Archaeology of Performance

Archaeology of Performance
Author: Takeshi Inomata
Publisher: Rowman Altamira
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2006-03-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0759114404

Performances in the premodern communities shaped identities, created meanings, generated and maintained political control. But unlike other social scientists, archaeologists have not worked much with these concepts. Archaeology of Performance shows how the notions of theatricality and spectacle are as important economics and politics in understanding how ancient communities work. Without sacrificing conceptual rigor, the contributors draw on the wide-ranging literature on performance. Without sacrificing material evidence, they try to see how performance creates meaning and ideology. Drawing on evidence from societies large and small, Archaeology of Performance offers an important new ways of understanding ancient theaters of power.

The Study of Musical Performance in Antiquity

The Study of Musical Performance in Antiquity
Author: Agnès Garcia Ventura
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2018-11-07
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1527521168

This collection of eleven essays provides the reader with some valuable insights into the richness of sources dealing with music and musical performance scattered over 3000 years and covering a wide range of geographies, from Syria to Iberia, through Greece and Rome. The volume, then, offers a series of examinations of literary data and materials from different areas of the Classical World and the Near East in ancient times and in late Antiquity, examined both synchronically and diachronically, in some cases in dialogue with one another. This broad treatment makes this collection of interest to historians, archaeologists, philologists and musicians, providing them with a multi-faceted volume which guides them towards a fuller understanding of ancient societies and which heightens the awareness of the importance of music as a transversal phenomenon.

Syro-Hittite Monumental Art and the Archaeology of Performance

Syro-Hittite Monumental Art and the Archaeology of Performance
Author: Alessandra Gilibert
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2011
Genre: Art
ISBN: 3110222256

The ceremonial centers of the Syro-Hittite city-states (1200-700 BC) were lavishly decorated with large-scale, open-air figurative reliefs - an original and greatly influential artistic tradition. But why exactly did the production of such an array of monumental images ever start? This volume explores how Syro-Hittite monumental art was used as a powerful backdrop to important ritual events, and opens up a new perspective by situating monumental art in the context of public performances and civic spectacles of great emotional impact, such as processions, royal triumphs, and dynastic funerals.

Theatre/archaeology

Theatre/archaeology
Author: Mike Pearson
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2001
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0415194571

Theatre/Archaeology is a provocative challenge to disciplinary practice and intellectual boundaries. It brings together radical proposals in both archaeological and performance theory to generate a startlingly original and intriguing methodological framework.

Archaeology of Performance

Archaeology of Performance
Author: Takeshi Inomata
Publisher: Rowman Altamira
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2006
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780759108776

Performances in the premodern communities shaped identities, created meanings, generated and maintained political control. But unlike other social scientists, archaeologists have not worked much with these concepts. Archaeology of Performance shows how the notions of theatricality and spectacle are as important economics and politics in understanding how ancient communities work. Without sacrificing conceptual rigor, the contributors draw on the wide-ranging literature on performance. Without sacrificing material evidence, they try to see how performance creates meaning and ideology. Drawing on evidence from societies large and small, Archaeology of Performance offers an important new ways of understanding ancient theaters of power.

Elements of Architecture

Elements of Architecture
Author: Mikkel Bille
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 463
Release: 2016-02-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317279220

Elements of Architecture explores new ways of engaging architecture in archaeology. It conceives of architecture both as the physical evidence of past societies and as existing beyond the physical environment, considering how people in the past have not just dwelled in buildings but have existed within them. The book engages with the meeting point between these two perspectives. For although archaeologists must deal with the presence and absence of physicality as a discipline, which studies humans through things, to understand humans they must also address the performances, as well as temporal and affective impacts, of these material remains. The contributions in this volume investigate the way time, performance and movement, both physically and emotionally, are central aspects of understanding architectural assemblages. It is a book about the constellations of people, places and things that emerge and dissolve as affective, mobile, performative and temporal engagements. This volume juxtaposes archaeological research with perspectives from anthropology, architecture, cultural geography and philosophy in order to explore the kaleidoscopic intersections of elements coming together in architecture. Documenting the ephemeral, relational, and emotional meeting points with a category of material objects that have defined much research into what it means to be human, Elements of Architecture elucidates and expands upon a crucial body of evidence which allows us to explore the lives and interactions of past societies.

The Archaeology of Ritual

The Archaeology of Ritual
Author: Evangelos Kyriakidis
Publisher: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2007-12-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1938770390

A wide spectrum of scholars, historians, art historians, anthropologists, students of performance, students of religion, archaeologists, cognitive scientists, and linguists were all asked to think and comment on how ritual can be traced in archaeology and which ways ritual research can go in that discipline. The product is a fairly accurate representation of research on ritual and the archaeology of ritual: scholars from various disciplines, backgrounds and agendas, arguing mostly in the most logical fashion, yet with little agreement between them. So this book should not be seen as presenting one unified attitude towards ritual and its study in archaeology. It should rather be seen as a reflection of what the discourse in the archaeology of ritual is today. The outcome has been extremely thought-provoking, often controversial, but always of extremely high quality.

Media Archaeology and Intermedial Performance

Media Archaeology and Intermedial Performance
Author: Nele Wynants
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019-01-12
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9783319995755

This book develops media archaeological approaches to theatre and intermediality. As an age-old art form, theatre has always embraced ‘new’ media. To create theatrical effects and optical illusions, theatre makers were ready to integrate state-of-the-art technics and technologies, and by doing so they playfully explored and popularized scientific knowledge on mechanics, optics and sound for live audiences. This book highlights this obvious but often overlooked relation between media developments and the history of intermedial theater. By considering the interplay between present intermedial performances and their archaeological traces, the authors assembled here revisit old and often forgotten media approaches and theatre technologies. This archaeology is understood less as the discovery of a forgotten past than as the establishment of an active relationship between past and present. Rather than treating archaeological remains as representative tokens of a fragmented past that need to be preserved, the authors stress the return of the past in the present, but in a different, performative guise.

Site-Specific Performance

Site-Specific Performance
Author: Mike Pearson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2017-09-16
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1137285583

Site-specific performance – acts of theatre and performative events at landscape locations, in village streets, in urban situations. In houses, chapels, barns, disused factories, railway stations; on hillsides, in forest clearings, underwater. At the scale of civil engineering; as intimate as a guided walk. Leading theatre artist and scholar Mike Pearson draws upon thirty years practical experience, proposing original approaches to the creation and study of performance outside the auditorium. In this book he suggests organizing principles, innovative strategies, methods and exercises for making theatre in a variety of contexts and locations, and through examples, case studies and projects develops distinctive theoretical insights into the relationship of site and performance, scenario and scenography. This book encourages practical initiatives in the conception, devising and staging of performances, while also recommending effective models for its critical appreciation.

Critical Public Archaeology

Critical Public Archaeology
Author: Camille Westmont
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2022-09-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1800736169

Critical approaches to public archaeology have been in use since the 1980s, however only recently have archaeologists begun using critical theory in conjunction with public archaeology to challenge dominant narratives of the past. This volume brings together current work on the theory and practice of critical public archaeology from Europe and the United States to illustrate the ways that implementing critical approaches can introduce new understandings of the past and reveal new insights on the present. Contributors to this volume explore public perceptions of museum interpretations as well as public archaeology projects related to changing perceptions of immigration, the working classes, and race.