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The article focuses on new directions in the study of modernity and theatre. Topics include rethinking Eurocentric views of modern drama, exploring intercultural perspectives, and examining the theoretical foundations of Indian theatre within a global context.; and also highlights the need to resist universalizing terms while understanding the depth and universalizability of diverse cultural forms.

The article focuses on the institutional crisis faced by British universities, with increasing workloads, casualized contracts, and pay gaps perpetuating inequalities. Topics covered include the struggles of early-career researchers, the impact of collective action by University and College Union members, and the commitment to alternative methodologies in theatre and performance studies.

How do performance studies scholars communicate the field to and for students, scholars, and stakeholders? Through an analysis of online data gathered from institutions of higher education in the United States, we investigated how educators narrate performance studies in curricular descriptions. We detail the stated characteristics of performance studies and its object of study; the theories and sources referenced by scholars; and the methodologies, approaches, and techniques educators use and teach (to which ends). These findings and the collective picture they paint provide a guide for current and future scholars and students interested in performance studies praxis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article highlights three stories of teaching and learning performance art from the 1980s to the present day in Ireland. Topics include that the stories highlight the inter-subjective nature of performance art training and how developmental pedagogy arises from real and practical engagements between teacher and student; and that Irish artists teach performance art to each other, younger generations, and emerging practitioners.

This article moves on from the ‘turn to affect’ in applied theatre to explore further how concepts related to affect theory might offer ways in which practice might respond to the contemporary context of a ‘post-normal’ and ‘post-truth’ world. Acknowledging the influence of transdisciplinary discourses on gender, race, disability, space, place, performance philosophy and neuro-psycho-biology, it explores how applied theatre-making might be conceptualised as a ‘space of potentiality’. The terms ‘space’ and ‘potentiality’ are surveyed as relational, contingent, and indeterminate, allowing for an understanding of practice that embraces fluidity, and difference, and resists pre-defined assumptions. Specifically, it draws on my practice of collaborative theatre-making with people in recovery from addiction to re-frame the issue of change within a more fluid appreciation of affect as a process of bodily inter-relation. It, therefore, discusses theatre-making as an affective ecology that generates an ‘aliveness’ that might support growth beyond the entropic life-cycle of addiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A biography of performance art teacher Monika Pagneux is presented. Topics covered include her educational background, which includes studying modern dance with mary Wigman, her achievements such as running an international theater school with Philippe Gaulier, a French master clown, pedagogue, and professor of theatre, and her teaching method.

Dr. Katrina Carter shares some of the challenges and successes she encountered when incorporating Audio Description (AD) into an undergraduate circus module in the UK, for the first time. She demonstrates how, by considering diverse audiences, access tools can enhance the creative process for the artists themselves. Forcing them to question what, how and why they make specific choices can facilitate a deeper understanding of their own story-telling. On completion, the finished works then have the potential to be received more fully, by diverse audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Soviet era, there was very limited contact between the rich training traditions of Russia and the UK. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, mutual exchange became easier. Bella Merlin, for example, has documented her difficult but inspiring year at the State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK). Merlin’s teachers at VGIK influenced a number of other English-speaking practitioners at a series of summer schools in Birmingham in the mid-1990s. These schools were known as the ‘Russian School of Acting’. The senior RSA teacher was Albert Filozov, the celebrated actor and People’s Artist of Russia, who died in April 2016. Steeped in the Russian tradition, Filozov trained at the Moscow Art Theatre under Kedrov, and was strongly influenced by Maria Knebel. During the first RSA, Filozov was interviewed by three participants, Asher Levin, David Jackson and John Albasiny. An edited reconstruction of the discussion is published here in ‘Sources’ for the first time. The introduction summarises Filozov’s achievements and contextualises three questions he considers which are of particular interest to performance training: what is the difference between life and stage emotion, what is the relationship between emotion and action and is it possible to teach acting at all? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on the findings of a research project into the impact of psychophysical actor training methods on neurodiverse students. It illustrates how the application of a Social Theory of Learning Difference reveals the mechanisms whereby these training methods dysconsciously discriminate against those students who are dyslexic and/or dyspraxic learners. The research findings recognise the inherent value of psychophysical methods in the training of actors but suggests that there is a need to move away from a singular Psycho-Medical Theory of Learning Difference and to adopt a framework of learning difference based on the social model of (dis)ability, which requires institutions to adapt their provision to better meet a diverse range of needs. A revision of psychophysical approaches is proposed, which draws on a neuroscientific theory of experiential practice and a psychological framework of actor engagement. This new approach seeks to enhance the effective communication of embodied knowledge and skills in diverse actor training contexts and to allow students who are dyslexic and/or dyspraxic learners equal access to that learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses Amakhosi Theatre Productions’ theatre training and performance programmes as a gender mainstreaming strategy in the period 1983‒2000. Through the gender equity approach lens, this paper traces the development and crafting of gender-sensitive training programmes and performances within the structure of Amakhosi Theatre Productions and, later, Amakhosi Cultural Centre as a gender mainstreaming strategy. Through exploring the development of major women arts practitioners that emerged out of Amakhosi Performing Arts Workshop (APAW) and other training programmes, this paper historically locates Amakhosi Theatre Productions and its training programmes as sites of gender empowerment and development. Amakhosi Theatre Productions was formed in 1980 by young people who were formerly members of Dragons Karate Club. It followed therefore that most plays performed by Amakhosi Theatre Productions were male-dominated in terms of cast. In this light, performance became one of the areas that needed to be transformed as far as gender was concerned. This paper examines the significance and role of plays such as Stitsha (1992) in mainstreaming and catapulting women into position of leadership and management at Amakhosi Theatre Productions. Finally, this paper positions training and performance programmes as alternative gender mainstreaming strategies that can be appropriated by other arts and creative industries in Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intersubjectivity offers a methodology for the comparison of performance training in Chinese jingju and Japanese nô. By connecting intersubjectivity with the concept of the rhizome, the article suggests that intercultural encounters arise from the intertwining of two subjectivities, the master and the student, neither of which totalise the theatrical form. The paper illustrates the limits and opportunities this methodology affords through an interrogation of personal experiences of training. In particular, it focuses on the deployment and channelling of energy (qi/ki) through the body. It is suggested that intersubjectivity enables concrete points of comparative reference to be offered, but also the specificities of one’s own training to be accounted for. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article initiates a discussion on actor and performer training from the perspective of habits. In addition to the exploration of the rich connections and overlaps between the two phenomena, the aim is to contextualise and counterbalance the predominant view that habits are obstacles in restraining innovation and freedom in movement, behaviour, and imagination. By evoking Jacques Derrida’s logic of the supplement, where something generally deemed peripheral comes to constitute a crucial dimension of the subject under analysis, the article offers a defamiliarised account of habits and its potential application to performance. Accordingly, far from arresting creativity, the power of habit is located in its capacity for generative change in performer processes like training, composition (e.g. devising and adaptation), rehearsing, and performing. A nuanced understanding of habit with close spatio-temporal connections with the material world is proposed as a possible post-psychophysical discourse that resists mind/body distinctions, focusing instead on the mechanisms, dynamics, and processes of habit formation, development, and disruption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the authors argue for novel, less mimetic, ways to harness ‘the real’ in drama practices. They study particular youth theatre-making practices in a Toronto secondary classroom, both successes and failures, to make the case for an untethering of ‘the real’ from realism’s representational aesthetics. They further track the more relational aesthetics at play for a group of young theatre-makers in their context of a multi-sited, global ethnography of youth civic engagement and theatre-making practices. Instead of mirroring reality, some of the devising work of the young people refracts, fragments, and multiplies it, making a strong case for the artistic, political, and educational value of an assemblage of reals in the drama classroom, in so-called post-truth times. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study explores how using Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) techniques in combination with training on culturally responsive pedagogies (CRP) impacts pre-service teachers’ perceptions of both themselves as future teachers and of the students whom they will teach. Classrooms in the United States and other parts of the world are undergoing dramatic demographic shifts. Research suggests that, in some US cities, the numbers of non-English speakers in classrooms is greater than native English speakers; 2015 marks the first year that non-White five-year-old children surpassed the number of White five-year-old children. The Pew Research Center and others have reported that 2020 will be the beginning of the “minority majority” in the US population. Demographic shifts; growing awareness of violence inspired by racism, cultural, linguistic, and ethnic diversity; expanded notions of identities and economic and social justice are discourses eschewed by many in privilege. Since the majority of teachers and pre-service teachers are White, it can be a challenge to substantively discuss CRP within contemporary classrooms. This study demonstrates how TO can play an important role in providing pre-service teachers with embodied experiences to understand CRP and encounter “the other.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does the demand to 'decolonise the university' imply for the discipline of Theatre and Performance Studies? Based on questions and insights derived from the author's own pedagogical practices and experiences at the University of Amsterdam, the article enquires into the intellectual traditions in the discipline of Theatre Studies that place questions of decolonisation together with a multi-axis, intersectional analysis of race, class, gender, sexuality, and global asymmetries. To what extent is the discipline of Theatre and Performance Studies still imperialist? What are the ways of acknowledging absences and invisibilities? How does embodied knowledge become knowable? The article reflects on how the question of the decolonisation of the university is inseparable from the question of defending the task of the university in social and political struggles, as a sphere of civic engagement. It equally emphasises the significance of theatrical and performative modes of engagement in these struggles. The classroom becomes a crucial site for the exploration of these issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The economic repression and moral crisis of the 1970s encouraged the experimentation in architecture with its concept, influenced widely by the art scene of the decade. Educational programmes in art and architecture schools were widely affected by the alternative spirit of the era, experimenting with the form of the classroom and the institution as well as the curriculum and the core subject of the discipline. The establishment and development of performance art throughout the decade introduced the genre into the architectural education, extending the practice into new pathways. This collaboration that started between architecture and performance art is revisited today under the new prism of performance architecture. The Viral Institute of Performance Architecture (VIPA) was launched in June 2016 as an alternative body that promotes the experimental connection of architecture with the human body. Adopting the title of an institute the members of the group are suggesting the emergence of performance architecture as a critical and transformative movement in the architecture of the twenty-first century. The institute takes a viral form, as it is housed in the bodies of all its members, a transient and fluid international assembly of performance architects, including Alex Schweder, Kyveli Anastasiadi and Aliki Kylika. Among its activities, VIPA participates in the architectural education, seeking to infiltrate performance practices and theories within the formal educational curriculum of architecture schools, by running workshops and small projects. In this attempt VIPA is inspired by the paradigms of many educators who experiment with the medium of performance in teaching architecture. Outside of schools, VIPA exercises an architectural education of the wider public, revitalizing the DIY cultures of the 1960s and 1970s in architecture. In collaboration with performance groups, communities and other practices VIPA explores the limits and mutations of the performance architecture genre by designing and building spaces through performance practices (participatory, improvisational, playful, performative). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In humanities and education university classrooms, the authors facilitated counter-narrative arts-based inquiry projects in order to build critical thought and social inclusion. The first author examines public performance installations created by graduate students in elementary and bilingual education on needs-based and dignity-based rights of bilingual families at schools. The second author examines visual and performance art pieces on historical colonial practices in world history, created by undergraduate theatre students. We suggest that critical arts-based pedagogies can build classroom communities and social inclusion, particularly through collaborative counter-narrative and problem-posing research and performance practices about minoritisation in history and contemporary society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

School-age students rarely attend live theatre events unless they have been organized as part of a curricular, or co-curricular, excursion facilitated by teachers. This article reports on the findings of the TheatreSpace project, a three-year study of young people’s attendance at theatre performances, and concentrates on a discussion of the impact of teachers on theatregoing. The authors propose that a teachers’ influence is threefold: as model, as mentor, and as guide. The article also discusses the impact of the dedicated study of theatre within the curriculum on the experience of a live theatre event. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Arts integration is relevant in the context of the increased demand for creative thinkers in a global economy. However, reaching across disciplinary boundaries is less common in higher education. Arts integration is one way that a literature class can "trespass" onto the dramatic arts. This paper reports on a study of integrating the dramatic arts into a university general education course. It addresses the relationships between literature and theater and the benefits of integrating artistic practice to cultivate creativity and enhance learning. The study investigates the process and outcomes of making a one-act play. The findings show that art and the process of creation/making promote collaboration and help students synthesize and put into practice what they have learned. Such strategies are necessary to maximize the benefits of general education and are likely to foster creative interdisciplinary approaches beyond the institution. The lack of objective quantifiable results is a study limitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the teaching of performance art and street art with a focus on the teaching of the art of South African performance artist Robin Rhode. Topics discussed include the use of these art forms to encourage students to reimagine their worlds, the documentation of the performance and street art created by the students, and the role of the body in performance art. The collaboration between students, the use of photographs to document the art, and the making of optical illusions by the students are also examined.

Part II of the continuing saga of junior faculty follows Barbie into a flashback at the end of her graduate school career and the beginning of her search for an academic home. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the concept of phenomenology and its use in the study of the performance arts. Topics covered include the author's definition of phenomenology and dramaturgy, the project study "Poetics of Reception" where the author uses phenomenological analysis to assess the participant's interpretation of the performance activities in the project study, and a description of the software application DD Matrix (Digital Dramaturgy Matrix).

An interview with visual artist and philosopher Andrés Galeano is presented. When asked about why he chooses objects as the focus of his performance art workshops, he explains the main elements of almost every performance and the co-presence of an artist with the audience, actions and objects. He also discusses the relationship between the body of the performer and objects that are being used, how he teaches it, and whether he has ever used animals as objects in his performance.

In this article, the authors describe a lesson for K-12 students that is inspired by the work of the contemporary performance artist Erwin Wurm. The authors first present an introduction to performance art, paying particular focus to the role of the body in performance art as well as its role in art education and art history. The authors then give a detailed-description of the class, noting that the students were invited to create One-Minute living sculptures, or performances in which they explored new physical possibilities and social improbabilities.

Framed as a career reflection, this essay narrates disciplinary history, specifically how aspects of contemporary musicology can inform performance studies research (staging and publication). In doing so, the importance of teachers, and the transformational and deeply personal responses to embodiment emerge as defining features of disciplinary practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay explores my roots in oral interpretation and performance studies as I chart my academic exploration of bodies, texts, and gendered expressions of the self on stage. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Doctoral writing in the visual and performing arts poses many challenges for the academy, not the least of which is accounting for the possible relations which can hold between the written and creative/performed components of a doctoral thesis in these fields. This article proposes that the interrelations between the two components in doctoral submissions of this kind can be theorized as being on a continuum of interrelations, with a number of key text types (or archetypes) being manifested. Through textual analysis of the written component only, the different possible relations can be distinguished through the ways in which the creative component is resemiotized in the written text, through both the verbal and visual semiosis of the written component. This enables us to identify a number of ways in which the ‘one’ project can be construed through its two different component parts, casting an important light on debates within the field in terms of the relations between creative practice and research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this essay, Alison Kotin, Stella Aguirre McGregor, DeAnna Pellecchia, Ingrid Schatz, and Shaw Pong Liu reflect on their experiences working with public high school students to create Speak Out. Act Up. Move Forward., a performative response to current and historical acts of civil disobedience. The authors—a group of instructors from the Urbano Project with specialties in contemporary dance, musical composition, and interactive digital media—discuss their collaboration with students to draw connections between nonviolent protest and the challenges, pressures, and choices teens are faced with in everyday life. Through the use of student voices and powerful images, this reflective piece illustrates the potential of contemporary art to empower youth with a platform to work collaboratively, engage in critical reflection, and provoke and intrigue their audiences in open-ended consideration of urban young people's lived experiences and views of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is based on an inquiry into the framing of artistic effects in space and addresses the interactions between two-year-old children and adult performers. I discuss how the traditional communication gap between actor and audience can be surmounted. My study is a crossover between performance art and drama pedagogy, which I describe as an interactive scenic playground. I will discuss how toddlers can be active participants in performance art by employing the materials and actions used by skilled kindergarten teachers. Specifically, these include clearly expressing expected intentions, bodily behaviours and social interactions. The interactions of toddlers with performers challenge dramaturgy and actors. The aim of this study is to analyse staging strategies for the benefit of interaction as a participatory and democratic learning process. My empirical sources consist of video footage, observations and notes from the actor-teacher group that performed with the toddlers in two small groups. My results include the sensory and embodied nonverbal contributions of toddlers to performative meaning making as they interacted with both textiles and people and developed into a community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article an art teacher offers observations on the ways in which contemporary art practice has been reflected in his high school art classroom and in spaces beyond. Particular focus is given to how his students responded to a lesson plan on public space projects by turning all of the items in his classroom upside-down. He describes the performance artworks and social sculptures his students designed as a part of the lesson which included walking around a shopping mall on dog leashes and shopping for items at a grocery store that were the same color as their clothing.

The article discusses the study of performance art using written accounts and photographs of performances as well as reenactments of performances. The author focuses on the 1993 film "Four Pieces by Morris," in which artist Babette Mangolte restaged performances by Robert Morris, and the 2010 performance "No Time to Fly," choreographed by Deborah Hay. Specific topics explored by the author include the meaning of the word "performance," the idea of temporality in art, and the dance and art contexts for Hay's performance.

The author discusses neuroscience research into the human mirror neuron system (MNS) that was discovered during animal brain research. Researchers found that neurons that fired when monkeys performed tasks also lit up when the monkeys observed other animals doing the tasks. The author suggests this research reflects phenomena that singers and teachers have noticed through experience and could engender new methods of training in all kinds of performance art. She discusses the relevance of MNS to practicing in music in which the MNS keeps charging even when the actual muscles are at rest.

The article offers the author's insights regarding the challenges that he encounter in communicating with his students using a local vocabulary and a cultural language. It states that the author finds it hard to explain performance to students using the English language for it makes them confused and bored. It mentions the author's experiences in creating Performatics, which came from the root words performance and informatics, that he had been using in teaching performance using his own way.

Many challenges currently face art educators who aim to address aspects of popular visual culture in the art classroom. This article analyzes the relationship between performance art and the MTV program Jackass, one example of problematic popular visual culture. Issues of gender representation and violence within the context of Reality TV and 'extreme' sports will be analyzed, with the intent of questioning the pedagogical limitations and possibilities of such topics within the field of art education, in order to provide art educators with related critical pedagogical strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author discusses aspects of performance and observation. She examines the "The Heist Academy," a multi-media art and performance piece that takes place in and around a large wooden box. Using that piece the author draws conclusions regarding a number of issues including the pleasure of being a spectator and the observation of the bodies of performers as objects.

This article delineates what responsible ecocriticism in theatre studies entails. It argues, in particular, that greater attention should be given to the material-ecological meanings and impacts of performance. Importantly, the article urges readers to understand ecocriticism as crucial to challenging the business as usual mentality that threatens to catapult the earth into ecological crisis. The article attempts to sort out theatre studies' tepid embrace of ecocritism. It suggests strategies for the trajectory of an emergent ecocriticism in theater studies.

A TA confronts the complex ethics of cultural representation in a drama project with Native American youth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is from a presentation about performance studies at the "State of the Profession" roundtable which was held at the 2005 meeting of the American Society for Theatre Research in Toronto, Canada.

The article focuses on the inclusion of performance art in the context of art education. The author proposes that art education is well suited for performance-based exploration of the so-called sociality of education. He believes that a performance work conducted by a student that results in overtly queer articulations of personal experience within the art classroom ultimately leads to the process of self-evaluation. He describes learning as a process of coping with the uncertainty of perception and feelings of estrangement.

The article discusses about the transplanting, adapting and developing voice pedagogy in Chile for the theatre. Topics discussed include the history of professional Chilean theatre; global exchange between voice coaches and the development of critical thought in voice and theatre studies; and reformulation of the voice curriculum in the principal theatre schools of Santiago, Chile. Also mentions about movement and recycling of vocal training in Chilean theatre.

Interviews Julian Maynard Smith, instructor for the `Documentation/Process' Summer School at the Centre for Performance Research in Wales in 1993. Description of the workshops and performances; Ideas surrounding Station House Opera's use of instruction and description to create performances.

Opinion. Examines the call and response to the application of sociomusicology to performance studies. What is sociomusicology; Definition of performance studies; Experiences of author as an `ethnomusicologist'; Author's recommendations to fellow ethnomusicologists; Benefits of applied sociomusicology within performance studies; Invitation for comments from other authors.

Presents a course in performance art. Course objective; Autobiographical text for use as a source for performance and installation work; Introducing song to an art performance; Object, story or diagram for a short performance piece.