Voices Made Flesh

Fourteen bold, dynamic, and daring women take the stage in this collection of women's lives and stories. Individually and collectively, these writers and performers speak the unspoken and perform the heretofore unperformed. The first section includes scripts and essays about performances of the lives of Gertrude Stein, Georgia O'Keeffe, Mary Church Terrell, Charlotte Cushman, Anaïs Nin, Calamity Jane, and Mary Martin. The essays consider intriguing interpretive issues that arise when a woman performer represents another woman's life. In the second section, seven performers--Tami Spry, Jacqueline Taylor, Linda Park-Fuller, Joni Jones, Terri Galloway, Linda M. Montano, and Laila Farah--tell their own stories. Ranging from narrrative lectures (sometimes aided by slides and props) to theatrical performances, their works wrest comic and dramatic meaning from a world too often chaotic and painful. Their performances engage issues of sexual orientation, ethnicity, race, loss of parent, disability, life and death, and war and peace. The volume as a whole highlights issues of representation, identity, and staging in autobiographical performance. It examines the links among theory and criticism of women's autobiography, feminist performance theory, and performance practice.

This volume includes scripts and essays about performances of the lives of women such as Gertrude Stein, Georgia O'Keeffe and Anais Nin, which consider issues that arise when a woman represents another woman's life. In the second section, seven performers tell their own stories, engaging issues of sexual orientation, ethnicity, race, loss of parent, disability, life and death. autobiographical performance. It examines the links between theory and criticism of women's autobiography, feminist performance theory and performance practice.

Lauryn Mayer examines chronicle histories that have been largely ignored by scholars, bringing these neglected texts into dialogue.

Building on the metahistorical exploration of drama that was the subject of Tongues of Flame, Dawn Langman explores the practical pathways through which the art of acting can evolve beyond the ‘body and soul’ paradigm still broadly accepted in contemporary culture. Through the integration of Rudolf Steiner’s research in the arts of speech and eurythmy, and together with Michael Chekhov’s acting techniques, Langman raises the spiritual dimension of the human being from that vague sensing which many actors intuit – but which has, however, little bearing on their practice – into a precise methodology. In this second volume in her series on ‘The Actor of the Future’, she offers performance artists a clear pathway ahead, enabling them to develop their work out of spiritual insight and consciousness.

The failure of secular modernity to deliver on its promise of progress and enlightenment leaves a void that religion is rushing to fill. Yet what kind of religious thinking and doing can be adequate to our posthuman condition? And how can we avoid either embracing religious fundamentalism and fantasy or remaining mired in hopeless atheistic nihilism? In Unnatural Theology Charlie Gere provides ways of thinking about the possibilities of religion and theology in the context of our highly technologized postmodernity. Taking its cue from a wide range of thinkers, from John Ruskin and Alfred North Whitehead, to Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben, Simon Critchley, Catherine Keller, Bruno Latour, and Timothy Morton, and artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Richard Hamilton, and films including The Incredible Shrinking Man, the book seeks the remnants of theology and religion in the realms of technology and media, and also art, as the basis of potential new religious thinking. Through an interdisciplinary engagement with these thinkers and artists it develops the notion of an unnatural theology as the basis of a new kind of religious thought that does not insult our intelligence.

THE CRUSADE OF THE CHILDREN is a fictionalized story about a young French shepherd boy who believed he was called by God to preach a crusade of children to free the Holy Land from the Moslems. The fever spread as he preached before thousands of people and he attracted a following of about 30,000 children, many under the age of twelve. This seething mass of children set out for Marseilles where they believed ships would carry them to the Holy Land, which was under control of the Moslems. After many days, many of the children deserted and returned to their homes. However, about five thousand sailed away in ships provided by two unsavory characters. Two ships were wrecked off the island of San Pietro, but the others reached a Mohammedan port and slave market.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1874.