Theatre and Performance in the Neoliberal University

Theatre and Performance in the Neoliberal University
Author: Kim Solga
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2019-11-21
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1000767450

Exploring how educators and institutions might embrace the STEAM turn to ensure that theatre and performance can be instrumental to the neoliberal university, without being instrumentalized by it, this volume showcases alternative models for teaching and learning in theatre and performance in a neoliberal age. Originally a special issue of Research in Drama Education, this volume foregrounds the above ideas in six principal articles, and provides a range of potential models for change in twelve case study discussions. Detailing a variety of ‘best practices’ in theatre and performance education, contributors demonstrate how postsecondary educators around the world have recentred drama and performance by collaborating with STEM-side faculty, using theatre principles to frame and support interdisciplinary learning, and working toward important applications beyond the classroom. Arguing that the neoliberal university needs theatre and performance more than ever, this valuable collection emphasizes the critical contribution which these subjects continue to make to the development of students, staff, and institutions. This book will be of particular interest to students, researchers, and librarians in the fields of Theatre Studies, Performance Studies, Applied Theatre, Drama in Education, and Holistic Education.

Performance, Feminism and Affect in Neoliberal Times

Performance, Feminism and Affect in Neoliberal Times
Author: Elin Diamond
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2017-04-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1137598107

This book is a provocative new study of global feminist activism that opposes neoliberal regimes across several sites including Asia, Australia, Canada, Europe, Latin America and the United States. The feminist performative acts featured in the book contest the aggressive unravelling of collectively won gains in gender, sexual and racial equality, the appearance of new planes of discrimination, and the social consequences of political economies based on free market ideology. The investigations of affect theory follow the circulation of intensities – of political impingements on bodies, subjective and symbolic violence, and the shock of dispossession – within and beyond individuals to the social and political sphere. Affect is a helpful matrix for discussing the volatile interactivity between performer and spectator, whether live or technologically mediated. Contending that there is no activism without affect, the collection brings back to the table the activist and hopeful potential of feminism.

Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism

Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism
Author: Patricia A. Ybarra
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2017-11-15
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0810136473

Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism traces how Latinx theater in the United States has engaged with the policies, procedures, and outcomes of neoliberal economics in the Americas from the 1970s to the present. Patricia A. Ybarra examines IMF interventions, NAFTA, shifts in immigration policy, the escalation of border industrialization initiatives, and austerity programs. She demonstrates how these policies have created the conditions for many of the most tumultuous events in the Americas in the last forty years, including dictatorships in the Southern Cone; the 1994 Cuban Rafter Crisis; femicides in Juárez, Mexico; the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico; and the rise of narcotrafficking as a violent and vigorous global business throughout the Americas. Latinx artists have responded to these crises by writing and developing innovative theatrical modes of representation about neoliberalism. Ybarra analyzes the work of playwrights María Irene Fornés, Cherríe Moraga, Michael John Garcés, Caridad Svich, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Victor Cazares, Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Tanya Saracho, and Octavio Solis. In addressing histories of oppression in their home countries, these playwrights have newly imagined affective political and economic ties in the Americas. They also have rethought the hallmark movements of Latin politics in the United States—cultural nationalism, third world solidarity, multiculturalism—and their many discontents.

Institutional Theatrics

Institutional Theatrics
Author: Brandon Woolf
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2021-06-15
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0810143577

Shortlist, 2021 Waterloo Centre for German Studies Book Prize In a city struggling to determine just how neoliberal it can afford to be, what kinds of performing arts practices and institutions are necessary—and why? Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, political and economic agendas in the reunified German capital have worked to dismantle long-standing traditions of state‐subsidized theater even as the city has redefined itself as a global arts epicenter. Institutional Theatrics charts the ways theater artists have responded to these shifts and crises both on- and offstage, offering a method for rethinking the theater as a vital public institution. What is the future of the German theater, grounded historically in large ensembles, extensive repertoires, and auteur directors? Examining the restructuring of Berlin’s theatrical landscape and most prominent performance venues, Brandon Woolf argues that cultural policy is not simply the delegation and distribution of funds. Instead, policy should be thought of as an artistic practice of institutional imagination. Woolf demonstrates how performance can critique its patron institutions in order to transform the relations between the stage and the state, between the theater and the infrastructures of its support. Bold, nuanced, and rigorously documented, Institutional Theatrics offers new insights about art, its administration, and the forces that influence cultural production.

Queer exceptions

Queer exceptions
Author: Stephen Greer
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2018-11-23
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1526113724

Queer exceptions is a study of contemporary solo performance in the UK and Western Europe that explores the contentious relationship between identity, individuality and neoliberalism. With diverse case studies featuring the work of La Ribot, David Hoyle, Oreet Ashery, Bridget Christie, Tanja Ostojic, Adrian Howells and Nassim Soleimanpour, the book examines the role of singular or ‘exceptional’ subjects in constructing and challenging assumed notions of communal sociability and togetherness, while drawing fresh insight from the fields of sociology, gender studies and political philosophy to reconsider theatre’s attachment to singular lives and experiences. Framed by a detailed exploration of arts festivals as encapsulating the material, entrepreneurial circumstances of contemporary performance-making, this is the first major critical study of solo work since the millennium.

Fair Play - Art, Performance and Neoliberalism

Fair Play - Art, Performance and Neoliberalism
Author: J. Harvie
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2013-08-29
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1137027290

This book asks what is the quality of participation in contemporary art and performance? Has it been damaged by cultural policies which have 'entrepreneurialized' artists, cut arts funding and cultivated corporate philanthropy? Has it been fortified by crowdfunding, pop-ups and craftsmanship? And how can it help us to understand social welfare?

Performance, Theatre, and Society in Contemporary Nicaragua

Performance, Theatre, and Society in Contemporary Nicaragua
Author: Alberto Guevara
Publisher:
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2014-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9781604978612

Since coming to power in 2007, the Sandinista Front of National Liberation (FSLN) has proclaimed itself the "government of the poor" and the "government of peace and reconciliation." Accordingly, the regime has endeavoured to control and manipulate the symbols, social images, important spaces, and situations of popular struggles for social justice in the country. Under the watch of Daniel Ortega's administration, Nicaragua has become a country where an extraordinary effort is put into social spectacles, propaganda, and theatricality to create the impression of social and economic transformation. While the current regime orchestrates impressive social performances in support of its power, there are other social spectacles marking Nicaragua's urban landscape that tell a different story. performances in support of its power, there are other social spectacles marking Nicaragua's urban landscape that tell a different story. These mine the gap between experiences and promises in today's Nicaragua. The exhibit of suffering bodies in public national spaces as political weapons by pesticide victims, as well as a transvestite circus spectacle in Managua redefine spaces and states of "invisibility" and "visibility" by articulating social positions through performance. The bodies of these Nicaraguans--refusing to be invisible--show Nicaragua's ongoing social drama of a predominant social power relation of inclusion and exclusion within a narrative intersected by political power, marginality and theatricality. As spectacularized bodies, they become avenues for showing processes of structural violence. Although there has been some excellent academic research focusing on performance or/and theatre in Nicaragua, such scholarship seldom attends to the very important connections between daily staged public social acts and local, national/global politics that deal directly and indirectly with marginalized social/cultural landscapes in this country. This book fills the gap by examining the connections between Nicaragua's marginalized landscapes and bodies, between social/political visibility and invisibility, and the relationship between social abandonment and social encompassment in the nation. This is an important book for performance studies, social cultural anthropology, theatre studies and Latin American studies. This book is in the Cambria Contemporary Global Performing Arts Series (general editor: John Clum, Duke University) and includes rare images.

Creative Practice Research in the Age of Neoliberal Hopelessness

Creative Practice Research in the Age of Neoliberal Hopelessness
Author: Agnieszka Piotrowska
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2020-07-06
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1474463584

Addresses the very notion of what creative practice research is, its challenges within the academy and the ways in which it contributes to scholarship and knowledge.

Brutal Beauty

Brutal Beauty
Author: Jisha Menon
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2021-10-15
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0810144077

Brutal Beauty: Aesthetics and Aspiration in Urban India follows a postcolonial city as it transforms into a bustling global metropolis after the liberalization of the Indian economy. Taking the once idyllic “garden city” of Bangalore in southern India as its point of departure, the book explores how artists across India and beyond foreground neoliberalism as a “structure of feeling” permeating aesthetics, selfhood, and everyday life. Jisha Menon conveys the affective life of the city through multiple aesthetic projects that express a range of urban feelings, including aspiration, panic, and obsolescence. As developers and policymakers remodel the city through tumultuous construction projects, urban beautification, privatization, and other templated features of “world‐class cities,” urban citizens are also changing—transformed by nostalgia, narcissism, shame, and the spaces where they dwell and work. Sketching out scenes of urban aspiration and its dark underbelly, Menon delineates the creative and destructive potential of India’s lurch into contemporary capitalism, uncovering the interconnectedness of local and global power structures as well as art’s capacity to absorb and critique liberalization’s discontents. She argues that neoliberalism isn’t just an economic, social, and political phenomenon; neoliberalism is also a profoundly aesthetic project.

Theaters of Citizenship

Theaters of Citizenship
Author: Sonali Pahwa
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020-04-15
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780810141759

Theaters of Citizenship investigates independent Egyptian performance practices from 2004 to 2014 to demonstrate how young dramatists staged new narratives of citizenship outside of state institutions, exploring rights claims and enacting generational identity. Using historiography, ethnography, and performance analysis, the book traces this avant-garde from the theater networks of the late Hosni Mubarak era to productions following the Egyptian revolution of 2011. In 2004, independent cultural institutions were sites for more democratic forms of youth organization and cultural participation than were Egyptian state theaters. Sonali Pahwa looks at identity formation within this infrastructure for new cultural production: festivals, independent troupes, workshops, and manifesto movements. Bringing institutional changes in dialogue with new performance styles on stages and streets, Pahwa conceptualizes performance culture as a school of citizenship. Independent theater incubated hope in times of despair and pointed to different futures for the nation’s youth than those seen in television and newspapers. Young dramatists countered their generation’s marginalization in the neoliberal economy, media, and political institutions as they performed alternative visions for the nation. An important contribution to the fields of anthropology and performance studies, Pahwa’s analysis will also interest students of sociology and Egyptian history.