City Stages

City Stages
Author: Michael McKinnie
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2013-06-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1442669446

In every major city, there exists a complex exchange between urban space and the institution of the theatre. City Stages is an interdisciplinary and materialist analysis of this relationship as it has existed in Toronto since 1967. Locating theatre companies – their sites and practices – in Toronto’s urban environment, Michael McKinnie focuses on the ways in which the theatre has adapted to changes in civic ideology, environment, and economy. Over the past four decades, theatre in Toronto has been increasingly implicated in the civic self-fashioning of the city and preoccupied with the consequences of the changing urban political economy. City Stages investigates a number of key questions that relate to this pattern. How has theatre been used to justify certain forms of urban development in Toronto? How have local real estate markets influenced the ways in which theatre companies acquire and use performance space? How does the analysis of theatre as an urban phenomenon complicate Canadian theatre historiography? McKinnie uses the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts and the Toronto Centre for the Performing Arts as case studies and considers theatrical companies such as Theatre Passe Muraille, Toronto Workshop Productions, Buddies in Bad Times, and Necessary Angel in his analysis. City Stages combines primary archival research with the scholarly literature emerging from both the humanities and social sciences. The result is a comprehensive and empirical examination of the relationship between the theatrical arts and the urban spaces that house them.

OK2BG

OK2BG
Author: Jack Dunsmoor
Publisher: Lulu.com
Total Pages: 611
Release: 2015
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1483428540

OK2BG is narrative nonfiction, a Memoir about a guy who wants to be a Mentor preferably to a teenager, so they can have a decent & meaningful conversation about stuff & preferably with a kid at-risk, or just otherwise lost, in order to help both the teenager as well as the determined subject of this story realize their unique potential & find or reinforce their place in the world. Overall, a chronicle about the author’s attempt over several years to understand the question of ‘why do I want to be a Mentor’ which eventually helps him become a more insightful person. Subsequently in September, 2010 after a plague of teen suicides, Jack turns his attention to researching gay biographies into optimistically appropriate groups of books for gay kids at-risk, from bullying. After 5 years Jack has categorized 2,000+ books in the form of Memoirs, Biographies & Autobiographies written by or about 1,000+ allegedly gay men. The primary message in OK2BG is to read & reassess before you run asunder!

Moving Performances

Moving Performances
Author: Jeanne Scheper
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2016-12-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0813585465

Fabulous yet fierce, imperious yet impetuous, boss yet bitchy—divas are figures of paradox. Their place in culture is equally contradictory, as they are simultaneously venerated and marginalized, hailed as timeless but then frequently forgotten or exhumed as cult icons by future generations. Focusing on four early twentieth-century divas—Aida Overton Walker, Loïe Fuller, Libby Holman, and Josephine Baker—who were icons in their own time, Moving Performances considers what their past and current reception reveals about changing ideas of race and gender. Jeanne Scheper examines how iconicity can actually work to the diva’s detriment, reducing her to a fetish object, a grotesque, or a figure of nostalgia. Yet she also locates more productive modes of reception that reach to revive the diva’s moving performances, imbuing her with an affective afterlife. As it offers innovative theorizations of performance, reception, and affect, Moving Performances also introduces readers to four remarkable women who worked as both cultural producers and critics, deftly subverting the tropes of exoticism, orientalism, and primitivism commonly used to dismiss women of color. Rejecting iconic depictions of these divas as frozen in a past moment, Scheper vividly demonstrates how their performances continue to inspire ongoing movements.

Avoidance Tactics

Avoidance Tactics
Author: Sky Gilbert
Publisher: Broken Jaw Press
Total Pages: 116
Release: 2001
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9781896647500

Sad Old Faggot

Sad Old Faggot
Author: Gilbert, Sky
Publisher: ECW Press
Total Pages: 166
Release: 2016-09-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1770909265

A daring foray into the groundbreaking genre of autobiographical fiction Sad Old Faggot is the absorbing, sometimes embarrassing, always entertaining story of a lonely, self-obsessed, selfish, deluded, impotent 62-year-old gay man named Sky Gilbert who „ despite his best intentions „ cannot help but become a stereotype. SkyÍs main claim to fame is founding Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in 1979. But since leaving Buddies, heÍs fallen on hard times. Sky Gilbert is no longer even remotely famous. He has to fight off his own bitterness as audiences for his plays steadily dwindle. Theatre people dismiss his work as old news and point to the fact that he teaches at the University of Guelph as proof: his descent into academia clearly signals his failure as an artist. All along the way, the book questions our truths and celebrates their mutability. What is really true about each of us? What do we actually know about ourselves? And how much, it asks, of our own personal truth is based on fact „ and how much is rooted in fiction?

The Uses of Excess in Visual and Material Culture, 1600–2010

The Uses of Excess in Visual and Material Culture, 1600–2010
Author: Ms Julia Skelly
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2014-08-28
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1409442373

Although the idea of excess has often been used to degrade, many of the essays in this collection demonstrate how it has also been used as a strategy for self-fashioning and empowerment, particularly by women and queer subjects. This volume examines a range of material - including ceramics, paintings, caricatures, interior design and theatrical performances - in various global contexts. Each case study sheds new light on how excess has been perceived and constructed, revealing how beliefs about excess have changed over time.

"The Uses of Excess in Visual and Material Culture, 1600?010 "

Author: Julia Skelly
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1351539744

Directing unprecedented attention to how the idea of ?excess? has been used by both producers and consumers of visual and material culture, this collection examines the discursive construction of excess in relation to art, material goods and people in various global contexts. The contributors illuminate how excess has been perceived, quantified and constructed, revealing in the process how beliefs about excess have changed over time and how they have remained consistent. The collection as a whole underscores the fact that the concept of excess must always be considered critically, whether in scholarship or in lived experience. Although the idea of excess has often been used to shame and degrade, many of the essays in this collection demonstrate how it has also been used as a strategy for self-fashioning, transgression and empowerment, particularly by women and queer subjects. This volume examines a range of material, including diamonds, ceramics, paintings, dollhouses, caricatures, interior design and theatrical performances. Each case study sheds new light on how excess was used in a specific cultural context, including canonical sites of study such as the Netherlands in the eighteenth century, Victorian Britain and Paris in the 1920s, and under-studied contexts such as Canada and Sweden.

How Theatre Educates

How Theatre Educates
Author: David Wallace Booth
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2003-01-01
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780802085566

How Theatre Educates is a fascinating and lively inquiry into pedagogy and practice that will be relevant to teachers and students of drama, educators, artists working in theatre, and the theatre-going public.

Gay Icons

Gay Icons
Author: Georges-Claude Guilbert
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2018-06-13
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1476674337

Who are the most significant gay icons and how did they develop? What influence do they have on gay individuals and communities? This book focuses on the superstars, femmes fatales and divas of the gay celebrity pantheon--Mae West, Julie Andrews, Britney Spears, RuPaul, Cher, Divine, Sharon Needles and many others--and their contributions to gay culture and the complications of sexual and gender identity. The author explores their allure along with the mechanisms of iconicity.

Queerly Remembered

Queerly Remembered
Author: Thomas R. Dunn
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2016-10-03
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1611176719

An interdisciplinary examination of the strategies GLBTQ communities have used to advocate for political, social, and cultural change Queerly Remembered investigates the ways in which gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer (GLBTQ) individuals and communities have increasingly turned to public tellings of their ostensibly shared pasts in order to advocate for political, social, and cultural change in the present. Much like nations, institutions, and other minority groups before them, GLBTQ people have found communicating their past(s)—particularly as expressed through the concept of memory—a rich resource for leveraging historical and contemporary opinions toward their cause. Drawing from the interdisciplinary fields of rhetorical studies, memory studies, gay and lesbian studies, and queer theory, Thomas R. Dunn considers both the ephemeral tactics and monumental strategies that GLBTQ communities have used to effect their queer persuasion. More broadly this volume addresses the challenges and opportunities posed by embracing historical representations of GLBTQ individuals and communities as a political strategy. Particularly for a diverse community whose past is marked by the traumas of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the forgetting and destruction of GLBTQ history, and the sometimes-divisive representational politics of fluid, intersectional identities, portraying a shared past is an exercise fraught with conflict despite its potential rewards. Nonetheless, by investigating rich rhetorical case studies through time and across diverse artifacts—including monuments, memorials, statues, media publications, gravestones, and textbooks—Queerly Remembered reveals that our current queer "turn toward memory" is a complex, enduring, and avowedly rich rhetorical undertaking.