Presence And Absence The Performing Body

This volume collects research and critical explorations of the performing body by scholars and practitioners in visual and performing arts, textile, fashion and experimental design research, scenography and costume design, dance and performance history. Authors examine performativity of the body, its materiality, immateriality, and virtuality, and investigate experiences of embodiment. They reenvision the body as a site for representation, exploring the absent body in performance and as performance through time and space. Contributors bring a broad variety of contemporary approaches, from live performance to mediated performance, from installation art to performance art, and from experimental fashion to theatre and dance. They discuss issues of process and meaning-making and practices from concept and interpretation to creative production and reception. The volume expands possibilities for the role of the body in performance, while also challenging roles and hierarchies of existing performance practice.

"With great originality and scholarship, Amelia Jones maps out an extraordinary history of body art over the last three decades and embeds it in the theoretical terrain of postmoderism. The result is a wonderful and permissive space in which the viewer...can wander"...-Moira Roth, Trefethen professor of art history, Mills College.

Text & Presentation gathers some of the best work presented at the 2014 Comparative Drama Conference in Baltimore. The subjects explored in this volume range from ancient to contemporary and encompass great cultural and intellectual diversity. The highlight of the conference was a presentation by award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang. A transcript of Hwang’s conversation is the lead piece, followed by twelve research papers, one review essay and ten book reviews. This volume accurately represents the diversity of the annual conference, and represents the latest research in the fields of comparative drama, performance and dramatic textual analysis.

This book examines the recent trend for re-performance and how this impacts on the relationship between live performance and death. Focusing specifically on examples of performance art the text analyses the relationship between performance, re-performance and death, comparing the process of re-performance to the process of mourning and arguing that both of these are processes of adaptation and survival. Using a variety of case studies, including performances by Ron Athey, Julie Tolentino, Martin O’Brien, Sheree Rose, Jo Spence and Hannah Wilke, the book explores performances which can be considered acts of re-performance, as well as performances which examine some of the critical concerns of re-performance, including notions of illness, loss and death. By drawing upon both philosophical and performance studies discourses the text takes a novel approach to the relationship between re-performance, mourning and death.

Performance and medicine are now converging in unprecedented ways. London's theatres reveal an appetite for medical themes – John Boyega is subjected to medical experiments in Jack Thorne's Woycek, while Royal National Theatre produces a novel musical about cancer. At the same time, performance-makers seek to improve our health, using dance to increase mobility for those living with Parkinson's disease or performance magic as physiotherapy for children with paraplegia. Performance, Medicine and the Human surveys this emerging field, providing case studies based on the author's own experience of devising medical performances in collaboration with cancer patients, biomedical scientists and healthcare educators. Examining contemporary medical performance reveals an ancient preoccupation, evident in the practices of both theatre and healing, with the human. Like medicine, theatre puts the human on display in order to understand and, perhaps, alleviate the suffering inherent to the human condition. Medical practice constitutes a sort of theatre in which doctors, nurses and patients perform their humaneness and humanity. This insight has much to offer at a time when established notions of the human are being radically rethought, partly in response to emerging biomedical knowledge. Performance, Medicine and the Human argues that contemporary medical performance can shed new light on what it means to be human – and what we mean by the human, the humane, humanism and the humanities – at a time when these notions are being fundamentally rethought. Its insights are relevant to scholars in performance studies, the medical humanities, healthcare education and beyond.

This research project investigates the concepts of absence across the disciplines of theatre, visual art, and performance. Absence in the centre of an ideology frees the reader from the dominant meaning. The book encourages active engagement with theatre theory and performances. Reconsideration of theories and experiences changes the way we engage with performances, as well as social relations and traditions outside of theatre. Sylwia Dobkowska examines and theorises absence and presence through theatre, performance, and visual arts practices. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre, visual art, and philosophy.

This volume maps out the relationship between psychoanalysis and performance in terms of analysing the nature of performance itself and in terms of making sense of specific performance-related activities.