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Focusing on a series of YouTube creators, this essay interrogates the persistence of the hegemonic power of the white male hardbody, arguing that digital facial replacements – in particular those of 1980s action stars – produce a mode of white, masculine identity that is essentially exchangeable and transactional. These bodies are capitalist commodities, fundamentally interchangable and asserting the same bundle of ideological traits. The technology of digital facial replacement allows creators to visualize this exchange value. As opposed to the pornographic, invasive, and misogynistic face swap videos originally posted on reddit.com by user ‘deepfakes’ in 2017, the facial replacement videos found on YouTube are more playful in nature, imagining alternate histories and using face swapping as a mode of comedy. This case study of 1980s action stars opens up to a broader examination of issues of identity in digital facial replacement. In the videos under analysis, gender swaps are relatively common, but ethnic swaps are scarce. The reluctance of the YouTubers to ‘blindcast’ their revisionist videos reveals a subtle critique of the fantasy of a post-racial world. Racial difference – and, perhaps, cultural specificity – remains intact, and the creators take a seemingly apolitical, comical, ‘safe’ approach to identity rather than an explicitly critical stance. By denuding the more threatening and destructive aspects of deepfakes, these YouTube videos produce a more palatable version of facial replacement. This version, however, is no less ideologically complex than its more explicitly political and misogynistic counterparts. These contemporary facial substitutions not only continue to ‘reboot’ white male hegemony, but they also function as an ideological reclamation of masculine power in the present through modified images of the (revisionist) past.

Cultural appropriation, as both concept and practice, is a hugely controversial issue. It is of particular importance to the arts because creativity is often found at the intersection of cultural boundaries. Much of the popular discourse on cultural appropriation focusses on the commercial use of indigenous or marginalized cultures by mainstream or dominant cultures. There is, however, growing awareness that cultural appropriation is a complicated issue encompassing cultural exchange in all its forms. Creativity emerging from cultural interdependence is far from a reciprocal exchange. This insight indicates that ethical and political implications are at stake. Consequently, the arts are being examined with greater attention in order to assess these implications. This article will focus on appropriation in literature, and examine the way appropriative strategies are being used to resist dominant cultural standards. These strategies and their implications will be analyzed through the lens of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of minor literature.

Theatre has been associated with contagion and contagious emotions since Plato and Aristotle. In the twentieth century, Antonin Artaud proposed that theatre or performance should be like the plague that takes control of actors’ and spectators’ bodies and infects them with an affective energy. For these infections to happen, however, audiences and actors must be in the same room. In times of the corona pandemic, this spatial proximity has been substituted by theatre mostly performed and/or streamed online. This article offers some preliminary thoughts on this development: it considers what we descriptively call “viral theatre.” We argue that we currently witness a form of viral theatre that manifests itself through an interplay of three aspects: first, the fact that both performers and spectators are in a state of disruption, second, the willingness/expectations on the part of spectators to participate in the event, and, finally, the use of communication technologies such as Zoom. The framework of the pandemic, therefore, enhances and modifies what viral theatre can be and what kind of effect it can have, oscillating between more Platonic notions of dangerous contagion when plays force us to explore questions of complicity and the Aristotelian ideal of cathartic emotions when plays/performers reach out to us for moral support.

This essay is part of a wider research project that has introduced puppets into the drawing studio. Puppets are odd operators, and this is an unorthodox approach to drawing research. In this case, eccentricity is appropriate given that orthodoxies of skilfulness and good drawing are the subject of investigation. Unlike other contemporary practices that utilize puppetry as subject matter, motif and narrative device, this project invites draughtspuppets to make drawings. These draughtspuppets are distinct from automata and other drawing machines, and these distinctions are outlined. The paper focuses on the virtue and value of dexterity. In drawing and in puppet manipulation, dexterity brings scrutiny to the hands as the primary site of action and queries the relationship between ‘good hands’ and ‘good drawing’. The text begins by connecting traditions of dexterity, manipulation, drawing and puppetry before delving into the essence of puppets – their animism and (semi-)autonomy – and the tacit implications of dextrous hands. This article asks the question: can puppet ontologies expose the value of dexterity as a procedural component of (good) drawing? Connecting a range of puppet scholarship, the author’s interactions with the draughtspuppets and over 25 years of teaching experience, this article finally argues for the productive capacity of draughtspuppets to transform orthodox beliefs about the tenets of dexterity and good drawing. In the final passage, the motifs present in the draughtspuppets’ recent drawings are briefly analysed and correlated with this examination.

Joann Kealiinohomoku's Silhougraphs®, traces of the silhouettes of dancers, were her attempt to operationalize her cultural relativist commitments and create a new method of dance analysis. Silhougraphs illuminate underexamined scholarly presumptions, methods, and tools that both contributed to and paralleled the emergence of dance studies as a discipline. Silhougraphs are also a cautionary tale demonstrating the ways culturally sensitive research commitments and methods can unintentionally yet decisively reiterate tools and logics of racist typologies.

Nancy Stark Smith passed away due to ovarian cancer on 1 May 2020. Her dedication to contact improvisation for nearly half a century—as a dancer, teacher, writer, and editor—contributed to its development and will continue to inform its ongoing vitality. But much remains uncertain for the future of contact improvisation. Complicated by the challenges of Covid-19, what sort of bodies will result from the practice going forward, and how might the form itself change?

My aim is to consider how anarchy reads and resists punitive regimes in performance, particularly in ‘immersive performance’. Punk troupe Pussy Riot forms a starting point, via Riot Days in 2017‐18, with a sustained consideration on Inside Pussy Riot at the Saatchi Gallery in 2017, produced by Les Enfants Terrible. I concentrate on claims for authenticity that seem to lend theatre and performance legitimacy in relation to social change, to critique theatrical work with claims to producing agency, legitimizing hope for social transformation that is predicated on an ‘empowered’ spectator-participant. In the wake of these concerns, questions that bleed through this material relate to the limits of participation in performance and how and whether representations serve to dismantle state institutions. I consider whether the force of replications of cells, yards or gulags enables or disintegrates any activist, anarchist potential in performance. I take a wide-ranging view of anarchism beyond political theory to consider anarchism modelled in performance terms. Building from the example of Pussy Riot, the article defines performance critique through desire and anarchism, ‘manifesting desire’ or ‘anarchy as method’.

This article examines Eleo Pomare's concept of vitality in his pieceBlues for the Jungle(1966) as a black aesthetic approach to choreography. Vitality seeks to connect with black audiences in Harlem by referencing and affirming shared cultural knowledge, conveying an embodied epistemology of the US political economy defined by the lived experiences of Harlem: “Harlem knows.” Using a lens of diaspora citation, I argue that Pomare's choreographic citations of “vital” ways of moving and knowing in Harlem critique the terms for “proper” national belonging, while articulating diasporic belonging in motion.

This article approaches the concept musical as a form defined by epistemological self-critique. Inviting spectators to affectively engage with its thematic concerns precisely by problematizing the spectators’ pleasurable consumption of musical theatre conventions, the concept musical deploys this reflection for potentially political purposes. Through a close reading of Love Life, the 1948 musical often understood as the first concept musical, I argue that the show’s unique structure cultivates the sense that capitalism, as embodied in the conventions of popular entertainment, has intervened in the life and happiness of the musical’s central family. By critiquing popular culture, Love Life – itself an element of popular culture – questions whether its own materials, the popular songs that make up its score and the vaudeville show on which its form is based, are fragmenting and dangerous illusions. I show how Cabaret pursues a similar epistemological experiment, implicating spectators in the passive sensual pleasures that the show frames as having facilitated fascism – just as Company pursues a formal structure that implicates spectators in the issues of “observing the action” that plague its central character, Bobby.

Reacting to recent materialist developments in music studies and beyond, I argue for the value of dialectics in accounting for compositional orientations vis-à-vis their objects – be these objects sound-producing, non-human entities, such as musical instruments, or the object that is ‘sound itself ’. Engaging the compositional thought and practice of Busoni, Russolo, Varèse, Cage and Tudor by way of example, I highlight two intersecting tendencies: the first constitutes a presumed mastery over the object in question; the second is suggestive of an exploration of the object on its own terms. Interweaving aspects of post-Marxist and psychoanalytic theory, I argue that, ultimately, our orientation towards the object manifests a negotiation of the self in a changing material world.

The paper situates current developments in British theatre within wider trends towards dystopia and (post-)apocalyptic writing. A central focus is on the role of posthuman elements in dystopian plays which are used to create a constant and pervasive, but mostly unspecific sense of crisis. Two recent works by female playwrights – Dawn King’s Foxfinder (2011) and Stef Smith’s Human Animals (2016) – are compared and related back to Caryl Churchill’s seminal Far Away (2000) to elucidate how the nonhuman comes to be perceived as a threat and how this leads to, and/or supports, a dystopian system and its violent measures. Moreover, both Foxfinder and Human Animals manage to combine absurdist elements that border on the surreal with more or less pronounced didactic implications for the audience, although these connections are realised in different ways by the two playwrights. In this manner, post-apocalyptic dystopian theatre of the early 21st century can become revolutionary rather than regressive.

"This article represents a closer examination of the triadic perspective of creating, performing and appreciating a performative event. This type of analysis is directly linked to choreological studies, a domain which is not yet part of the Romanian academic field, but, in essence, it does exist through other forms of theatrical studies and practices. I localize every scholarly aspect in current performative practices, more precisely, in that of physical and dance theatre. Through this article I would like to bring more attention to the way these forms of performing arts are created, performed and spectated by individuals who are able to deal with all three processes. Therefore, this analysis will have a more personal mark, thanks to the interviews integrated, with two internationally known artists in physical theatre: Hannes Langolf and Rob Hayden. It is a closer unveiling of how processes of transaction function within a piece of work. It is a way of constant questioning every participant in an artistic event should confront him/herself with. Keywords: choreology, movement, physical theatre, creator, performer, spectator, interview, Hannes Langolf, Rob Hayden"

This article explores the political and ethical implications of performance representing the ongoing realities of migration in contemporary Britain. Using Good Chance Theatre's The Jungle (2018) as its point of departure, the article problematizes the use of dramaturgies of proximity to confect simplistic notions of empathy as tantamount to political change. In a Brechtian vein, the article argues for modes of distanciation to foster critical engagement among audiences at the site of contemporary performance on migration. Focusing upon the production's West End transfer, its use of immersive strategies and its use of a comedic model to address ongoing issues in migration, this article finds that such strategies are not as politically transgressive as marketing and critical reception often contend them to be, with the onus of responsibility placed solely upon the individual spectator.

This article intends to critique the spectres of authority which haunt theatrical interpretations of Rabindranath Tagore's (1861–1941) plays. As Tagore is a cultural icon, since even before his demise his plays have been made sites for exercising cultural and institutional authority. A consequent uneasy anticipation of denunciation or censorship has essentially deterred theatre directors from creatively interpreting and staging his plays. In terms of discourse also, there has been a spiral of silence regarding the presence of such authority. It is only since the beginning of the twenty-first century, after the termination of the copyright to Tagore's works, that the situation has lightened considerably. This article deals with the above phenomenon in two segments. While the second segment provides a close analysis of one of the first productions to radically subvert the status quo regarding the creative staging of Tagore's plays, the first provides a contextual, historical build-up to that moment. The article argues that in dramatic theatre authority is often validated on the basis of an ‘archival logic’ of thinking which requires systematic dismantling.

The two performative genres of the dybbuk constitute a reciprocal system—as a Jewish possession illness and as a canonical play. Tracking the two highlights the dialectical relationship between the dybbuk-as-illness and the Dybbuk-as-play. Dybbuk possession cases reemerged in Israel at the end of the 20th century; one new and highly publicized case in particular kindled opposing moral crusades.

In this research, we brought together various theories and speculative conceptual connections of otherness associated with liminality especially as seen through one methodological experiment and art-based intervention, namely flash mobs. From our perspective, liminality and liminal spaces are incomplete and always becoming since often they cannot be documented or described through existing language and normative concepts. Moving away from normativity and speaking back from liminal spaces carry risks since complex and intersubjective liminal spaces challenge the authority of the researcher, knowing, and doing in Academia. In this work, we use examples from our flash mob events to bridge theorizing and public performances, actual limit experiences, and twisted forms of (normative) scholarship. We ask what is being produced through art-based interventions, resistance, liminality, and twisted scholarship in the context of inquiry.

To understand performance art of the past is to grapple with the fact that this art was designed to be lost. That is to say, it purposefully aspired to the condition of the lost work of art.

The theoretical turn to object ontologies in the social sciences and the humanities brings puppetry work related to illness, disability and health to the forefront of artistic practice-as-research, disability studies and the medical/health humanities. Articulating chronic illness and disability through the tools and practice of puppetry animation can help form complex embodiment, where the person is empowered to value their embodiment as a site of knowledge. Puppetry pedagogy can train the bodies of medical students and clinicians to develop the capacity for embodied attunement and may decolonize both the knowledge of the body and medical education by reunifying mind, body and imagination. By training to perceive materials both physically and poetically, puppetry allows silenced bodies and histories to speak.

As a real-life figure who was extensively written about in medical journals after his death, but whose voice is entirely absent from the historical record, the character of Tarrare presents the theatre-maker with a number of ethical and artistic considerations. In documenting Tarrare’s life through puppetry and opera, Wattle and Daub engaged in both a literal and a metaphorical act of ventriloquism, wherein we put our own words into the mouths of the dead. Drawing on Levinas’s ethics of the ‘other’ and Salverson’s reflections on the ethics of documentary theatre, this article interrogates The Depraved Appetite of Tarrare the Freak as an example of documentary theatre and explores the unique opportunities and challenges presented when using puppetry to represent the historical ‘other’.

The concept of the dithyrambic dramatist – introduced by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in the fourth essay of his Untimely Meditations of 1873–76 – is one of the most performance-oriented concepts to emerge out of the nineteenth century in which theatre was often associated with dramatic literature. This article investigates the nature of the dithyrambic dramatist by tracing, in the first instance, the underlying musical perspectives – already evident in The Birth of Tragedy of 1872 – which led Nietzsche to develop the concept. In the second instance, the author articulates what may be considered as its key conditions, namely the visible–audible and individual–collective relationalities. In view of the arguments brought forward, the concept of the dithyrambic dramatist is located as an interdisciplinary element that emerged out of an art form – music – to which Nietzsche was intimately associated in his youth as a composer. The author further proposes that, rather than a metaphor to philological tropes, the dithyrambic dramatist is a concrete manifestation of interdisciplinary and performative foundations that inform Nietzsche’s analytic perspectives.

Beginning from the premise (vis-à-vis wrestler-turned-scholar Laurence de Garis) that professional wrestling scholarship has historically overlooked the embodied, physical dimension of the form in favour of its drama, and reflecting on a series of professional wrestling story-lines that have blurred the lines between staged performance (“kayfabe”) and reality, this article suggests that the business of professional wrestling offers a vivid case study for the rise and dissemination of what political theorist Wendy Brown calls neo-liberal rationality: the dissemination of the market model to every aspect and activity of human life. Drawing on Brown’s work, the language of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) contracts, and professional wrestling’s territorial history, this article argues that contemporary story-lines in professional wrestling rationalize, economize, and trivialize the form’s very real violent labour, even rendering audiences complicit in said violence—while serving also as a potent vehicle for understanding the metaphorical (and sometimes literal) violence of neo-liberal rationality more broadly.

Drawing on somatic practice, psychology, philosophy and the dance experience, this article operationalizes Sartre’s ideological response to movement pedagogy. The ‘thisness’ experience of embodiment during traditional dance styles negatively impacts on the realization of our body’s somatic potential. However, Sartre’s ‘body-for-itself’ mode can be stimulated with certain somatic practices, due to the concentration on the inner experience and sensations present in the body. In this sense, the body becomes a learning outcome in itself, through a deep and respectful connection with the dancer’s inner being. Pedagogically, this combination of Sartre’s theory with holistic techniques of the self, specifically the fundamental principles of Feldenkrais and dance literacy, can benefit the realization of individual potential during dance, and optimize positive embodiment. This article discusses initial materializations of the learning experiences of the dance student, informed by Sartre’s thinking on embodiment, and a theoretical discussion of the pedagogical implications of Sartre’s ideas for somatic pedagogy in contemporary dance.

This visual essay explores the creative practice of The Stitchery Collective, which uses costume as a strategy in their participatory works. Inspired by performance artist, queer icon and costume lover Leigh Bowery, The Stitchery Collective has created The Bowery Party, a series of events encouraging radical dress up. These immersive occasions emphasize the significance of costume as enabling joy, community and extravagant social performance. The essay discusses the importance of Bowery as a figure in designing the party in terms of the nature of participant responses, as his legacy provides a subversive approach to costuming the self. The analysis focuses on strategies for and the importance of making and holding space, both physical and virtual, for alternate visions of the body – an empowering ethic that celebrates diversity and inclusivity. The costumes created by the attending public are challenging, often both to wear and to social, gender and body norms. This essay offers a brief example of the costumes created by participants in direct response to Bowery as a radical, slippery and chaotic aesthetic target.

As a genre, the gothic deals frequently in loneliness, isolation, and paranoid orientations toward others. These characteristics make the gothic a productive lens through which to explore the effects of neoliberalism, particularly the way neoliberalism structures intimate human connection. I analyse three plays by Jen Silverman, demonstrating how her use of gothic conventions illuminates the promotion of isolation within neoliberal discourse as well as the exchange of emotional intimacy for public intimacy and the commodification of intimacy within the attention economy. By reframing familiar gothic tropes, Silverman draws parallels between the rebellious nature of gothic villains and the hyper-individualism promoted by neoliberal discourse. She further reworks the gothic heroine’s struggle against patriarchal authority, utilizing it to interrogate the role of family life within neoliberalism. Through these techniques, Silverman highlights the anxious tension that lies at the heart of neoliberalism: between fearing others and needing them to affirm our existence.

Since the publication of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man in 1952, invisibility and hypervisibility have ranked among the central metaphors of black cultural production and the critical discourse on blackness. This article takes Tarell Alvin McCraney’s The Brothers Size (2007) and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview (2018) as case studies for discussion of the ways in which contemporary African-American dramatists engage the familiar (and co-constitutive) poles of invisibility and hypervisibility to advance a new, more relational model for visualizing blackness. The article argues that pairing the plays uncovers an under-examined resonance between longstanding conversations in theatre and performance studies about disappearance and recent ones across disciplines on opacity.

February 2010. The lights are off. As I adjust to the dark I can make out shapes of others scattered around the room. Disoriented and uncertain I wait for some sign or direction of what to do. The air is thick with anticipation, but as time drags it becomes clear that no instructions are coming. Then it begins all around me. Sat in the dark in a workshop in the courtroom studio of Toynbee Studios, I begin to feel anxious. I see the outline of another body in front of me and I panic. I should do something. I reach for anything that might keep things working, that might keep play going. Does anyone want to dance, I ask. I waltz. I sense someone dancing behind me.In what follows I think through my participation in a 2010 workshop led by Anne Bean, recounted in part above, to understand better the role of play in the conditions of production for theatre and performance under capital. Bean is an interdisciplinary artist, belonging to (or claimed by) multiple experimental art scenes, including visual, performance, and sound art, who has been a central figure of European live art since the 1970s. The workshop, which was conducted largely in the dark and focused on the aestheticization of cooperation through an emphasis on its participants doing play was held at Artsadmin's Toynbee Studios, the influential UK arts producing organization's home in East London. This article puts my account of Bean's workshop in conversation with Victorian economist Arnold Toynbee's demand for a new capitalist morality. Toynbee's appeal was, of course, not directed at me or the other workshop participants disoriented and uncertain in the dark. But, I argue, the situation of play that arose in Bean's workshop is a contemporary iteration of what Toynbee called agospel of life,a term referring to a commitment to self and civic betterment at the core of a burgeoning capitalist morality. The connection between the shaping of Victorian labor practices and the staging of cooperation between participants in Bean's contemporary workshop is the basis for this essay's core assertion: that the value of play as a counterpoint to work within practices and discourses of theatre and performance needs considerable rethinking.

This article examines dance pieces premiered in the Nordic countries at the height of the Syrian refugee crisis in 2015. Framed by the heated debates on current immigration policies, as well as prevailing tropes of a theater of migration and the figure of “the migrant,” the analysis centers on the potential for creating spaces of resistance in the encounter between choreographic performance and spectators. Drawing on analytical concepts such as migratory aesthetics and choreographic agency, the focus is on the interrelationship between the choreographic articulations of experience of migration and their materialization before an audience.

This essay considers what it might mean to learn ‘through’ Beckett, inaugurating a critical pedagogy that could be called ‘Beckettian’. By integrating existing strands of scholarship on Beckett and his relationship to education, the essay draws a distinction between the ‘practical’ and ‘biographical’ ways of thinking about Beckett and learning. This draws on previous work within the field, but also proposes a new vocabulary – derived from an interdisciplinary encounter with the scholarship of teaching and learning and the philosophy of education, especially ‘critical pedagogy’ – through which the possibility of ‘Beckettian pedagogies’ might be manifested. Recalling Beckett's biographers, his work's fundamental silence haunts most attempts to contain, explain, avoid or domesticate it. The essay proposes that a critical pedagogy of Beckett must be grounded in the concept of openness, especially in the notion that ‘void’ is a productive category, and in the embodiment of an evolving ecology of praxis. This alternative pathway reflects on the philosophy of education inherent within Beckett as an idea, engaging with ‘Beckettian pedagogies’ in an entangled sense of instruction, guidance and teaching with a particular focus on the latter in terms of the theory or principles of education. This move does not require abandoning existing traditions, but rather gathering them under new light, by placing the biographical Beckett (1906–89) in juxtaposition with the praxis of Beckett (ongoing) and the contemporaneous notion of critical pedagogy, as expounded by several scholars including Paulo Freire (1921–97). Beckettian pedagogies therefore remove dormant assumptions, habits of mind, and hierarchies that impede exploration to enable a move away from the curriculum, or toward a curriculum of unlearning and uncertainty, thereby disrupting the entrenched powers that Beckett saw fit to resist.

It is through voice that oftentimes individuals find themselves breaking with conventions and systematically ingrained injustices. In the recent literature in the burgeoning field of interdisciplinary voice studies, the phenomenon of voicing has been projected as a powerful process, across cultures, to represent human agency at its most potent, and this article is a critical discussion on this very uniqueness of voicing in relation to social equity, corporeality and cultural value. The author, a female singer-researcher of Karnatik music of South India, unpacks the burdens and privileges of voice in the light of cultural contingency, global mobility and interculturality. Following a discussion encompassing literature and theories on voice, historical ideas of voice and feminist critiques on voice and the voicing female body from a South Indian angle, the author proposes a Pentagonal Entanglement framework for equitable engagement with the voice ‐ across scenarios and cultures, to critically address the socially pressing issues of our time through the medium of voice.

PurposeThis article aims to bring together and demonstrate overlaps in three different areas of reflexive research concerned variously with audiences for contemporary dance. These are: 1) artists reflecting on their own creative process and engaging other researchers in doing so, generating new insights and language as a result; 2) humanities-based dance studies and a small number of dance scholars reflecting on this “process turn” in dance; and 3) the field of empirical audience studies, drawing on a single study specifically interested in access to creative process. The goal is to propose how these areas might coexist and mutually inform each other.Design/methodology/approachThe approach develops a three-fold framework where the multiple definitions and examples of reflexive research in dance-making processes coexist. It draws systematically on a detailed example of one self-reflective study conducted by a dance company into creative process, on new scholarly writing on the “process turn” in dance research and written analysis of a unique audience research project as well as related literature.FindingsIn conclusion, the article suggests that in whatever combination of different research approaches, empirical evidence is increasingly important. This risks tipping the balance towards a more utilitarian understanding, particularly in the area of audience studies. It is possible to counterbalance this with approaches from artists and scholars interested in understanding arrived at through reflexive study of creative practice.Originality/valueThe original contribution is to bring these three areas together for the first time to expose difference and overlaps and suggest that challenges of understanding (in a non-utilitarian form) could be mitigated through more systematic dialogue between them, such as presented here.

Every evening from 28 June to 24 September 2017, twenty-five minutes of digitally mapped and projected images transformed the concrete undersurface of Vancouver’s Cambie Street Bridge into a wild river filled with migrating salmon. Billed as a hybrid form that blends “cinematic storytelling and high-tech art installation” (Uninterupted.ca), the work spun a complex web of relations between humans, non-humans, and places, with a goal of inciting activist-style commitment to the issue of salmon depletion. The article argues that Uninterrupted manifests a civic imaginary in which urban infrastructure, a major catalyst of environmental degradation, can participate, through aesthetic intervention, in an act of recovery of biotic life.

Digital-audio performance walks can be powerful performances, responding to troubling pasts, giving voice to testimony, and creating an affective geography that satisfies a participant's desire to connect with the city rather than just walk through it. Yet digital-audio performance walks also raise questions about performance and voyeurism, and the disconnection of private headphone experience, alongside issues of agency, detachment and appropriation. This article addresses key issues associated with digital-audio performance walks, using two case studies of performance walks (from Israel and Ireland), that aim to communicate politically charged and painful histories, which are at once ‘now’ and ‘then’, ‘here’ and ‘there’. The article considers some of the risks in digital-audio performance walks: dark tourism, privatization and empathic quietism. Finally, the article assesses what creative strategies are available to creators – and audiences – to make collaborative performance walks that galvanize spectators to become active witnesses.

In this paper I share my personal attempt of co-working with plants as ghosts and how this has started to shape a curatorial practice that tries to resist extractivism. I wanted to rethink my own practice as a curatorand investigate how to shape relations and ethics differently. For this work I turned towards plants and ghosts as my teachers and allies. They pointed me towards strategies of being-with, generosity and sympoiesis, which I am trying totranspose into a (life-)practice. Rooted Hauntology Lab as an artistic-curatorial project is both the result and ongoing practical playground for this experimentation.

Performance theorists have long been drawn to the potential of performance to subvert established institutions. The results of performance are never fully determined in advance; performances subject established images to reinterpretation; they take place before an audience that can criticize and intervene. But performative principles also play a role in maintaining established institutions and ways of being. Performance demands that participants take on roles and perform them more or less effectively. Performance also establishes a separation between the relatively active people who have the authority to perform publicly important roles and relatively passive audiences who observe those institutionalized performances. In this paper I argue for a balanced view of the subversive potential of performance, taking seriously the tradition of anti-theatricality, in order to determine the role of performance both in undermining and in upholding established institutions, and I call attention to the potentially subversive (but often contradictory) role of what I call anti-performance, the attempt (which is just as contradictory as performance itself) to move beyond the performativity that is imposed by established institutions, in order to achieve new forms of being that are experienced not only as “played” but as “real.”

Contributors to this new rubric draw attention to terms that are frequently used when we speak or write about our pedagogical practices. The idea is to engage Scenario readers in a discussion of key terminology in the area of performative teaching and learning. Through Scenario Journal and various Scenario Forum initiatives, including conferences, symposia, colloquia, the term performative has become a key term in the modern languages debate.2 Many readers will remember the 2014 conference entitled Performative Teaching, Learning, Research, the 2017 conference on Performative Spaces in Language, Literature and Culture Education; and the 2020 conference, which carried the title Going Performative in Education, had to be cancelled due to the Covid-19 related lockdown. Like with any other term the meaning of the term performative very much depends on how it is used in a specific context. The photograph below draws our attention to a context that is particularly noteworthy against the background of the recent worldwide Black Lives Matter protests. Fig. 1: Underground station Mohrenstraße in Berlin Why is the streetname crossed out with a red line? From medieval times the German word Mohr was often used when reference was made to people with dark skin. Similary, in the ...

Šiame straipsnyje nagrinėjama, kaip per pastaruosius tris dešimtmečius – nuo 10-ojo dešimtmečio pradžios iki 2-ojo dešimtmečio pabaigos – į Lietuvos teatro lauką buvo įtrauktas auditorijos dalyvavimo reiškinys ir kaip šiuolaikiniuose Lietuvos teatro projektuose atskleidžiami 7-ojo dešimtmečio Vakarų teatro auditorijos įtraukimo metodai. Pagrindinis šio straipsnio tikslas – išnagrinėti auditorijos dalyvavimo ir kolektyvinio teatro tradicijos raidą Lietuvos teatre, išanalizuoti dalyvavimo šalies teatro lauke prielaidas, apibrėžti dalyvavimo apimtis bei pasireiškiančius prieštaravimus naujausiuose Lietuvos šiuolaikinio teatro pavyzdžiuose. Šie prieštaravimai pastebimi ne tik Lietuvos, bet ir šiandienėse performatyviose Vakarų teatro praktikose, kurios yra nutolusios nuo 7-ojo ir 8-ojo dešimtmečių kolektyvinio teatro praktikų, bet išlaiko ir selektyviai panaudoja tam tikrus aplinkos teatro dalyvavimo aspektus, kurie gali būti pritaikomi naujuose pramoginiuose teatruose. Panaši ribota dalyvaujamojo teatro sklaida Lietuvoje gali būti grindžiama priešinga prielaida – žiūrovų įpročių pokyčiai nespėja pasivyti naujai taikomų teatro praktikų, todėl Lietuvos kūrėjai vis dar stengiasi atsargiai sinchronizuoti tradicines stebėjimo taktikas su interaktyviomis, taip užkirsdami kelią ir principiniams pokyčiams, susijusiems su pastatymo ir stebėjimo strategijomis. Straipsnyje remiamasi Lietuvos teatrologų akademiniais tekstais: Ramunės Balevičiūtės, Rasos Vasinauskaitės, Rūtos Mažeikienės, Jurgitos Staniškytės, Vaido Jauniškio, Linos Michelkevičės ir kitų, siekiant iliustruoti auditorijos dalyvavimo analitinį diskursą ir pristatyti skirtingus dalyvavimo tradicijos etapus Lietuvos teatro istoriografijoje. Apžvelgiant tarptautinį kontekstą, auditorijos dalyvavimo mechaniką ir istoriją, remtasi Erikos Fischer-Lichte, Michael Kirby, Richardo Schechnerio, Gareth White, Gay McAuley, Johano Huizingos ir kitų autorių tekstais. This article explores how audience participation practices were introduced into Lithuanian theatre in the last three decades (between the early ’90s and the late 2010s) and how the audience participation methods of the 1960s Western theatre are/were being implemented into contemporary Lithuanian theatre projects. The key goal of this article is to examine the evolution of audience participation and collective theatre tradition in Lithuanian theatre by analysing the preconditions for participatory practices in the country’s theatre scene and defining the scope and contradictions of participation in the latest examples of contemporary Lithuanian theatre practices. These contradictions are also apparent in contemporary Western performative practices, which have already distanced themselves from the collective theatre movement of the ’60s and the ’70s and the political agenda of the performances of that time, selectively retaining only limited participatory aspects of the environmental theatre culture as a new form of entertainment. Similar limited levels of participation in Lithuanian theatre can be based on a different premise—that changes in spectators’ habitude cannot catch up with the newly (re)introduced theatrical ideas after the 1990s, and that theatre creators are still trying to cautiously synchronise conventional observation tactics and modern theatre hierarchies with the interactive ones, thus slowing down changes in staging and spectatorship strategies as well. The article focuses on academic texts by Lithuanian theatre researchers Ramunė Balevičiūtė, Rasa Vasinauskaitė, Rūta Mažeikienė, Jurgita Staniškytė, Vaidas Jauniškis, Lina Michelkevičė, and others to illustrate the discourse of audience participation analysis and to present different stages of the participatory tradition in the historiography of Lithuanian theatre. For international context, history, and mechanics of audience participation, texts by Erika Fischer-Lichte, Michael Kirby, Richard Schechner, Gareth White, Gay McAuley, Johan Huizinga, and others are used.

Heiner Goebbels’s works are examples of “postdramatic” theatre works that engage with the political by seeking to challenge socially ingrained habits of perception rather than by presenting traditional, literary-based theatre of political didacticism or agitation. Goebbels claims to work toward a “non-hierarchical” theatre in the contexts of his arrangement of the various theatrical elements, in fostering collaborative working processes between the artists involved, and in the creation of audience-artist relationships. In offering a reading of Goebbels’s “no-man show” Stifters Dinge, this paper seeks to situate Goebbels’s practice within a theoretical tradition that also encompasses Hannah Arendt’s deployment of the theatre as a metaphor for the public sphere. Within this analysis, I suggest, theatre can be seen to offer the possibility of a participatory democracy through its attention to disappearance and absence.

In his work titled ‘Dance Curves: On the Dances of Palucca’ (1926), Wassily Kandisky translates two postures of the German Expressionist choreographer Gret Palucca from photographs into line drawings. The drawings are a study, but they are neither pictorial, nor straightforwardly representational. Staging an encounter between Dance Curves and Hannah Arendt’s investigation into thinking as both an interrupted and interruptive activity, this essay argues for a poetics of appearance as it is constituted by nonconforming acts of critique.Negotiating conflicts that shape a politics of recognition for criticism which deliberately or implicitly refutes utility, I articulate a process of appearance of meaning with differential relation to modernist concerns for interpretation, dissenting from rationalist and objectivist traditions that have dominated theatre and performance criticism since the Enlightenment. What happens when I disavow the drawings from the images, remove them from the source? Perhaps in such a place, we might find critique as a process of deliberately mishandled translation, as an occupation of an idea shifted elsewhere, as a displacement of meaning. Appearance shapes itself around slippages of attention that depart from the work of performance.In this essay, I turn to how these slippages fold outwards from the encounter, to the political nexus between performance and its world. In Arendt, I locate a means through which forms of thinking rendered as criticism constitute a resistant poetics to normative modes of paying attention, operating beyond what Bojana Kunst calls ‘the ready-made possibilities of discourse’ (2015, 13) under neoliberalism, that is, the ‘pre-established models of criticality and reflexivity’ to which art and artistic subjectivity often partake (ibid.)

We endeavor through this research paper to read the feminist movements, in particular countries in order to understand its dynamics and at the same time to foresee its future directions. To achieve this, as an adequate tool, Juri Lotman’s Culture and Explosion (2009) provides us a model for reading the different dynamics within feminism, as a cultural text, as well as its interconnection to other sign systems within the same semiotic sphere. Thus we can understand the interconnection of feminism with politics and society, and with its plurality of discourses makes it in constant change and exposed to explosions which would change its course in the future. These explosions are displayed through the political acts which were passed in favour of the women as a result of the feminist dynamics. Besides, the feminist movement has the capacity to integrate into other movements and also can be transformed into other movements, and thus, new realities and discourses are created. Within this arena, among these realities is the anti-feminist pornography as opposed to pro-sex feminists. From our stand point, pornography, and especially that in the digital age, is the dark side of the feminist movement. Semiotically, in Lotman’s (2009) model, pornography is abnormal, sick or non-existent because it is different from the norm. In the light of this, we are able to expose different views about the harms of pornography both on women and even men.

Oobleck is two things: a non-Newtonian fluid, a mixture of cornstarch and water showing properties of both a liquid and a solid; and an invention by Dr. Seuss, an odd green weather occurrence who’s fluid, adhesive, and elastic attributes manage to threaten the entire state apparatus of the “Kingdom of Didd.” Re-viewing the children’s book Bartholomew and the Oobleck, and in light of its starch-and-water namesake, I argue that we can learn an insurrective strategy of political resistance from its performativity.

Object-Oriented Ontology presents stark implications for the process of the artist. If all matter is alive, then all things are co-performers, and all art becomes performance. How does one work with the presence of the non-human, and what are the ethical implications of attempting to attune to its needs? Beginning with the object of a table, and considering it within both Graham Harman's discussion of "The Third Table" and the thing as a performing object, Meghan Moe Beitiks analyzes the presence of the non-human in performance and asserts a need for awareness, consideration and love in the creative process.

Based on considerations of the connection between fascination, crisis, and the “Medusa effect,” this paper argues that contemporary drama tends to challenge the audience’s sense of safe spectatorship by stimulating perceptual crises, returning the spectators’ gaze, and exposing their tendencies of (in)attentional blindness. Besides plays by Martin Crimp, Carol Ann Duffy, and Rufus Norris, the analysis focuses on James Graham’s Quiz (2017), which dramatizes one of the most popular scandals in the history of British game shows and challenges the audience’s capacity of moral attention. As I argue, Quiz engages the audience in multi-levelled crises (a crisis of knowledge, a crisis of perception, and a crisis of judgement), which stimulates conceptual blending, tests spectators’ response-ability on an ethical, aesthetic, and political level, and eventually allows them to overcome the perceptual crisis created in the course of the play.

This article examines how spectators describe their expectations of contemporary dance by referring to action. Through discussing a qualitative audience study, the article argues that spectators always have an expectation of being affected by performances they attend. This expectation can guide their interest in attending performances of certain genres instead of other possible ones on offer. Additionally, the article points out how spectators can actively manage their expectations in order to be affected. The study is based on 21 in-depth interviews with spectators at a dance venue, a company and a festival in Finland. The analysis of the interviews combines thematic analysis with metaphor analysis. Employing the paradigm of enaction and the concept of affordances, this article approaches expectations as embodied and dynamic, created in interactions between artists, producers and spectators. The analysis shows that when speaking about their expectations of performances spectators use bodily and spatial metaphors. Focusing on metaphors reveals how, for the spectators, performances afford a possibility for action that affects them. The interviewed spectators describe that contemporary dance is “not set in its ways”, therefore it keeps them “awake” and their thoughts do “not fossilize”. This way, they understand contemporary dance as a genre that affords a possibility to be affected by allowing a freedom of own interpretation and surprising experiences if they desire such. Concentration on the metaphors of language offers a deeper understanding of the active nature of spectators’ expectations. Understanding how spectators describe their expectations by referring to action that enables the shaping of their emotions and thoughts can help the development of arts marketing and audience engagement. Purpose–This article examines how spectators describe their expectations of contemporary dance by referring to action. Through discussing a qualitative audience study, the article argues that spectators always have an expectation of being affected by performances they attend. This expectation can guide their interest in attending performances of certain genres instead of other possible ones on offer. Additionally, the article points out how spectators can actively manage their expectations in order to be affected. Design/methodology/approach–The study is based on 21 in-depth interviews with spectators at a dance venue, a company and a festival in Finland. The analysis of the interviews combines thematic analysis with metaphor analysis. Employing the paradigm of enaction and the concept of affordances, this article approaches expectations as embodied and dynamic, created in interactions between artists, producers and spectators. Findings–The analysis shows that when speaking about their expectations of performances, spectators use bodily and spatial metaphors. Focusing on metaphors reveals how, for the spectators, performances afford a possibility for action that affects them. The interviewed spectators describe that contemporary dance is“not set in its ways”, and therefore it keeps them“awake”and their thoughts do“not fossilize”. This way, they understand contemporary dance as a genre that affords a possibility to be affected by allowing a freedom of own interpretation and surprising experiences if they desire such. Originality/value–Concentration on the metaphors of language offers a deeper understanding of the active nature of spectators’ expectations. Understanding how spectators describe their expectations by referring to action that enables the shaping of their emotions and thoughts can help the development of arts marketing and audience engagement. Keywords: Expectations, Affordances, Enaction, Metaphor analysis, Contemporary dance, Qualitative audience research

UID/EAT/00693/2019 Constança Capdeville é a maior representante do teatro-música em Portugal. As suas composições vão além do musical, incluindo recursos extramusicais, como adereços, luzes, imagens, elementos teatrais e gravações em fita magnética. Esses recursos foram introduzidos nas suas obras, seja para estabelecer ambientes, estados emocionais ou para definir espaços. As obras de teatro-música de Capdeville, apesar de seu sucesso, também suscitaram reações controversas no público. Na perspetiva da compositora, a ópera e o concerto tradicional tinham terminado e, portanto, o conceito do palco deveria ser repensado. Capdeville referiu que, muitas vezes, teve que resolver esse problema criando os seus próprios palcos. Neste artigo, discutiremos o conceito de teatro-música no contexto da música contemporânea portuguesa e as suas influências nas composições de Capdeville. publishersversion published

This article mines the history of rape jurisprudence to illuminate how the legal treatment of wartime rape informs long-standing gendered tropes that dominate its understanding on the ground as well as its representation in literary and cultural texts. The essay concludes by reading Congolese novelist Emmanuel Dongala’s Johnny Mad Dog as a model for a dialogic literary imagination capable of revealing the fatal consequences of toxic masculinity as it informs not only the perpetration of rape in wartime, but also the possibility for either perpetrator or victim to achieve subjectivity free from the burdens of brutally constraining gender norms.

When recognizable designer couture costumes the modernist stage, it adds layers of aesthetic, choreographic, and social meaning via extrascenic reference, a capacity to alter and reshape bodily movements, and the relationship to the pleasures and politics of women’s material culture. Onstage couture can confer a kind of contemporary mythological resonance upon performance — what I call the “mythic fashion unconscious.”

This article examines Alma Guillermoprieto's use of embodied knowledge in her memoir Dancing with Cuba. Descriptions of embodiment reveal her struggle to reconcile the values of modern dance with Ernesto Guevara's symbolic New Man—the ideal revolutionary used to promote physical labor as the means to a socialist utopia. I argue that Guillermoprieto solves this crisis by turning toward language, in particular language that activates the kinesthetic imagination—an archive of embodied experiences dancers rely on to engage choreography. An emphasis on embodied knowledge in the memoir shows how crucial dancing bodies are to the literary archive of the Revolution.

Choreographic bodies are empowered by modes of expansion and transgression. Focusing on the energetic processes that lead to such empowerment, this article discusses the perceptual politics of trancelike scenes in the work of contemporary European choreographers and performers. As a body-mobilizing choreographic strategy of out-of-body and out-of-mind experiences, trance is closely linked to critical and utopian ideas, bodily transgressions, and crossed boundaries. While Mary Wigman treats trance as an incantation which contains the powers that it unleashes, contemporary choreographers like Doris Uhlich or Meg Stuart, expose the body to powers that nearly disintegrate it. As opposed to Wigman-style modernism, contemporary dance stages movement as a tremendous event that exposes performers and audiences to experiences of transgression.

Theatre pedagogy involves professional theatre educators putting on theatre with non-professional actors, conveying to them the art of theatre both in terms of production and reception, initiating learning processes and thus enabling the development of aesthetic, social and individual skills, which include the ability to reflect on theatre education from different theoretical perspectives. This understanding of the concept is to be situated within the context of the “aesthetic turn” of the 1990s, which followed on from the dominant role that in the preceding period had been afforded to personality development, collective learning processes and the passing on of political awareness. Functional applications are not to be excluded here, such as sociocultural application, theatre for personal development processes, social interventions and foreign and second language acquisition, although the difference between the art of theatre as an aesthetic field and theatre methods as a tool used within social, mental or learning processes should still always be kept in mind. The term “applied theatre” also is appropriate in this context, whereby application is understood in terms of usefulness. Theatre educational work usually takes place within projects that aim at the presentation of the results of the working process, that is, in the form ...

Emphasis on the political activism of the Black Theatre Movement has obfuscated its investment in contemplation and interiority. Ed Bullins’s avant-garde dramatic texts – particularly The Theme Is Blackness (1966) and A Short Play for a Small Theater (1970) – are key to the genre I call the conceptual play and an archive I call conceptual theatre. In dialogue with Amiri Baraka and Jean Genet, Bullins built on experiments with closet drama by Marita Bonner and Jean Toomer, resisting the physical stage and the public sphere in order to reimagine blackness. My reading of Bullins’s work shifts our understanding of the Black Theatre Movement from a theatre of reality to a conceptual theatre that catalyses a politics of the imagination.