Staging Systemic Violence

Staging Systemic Violence
Author: Alex Watson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2024-07-25
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1350387290

This study offers a historicization of the 2010s in British theatre with a focus on the representation of systemic violence, exploring productions that engage with concerns of protest, climate crisis, neoliberalism, racism and gender-based violence. It offers a range of case studies from established and emergent playwrights such as Caryl Churchill, Martin McDonagh, Anders Lustgarten, Lucy Kirkwood, Ella Hickson, Jasmine Lee-Jones, debbie tucker green, Zinnie Harris, and Travis Alabanza. Productions of their work in the 2010s are analysed through a framework of cultural theory, philosophy, and theatre and performance studies that offer insightful conceptions of violence and performativity. Central to this book is the belief that theatre has the ability to depict issues of systemic violence in thoughtful and valuable ways, drawing on the medium's specific relations between creatives, texts, spectatorship and audiences to mindfully engage participants in the most pressing societal and cultural concerns of their time.

Harold Pinter

Harold Pinter
Author: Basil Chiasson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2021-01-28
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1350133655

This important book offers a thematic collection of critical essays, ideal for undergraduate courses on modern British theatre, on Harold Pinter's theatrical works, alongside new interviews with contemporary theatre practitioners. The life and works of Harold Pinter (1930–2008), a pivotal figure in British theatre, have been widely discussed, debated and celebrated internationally. For over five decades, Pinter's work traversed and redefined various forms and genres, constantly in dialogue with, and often impacting the work of, other writers, artists and activists. Combining a reconsideration of key Pinter scholarship with new contexts, voices and theoretical approaches, this book opens up fresh insights into the author's work, politics, collaborations and his enduring status as one of the world's foremost dramatists. Three sections re-contextualize Pinter as a cultural figure; explore and interrogate his influence on contemporary British playwriting; and offer a series of original interviews with theatre-makers engaging in the staging of Pinter's work today. Reconsiderations of Pinter's relationship to literary and theatrical movements such as Modernism and the Theatre of the Absurd; interrogations of the role of class, elitism and religious and cultural identity sit alongside chapters on Pinter's personal politics, specifically in relation to the Middle East.

Staging Trauma

Staging Trauma
Author: Miriam Haughton
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2018-03-16
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1137536632

This book investigates contemporary British and Irish performances that stage traumatic narratives, histories, acts and encounters. It includes a range of case studies that consider the performative, cultural and political contexts for the staging and reception of sexual violence, terminal illness, environmental damage, institutionalisation and asylum. In particular, it focuses on 'bodies in shadow' in twenty-first century performance: those who are largely written out of or marginalised in dominant twentieth-century patriarchal canons of theatre and history. This volume speaks to students, scholars and artists working within contemporary theatre and performance, Irish and British studies, memory and trauma studies, feminisms, performance studies, affect and reception studies, as well as the medical humanities.

Staging Resistance

Staging Resistance
Author: Jeanne Marie Colleran
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 1998
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780472066711

Fresh perspectives on political theater and its essential contribution to contemporary culture. Focused studies of individual plays complement broad-based discussions of the place of theater in a radically democratic society. This consistently challenging collection describes the art of change confronting the actual processes of change. 17 photos.

Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City

Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City
Author: Elijah Anderson
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2000-09-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0393070387

Unsparing and important. . . . An informative, clearheaded and sobering book.—Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post (1999 Critic's Choice) Inner-city black America is often stereotyped as a place of random violence, but in fact, violence in the inner city is regulated through an informal but well-known code of the street. This unwritten set of rules—based largely on an individual's ability to command respect—is a powerful and pervasive form of etiquette, governing the way in which people learn to negotiate public spaces. Elijah Anderson's incisive book delineates the code and examines it as a response to the lack of jobs that pay a living wage, to the stigma of race, to rampant drug use, to alienation and lack of hope.

The Grammar of Politics and Performance

The Grammar of Politics and Performance
Author: Shirin M Rai
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2014-12-05
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1134751265

This volume brings together important work at the intersection of politics and performance studies. While the languages of theatre and performance have long been deployed by other disciplines, these are seldom deployed seriously and pursued systematically to discover the actual nature of the relationship between performance as a set of behavioural practices and the forms and the transactions of these other disciplines. This book investigates the structural similarities and features of politics and performance, which are referred to here as ‘grammar’, a concept which also emphasizes the common communicational base or language of these fields. In each of the chapters included in this collection, key processes of both politics and performance are identified and analyzed, demonstrating the critical and indivisible links between the fields. The book also underlines that neither politics nor performance can take place without actors who perform and spectators who receive, evaluate and react to these actions. At the heart of the project is the ambition to bring about a paradigm change, such that politics cannot be analyzed seriously without a sophisticated understanding of its performance. All the chapters here display a concrete set of events, practices, and contexts within which politics and performance are inseparable elements. This work will be of great interest to students and scholars in both International Relations and Performance Studies.

Violence

Violence
Author: Slavoj Zizek
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2008-07-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 0312427182

Philosopher, cultural critic, and agent provocateur Zizek constructs a fascinating new framework to look at the forces of violence in the world.

Situating Global Resistance

Situating Global Resistance
Author: Lara Montesinos Coleman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2013-09-13
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1135725322

The book examines some of the ways in which contemporary forms of political dissent are situated within processes of global ordering. Grounded in analysis of concrete practices of discipline and dissent in specific contexts, it explores the ways in which resistance can be shaped by dominant ways of thinking, seeing or enacting politics and by the multiform relations of power at play in the making of global order. The contributions, written from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, address themes such as the processes through which particular sorts of resisting subjects are produced; the politics of knowledge in which resisting practices are embedded; the ways in which visual technologies are deployed within and towards oppositional practices; and the politics of gender, race and class within spaces of contestation. The volume thus opens up space for critical reflection and inter-disciplinary dialogue on what it means to be a resisting subject and on the interplay between the power and counter-power in global order. This book was published as a special issue of Globalizations.

Rape on the Contemporary Stage

Rape on the Contemporary Stage
Author: Lisa Fitzpatrick
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2018-01-22
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 3319708457

This book investigates the representation of rape in British and Irish theatre since the second wave of the Women’s Movement. Mainly focusing on the period from the 1990s to the present, it identifies key feminist debates on rape and gender, and introduces a set of ideas about the function of rape as a form of embodied, gendered violence to the analysis of dramaturgical and performance strategies used in a range of important and/or controversial works. The chapters explore the dramatic representation of consent; feminist performance strategies that interrogate common attitudes to rape and rape survivors; the use of rape as an allegory for political oppression; the relationships of vulnerability, eroticism and affect in the understanding and representation of sexual violence; and recent work that engages with anti-rape activism to present women’s personal experiences on stage.

Hypersexual City

Hypersexual City
Author: Nicole Kalms
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 394
Release: 2017-03-31
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1317028260

Much of feminist architectural scholarship focuses on the enormous task of instating women’s experience of space into spatial praxis. Hypersexual City: The Provocation of Soft-Core Urbanism suggests this attention to women’s invisibility in sociocultural space has overlooked the complex ways in which women already occupy space, albeit mostly as an image or object to be consumed, even purchased. It examines the occupation of urban space through the mediated representation of women’s hypersexualized bodies. A complex transaction proliferates in the commercial urban space of cities; this book seeks to address the cause and consequence of the increasing dominance of gendered representation. It uses architectural case studies and analysis to make visible the sexual politics of architecture and urbanism and, in doing so, reveal the ways that heterosexist culture shapes the spaces, behaviour and relationships formed in neoliberal cities. Hypersexual City announces how examining urbanism that operates through, and is framed by, sexual culture can demonstrate that architecture does not merely find itself adrift in the hypersexualized landscape of contemporary cities, but is actively producing and contributing to the sexual regulation of urban life.