Performing Utopia

"Jill Dolan is the theatre's most astute critic, and this new book is perhaps her most important. Utopia in Performance argues with eloquence and insight how theatre makes a difference, and in the process demonstrates that scholarship matters, too. It is a book that readers will cherish and hold close as a personal favorite, and that scholars will cite for years to come." ---David Román, University of Southern California What is it about performance that draws people to sit and listen attentively in a theater, hoping to be moved and provoked, challenged and comforted? In Utopia in Performance, Jill Dolan traces the sense of visceral, emotional, and social connection that we experience at such times, connections that allow us to feel for a moment not what a better world might look like, but what it might feel like, and how that hopeful utopic sentiment might become motivation for social change. She traces these "utopian performatives" in a range of performances, including the solo performances of feminist artists Holly Hughes, Deb Margolin, and Peggy Shaw; multicharacter solo performances by Lily Tomlin, Danny Hoch, and Anna Deavere Smith; the slam poetry event Def Poetry Jam; The Laramie Project; Blanket, a performance by postmodern choreographer Ann Carlson; Metamorphoses by Mary Zimmerman; and Deborah Warner's production of Medea starring Fiona Shaw. While the book richly captures moments of "feeling utopia" found within specific performances, it also celebrates the broad potential that performance has to provide a forum for being human together; for feeling love, hope, and commonality in particular and historical (rather than universal and transcendent) ways.

In her landmark study Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre, Jill Dolan departed from historical writings on utopia, which suggest that social reorganization and the redistribution of wealth are utopian efforts, to argue instead that utopia occurs in fragmentary "utopian moments," often found embedded within performance. While Dolan focused on the utopian performative within a theatrical context, this volume, edited by Rachel Bowditch and Pegge Vissicaro, expands her theories to encompass performance in public life--from diasporic hip-hop battles, Chilean military parades, commemorative processions, Blackfoot powwows, and post-Katrina Mardi Gras to the Philadelphia Mummers Parade, Festas Juninas in Brazil, the Renaissance Fairs in Arizona, and neoburlesque competitions. How do these performances rehearse and enact visions of a utopic world? What can the lens of utopia and dystopia illuminate about the potential of performing bodies to transform communities, identities, values, and beliefs across time? Performing Utopia not only answers these questions, but offers a diverse collection of case studies focusing on utopias, dystopias, and heterotopias enacted through the performing body.

Over 20 years after the war in Yugoslavia, this book looks back at its two most iconic cities and the phenomenon of exile emerging as a consequence of living in them in the 1990s. It uses examples ranging from street interventions to theatre performances to explore the making of urban counter-sites through theatricality and utopian performatives.

Precarious Forms: Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas explores how performance art and poetry convey utopian desires even in the bleakest of times. Candice Amich argues that utopian longing in the neoliberal Americas paradoxically arises from the material conditions of socioeconomic crisis. Working across national, linguistic, and generic boundaries, Amich identifies new political and affective modes of reception in her examination of resistant art forms. She locates texts in the activist struggles of the Global South, where neoliberal extraction and exploitation most palpably reanimate the colonial and imperial legacies of earlier stages of capitalism. The poets and artists surveyed in Precarious Forms enact gestures of solidarity and mutual care at sites of neoliberal dispossession. In her analysis of poems, body art, and multimedia installations that illuminate the persistence of a radical utopian imaginary in the Americas, Amich engages critical debates in performance studies, Latin American cultural studies, literature, and art history.

A rare glimpse into North Korean propaganda—in parades, posters, murals, theater, and films

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Media narratives inform our ideas of the future - and Games are currently making a significant contribution to this medial reservoir. On the one hand, Games demonstrate a particular propensity for fantastic and futuristic scenarios. On the other hand, they often serve as an experimental field for the latest media technologies. However, while dystopias are part of the standard gaming repertoire, Games feature utopias much less frequently. Why? This anthology examines playful utopias from two perspectives. It investigates utopias in digital Games as well as utopias of the digital game; that is, the role of ludic elements in scenarios of the future.

Over 20 years after the war in Yugoslavia, this book looks back at its two most iconic cities and the phenomenon of exile emerging as a consequence of living in them in the 1990s. It uses examples ranging from street interventions to theatre performances to explore the making of urban counter-sites through theatricality and utopian performatives.