Performance in an Age of Precarity

Performance in an Age of Precarity
Author: Maddy Costa
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2021-01-28
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1350190659

"This magical book is a love letter to the artists whose imagination and cleverness transport us and unite us, and to the beauty and fragility of their performance. When I read it I feel like I am constantly on the joyful edge of falling in love, trying so hard to keep hold of the feelings evoked. A very precious book in our precarious times." Vicky Featherstone An anthology of critical essays that draw on a decade of the authors thinking, writing about and working within contemporary performance as critics, producers, dramaturgs, makers, archivists and more. Together, the 40 essays sketch a map of the contemporary performance landscape from avant-garde dance to live art to independent theatre, tracing the contours of its themes, aims, desires and relationship to the wider worlds of mainstream theatre, art and politics. Each essay focuses on a particular artist and these include Bryony Kimmings, Dickie Beau, Forced Entertainment, Scottee, Selina Thompson, Tania El Khoury and Uninvited Guests. Reflecting the radical nature of the work considered, the authors attempt to find a new vocabulary and a non-conventional way of considering live performance in these essays. As both a fresh survey of contemporary performance and an exploration of how to think and write about upstream and avant-garde work, this book should be an essential resource for students, artists and audiences, as well as an accessible entry point for anyone curious to know about the beautiful and strange things happening beyond the UK's theatrical mainstream.

Performance in an Age of Precarity

Performance in an Age of Precarity
Author: Maddy Costa
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2021-01-28
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1350190667

"This magical book is a love letter to the artists whose imagination and cleverness transport us and unite us, and to the beauty and fragility of their performance. When I read it I feel like I am constantly on the joyful edge of falling in love, trying so hard to keep hold of the feelings evoked. A very precious book in our precarious times." Vicky Featherstone An anthology of critical essays that draw on a decade of the authors thinking, writing about and working within contemporary performance as critics, producers, dramaturgs, makers, archivists and more. Together, the 40 essays sketch a map of the contemporary performance landscape from avant-garde dance to live art to independent theatre, tracing the contours of its themes, aims, desires and relationship to the wider worlds of mainstream theatre, art and politics. Each essay focuses on a particular artist and these include Bryony Kimmings, Dickie Beau, Forced Entertainment, Scottee, Selina Thompson, Tania El Khoury and Uninvited Guests. Reflecting the radical nature of the work considered, the authors attempt to find a new vocabulary and a non-conventional way of considering live performance in these essays. As both a fresh survey of contemporary performance and an exploration of how to think and write about upstream and avant-garde work, this book should be an essential resource for students, artists and audiences, as well as an accessible entry point for anyone curious to know about the beautiful and strange things happening beyond the UK's theatrical mainstream.

Care Ethics in the Age of Precarity

Care Ethics in the Age of Precarity
Author: Maurice Hamington
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 399
Release: 2021-11-30
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1452966230

How care can resist the stifling force of the neoliberal paradigm In a world brimming with tremendous wealth and resources, too many are suffering the oppression of precarious existences—and with no adequate relief from free market–driven institutions. Care Ethics in the Age of Precarity assembles an international group of interdisciplinary scholars to explore the question of care theory as a response to market-driven capitalism, addressing the relationship of three of the most compelling social and political subjects today: care, precarity, and neoliberalism. While care theory often centers on questions of individual actions and choices, this collection instead connects theory to the contemporary political moment and public sphere. The contributors address the link between neoliberal values—such as individualism, productive exchange, and the free market—and the pervasive state of precarity and vulnerability in which so many find themselves. From disability studies and medical ethics to natural-disaster responses and the posthuman, examples from Māori, Dutch, and Japanese politics to the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, this collection presents illuminating new ways of considering precarity in our world. Care Ethics in the Age of Precarity offers a hopeful tone in the growing valorization of care, demonstrating the need for an innovative approach to precarity within entrenched systems of oppression and a change in priorities around the basic needs of humanity. Contributors: Andries Baart, U Medical Center Utrecht, Tilburg U, and Catholic Theological U Utrecht, the Netherlands; Vrinda Dalmiya, U of Hawaii, Mānoa; Emilie Dionne, U Laval; Maggie FitzGerald, U of Saskatchewan; Sacha Ghandeharian, Carleton U; Eva Feder Kittay, Stony Brook U/SUNY; Carlo Leget, U of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht, the Netherlands; Sarah Clark Miller, Penn State U; Luigina Mortari, U of Verona; Yayo Okano, Doshisha U, Kyoto, Japan; Elena Pulcini, U of Florence.

Precarity and Ageing

Precarity and Ageing
Author: Grenier, Amanda
Publisher: Policy Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2021-07-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1447340868

This edited collection develops an exciting new approach to understanding the changing cultural, economic and social circumstances facing different groups of older people.

Subversive Performance in the Age of Human Capital

Subversive Performance in the Age of Human Capital
Author: Pil Kollectiv
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2023-08-04
Genre: Art
ISBN: 3031358155

Contemporary art relies on an expansionist, modernist ideal and still progresses through a critique of earlier forms of democratisation. But beneath this democratic drive, lurks a creeping crisis. Under neoliberalism, criticality has become a zone of value production. A self-deprecating irony, exposing and re-enacting this position of impotence, is one of the few gestures left in the arsenal of critical art. Against this irony, this book pits overidentification. This term has been taken to mean a kind of parodic mimicry of institutional power. Using a broad tapestry of sources, from political philosophers to art theorists, from post-Marxist critiques of labour to ethnographic studies, it proposes an interpretation of overidentification that does not collapse into ironic posturing. The authors differentiate this from bad faith flirting with taboo aesthetics by focusing on practices grounded in a genuine identification with power that ushers the kind of excess implied by overidentification. It is these forms of overidentification that destabilise the metastasis of liberal-democracy. Staging forms of critique not so readily absorbed into the structure of the present, these subversive performances herald a future beyond the democratic paradox.

The Theatre of Anxiety

The Theatre of Anxiety
Author: Leila Michelle Vaziri
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2024-10-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3111555089

We are living in times when populism, war and climate change are all sources of anxiety caused by overlapping crises. Anxiety is a phenomenon that is not just reflected everywhere around us but is also increasingly manifesting itself in contemporary drama: particularly in the last five to ten years many new British dramas and theatre productions have given a stage to anxiety. Given this central role of anxiety, the aim of this study is to outline the interplay of theatre and anxiety on both a thematic and aesthetic level. It argues that a strand of contemporary theatre that combines topics of social, ecological, technological and pandemic importance with investigations into the philosophical and aesthetic implications of anxiety has come to prominence in recent years: the theatre of anxiety. This is traced across exemplary readings of a number of contemporary British plays by playwrights such as Caryl Churchill, Zinnie Harris, Alistair McDowall and others. They show that contemporary drama and performance both aesthetically and thematically reflect and comment on global crises and catastrophes through the lens of anxiety as a feeling that 'colours' the perception of and reaction to these social and political conditions.

Precarity within the Digital Age

Precarity within the Digital Age
Author: Birte Heidkamp
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2017-07-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3658176784

The book deals with precarity within the digital age and focuses on media change and social insecurity. Change arising from digital developments takes place on micro-, meso- and meta-levels and have always social implications. Concepts such as Social Media, eHealth and Digital Capitalism, Informational Capitalism and Social Exclusion, Digital Globalization and Motility frame the social dynamics and implications of changes in digital media. These changes evoke a double precarity or stable unstability: Social practices throughout the diverse societal fields are questioned through the media change which leads to a digital age. The ongoing media change requires new social practices – what evokes precarity as an ongoing insecurity how to face the `new digital world ́.As a socio-economic phenomenon and effect of neoliberal policy precarity changes life planning and self-narrations of the affected individuals. Precarity and neoliberal subjection-processes manifest in the digital age and are performatively re-produced by the way new media are used.

Self-Employment as Precarious Work

Self-Employment as Precarious Work
Author: Wieteke Conen
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2019
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1788115031

Since the 1970s the long term decline in self-employment has slowed – and even reversed in some countries – and the prospect of ‘being your own boss’ is increasingly topical in the discourse of both the general public and within academia. Traditionally, self-employment has been associated with independent entrepreneurship, but increasingly it has become a form of precarious work. This book utilises evidence-based information to address both the current and future challenges of this trend as the nature of self-employment changes, as well as to demonstrate where, when and why self-employment has emerged as precarious work in Europe.

Precarious Belongings

Precarious Belongings
Author: Chih-ming Wang
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2017-04-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1786602261

In the midst of refugee crises, terrorist attacks and territorial disputes across the globe, nationalism remains a powerful force in generating affects of inclusion and exclusion. In Asia, inter-Asian migration, enabled and disrupted by a history of colonialism, capitalist globalization and political conflicts, has rendered the idea of nation as both politically distinct and culturally malleable. Precarious Belongings: Affect and Nationalism in Asia explores the affective politics of Asian nationalism by addressing the entwined structures of precarious belonging and national feelings. Bringing together leading scholars it looks at how the reification of nationalism in social movements, popular sentiments, online groups, and cultural representation directs hatred towards migrant and minority groups across Asia. The book posits that nationalist affects are embedded in the politics of exclusion, and seeks to make room for precarious belongings in the transnational and multicultural present. It should be of interest to students and scholars interested in Asian Cultural Studies, transnationalism, migration and nationalism.

Positive Aging and Precarity

Positive Aging and Precarity
Author: Irina Catrinel Crăciun
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 199
Release: 2019-05-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3030142558

This book explores positive aging through the lens of precarity, aiming to ground positive aging theories in current social contexts. In recent years, research on aging has been branded by growing disagreements between supporters of the successful aging model and critical gerontologists who highlight the widening inequalities, disadvantages and precarity that characterize old age. This book comes to fill a gap in knowledge by offering an alternative view on positive aging, informed by precarity and its impact on projections concerning aging. The first part of the book places aging in broader theoretical and empirical context, exploring the complex links between views on aging, successful aging theories, policy and social reality. The second part uses results from a qualitative research conducted in Germany to illustrate the dissonance between successful aging ideals and both negative and positive views on aging as well as aging preparation strategies inspired by precarity. Findings from this section provide a solid starting point for comparisons with countries that are both similar and different from Germany in terms of welfare regimes and aging policies. The final part of the book discusses the psychological implications of these findings within and beyond the German case study and outlines potential solutions for practice. This book provides health psychologists, gerontologists, sociologists, social workers, health professionals as well as students and aging individuals themselves with better understanding of the meaning of aging in precarious times and builds confidence about aging well despite precarity.