The Performance Studies Reader

by Henry Bial (Editor), Sara Brady (Editor)

Overview

The first edition of The Performance Studies Reader established itself as the leading anthology of key writings on the continually evolving field of performance studies. Bringing together contributions from a host of renowned artists and scholars, the Reader provided a lively and diverse collection of ideas suitable for undergraduates and beginning graduate students in performance studies, theater, cultural studies and related disciplines. This updated and significantly enlarged Second Edition offers eight new chapters - for a total of 42 - on such important topics as devising theater, public memorial observances, and neurocognitive approaches to performance, as well as expanded introductory essays and internal cross-references. Widely used by students and scholars around the world as a stand-alone text, The Performance Studies Reader, Second Edition is also synchronized to the second edition of Richard Schechner's Performance Studies: An Introduction. Used together, the two volumes continue to provide a complete and integrated package for teaching and learning performance studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781138023352
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	08/14/2015
Edition description:	Revised
Pages:	438
Product dimensions:	6.88(w) x 9.69(h) x (d)

About the Author

Henry Bial is Professor and Chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Kansas, USA. He is the author of Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (2005) and Playing God: The Bible on the Broadway Stage (2015).  

Sara Brady is Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at Bronx Community College of the City University of New York, USA, and Managing Editor of TDR: The Drama Review. She is the author of Performance, Politics and the War on Terror (2012) and coeditor with Lindsey Mantoan of Performance in a Militarized Culture (2018).

Table of Contents

Contributors     xii
Acknowledgements     xix
Introduction   Henry Bial     1
What is performance studies?     5
Performance studies: the broad spectrum approach   Richard Schechner     7
Disciplines of the text: sites of performance   W.B. Worthen     10
The liminal-norm   Jon McKenzie     26
Professing performances: disciplinary genealogies   Shannon Jackson     32
Performance studies   Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett     43
Performance studies in an age of terror   John Bell     56
What is performance?     59
Performances: belief in the part one is playing   Erving Goffman     61
Blurred genres: the refiguration of social thought   Clifford Geertz     66
What is performance?   Marvin Carlson     70
Life the movie   Neal Gabler     76
Marina Abramovic: witnessing shadows   Peggy Phelan     78
Ritual     87
Liminality and communitas   Victor Turner     89
"Performance" and other analogies   Catherine Bell     98
"The blood that runs through the veins": thecreation of identity and a client's experience of Cuban-American Santeria Dilogun divination   Michael Atwood Mason     107
Saint Orlan: ritual as violent spectacle and cultural criticism   Alyda Faber     118
Performative commemoratives, the personal, and the public: spontaneous shrines, emergent ritual   Jack Santino     125
Play     135
The nature and significance of play as a cultural phenomenon   Johan Huizinga     137
A theory of play and fantasy   Gregory Bateson     141
The ambiguity of play: rhetorics of fate   Brian Sutton-Smith     152
Just doing   Allan Kaprow     159
Falling apart to stay together: deep play in the Grand Marais Mardi Gras   Barry Jean Ancelet     164
Performativity     175
How to do things with-words: lecture II   J.L. Austin     177
Excerpt from "Signature Event Context"   Jacques Derrida     184
Performative acts and gender constitution: an essay in phenomenonology and feminist theory   Judith Butler     187
Introduction to Performativity and Performance   Andrew Parker   Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick     200
Theater and anthropology, theatricality and culture   Johannes Fabian      208
Performing     217
A dialogue about acting   Bertolt Brecht     219
The actor's technique   Jerzy Grotowski     223
A dream of passion   Lee Strasberg     229
Presenting and re-presenting the self: from not-acting to acting in African performance   Frances Harding     231
Reconsidering Stanislavsky: feeling, feminism, and the actor   Rhonda Blair     249
Performance processes     263
First attempts at a stylized theatre   Vsevolod Meyerhold     265
The oral artist: training and preparation   Isidore Okpewho     274
The performance text   Marco de Marinis     280
The deep order called turbulence: the three faces of dramaturgy   Eugenio Barba     300
The archaeology of performance   Mary Zimmerman     310
Global and intercultural performances     321
Performing ethnography   Victor Turner   Edie Turner     323
Of mimicry and man   Homi K. Bhabha     337
Culturas-in-extremis: performing against the cultural backdrop of the mainstream bizarre   Guillermo Gomez-Pena     345
Reverend Billy: preaching, protest, and post-industrial flanerie   Jill Lane     357
Performance studies: interventions and radical research   Dwight Conquergood     369
Translating performance   Diana Taylor     381
Index     337