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Review: Performing for the Camera at Tate Modern - 16th February - 12th June 2016
No full textDiana Damian Martin finds that the Tate Modern’s exhibition imposes an “obscure, totalising framework” onto the complex interplay between performance and photography
Reversing the Process: Investigating Multi-Disciplinary Compositional Practices in The Fall of Icarus [2009]
No full textThe Fall of Icarus was a piece of music theatre created by director George Rodosthenous, writer Duška Radosavljević, and composer Demetris Zavros with an ensemble of performers in 2009 in Leeds, UK. The piece was commissioned by the Cypriot embassy in Berlin as part of the “Fall of the Berlin Wall” anniversary, and the commission included the participation of Greek Cypriot Lia Vissi.1 As a director/producer, Rodosthenous wanted to create a chamber musical that could tour with a cast of four specific performers, as well as an aesthetically strong space design to showcase the bodies and voices of the performers. Thus Rodosthenous knew how the musical would look before he knew how it would sound or how it would develop its narrative. This is not customary in making musical theatre work according to the traditional model, whereby the music and book precede the visual identity of the work, whether it is a concept album (American Idiot), novel (The Phantom of the Opera), or film (Billy Elliot). Radosavljević accepted the customary restrictions of the commission (the theme of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the composition of the ensemble), but she also generated her own aesthetic framework of restriction by eliciting five mise en scène images from the director as her starting point. The working process leading up to performance yielded some important discoveries, which this essay wishes to highlight. We will contextualize our findings in two ways: dramaturgically and epistemologically, emphasizing the notion of reversed methodology in both cases
Border Stories: From There to Here: How Innovative Research Into Personal Experiences Can Help The EU Address Intra-European Union Mobility and Third Country Migration
No full textThree items related to the London Higher Europe Conference entitled Border Stories: From Here to There including the introductory notes and formal presentation by Prof. Sally Mackey plus the Conference Timetable for the 3rd February 2016
Mapping Movement on the Move: Dance Touring and Digital Methods
No full textA better understanding of the transnational networks of dance touring is critical to placing dance within larger theatrical and cultural systems. This essay demonstrates how digital research methods can work in tandem with more traditional scholarly methods to manage the scale and complexity of data truly necessary to account for what we call “movement on the move.” Drawing on the authors’ research on dance touring—namely, South American tours by Anna Pavlova’s company during World War I and the American Ballet Caravan during World War II—the essay focuses on the database and the map as tools that expand the capacity to trace “dynamic spatial histories of movement.” It argues that larger questions of mobility, transportation, infrastructure, and cultural transmission are central to studying dance touring, and that digital methods of research and representation can greatly assist scholars in the comparative analysis and interpretation of this phenomenon. Considered are debates in dance, theatre, digital humanities, geography, and cultural studies to advocate for the use of digital methods in dance history research
Unpeeling Action: Critical Writing, Training and Process
No full textFor political philosopher Hannah Arendt, action is also that which inserts us into the world, makes possible our public appearance and our political participation. In performance, action is that which invites us in, marks or blurs the boundaries between public and private, theatrical gesture and its spectating. In writing about performance, I am confronted with action two-fold. In the instance in which I encounter it in the live moment, raw and incomplete; and in the textual gesture I extend in return. This paper considers the relationship between critical writing about performance and training practice, through an exploration of action. It draws on Arendt’s philosophy to examine the ways in which action operates in pedagogical approaches to critical writing. It does so by considering the plural modes of action and representation as found in a Jackson Pollock painting inspired by William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In this manner a gentle confrontation is staged between the process of critical writing, marked by encounter, resistance, articulation, interpretation and dialogue, my own experience of training critical writers, and the politics of description that shape the critical text. The article considers how this confrontation might offer configurations of encounters with performance, allowing for change and specificity in the training process
What is a Question?
No full textResponse to ASAP/Journal Editors' Roundtable on "What is a Question?" Focuses on strands of inquiry and generating constellations of artistic questions, using the example of Breath Catalogue
Applied Theatre: Performing Health and Wellbeing
No full textApplied Theatre: Performing Health and Wellbeing is the first volume in the field to address the role that theatre, drama and performance have in relation to promoting, developing and sustaining health and wellbeing in diverse communities. Challenging concepts and understanding of health, wellbeing and illness, it offers insight into different approaches to major health issues through applied performance. With a strong emphasis on the artistry involved in performance-based health responses, situated within a history of the field of practice, the volume is divided into two sections:
Part One examines some of the key questions around research and practice in applied performance in health and wellbeing, specifically addressing the different regional challenges that dominate the provision of health care and influence wellbeing: how the ageing population of the global north creates pressure on lifetime healthcare provision, while the global south is dominated by a higher birth rate and a larger population under 15 years old.
Part Two comprises case studies and interviews from international practitioners that reflect the diversity of practices across the world and in particular differences between work in the northern and southern hemispheres. These case studies include a sanitation project in a Hmong refugee camp in Thailand in the 1980s, and the sanitation and rural development projects initiated by the travelling theatre troupes of a number of University theatre departments in Africa – Makerere in Kampala, Uganda; Botswana; Lesotho and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania – which began in the 1960s. It considers the emergence of Theatre for Development's use as a health approach, considering the work of Laedza Batanani and the influences of Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed
Review: Holy Smoke at the Southbank Centre 4th - 5th November 2016
No full textA pop shamanic spell like no other: Diana Damian Martin reviews Ultimate Dancer at the Southbank Centre
Review: Performance and the New Tate Modern
No full text“So what is the new Tate Modern? Is it the ultimate neoliberal art institution?” As the gallery opens its vast new Switch House extension, Diana Damian Martin explores the interplay between economics, performance and public engagemen