within economic, political, and religious cross-currents, these paradoxical figures affirm the spirit of community within the framework of subversion and inversion found at the heart of the festival world.

Molissa Fenley, one of the most influential artists of postmodern dance, has had a lasting impact on performance. In dance, she has explored extreme effort and duration in highly crafted patterns and performed with an explosive, joyous energy that infused her work with endurance, balance, and life force. She challenged modern dance orthodoxy and redefined the character of a woman's moving body in the late twentieth century, bringing postmodernized ritual to the stage. Rhythm Field is a vivid and probing portrait of Fenley's four-decade career, written by her fellow artists. The collection functions as a multifaceted look into one woman's complex performing arts legacy. The result is itself an aesthetic undertaking that investigates the ways in which Fenley straddles dance traditions, art genres, and gender norms and has been a model to the field. The collection offers several scholarly analyses of the choreographer's work, and is, above all, a vibrant record from the field. Rhythm Field sits at a necessary midpoint between criticism and scholarship.

One of Polish theater's great innovators is Jerzy Grotowski, well known for his lifelong research on the work of the self with and through the other. Taking various forms and undergoing multiple transformations, this single underlying proposition propelled Grotowski's career. In Grotowski's Bridge Made of Memory, Dominika Laster analyzes core aspects of Grotowski's work such as body-memory, vigilance, witnessing, verticality, and transmission, arguing that these performance praxes involve a deliberate blurring of the boundaries of the self and other. This comprehensive study traces key thematic threads across all phases of Grotowski's research, examining lesser-known aspects of his praxis such as performance compositions structured around African and Afro-Caribbean traditional songs and ritual movement, as well as textual material from the Christian Gnostic tradition. As an active process of research and questioning conducted through the "body-being" of the performer, the Grotowski work is a practical realization of the often highly theoretical and abstract discussions of one of the field's main preoccupations: embodied practice as a way of knowing.

In her landmark study Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre, Jill Dolan departed from historical writings on utopia, which suggest that social reorganization and the redistribution of wealth are utopian efforts, to argue instead that utopia occurs in fragmentary "utopian moments," often found embedded within performance. While Dolan focused on the utopian performative within a theatrical context, this volume, edited by Rachel Bowditch and Pegge Vissicaro, expands her theories to encompass performance in public life from diasporic hip-hop battles, Chilean military parades, commemorative processions, Blackfoot powwows, and post-Katrina Mardi Gras to the Philadelphia Mummers Parade, Festas Juninas in Brazil, the Renaissance Fairs in Arizona, and neoburlesque competitions. How do these performances rehearse and enact visions of a utopic world? What can the lens of utopia and dystopia illuminate about the potential of performing bodies to transform communities, identities, values, and beliefs across time?Performing Utopia not only answers these questions, but offers a diverse collection of case studies focusing on utopias, dystopias, and heterotopias enacted through the performing body.

Clowns are not just the stuff of backyard children's parties anymore. These days, clown doctors see patients especially children to introduce humor and imagination into an anxiety-filled and painful experience. The origins of medical clowning can be traced to the Big Apple Circus Clown Care Unit at the Infants and Children's Hospital of New York, established about thirty years ago. Since that time, the practice has developed extensively and medical clowns now work in hospitals around the world. Over the past ten years, the number of scientific studies on medical clowning has increased, with findings showing the important contribution of medical clowns to children and adults suffering from mild to incurable illnesses.Medical Clowning is the first guide to this phenomenon, summing up decades of research, education, and practice to give readers a comprehensive look into this innovative field. Amnon Raviv analyzes the performance of medical clowns, looking at research and case studies, and goes on to propose a training and evaluation model, including hands-on exercises to train experienced clowns for work in hospitals.

From 1974 to 1994, Ron Vawter was a staple of New York’s downtown theater scene, first with the Performance Group and later as a founding member of the Wooster Group. Ron Vawter’s Life in Performance is the first book focused on this incomparable actor’s specific contributions to ensemble theater, while also covering his solo projects. Through a combination of archival research and oral testimony—including interviews with Willem Dafoe, Spalding Gray, Elizabeth LeCompte, Gregory Mehrten, Richard Schechner, and Marianne Weems—Vawter emerges as an unsung innovator whose metamorphosis from soldier to avant-garde star was hardly accidental. Theresa Smalec reconstructs Vawter’s years in amateur theater, his time in the National Guard, and his professional body of work.  Partly recuperative history, Ron Vawter’s Life in Performance explores the complex intersections of individual and group biography. It also offers a unique perspective on an era that spanned from the Vietnam War to the AIDS crisis, putting Vawter’s own activism at the forefront. This volume’s broad historical and cultural reach, coupled with its careful study of a beloved yet enigmatic performer, will make it a tremendous resource for theater scholars and practitioners.

Odissi holds iconic status as one of the eight classical dance forms recognized and promoted by the Indian government. This book traces the dance’s transformation from its historical role as a regional artistic practice to its modern incarnation as transnational spectacle, with a focus on the state’s regulation of the dance form and the performances of gender embedded within it. Using an interdisciplinary approach that brings together social history, political theory, and dance and performance studies, the book explores three original themes: the idea of the state as a choreographic agent; the performance of “extraordinary genders,” or those identities and acts that lie outside everyday norms; and the original concept of the “paratopia”—a space of alterity produced by performance. Through an investigation of these themes, the author explores how Odissi has shown the potential to challenge dominant cultural imperatives in India.

This unique book is a graphic novel and performance poem, a mixed-media musical cartoon, an animated feature film come to life. Lee Breuer’s La Divina Caricatura is in the pataphysical tradition of Alfred Jarry—if Jarry had been a Dante fan. In this play we meet unforgettable characters: Rose the Dog, who thinks she is a woman; her lover John, a junkie filmmaker; Ponzi Porco, PhD, a pig in love with the New York Times; and the Warrior Ant, who, to impress his father, Trotsky the Termite, declares the “perpetual revolution” of the bugs of the fifth world. Each a soul on its own pilgrimage, seldom with a Virgil or a Beatrice to guide them, they often try to guide each other, only to get more lost. A dazzling, comic, potent mix of ideas and character, invention and reality, the plays in La Divina Caricatura reinvigorate the stage for our time.

Over the past three decades, theater studies has undergone a radical worldwide development and renewal. This happened through two different yet complementary paths: the first (North American in origin) led to the birth of the discipline of performance studies; the second (European continental) is what Marco de Marinis calls “new theatrology.” New theatrology arises from the dialogue between theatre history and the humanities and social sciences, yet de Marinis also characterizes it by a strong experimental imprint resulting from a close and participatory relationship with theatrical practice and its players. The first part of Understanding Theatre retraces the main steps that brought theater studies to make the transition from performance to the audience to their receptive act, giving proper attention to the documentary element. In the second part, de Marinis tests the new perspective of investigation on some fundamental innovative theatrical experiences of the twentieth century. In this way, the volume collects de Marinis’s essays—written for magazines, conference programs, and edited collections—from a span of almost thirty years and documents key post-semiological developments in how we understand theater today.

Tadeusz Kantor (1915–90) was renowned for his revolutionary theater performances in both his native Poland and abroad. Despite nominally being a Catholic, Kantor had a unique relationship with Jewish culture and incorporated many elements of Jewish theater into his works. In Kaddish, Jan Kott, an equally important figure in twentieth-century theater criticism, presents one of the most poignant descriptions of what might be called “the experience of Kantor.” At the core of the book is a fundamental philosophical question: What can save the memory of Kantor’s “Theatre of Death”—the Image, or the Word/Logos? Kott’s biblical answer in Kaddish is that Kantor’s theatre can be saved in its essence only by the Word, the Logos. This slim volume, Kott’s final work, is a distilled meditation that casts light on how two of the most prominent figures in Western theater reflected on the philosophy of the stage.

A wildly popular form of mass media and live entertainment, professional wrestling makes a spectacle of violent acts. With its long history of working contemporary events into storylines and commenting upon cultural and military conflicts, professional wrestling is also intrinsically political. Its performance—theatricalities, machinations and conditions of production, figurations, and audiences—arises from and engages with the world around. Whether flowing with the mainstream of popular culture or fighting at the fringes, professional wrestling shows us how we are fighting, what we are fighting about, and what we are fighting for.This edited volume asks how professional wrestling is implicated in the current resurgence of populist politics, whether right-wing and Trump–inflected, or leftist and socialist. How might it do more than reflect and, in so doing, reaffirm the status quo? While provoked by the disruptive performances of Trump as candidate and president, and mindful of his longstanding ties to the WWE, this timely volume looks more broadly and internationally at the infusion of professional wrestling’s worldview into the twinned discourses of politics and populism. The contributors are scholars from a wide range of disciplines: theater and performance studies; cultural, media, and communication studies; anthropology and sociology; and gender and sexuality studies. Together they argue that the game’s popularity and its populist tendencies open it to the left as well as to the right, to contestation as well as to conformity, making it an ideal site for working on feminist and activist projects and ideas.

Retelling performances, collecting things, reading traces, mapping memories, gaming autobiographies: in European and Anglo-American theater since the turn of the millennium, a range of new nonliterary narrative practices such as these have taken root. Unable to be subsumed under a well-established narratological, dramatic, or postdramatic perspective, they call for a reexamination of the relationship between performance and narration. Performing Stories seeks to reconceptualize narrative against the backdrop of innovative theater formats such as collective storytelling games, theater installations, extensive autobiographical performances, immersive role-playing, and audio-video walks.Nina Tecklenburg’s focus lies on narration less as literary composition than as sensate, embodied cultural practice—a participatory and open process that fosters social relationships. She gives central importance to the forces of narration that create and undo culture and politics. A foundational new book, Performing Stories presents a groundbreaking transdisciplinary perspective through new approaches that are stimulating to performance studies, narrative and cultural theory, literary criticism, and game and video studies.

Examines the previously unresearched formative years of Polish director Jerzy Grotowski’s career.  Polish director Jerzy Grotowski (1933–1999) was an international leader in experimental theater who became famous in the late 1960s for his revolutionary approach to audience involvement. This volume is devoted to Grotowski’s early work—the performances he directed in the Theatre of 13 Rows (later Laboratory Theatre of 13 Rows) between 1959 and 1964 when the theater was working in the provincial town Opole in south-western Poland. Having decided to work in his own independent theater, Grotowski moved to Opole in September 1956 and developed his ideas with young, inexperienced actors, creating important performances that foreshadowed his renowned masterpieces of the late 1960s.  In The Unknown Theatre of Jerzy Grotowski, Dariusz Kosiński and Wanda Świątkowska reconstruct, analyze, and interpret each of the nine performances directed by Grotowski over this period: from Orpheus based onJean Cocteau (1959) to Hamlet Study based on Stanisław Wyspiański (1964). Previously mentioned mainly in the context of the development of Grotowski’s method, these performances dealt with important social, political, and philosophical problems of postwar and post-Holocaust Poland. Grotowski also used these performances to experiment with the forces and problems that he later tried to be discreet about, such as sexuality.  Revealing unnoticed and forgotten aspects of Grotowski’s theater, this landmark book presents new materials and perspectives that give fresh life to the study of a genius of twentieth-century theater.

Exploring the social, political, cultural, artistic, and religious significance of Muharram rituals for millions of global observers.  Over the centuries, observances of Muharram, the first month of the Islamic calendar, have traveled far from their origins at Karbala—a windswept desert plain that is now a town in present-day Iraq—where, according to tradition, Hussein, the beloved grandson of Prophet Muhammad, was brutally put to death together with seventy-two of his male companions on the tenth day of the month. For this reason, Muharram is synonymous with both the first month and the tenth day. Hussein’s passion and death are considered the ultimate example of sacrifice for Shia Muslims and scores of rituals devoted to Muharram have developed during the last thirteen centuries, especially in Iran where Twelver Shi’ism became the state religion in the sixteenth century.  As the essays describe in Eternal Performance, many of these rituals were exported to other lands over time. They crossed boundaries and cultures from Iran and Iraq to Lebanon, the Indian subcontinent, North America, and the Caribbean. Yet all Muharram rituals, no matter where or how they are performed, have their origins in Karbala. The transformation and transmission of these observances to their present-day forms around the world are the result of the intersection of multiple races, religions, and artistic traditions. Eternal Performance explores the social, political, cultural, artistic, and religious significance of Muharram rituals for millions of global observers.

An actor delves into the electrifying world of Jerzy Grotowski’s Polish Laboratory Theatre.The legacy of Polish theatre director Jerzy Grotowski and the skills of his legendary actors come to life in this personal account of a workshop and intensive with Laboratory Theatre master actor Zbigniew Cynkutis. Drawing from her extensive notes and recordings, Diane Edgecomb takes us to the heart of the workshop experience as a young actor determined to make this process her own. Cynkutis guides the participants to a deep understanding of his artistic philosophy and craft, giving them invaluable tools and sources to enrich their acting. Stimulated by a developing series of tasks, Laboratory Theatre training exercises, and by Cynkutis’ startling demonstrations, the group is challenged to bring their whole selves to the work and to reimagine what is possible in theatre.The intensive proceeds from exercises familiar to those who have studied Grotowski to innovative explorations of dramatic text and character which draw from theatre sources based in the primal energies of nature. Those who have been mystified by academic writings on the work of the Laboratory Theatre will find this personal story refreshing and accessible, filled with advice and exercises grounded in the rich conversational style of a charismatic master actor. Links to audio files of Cynkutis speaking as he leads the work lend an invaluable immersive element to the book.This compelling volume bears witness to the power of a deeply visceral form of theatre and illustrates why the work of Grotowski and his actors has had such a profound impact on generations of theatre artists. It is sure to stimulate students, challenge directors and inspire innovative work.

A captivating exploration of identity, language, and memory, weaving together whimsical and profound vignettes that challenge our understanding of home and self in a multicultural world.In Crossings, Sylvia Molloy embarks on an evocative exploration of the intricate and profound experience of living between languages, cultures, and geographies. A pioneering Argentine writer, fluent in Spanish, English, and French, Molloy inhabited all three languages, shuttling back, forth, and between, aware that each place and each language bring forth a different self.The short entries that make up “Varied Imagination” and “Living Between Languages”—the two collections gathered in this volume for the first time—revolve around an interrelated set of questions. What makes “home”? Does language make or destabilize a sense of home? How does speaking a language or switching between languages perform one’s place in the world? These vignettes capture the realization that the most seemingly natural things in life—such as home, language, and identity—depend entirely on performance. Each act, each word communicates something, means something, does something to their specific audience; another audience might react quite differently. Molloy wrote, rewrote, edited, and reworked to find the right mix to express the estar entre or “between” that was her life.In this compelling volume, Molloy’s reflections on the fluidity of identity and the transient nature of home resonate deeply, prompting readers to contemplate the profound connections between language, place, memory, and lived experience.

A captivating exploration of identity, language, and memory, weaving together whimsical and profound vignettes that challenge our understanding of home and self in a multicultural world.In Crossings, Sylvia Molloy embarks on an evocative exploration of the intricate and profound experience of living between languages, cultures, and geographies. A pioneering Argentine writer, fluent in Spanish, English, and French, Molloy inhabited all three languages, shuttling back, forth, and between, aware that each place and each language bring forth a different self.The short entries that make up “Varied Imagination” and “Living Between Languages”—the two collections gathered in this volume for the first time—revolve around an interrelated set of questions. What makes “home”? Does language make or destabilize a sense of home? How does speaking a language or switching between languages perform one’s place in the world? These vignettes capture the realization that the most seemingly natural things in life—such as home, language, and identity—depend entirely on performance. Each act, each word communicates something, means something, does something to their specific audience; another audience might react quite differently. Molloy wrote, rewrote, edited, and reworked to find the right mix to express the estar entre or “between” that was her life.In this compelling volume, Molloy’s reflections on the fluidity of identity and the transient nature of home resonate deeply, prompting readers to contemplate the profound connections between language, place, memory, and lived experience.

Pyotr Pavlensky turns state violence into his medium—now, in his own words, he reveals the theory behind the fire.Pyotr Pavlensky’s Subject–Object Art Theory is both a manifesto and a method—an incendiary redefinition of what art can and should be in an era of increasing repression. Known for his radical public events, such as setting fire to government buildings, stitching his lips shut, or nailing his own body to the ground, Pavlensky has been called a provocateur. In this book, he offers his own framework: subject–object art, a practice that redefines the position of art with respect to power and forces state mechanisms to work for art.Venturing past the confines of political art, he examines the historical intersections of art and power, situating his work within a lineage of radical avant-garde movements. Whether seen as a guide or an act of defiance in itself, Subject–Object Art Theory urges the reader to rethink artistic freedom but as a means of bringing art back to its true independence.

One man's life unfolds into a memoir of the defining cultural figures of the mid-twentieth century and beyond.I Never Made Love with James Baldwin is a dazzling memoir told through a succession of attorney Stanley Cohen's vivid encounters with some of the most compelling figures of the twentieth century and beyond. Moving between America, Europe, and Asia, Cohen recounts moments shared with artists, writers, jurists, and financiers, including Alexander Calder, Joseph Heller, Robert Caro, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Yehuda Hanani, and members of the Rothschild family. These figures appear not as distant icons but as sharp, human presences—brilliant, eccentric, generous, and flawed. Cohen’s life unfolds like a performance, shaped less by planning than by intensity: conversations, friendships, arguments, and coincidences that flare briefly and leave lasting marks. With wit, candor, and an eye for the telling detail, he captures a vast social and creative network spanning the mid-twentieth century to the present. The result is an intimate, unconventional portrait of an exceptional life and of the people who lit its path.

A groundbreaking lens on humanitarianism, which reframes global humanitarian responses to war and disaster through performance studies, revealing how aid, media, and public attention transform crisis into spectacle on a world stage.As the world is challenged by a state of constant conflict and by disasters, both natural and manmade, support communities endeavour through humanitarianism to overcome human suffering and help to build more peaceful and safe futures. Humanitarian Performance argues that the humanitarian project—from its history and rationale to its contemporary practice—can be productively explored through the critical lens of performance studies. Using the outpouring of international support for projects to benefit survivors of the Asian tsunami, the War in Kosovo, and the crisis in Darfur as case studies, this timely volume explores humanitarian attention to these narratives and the stories of tragedy and survival that emerge. With the peculiar focus and international audiences that the media brings to local tragedies, these contemporary disasters—and the humanitarianism that they elicit—become a performance on the world stage.

During the week before Labor Day every year, nearly fifty thousand people gather in Nevada's Black Rock Desert and build Black Rock City. At the center of Black Rock City is a forty-foot wooden effigy of a man, an icon around which art, performance, and community revolve. Since 1986, the Burning Man Festival has evolved from founder Larry Harvey's personal healing ritual into a cultural movement where ceremony, religion, visual art, and performance converge on an epic scale. In "On the Edge of Utopia", Rachel Bowditch - performer, theater director, scholar, and Burning Man participant - explores the spectrum of performance and ritual practices within Black Rock City from the everyday to wild spectacle, the profane to the sublime. Bowditch argues that Burning Man can be understood as a contemporary galaxy of happenings, a revival of the ancient Roman Saturnalia, a site for rehearsals of utopia, and a secular pilgrimage. As Burning Man continues to grow, it will create new paradigms for performance, installation art, community, and invented rituals that bridge ancient traditions to the twenty-first century.

For the last fifteen years, performance artist and writer Guillermo Gomez-Pena has led a series of ongoing conversations with cultural luminaries from both North and South America. These dialogues with theorists, curators, activists, and fellow artists - such as Lisa Wolford Wylam, Tim Miller, Felipe Ehrenberg, Orlando Britoo Jinorio, Silvana Straw, and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, among others - explore the terrain between art and theory. In "Conversations Across Borders", Gomez-Pena has gathered the most challenging and captivating of these conversations, revealing their significant contribution to key debates within the international art world. Both bold and humorous, these conversations address issues of timely concern to artists, including border culture, new technologies, urban hipsterism, and globalization gone wrong. "Conversations Across Borders" explores dialogue as a performative act, as a radical space for initiating and testing the boundaries of critical culture. Together, these texts propose a distinct set of critical practices that are invigorated by the endangered art of conversation.