1,721,055 research outputs found
The flaming archive
No full textBook synopsis: This collection is a record of some of the most important performative ideas and embodied interventions that have shaped queer culture and theatre and performance practice in Ireland
in recent times, principally in the years following the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1993, up to and including the present. The anthology includes plays, experimental performance documentation, and a visual essay that reveal the impassioned creativity that illuminates and invigorates the margins of culture
The power of the powerless: theatre in turbulent times
No full textBook synopsis: In the wake of Ireland’s recent economic rise, fall, and associated social crises, theatre and performance have played vital roles in reflecting on the past, engaging the present, and imagining possible futures.
That Was Us features a wide, rich range of critical essays and artist reflections that strive to make sense of some of the most significant shifts and trends in contemporary Irish theatre and performance.
Focusing on artists connected to the Dublin Theatre Festival, the book addresses work by the Abbey Theatre, ANU Productions, Brokentalkers, The Corn Exchange, Druid, Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre, the Gate Theatre, Landmark Productions, Rough Magic Theatre Company, THEATREclub, Theatre Lovett, Pan Pan, The Stomach Box and THISISPOPBABY, among others.
Some of the burgeoning forms and practices discussed include: site-specific and site-responsive theatre; testimonial, documentary, and biographical performance; dance theatre; theatre for children and families; new writing; and fresh takes on canonical writing staged at home or toured internationally.
In bringing together critics and artists to think side by side, That Was Us is indispensable for anyone interested in contemporary practices and cultural politics
Commentary and Notes to the play Once Before I Go by Phillip McMahon (London: Methuen Drama, 2025), pp. 1-25
No full textBook synopsis: Told against the backdrop of Dublin's burgeoning gay rights movement of the 1980s and 1990s and the contemporary LGBTQ+ community of today, Once Before I Go explores the bonds of Irish queer lives across three decades in Dublin, London and Paris.
This Student Edition includes commentary and notes by Fintan Walsh, Birkbeck, University of London, UK, which look at the play's themes of sexuality, emigration, time and relationships, as well as its style as a realistic three-part drama that draws on queer performance aesthetics, such as drag, camp, music, idioms and queer culture references.
It also considers the cultural context of the world of the play for the gay community compared to today's world in which queer rights and representation have become the relative norm.
The edition includes an original interview with the playwright
The matter of queer politics and ethics: Antony Hegarty and "The Crying Light"
No full textBook synopsis: This book stages a timely discussion about the centrality of identity politics to theatre and performance studies. It acknowledges the important close relationship between the discourses and practices historically while maintaining that theatre and performance can enlighten ways of being with others that are not limited by conventional identitarian languages. The essays engage contemporary theatre and performance practices that pose challenging questions about identity, as well as subjectivity, relationality, and the politics of aesthetics, responding to neo-liberal constructions and exploitations of identity by seeking to discern, describe, or imagine a new political subject. Chapters by leading international scholars look to visual arts practice, digital culture, music, public events, experimental theatre, and performance to investigate questions about representation, metaphysics, and politics. The collections seeks to foreground shared, universalist connections that unite rather than divide, visiting metaphysical questions of being and becoming, and the possibilities of producing alternate realities and relationalities. The book asks what is at stake in thinking about a subject, a time, a place, and a performing arts practice that would come ‘after’ identity, and explores how theatre and performance pose and interrogate these questions
Introduction: performance studies and Irish culture
No full textBook synopsis: In the expansive and expanding field of Irish studies, performance has typically featured as drama, theatre, dance, and music. Recent changes in Irish society, the arts industry, and modes of critical inquiry have all prompted the need to think further about the complex and under-researched area of performance in and of Irish culture. It is increasingly well recognized that the categories of 'Irish culture' and 'Irishness' are highly performative, effected through a wide range of social practices, cultural formations, and discursive utterances, and in timely need of critical address.
The purpose of this seminal collection of essays is to broach this task by considering Irish culture through some of the paradigms and vocabularies offered by performance studies. As the title of the book makes clear, we return to the evocative metaphor of crossroads by way of signaling the manifold ways in which Irish culture has been performed in past, present, and likely futural tenses at local, national, and international domains. These roads do not respect the static symmetry indexed by a figural cross; rather the trajectories mapped here are suggestive, multiplicitous, and mobile. Practices, epistemologies, temporalities, geographies, and identities splinter in their wake, clearing the ground for the emergence of nuanced understandings of performance and cultural politics
Queer publics, public queers
No full textThis is the introduction to an issue of this journal. Fintan Walsh is the editor of this issue
Contagious performance: between illness and ambience
No full textBook synopsis: To what extent is theatre a contagious practice, capable of undoing and enlivening people and cultures? Theatres of Contagion responds to some of the anxieties of our current political and cultural climate by exploring theatre's status as a contagious cultural force, questioning its role in the spread or control of medical, psychological and emotional conditions and phenomena. Observing a diverse range of practices from the early modern to contemporary period, the volume considers how this contagion is understood to happen and operate, its real and imagined effects, and how these have been a source of pleasure and fear for theatre makers, audiences and authorities. Drawing on perspectives from medicine, neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, law and affect theory, essays investigate some of the ways in which theatre can be viewed as a powerful agent of containment and transmission.
Among the works analysed include a musical adaptation and an intercultural variation of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet; a contemporary queer take on Hamlet; Grand Guignol and theatres of horror; the writings and influence of Artaud; immersive theatre and the work of Punchdrunk, and computer gaming and smartphone apps
Viral Hamlet: history, memory, kinship
No full textBook synopsis: To what extent is theatre a contagious practice, capable of undoing and enlivening people and cultures? Theatres of Contagion responds to some of the anxieties of our current political and cultural climate by exploring theatre's status as a contagious cultural force, questioning its role in the spread or control of medical, psychological and emotional conditions and phenomena. Observing a diverse range of practices from the early modern to contemporary period, the volume considers how this contagion is understood to happen and operate, its real and imagined effects, and how these have been a source of pleasure and fear for theatre makers, audiences and authorities. Drawing on perspectives from medicine, neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, law and affect theory, essays investigate some of the ways in which theatre can be viewed as a powerful agent of containment and transmission.
Among the works analysed include a musical adaptation and an intercultural variation of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet; a contemporary queer take on Hamlet; Grand Guignol and theatres of horror; the writings and influence of Artaud; immersive theatre and the work of Punchdrunk, and computer gaming and smartphone apps
Homelysexuality and the “beauty” pageant
No full textBook synopsis: In the expansive and expanding field of Irish studies, performance has typically featured as drama, theatre, dance, and music. Recent changes in Irish society, the arts industry, and modes of critical inquiry have all prompted the need to think further about the complex and under-researched area of performance in and of Irish culture. It is increasingly well recognized that the categories of 'Irish culture' and 'Irishness' are highly performative, effected through a wide range of social practices, cultural formations, and discursive utterances, and in timely need of critical address.
The purpose of this seminal collection of essays is to broach this task by considering Irish culture through some of the paradigms and vocabularies offered by performance studies. As the title of the book makes clear, we return to the evocative metaphor of crossroads by way of signaling the manifold ways in which Irish culture has been performed in past, present, and likely futural tenses at local, national, and international domains. These roads do not respect the static symmetry indexed by a figural cross; rather the trajectories mapped here are suggestive, multiplicitous, and mobile. Practices, epistemologies, temporalities, geographies, and identities splinter in their wake, clearing the ground for the emergence of nuanced understandings of performance and cultural politics
Introduction: performance, identity and the neo-political subject
No full textBook synopsis: This book stages a timely discussion about the centrality of identity politics to theatre and performance studies. It acknowledges the important close relationship between the discourses and practices historically while maintaining that theatre and performance can enlighten ways of being with others that are not limited by conventional identitarian languages. The essays engage contemporary theatre and performance practices that pose challenging questions about identity, as well as subjectivity, relationality, and the politics of aesthetics, responding to neo-liberal constructions and exploitations of identity by seeking to discern, describe, or imagine a new political subject. Chapters by leading international scholars look to visual arts practice, digital culture, music, public events, experimental theatre, and performance to investigate questions about representation, metaphysics, and politics. The collections seeks to foreground shared, universalist connections that unite rather than divide, visiting metaphysical questions of being and becoming, and the possibilities of producing alternate realities and relationalities. The book asks what is at stake in thinking about a subject, a time, a place, and a performing arts practice that would come ‘after’ identity, and explores how theatre and performance pose and interrogate these questions
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