Contemporary British Queer Performance

Contemporary British Queer Performance
Author: S. Greer
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2016-02-02
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1137027339

This book examines queer performance in Britain since the early 1990s, arguing for the significance of emerging collaborative modes of practice. Using queer theory and the history of early lesbian and gay theatre to examine claims to representation among other things, it interrogates the relationships through which recent works have been presented.

Queer Dramaturgies

Queer Dramaturgies
Author: Alyson Campbell
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 503
Release: 2016-01-26
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1137411848

This international collection of essays forms a vibrant picture of the scope and diversity of contemporary queer performance. Ranging across cabaret, performance art, the performativity of film, drag and script-based theatre it unravels the dynamic relationship performance has with queerness as it is presented in local and transnational contexts.

Contemporary Chinese Queer Performance

Contemporary Chinese Queer Performance
Author: Hongwei Bao
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2022-08-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1000635732

In this ground-breaking study, Hongwei Bao analyses queer theatre and performance in contemporary China. This book documents various forms of queer performance – including music, film, theatre, and political activism – in the first two decades of the twenty first century. In doing so, Bao argues for the importance of performance for queer identity and community formation. This trailblazing work uses queer performance as an analytical lens to challenge heteronormative modes of social relations and hegemonic narratives of historiography. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre and performance studies, gender and sexuality studies and Asian studies.

The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre since 1945

The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre since 1945
Author: Jen Harvie
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2024-02-29
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1108421806

The definitive guide to post-war British theatre's huge variety and expansion, exploring the diverse contexts that shaped it.

Writing Queer Performance

Writing Queer Performance
Author: Le Gateau Chocolat
Publisher: Methuen Drama
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2025-01-23
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1350431508

This anthology documents a decade of some of the UK's most exciting queer performances, through a combination of retrospective scripts, development material and visual documentation. Queer performances are expected to live a brief, bright life without leaving any textual record. Indeed, they rarely begin with complete scripts at all, being often developed instead by performance practices designed to fill noisy bars, clinking cabaret venues and fringe theatres, typically for short runs. This lack of textual documentation underplays the importance of writing to contemporary queer performances, while rendering them vulnerable to disappearance in the diaphanous archives of memory. Writing Queer Performance: Contemporary Texts and Documents features eight seminal works, captured though performance texts and visual documentation, that ensures their accessibility long after the event of live performance. Supported by a contextualizing introduction, the anthology provides a panoramic view of contemporary preoccupations, processes and practices. The works include: Black (2013), Le Gateau Chocolat Pull the Trigger (2016), Vijay Patel Re-Member Me (2017), Dickie Beau DollyWould (2017), Sh!t Theatre NIGHTCLUBBING (2018), Ray Young Pleasure Seekers (2022), Bourgeois & Maurice The Making of Pinocchio (2022), Rosana Cade and Ivor MacAskill Ten Commandments (2022), David Hoyle

In Between Subjects

In Between Subjects
Author: Amelia Jones
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2020-11-09
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1000207978

This volume is a study of the connected ideas of "queer" and "gender performance" or "performativity" over the past several decades, providing an ambitious history and crucial examination of these concepts while questioning their very bases. Addressing cultural forms from 1960s–70s sociology, performance art, and drag queen balls to more recent queer voguing performances by Pasifika and Māori people from New Zealand and pop culture television shows such as RuPaul’s Drag Race, the book traces how and why "queer" and "performativity" seem to belong together in so many discussions around identity, popular modes of gender display, and performance art. Drawing on art history and performance studies but also on feminist, queer, and sexuality studies, and postcolonial, indigenous, and critical race theoretical frameworks, it seeks to denaturalize these assumptions by questioning the US-centrism and white-dominance of discourses around queer performance or performativity. The book’s narrative is deliberately recursive, itself articulated in order performatively to demonstrate the specific valence and social context of each concept as it emerged, but also the overlap and interrelation among the terms as they have come to co-constitute one another in popular culture and in performance and visual arts theory, history, and practice. Written from a hybrid art historical and performance studies point of view, this will be essential reading for all those interested in art, performance, and gender, as well as in queer and feminist theory.

Performing Queer Modernism

Performing Queer Modernism
Author: Penny Farfan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 153
Release: 2017-07-12
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0190679719

Focusing on some of the best-known and most visible stage plays and dance performances of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries, Penny Farfan's interdisciplinary study demonstrates that queer performance was integral to and productive of modernism, that queer modernist performance played a key role in the historical emergence of modern sexual identities, and that it anticipated, and was in a sense foundational to, the insights of contemporary queer modernist studies. Chapters on works from Vaslav Nijinsky's Afternoon of a Faun to Noël Coward's Private Lives highlight manifestations of and suggest ways of reading queer modernist performance. Together, these case studies clarify aspects of both the queer and the modernist, and how their co-productive intersection was articulated in and through performance on the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century stage. Performing Queer Modernism thus contributes to an expanded understanding of modernism across a range of performance genres, the central role of performance within modernism more generally, and the integral relation between performance history and the history of sexuality. It also contributes to the ongoing transformation of the field of modernist studies, in which drama and performance remain under-represented, and to revisionist historiographies that approach modernist performance through feminist and queer critical perspectives and interdisciplinary frameworks and that consider how formally innovative as well as more conventional works collectively engaged with modernity, at once reflecting and contributing to historical change in the domains of gender and sexuality.

Performing the Queer Past

Performing the Queer Past
Author: Fintan Walsh
Publisher: Methuen Drama
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2023-09-21
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1350297968

Why do contemporary queer theatre and performance appear to be possessed by the past? What aesthetic practices and dramaturgical devices reveal the occupation of the present by painful history? How might the experience of theatre and performance relieve the present of its most arduous burdens? Following recent legislation and cultural initiatives across many Western countries that suggest the darkest days for LGBTQ+ people are over, this book turns our attention to artists who invoke history's enduring harm. Guiding us through an eclectic range of examples that includes Artangel, Cassils, David Hoyle, Dickie Beau, Franko B, Jeremy O. Harris, Karen Finley, les ballets C de la B, McDermott & McGough, Milo Rau, Rachel Mars, Split Britches and Travis Alabanza, Walsh explores how this work reckons with the incarceration and untimely death of Oscar Wilde, the Holocaust, racial objectification, the AIDS crisis and covid-19, alongside more local and personal experiences of violence, trauma and grief. Walsh deftly traces how these histories are summoned and interrogated via what he elaborates as aesthetics and dramaturgies of possession, which lend form to the still-stinging aches and generative potential of injustice and loss. These strategies expose how the past continues to haunt a wishfully timeless present, while calling on those of us who feel its force to tend to history's unresolved hurt.

Love in Contemporary British Drama

Love in Contemporary British Drama
Author: Korbinian Stöckl
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2021-01-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110714760

Despite the recent turn to affects and emotions in the humanities and despite the unceasing popularity of romantic and erotic love as a motif in fictional works of all genres, the subject has received surprisingly little attention in academic studies of contemporary drama. Love in Contemporary British Drama reflects the appeal of love as a topic and driving force in dramatic works with in-depth analyses of eight pivotal plays from the past three decades. Following an interdisciplinary and historical approach, the study collects and condenses theories of love from philosophy and sociology to derive persisting discourses and to examine their reoccurrence and transformation in contemporary plays. Special emphasis is put on narratives of love’s compensatory function and precariousness and on how modifications of these narratives epitomise the peculiarities of emotional life in the social and cultural context of the present. Based on the assumption that drama is especially inclined to draw on shared narratives for representations of love, the book demonstrates that love is both a window to remnants of the past in the present and a proper subject matter for drama in times in which the suitability of the dramatic form has been questioned.