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In response to the global movement of neoliberal values, the rise of mega-ships has produced a shift towards a vacation trend that is promoted as offering everything you could need … for any age, style or mood. These extravagant floating cities package a vacation where you can be everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. In addition to a borderless onboard multisensory shops, theatres, wine cellars, bars, spas, pools, fitness centres, symphonies, libraries, art galleries, eclectic restaurants, display of rooftop grassy parks and crew ‘from every corner of the world’, passengers also consume offshore itineraries at multiple ports of call. This market-driven industry of cultural fantasy tourism is what Andrew Wood calls an ‘omnitopia’, defined as ‘an architectural and perceptual enclave whose apparently distinct locales (and locals) convey inhabitants to a singular place’ (Wood 2005: 318). These lavish omnitopian palaces are ideal spaces for fuelling unreflexive consuming behaviours that evoke Mikhail Bakhtin’...

My review of Sara Jane Bailes’ Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure will depart periodically from a standard appraisal to take up a subjective artist-scholar position that reflects the bo...

“Domestic Train Wreck: A Radical Utopia” by Melanie Bennett uses the emerging discourse of failure in art practice to discuss $u:Domestic Train Wreck$eu:, a partly autobiographic/partly participatory event performed as a Shift during the Performance Studies International conference at the University of Leeds in June 2012. Written and performed by the author with sound artist Aaron Collier and directed by Richie Wilcox,$u:Domestic Train Wreck$eu:transformsBennett's grandmothers' and mother's domestic heirlooms and private rituals into a performance that pays homage to invisible and failed utopian housewives. Using an autoethnographic trajectory, this article discusses how the live event gave value to otherwise invisible women by reanimating two differing kinds of domestic labour manifested in the author's grandmothers and mother. Bennett'stwo grandmothers' labour of domestic proficiency and the pleasure they derived from it is presented as a legitimate act of artistry despite its contemporary and negative ...