Performing Women

Examines the 10 key characteristics of today's winning leaders. Includes the voices of experience, some 70 women who have participated in the Judy Project, a leadership program run by the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto that has trained 400 women for future leadership positions. These women tell compelling, first-person stories about ambition, courage, and the hard choices they've made to manage their personal and professional lives in the real world of business.--Book jacket.

Argues that critics have misunderstood the relationship between male playwrights and women's roles because they have neglected the interpretive skills of the actresses playing those roles. Analyzes hypothetical as well as historical performances to demonstrate how women have invented acting styles to portray women created by playwrights from Ibsen to Beckett. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Alison Oddey's interviews with prominent performing women span generations, cultures, perspectives, practice and the best part of the twentieth-century, telling various stories collectively. Stand-ups, 'classic' actresses, film and television personalities, experimental and 'alternative' practitioners discuss why they want to perform, what motivates them, and how their personal history has contributed to their desire to perform. Oddey's critical introductory and concluding chapters analyze both historical and cultural contexts and explore themes arising from the interviews. These include sense of identity, acting as playing (recapturing and revisiting childhood), displacement of roots, performing, motherhood and 'being', performing comedy, differences between theatre, film and television performance, attitudes towards and relationships with audiences, and working with directors. The prominent subtext of motherhood reveals a consciousness of split subjectives with and beyond performance. This new edition of the book includes three new interviews with actresses, and is useful primary resource material for undergraduate students on performance studies courses.

Women have always been the muses who inspire the creativity of men, but how do women become the creators of art themselves? This was the challenge faced by Latin American women who aspired to write in the 1920s and 1930s. Though women's roles were opening up during this time, women writers were not automatically welcomed by the Latin American literary avant-gardes, whose male members viewed women's participation in tertulias (literary gatherings) and publications as uncommon and even forbidding. How did Latin American women writers, celebrated by male writers as the "New Eve" but distrusted as fellow creators, find their intellectual homes and fashion their artistic missions? In this innovative book, Vicky Unruh explores how women writers of the vanguard period often gained access to literary life as public performers. Using a novel, interdisciplinary synthesis of performance theory, she shows how Latin American women's work in theatre, poetry declamation, song, dance, oration, witty display, and bold journalistic self-portraiture helped them craft their public personas as writers and shaped their singular forms of analytical thought, cultural critique, and literary style. Concentrating on eleven writers from Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela, Unruh demonstrates that, as these women identified themselves as instigators of change rather than as passive muses, they unleashed penetrating critiques of projects for social and artistic modernization in Latin America.

Performing Female Blackness examines race, gender, and nation in Black life using critical race, feminist and performance studies methodologies. This book examines what private and public performances of female blackness reveal about race, gender, and nation and considers how the land widely known as Canada shapes these performances. By exploring Black expressive culture in familial, literary, and performance settings, Naila Keleta-Mae theorizes that “perpetual performance” forces people who are read as female and Black to always be figuratively on stage regardless of cultural, political, or historical contexts. Written in poetry, prose, and journal form and drawing from the author’s own life and artistic works, Performing Female Blackness is ideal not only for scholars, educators, and students of the humanities, social sciences, and fine arts but also for artists and the general public too.

Alison Oddey's interviews with prominent performing women span generations, cultures, perspectives, practice and the best part of the twentieth century, telling various stories collectively. Stand-ups, 'classic' actresses, film and television personalities, experimental and 'alternative' practitioners discuss why they want to perform, what motivates them, and how their personal history has contributed to their desires to perform. Oddey's critical introductory and concluding chapters analyse both historical and cultural contexts and explore themes arising from interviews. These include sense of identity, acting as playing (recapturing and revisiting childhood), displacement of roots, performing, motherhood and 'being', performing comedy, differences between theatre, film and television performance, attitudes towards and relationships with audiences, and working with directors. The prominent subtext of motherhood reveals a consciousness of split subjectivities with and beyond performance.

World-renowned strength and performance coach Mark Verstegen has trained top athletes and countless workaday warriors into the best shape of their lives. He's spent years developing a proven system for a wide range of clients, and he knows the essential keys for building lean muscle, shedding excess fat, increasing strength and endurance, and breaking through plateaus. For the first time, Verstegen tailors the Core Performance System specifically for women. Core Performance Women helps you develop the right mindset for success, while presenting a targeted nutrition and workout plan to guarantee results. Essential to Verstegen's system is his focused approach to proper recovery and muscle regeneration, which helps athletes gain full advantage of their time in the gym and prevent injury and everyday aches and pains. Verstegen offers his strategies for success, revealing his "non-diet" plan and simple rules for nutrition, even providing fast-food meal plans for women on the go. He teaches readers how to boost their "rear view" and homes in on the core movements that will whip every body into shape. The book is filled with powerful advice interwoven with inspiring vignettes of women who take charge of their health. Packed with full-color photographs detailing each exercise, along with full workout routines and integrated meal plans, Core Performance Women takes every woman to the top of her game.

Women in Asian Performance offers a vital re-assessment of women's contributions to Asian performance traditions, focusing for the first time on their specific historical, cultural and performative contexts. Arya Madhavan brings together leading scholars from across the globe to make an exciting intervention into current debates around femininity and female representation on stage. This collection looks afresh at the often centuries-old aesthetic theories and acting conventions that have informed ideas of gender in Asian performance. It is divided into three parts: erasure – the history of the presence and absence of female bodies on Asian stages; intervention – the politics of female intervention into patriarchal performance genres; reconstruction – the strategies and methods adopted by women in redefining their performance practice. Establishing a radical, culturally specific approach to addressing female performance-making, Women in Asian Performance is a must-read for scholars and students across Asian Studies and Performance Studies.