Blue Sky Body: Thresholds for Embodied Research / Edition 1

by Ben Spatz

Overview

Blue Sky Body: Thresholds for Embodied Research is the follow-up to Ben Spatz's 2015 book What a Body Can Do, charting a course through more than twenty years of embodied, artistic, and scholarly research.

Emerging from the confluence of theory and practice, this book combines full-length critical essays with a kaleidoscopic selection of fragments from journal entries, performance texts, and other unpublished materials to offer a series of entry points organized by seven keywords: city, song, movement, theater, sex, document, politics. Brimming with thoughtful and sometimes provocative takes on embodiment, technology, decoloniality, the university, and the politics of knowledge, the work shared here models the integration of artistic and embodied research with critical thought, opening new avenues for transformative action and experimentation.

Invaluable to scholars and practitioners working through and beyond performance, Blue Sky Body is both an unconventional introduction to embodied research and a methodological intervention at the edges of contemporary theory.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781138608559
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	12/18/2019
Pages:	330
Product dimensions:	5.44(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Ben Spatz is Senior Lecturer in Drama, Theatre, and Performance at the University of Huddersfield, UK. They are the author of What a Body Can Do: Technique as Knowledge, Practice as Research (2015), the founder and editor of the videographic Journal of Embodied Research, published by Open Library of Humanities, and an internationally recognized speaker on embodied research methods. For more information, please visit www.urbanresearchtheater.com.

Table of Contents

Foreword : D. Soyini Madison

 

Preface: Blue Sky Body

 

Acknowledgments

THRESHOLDS

1. CITY: FRAGMENTS

Sky Gold (1995)

The Electronic Heart (2001)

Vermilion’s Text (2001-2003)

Another City (2009)

Embodiment as First Affordance (2017)

2. SONG: FRAGMENTS

Sweat (2003)

Vessels (2008)

Burning Up (2009)

Topology of Song (2015)

Colors Like Knives (2017)

3. MOVEMENT: FRAGMENTS

First Showing (2000)

The Door is Open (2004)

Letters to an Empty Room (2008)

Irregular Rhythms (2014)

Choreography as Research (2017)

4. THEATER: FRAGMENTS

Wild Spirit (1999)

Acts Without Organs (2008)

Beckett’s Non-Theater (2011)

PLAYWAR (2012)

A Thousand Tiny Viewpoints (2020)

5. SEX: FRAGMENTS

the desert (2003)

On Pornography and Trauma (2009)

Is Grotowski Queer? (2013)

soft butch (2018)

This Extraordinary Power (2010)

6. DOCUMENT: FRAGMENTS

Citing Musicality (2013)

Ethics of the Scribble (2016)

What Do We Document? (2017)

Criteria for Assessment (2017)

The Video Way of Thinking (2018)

7. POLITICS: FRAGMENTS

neverland (2002)

A Charismatic Moment (2009)

Touching Landscape (2016)

Duration and Kinship (2018)

Notes for Decolonizing Embodiment (2019)

Appendix: Interviews

Interview: Iben Nagel Rasmussen (2018)

Interview: Tim Ingold (2019)

Performance Text: Rite of the Butcher (2013)

Editorial Reviews

Spatz’s first book, What A Body Can Do, was immensely helpful to me as an ethnographer in providing a vocabulary and conceptual framework to name and honor the hidden abodes of clandestine knowledges and the resistant performatives of local embodied practices. This book will be no less influential as an example of performative writing, offering another level in the discovery of "what a body can do" as first affordance, as well as showing how pedagogy can instigate threshold crossings, all in service of ethics and politics.

— From the Foreword by D. Soyini Madison

From the Publisher