Performing Arts
Vernacular Theatre
Making Theatre with Community
Between 1989 and 2020 Jonathan Petherbridge worked as the Artistic Director of a community-based theatre company - London Bubble. This longer than average tenure allowed him time to forge a close working relationship with the community and develop new ways to involve people of all ages in theatre-making.
Out of a slew of projects emerged a particular methodology to make work that was researched curated and performed by citizens between the ages of 8 and 80. The process that emerged was called Foraging – a methodology carefully divided into five phases which attempts to bring the best out of both voluntary and specialist artists – making time and space for them to create theatre that has a striking beauty and an ingrained aesthetic of care. Vernacular Theatre describes the result – the aesthetic.
The case studies - based on work with citizens of London and Hiroshima - examine how this theatre has valued key moments of communal history contemporary issues and everyday institutions. The book suggests reasons and techniques for others to make similar work. Concluding with a reflection on the pre-classical Chorus of Greek Theatre where original work was produced to celebrate events with and for the community this book proposes a new genre – a social and intergenerational art form that invites people to gather and share their life experience concerns and creativity.
Still Moving
Conversations with Senior Professional Dancers Still Performing
The concept of this book is ‘dance and ageing’ and is driven by the possibility that everybody in the Western dance community in particular young dance students but also readers beyond the parameters of dance will profit if the voices of senior professional practitioners are heard.
It features dancers from USA Canada UK Europe and Australia all interviewees are practitioners of stature and prominence who continue to contribute despite ageism to the dance industry. They are inspiring role models for younger dancers but also for an ageing demographic in society; it is a celebration of the body and the indomitable urge to create and express.
Conversations with twenty senior professional dancers explore how they sustain performing despite the inground ageism that exists through society and is mirrored within the dance world. This cohort of older dancers aged between 41 and 107 illuminate inspiring life stories that convey their passion to continue performing while overcoming the prejudices in an artform that champions youth.
Dance practitioners remaining active and relevant throughout the life stages is an area of growing interest particularly in community dance health and wellbeing. This would inspire all dancers to follow in their footsteps to believe that diversity and inclusion would widen the boundaries within Western dance culture and eradicate bias. Further interest from an older demographic who enjoy watching dance or dance themselves who would appreciate their representation in a book that reveals the positive attributes ageing can bring. It also has the potential to reach an anti-ageing reader as well as a dance reader. The book has a broad appeal not just within Western dance culture but also where ageing/ageism is a prominent concern within Western society.
Dancing Place
Scoring the City, Scoring the Shore
The book explore how dance practices can be embodied through relationships with the environment. The book begins with discussing somatic experiences of being in Place; including discussing a sense of belonging to the environment through responsive movement. The second part offers infrastructures (scores) for generative movement drawn from transdisciplinary workshops. The book presents text poetic prose and image.
Dancing Place: Scores of the City Scores of the Shore reveals the collaborative choreographic making process as a way of being in the world. In the book the authors story their experiences of working with scores as ways of noticing sensing and bringing focus to moments within the assemblage of environments of which we are a part.
Theatricality Beyond Disciplines
This book expands on theories of "theatricality" in French and critical studies adopting a transdisciplinary approach that reaches beyond performance studies into poetry media technology translation and psychoanalytic theory.
Building on Artaud’s concept of theater as a "plague"—an unpredictable cataclysmic and contagious force that disrupts power structures and knowledge—the book challenges Aristotelian norms of theater as a medium of "healing" and "teaching." Instead theatricality emerges as a force of radical disruption what Artaud called "the return of the repressed" demanding openness to otherness.
The chapters present theatricality as primarily aural rather than visual inciting "paranoiac listening" invoking unretrievable "primal scenes" and allowing unconscious "psychic" contamination. "Theatricality" is explored through works by Artaud Genet Novarina and Koltès but also Freud Barthes Kristeva Girard and Derrida. Each writer challenges the premises of their own artistic genres and fields of study questioning binary systems like artistic production versus theoretical articulation the technological versus the natural and art versus life.
As shown these binaries underpin mechanisms of repression sacrificial violence and the exclusion of the voiceless other. The book assigns a generative function to traditionally maligned notions like unintelligibility madness marginality contagion and criminality.
Drama for Schools and Beyond
Transformative Learning Through the Arts
Transformative Professional Learning in Arts Integration invites educators and artists to name and center dilemma discovery and learning at the core of their collaborative efforts to improve the learning culture of classrooms through the arts. A dilemma comes in many forms.
Personal and programmatic dilemmas are often the result of a rupture between personal belief and the requirements of a system. The rupture - or dilemma - seeds a desire for something new something better. However as Queensland Aboriginal activists remind us we must address our own bias and power in relationship to those we presume to support: "If you have come to help me you are wasting your time; but if you are here because your liberation is bound up with mine then let us work together.” This text therefore shares the stories of individuals working towards collective educational improvement and change.
It is a story of failure and possibility about individuals “bound up with” with each other harnessing the power of the arts in the common effort to make education more just and equitable for all.
Drama for Schools and Beyond: Transformative Learning Through the Arts tells the story of twenty years of research and practice grounded in the Drama for Schools (DFS) professional development learning model based at The University of Texas at Austin USA.
This book offers a critical look at the evolution of Drama for Schools through the learnings of its leaders and participants. It also gathers stories from partners across the globe who have adapted and built upon this model at their own sites. It is a primer for how to centre teacher and student inquiry and learning at the core of educational improvement. It is an invitation for teachers administrators and researchers to address their own bias and power in relation to those they aim to support.
Throughout the authors show that by integrating the arts across education new networks of possibility can be grown to create a more just and equitable education for all.
The Intellect Handbook of Dance Education Research
A review of dance education research methodologies with examples and exemplars from the field and an important resource for dance students professionals and advocates.
The editors recognized the need for a book of this type – one that would not only provide examples of a variety of dance education research projects but also present a broad look at methodologies. In addition the book would not only focus on Dance Education research in the U.S but more broadly with examples of dance research from several different countries. The curated book includes the voices of both seasoned professionals and newer scholars in the field with examples of dance research from a number of different countries. The contributions represent several countries including Korea South Africa United States of America Jamaica India United Kingdom Brazil and Slovenia underscore the global relevance and significance of research in dance education.
This book is divided into 5 parts. The first part focuses on dance education research and methodologies and is divided into three sections. With an introduction by Jill Green the chapters that follow provide an overview of research types including the more traditional qualitative quantitative and mixed and other methods such as portraiture and a/r/tography.
Part II introduced by Lynnette Young Overby includes examples of dance education research that incorporate qualitative quantitative and/or mixed methods. Three sections covering dance education research applications in the areas of history and culture dance teaching and choreography and community based research follow.
Part III of the Handbook of Dance Education Research provides insight into dance education that takes place in several countries. This part is introduced by Peter Cook Associate Deputy Chancellor Southern Cross University Australia. The collection of chapters within this part of the Handbook of Dance Education Research provides snapshots of research practices from contrasting international areas and with a variety of approaches and paradigms.
The final Part IV includes chapters focused on Social Justice dance education practice and research. This part is introduced by Alfdaniel Mivule Basibye Mabingo Makerere University Uganda. These chapters push the boundaries of dance education research to promote meaning and social change. They provide substantive examples of the impact dance education research can have in response to social and cultural issues.
This book will be a key resource for university students professors practitioners and policy makers in organizations and in school systems. It will inspire future dance education researchers to conduct research that is collaborative impactful inclusive and diverse– research that will solidify the place of dance as an integral part of each person’s education.
Entrepreneurial Arts and Cultural Leadership
Traits of Success in Nonprofit Theatre
Traits is timely and needed. It provides a pathway to cultivate an entrepreneurial mindset in nonprofit arts management students and in those in the nonprofit field. Traits is not another academic hypothetical imagining text. Rather Traits is a tactical centred on entrepreneurial leadership offering a concrete case example Imagination Stage.
2020 brought significant changes to the world’s business and social fabric. The nonprofit arts has been greatly impacted with the highest unemployment rate during the peak of the pandemic response to the slow and inconsistent return of patrons. Internally organizations had to address often long-over-due adaptations to the inclusive and accessible practices demanded by their communities including equitable pay scales diversity inclusion and access on stage staffs and boards.
Consequently many nonprofit arts organizations are now less viable; many have gone out of business; and most are struggling to adopt new post-pandemic practices that promote a new culture in their organization. The authors contend that those organizations that have survived are led by social entrepreneurs who were always ahead of the curve and able to adapt.
The authors’ underlying assumption is that while entrepreneurship may be innate in some in most it is not - even in those who lead organizations. But it can also be taught – just like any form of leadership. And this is what Traits does.
Leigh Bowery
Performative Costuming and Live Art
An exploration of the life artistic practice social-historical context and cultural impact of Leigh Bowery. Vranou particularly considers Bowery's performative costuming and Live Art in relation to the ways they have influenced the broader spectrum of visual culture and the expanded field of performance studies.
Bowery’s cult status as an outrageously self-styled nightclub personality has obscured his significant contribution to performance studies and visual culture in favour of a justifiable discursive emphasis on his importance to fashion. The diversity of Bowery’s work and his marginality as an artist who emerged from a subcultural milieu complicated and thwarted his cultural value hindering as a consequence his incorporation into art institutions and performance narratives.
Through close analysis of Bowery’s key looks and non-theatrical performances the book examines the implications of his work in dominant histories of performance art and urgent discourses surrounding normativity representations of illness and body politics. It focuses on the performative dimension of Bowery’s costuming as an effective strategy for blurring the boundaries between art and life reflecting his aesthetics of freakishness and narcissistic desire his engagement in BDSM practices and the performance of extremity and the posttranssexual ethos behind his hybrid embodiments and trans-queer visual language.
Flesh and Text
Devising Performance by Bodies in Flight
BODIES IN FLIGHT make performance where flesh utters and words move challenging and re-energizing the relationship between audiences and performers and audiences and place.
Emerging from rigorous interdisciplinary and collaborative methods often with new technologies in cutting-edge venues we insist on the buzz of ideas on philosophy and poetry using words and images movement and stillness voices and bodies through which they aim to move audiences emotionally and spiritually. Organized in a highly visual design this volume is both a history and a workbook with selections of scripts and archival material from 30 years of making devised theatre and performance in the UK and internationally plus texts by collaborators arts professionals and scholars exploring the company’s collaborative working method contextualizing it in the wider performance ecology and culture.
Intended as an inspiration to emerging artists the volume covers key questions for any maker of contemporary performance: the relationship of choreography and spoken word the use of new technologies and multi-media the role of original music and soundscapes the differences between work presented in a theatre or gallery or sited in non-theatrical places the persistence of theatre as an art-form in an increasingly digital culture.
Schechner Plays
A collection of performance texts ranging from orthodox plays to group-devised texts. The book traces from most recent to earliest Schechner's work as a "writer" and a "wrighter" -- the author of plays and the conceptualizer and leader of teams of artists. The book includes several never before published early texts as well as updated versions of well-known productions such as "Dionysus in 69" "YokastaS" "Makbeth" and "Imagining O." The earliest texts are from the 1950s the most recent from 2014.
This book brings together for the first time Richard’s original plays and adaptations: YokastaS Redux Dionysus 69 Commune Oresteia Prometheus Project Makbeth Richard’s Leer Imagining O Faust/gastronome Blessing of the Fleet Briseis and the Sergeant Lot's Daughters and The Last Day of FK. The scripts engage with perennial canonic themes such as Oedipus and Faust and topical issues of our times. They embody Richard’s world-famous performance approach. The introduction sets the scripts in intellectual and production context. The book complements Schechner’s other works Performance Studies (now in its 3rd ed.) Performance Theory The Grotowski Sourcebook The Future of Ritual and his new A New Third World of Performance.
artmaking as embodied enquiry
entering the fold
What can a fold be? Virtually anything and everything.
For centuries folds and folding have captured the world’s imagination. Folds readily appear in revivals of the ancient craft of origami amid the simplest acts of pedestrian life within the philosophical turnings of the mind and in art design architecture performing arts and linguistics around the world. What awaits our understanding is how deeply the fold figures into embodiment into our very impulse to create.
This book is about folding as a vibrant stimulus for inter/trans/postdisciplinary artistic research whether for the performative for product realization or simply to enliven body mind and spirit. Destined for artmaking—for making any art—the f/old practice etches into the very fabric of embodiment. As such the f/old reaches outside the constraints of disciplinary silos into nice areas that embrace the unknown with all its underlying tensions and ambiguities. In conceiving of art made differently two seasoned facilitators Susan Sentler and Glenna Batson share the abundance of their decade-long collaboration in developing their approach to practice research in the fold. In addition to their insights they invite eight of their collaborators to contribute each a veteran artist of a diverse genre.
Featuring a wide variety of practice samples and images this book reflects on a current and unique somatic-oriented arts research practice and pedagogy with an intriguing blend of interdisciplinary concern and practice.
Artists as Writers
Part of the Living and Sustaining a Creative Life series Artists as Writers joins the tradition of writing books designed or intended to inspire would-be writers to write but distinguishes itself by offering succinct first-person narratives by writers of varied genres about the day-to-day life of writing for a living.
Artists as Writers offers accounts of the journeys that thirty two writers have taken to becoming a real writer what decisions were made which paths were taken rejected charted and why. It answers the question: What magic keeps a writer writing?
Writers from Ethiopia Guatemala Nigeria Palestine Poland and Sweden as well as several who live throughout the United States: California Colorado Georgia Louisiana Pennsylvania Texas and Washington contribute their stories. They each provide vividly detailed accounts of the circuitous roads that each individual took to earn the title “writer.” These are richly descriptive stories from writers who write consistently relating how they came to the writing life who helped them get there and what sustains them as writers.
Youth, Power, Performance
Applied Theatre with Systemically Marginalized Youth
This book draws on over twenty years scholarship from Diane Conrad's academic career in applied theatre research with systemically marginalized youth. It draws on applied theatre research conducted with youth in three specific contexts: in alternative high schools in a youth jail and with street-involved youth.
By drawing on examples from several projects highlighting youths’ voices and youths’ creations the book offers an introduction to the researcher and theoretical considerations for the research suggests practical strategies for engaging with this youth population describes the applied theatre process developed. It addresses specific considerations for working with incarcerated youth and with Indigenous youth and explores the potential demonstrated for youth empowerment through applied theatre some ethical considerations in conducting such work and the role of applied theatre in social change. The book may be of interest to applied theatre researchers instructors practitioners and students and to drama teachers and youth workers.