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      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        June 2021

        Genre and performance: film and television

        by Christine Cornea

        Looking at contemporary film and television, this book explores how popular genres frame our understanding of on-screen performance. Previous studies of screen performance have tended to fix upon star actors, directors, or programme makers, or they have concentrated upon particular training and acting styles. Moving outside of these confines, this book provides a truly interdisciplinary account of performance in film and television and examines a much neglected area in our understanding of how popular genres and performance intersect on screen. Each chapter concentrates upon a particular genre or draws upon generic case studies in examining the significance of screen performance. Individual chapters examine contemporary film noir, horror, the biopic, drama-documentary, the western, science fiction, comedy performance in 'spoof news' programmes and the television 'sit com' and popular Bollywood films.

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        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2023

        Politics, performance and popular culture

        Theatre and society in nineteenth-century Britain

        by Peter Yeandle, Katherine Newey, Jeffrey Richards

        This collection brings together studies of popular performance and politics across the nineteenth century, offering a fresh perspective from an archivally grounded research base. It works with the concept that politics is performative and performance is political. The book is organised into three parts in dialogue regarding specific approaches to popular performance and politics. Part I offers a series of conceptual studies using popular culture as an analytical category for social and political history. Part II explores the ways that performance represents and constructs contemporary ideologies of race, nation and empire. Part III investigates the performance techniques of specific politicians - including Robert Peel, Keir Hardie and Henry Hyndman - and analyses the performative elements of collective movements.

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        The Arts
        February 1996

        Analysing performance

        A critical reader

        by Patrick Campbell

        Each chapter in this important critical reader tackles the theory and practice of modern performance work, and enables students and teachers to see what is at stake in analysing dance, drama, music and videos using contemporary critical theories. Including Elizabeth Wright on psychoanalysis, Baz Kershaw on the politics of performance, Jatinder Verma on multiculturalism, E. Ann Kaplan on MTV and video, Lizabeth Goodman on feminism and AIDS, Stephen Connor on postmodernism and many others. ;

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        Humanities & Social Sciences
        December 2023

        Transitional justice in process

        Plans and politics in Tunisia

        by Mariam Salehi

        After the fall of the Ben Ali regime in 2011, Tunisia swiftly began dealing with its authoritarian past and initiated a comprehensive transitional justice process, with the Truth and Dignity Commission as its central institution. However, instead of bringing about peace and justice, transitional justice soon became an arena of contention. Through a process lens, the book explores why and how the process evolved, and explains how it relates to the country's political transition. Based on extensive field research in Tunisia and the US, and interviews with a broad range of international stakeholders and decision-makers, this is the first book to comprehensively study the Tunisian transitional justice process. It provides an in-depth analysis of a crucial period, examining the role of justice professionals in different stages, as well as the alliances and frictions between different actor groups that cut across the often-assumed local-international divide.

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        Literature & Literary Studies
        July 2024

        Thomas Nashe and literary performance

        by Chloe Kathleen Preedy, Rachel Willie

        As an instigator of debate and a defender of tradition, a man of letters and a popular hack, a writer of erotica and a spokesman for bishops, an urbane metropolitan and a celebrant of local custom, the various textual performances of Thomas Nashe have elicited, and continue to provoke, a range of contradictory reactions. Nashe's often incongruous authorial characteristics suggest that, as a 'King of Pages', he not only courted controversy but also deliberately cultivated a variety of public personae, acquiring a reputation more slippery than the herrings he celebrated in print. Collectively, the essays in this book illustrate how Nashe excelled at textual performance but his personae became a contested site as readers actively participated and engaged in the reception of Nashe's public image and his works.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        April 2001

        Women, theatre and performance

        New histories, new historiographies

        by Kate Dorney, Maggie B. Gale, Susan Williams

        The first in a new annual series, Women, Theatre and Performance that will consist of themed volumes on diverse aspects of women's engagement with theatre and performance. Ranging across three hundred years the essays in this volume address key questions in women's theatre history and retrieve a number of hitherto 'hidden' histories of women performers. Resituates women's, largely neglected, creative contribution within theatre and cultural history and seeks to challenge orthodox readings of both history and text. Topics include: Susanna Centlivre and the notion of intertheatricality; gender and theatrical space; the repositioning of women performers such as Wagner's Muse, Willhelmina Schröder-Devrient, the Comédie Français' 'Mademoiselle Mars', Mme Arnould-Plessey, and the actresses of the Russian serf theatre. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        April 2025

        The theatrical orchestra

        British music ensembles experiment with performance

        by Adrian Curtin

        The Theatrical Orchestra analyses experimental performances by British music ensembles in the twenty-first century. Orchestras are reconceiving how concerts are programmed and presented, how musicians perform, where performance can occur, and the role of the audience in the co-creation of the live event. They are embracing theatricality, thereby realising music more fully as a multi-sensory performance art. This book explains how and why orchestras are thinking theatrically about performance, and uses the work of British music ensembles as exemplars. It analyses performances by Aurora Orchestra, London Contemporary Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, Manchester Collective, Multi-Story Orchestra, Paraorchestra, Scottish Ensemble, and Southbank Sinfonia. The book bridges musicology and theatre studies to analyse the theatrical orchestra on the concert stage and beyond, addressing such topics as visuality, storytelling, physical performance, site-engaged performance, and immersive performance.

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        Political ideologies
        May 2017

        Neoliberal power and public management reforms

        by Professor Peter Triantafillou. Series edited by Mark Haugaard

        This book examines the links between major contemporary public sector reforms and neoliberal thinking. The key contribution of the book is to enhance our understanding of contemporary neoliberalism as it plays out in the public administration and to provide a critical analysis of generally overlooked aspects of administrative power. The book examines the quest for accountability, credibility and evidence in the public sector. It asks whether this quest may be understood in terms of neoliberal thinking and, if so, how? The book makes the argument that while current administrative reforms are informed by several distinct political rationalities, they evolve above all around a particular form of neoliberalism: constructivist neoliberalism. The book analyses the dangers of the kinds of administrative power seeking to invoke the self-steering capacities of society and administration itself.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        November 2011

        The limits of performance in the French Romantic theatre

        by Susan McCready, Mike Thompson

        This volume analyses major French plays of the 1830s, focusing on their theatricality, and on the ways in which they expose the workings of the theatre rather than conceal them. Through an examination of performance within these plays, the study posits that the stage is a privileged site of demonstration, a literal 'proving ground' that lends a physical reality to abstract values announced in the text and shared or questioned by the audience. Negotiating between the literary study of drama and performance theory, this work breaks new ground in nineteenth-century theatre scholarship while proposing a fresh direction in the study of text and performance. The limits of performance 'challenges conventional wisdom', offering 'a novel take on the mal du siècle, that thematic hardy perennial of French Romanticism and the nineteenth century in general', combined with 'eminently readable and, therefore, compelling' analysis of plays - 'a thought-provoking addition to work in the field' (Glyn Hambrook, Modern and Contemporary France, November 2008). ;

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        May 2024

        Adaptation and resilience in the performing arts

        The pandemic and beyond

        by Pascale Aebischer, Rachael Nicholas

        This book offers insights into some of the digital innovations, structural adaptations and analogue solutions that enabled live performance in the UK to survive through the COVID-19 pandemic. It provides evidence of values-led policies and practices that have improved the wellbeing of the creative workforce and have increased access to live performance. Through sections that address digital innovations, workforce resilience and programming live performances outdoors and in community settings, this book provides practical insights into the challenges live performance faced during the pandemic. It shows how, in order to survive, individuals and companies within the sector drew on the creativity and resourcefulness of its workforce, and on new and existing networks. In these accounts, the pandemic functioned as catalyst for technological innovations, stock-taking regarding exploitative industry structures, and a re-valuing of the role of live performance for community-building.

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      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        July 2024

        Theatre, activism, subjectivity

        Searching for the Left in a fragmented world

        by Bishnupriya Dutt, Silvija Jestrovic

        Through the lens of performance and politics, this collection zooms in on the context-specific dimensions, analogies, and micro-histories of the Left to better understand the larger picture. It proposes a search for the Left not from totalising Leftist ideological positions and partisan politics but from ethical dimensions through smaller-scale Left-leaning struggles; not from the political to the aesthetic, but from the potentiality of art to offer new political imagination and critique; not from the individual subordinated to the collective, but from the dialectics of subjectivity and collectivity. This is not an attempt at a sweeping global overview of Leftist cultures either, but a collection that brings together culture-specific and comparative perspectives. This book searches for fragments of and on the Left, past and present, through which to rethink and patch a fragmented world.

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        Literature & Literary Studies
        November 2011

        Three seventeenth-century plays on women and performance

        by Paul Edmondson, Hero Chalmers, Julie Sanders, Sophie Tomlinson, Martin White

        This is a ground-breaking edition of three seventeenth-century plays that all engage in diverse and exciting ways with questions of gender and performance. The collection, edited by three pioneering scholars of elite female culture and early modern drama, makes the texts of three much-discussed plays - John Fletcher's The Wild-Goose Chase, James Shirley's The Bird in a Cage and Margaret Cavendish's The Convent of Pleasure - available together in a full scholarly edition for the first time. The Wild Goose Chase (1621) and The Bird in a Cage (1633) were both performed in the commercial London theatres in the Jacobean and Caroline periods respectively. The Convent of Pleasure (1668) is a so-called 'closet' drama, designed primarily for reading but drawing on a tradition of aristocratic theatricals. In a wide-ranging co-authored introduction to the volume, the editors explore the concerns of these playtexts in relation to contemporary debates surrounding popular festivity and anti-theatricalism, as well as the agency of elite female culture in the Stuart period and the emergence of the professional female actor in the Restoration. The volume will be an invaluable teaching and research tool for students and scholars of early modern drama, women's writing and performance studies more generally, as well as providing a rich sourcebook for the reader interested in seventeenth-century theatrical culture. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2022

        Transitional justice in process

        by Mariam Salehi, Simon Mabon

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        February 2022

        "I am Jugoslovenka!"

        Feminist performance politics during and after Yugoslav Socialism

        by Jasmina Tumbas, Amelia Jones, Marsha Meskimmon

        "I am Jugoslovenka" argues that queer-feminist artistic and political resistance were paradoxically enabled by socialist Yugoslavia's unique history of patriarchy and women's emancipation. Spanning performance and conceptual art, video works, film and pop music, lesbian activism and press photos of female snipers in the Yugoslav wars, the book analyses feminist resistance in a range of performative actions that manifest the radical embodiment of Yugoslavia's anti-fascist, transnational and feminist legacies. It covers celebrated and lesser-known artists from the 1970s to today, including Marina Abramovic, Sanja Ivekovic, Vlasta Delimar, Tanja Ostojic, Selma Selman and Helena Janecic, along with music legends Lepa Brena and Esma Redzepova. "I am Jugoslovenka" tells a unique story of women's resistance through the intersection of feminism, socialism and nationalism in East European visual culture.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        August 2024

        The machinic city

        Media, performance and participation

        by Marcos P. Dias

        As human and machine agency become increasingly intermingled and digital media is overlaid onto the urban landscape, The machinic city argues that performance art can help us to understand contemporary urban living. Dias analyses interventions from performance artists such as Blast Theory, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Rimini Protokoll, which draw from a rich history of avant-garde art movements to create spaces for deliberation and reflection on urban life, and speculation on its future. While cities are increasingly controlled by autonomous processes mediated by technical machines, Dias analyses the performative potential of the aesthetic machine, as it assembles with media, capitalist, human and urban machines. The aesthetic machine of performance art in urban space is examined through its different components - design, city and technology actants. This unveils the unpredictable nature and emerging potential of performance art as it unfolds in the machinic city.

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