‘The Most Traditional and the Most Pioneering’: New Concept Kun Opera

2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 223-236
Author(s):  
Chengzhou He
Keyword(s):  
Performance Studies ◽  
First Century ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Chinese Opera ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
The Awakening ◽  
Alternative Future ◽  
New Form ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Chinese And English

Featuring hybridity, transgression, and improvisation, New Concept Kun Opera refers to experimental performances by Ke Jun and other Kun Opera performers since the beginning of the twenty-first century. From telling the ancient stories to expressing the modern self, this new form marks the awakening of the performer’s subjectivity and develops a contemporary outlook by rebuilding close connections between Kun Opera and modern life. A synthetic use of intermedial resources contributes to its appeal to today’s audiences. Its experimentation succeeds in maintaining the most traditional while exploring the most pioneering, thus providing Kun Opera with the potential for renewal, as well as an alternative future for Chinese opera in general. Chengzhou He is a Yangtze River Distinguished Professor of English and Drama at the School of Foreign Studies and the School of Arts at Nanjing University. He has published widely on Western drama, intercultural theatre, and critical theory in both Chinese and English. Currently, he is the principal investigator for a national key-research project, ‘Theories in European and American Theatre and Performance Studies’.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. xviii-22
Author(s):  
Milija Gluhovic ◽  
Silvija Jestrovic ◽  
Shirin Rai ◽  
Michael Saward
Keyword(s):  
Performance Studies ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
First Century ◽  
Field Of Study ◽  
Political World ◽  
Key Points ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Key Terms ◽  
A Current

Beginning with two vivid examples that illustrate the Handbook’s core arguments—that politics is performative, performance is political, and that both of these matter to understanding our worlds—the introduction provides a current, contextual account of the shared syntax of politics and performance. It defines key terms, such as politics, performance, theatricality, and performativity, that inform the Handbook contributions. Through accessible and provocative engagements with new ways of thinking about politics and performance in both disciplinary and interdisciplinary modes, the introduction shows that these categories are interwoven and entangled in complex and consequential ways. It outlines the states of the art in theater and performance studies and politics, respectively, capturing key points of interconnection between these discourses in order to build on, extend, and reshape interdisciplinary conversations. Finally, it reflects on key challenges and opportunities that attend bringing the two broad fields together for mutual enrichment and building a new, hybrid field of study. Underlining the co-constitutive nature of performance and politics, the introduction suggests that such a framework is critical to promoting an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the complex political world of the twenty-first century.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Schwadron
Keyword(s):  
Performance Studies ◽  
Female Identity ◽  
Jewish Studies ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
The Body ◽  
First Century ◽  
Gender And Sexuality Studies ◽  
And Performance ◽  
White Womanhood

This introductory chapter frames the book’s emphasis on the twenty-first-century Sexy Jewess, whose image proliferates in neoburlesque, comedy, mainstream film, and progressive pornography. A review of significant literature in Jewish studies, gender and sexuality studies, and dance and performance studies (1) introduces how performers complicate self-critical jokes of the excessive Jewish female body by playing up their differences, (2) historicizes the techniques that performers employ to mimic and master different ideas of sexiness, and (3) theorizes how performances of Jewish female identity use the body to participate in and parody notions of appropriate femininity as they relate to white womanhood.

Theatre and Performance at a Time of Shifting Disciplines

2001 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marvin Carlson
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Academic Culture ◽  
American Universities ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
Disciplinary Boundaries ◽  
Traditional Organization ◽  
And Performance

The boundaries of theatre as an academic discipline have never been particularly clear, and its relationship to other disciplines has been the focus of constant struggle and negotiation. This essay traces that negotiation, focusing upon its process in American universities. Competing with literature departments for the study of dramatic texts, American theatre departments drew their own new disciplinary model, based primarily on German Theaterwissenschaft, with emphasis upon the staging history and historical context of dramatic texts. More recently such emerging fields as performance studies and cultural studies have sought to transcend such traditional disciplinary boundaries. Despite some resistance from existing academic and publishing structures, the trend towards the breaking down of these traditional boundaries seems clear. Our academic culture seems headed towards a considerably more fluid organization of its materials of study than the traditional organization into fairly discrete disciplines could offer.

scholarly journals On Teaching Kim’s Convenience: Asian American Studies, Asian Canadian Studies, and the Politics of Race in Asian Canadian Theatre and Performance Studies

2019 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Colleen Kim Daniher
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Learning Experience ◽  
Institutional Setting ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
Canadian Theatre ◽  
Canadian Studies ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Politics Of Race

This article offers a critical overview and rationale for why and to what ends Daniher put a comparative Asian North American method into practice in her classroom on Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies at Brown University in Spring 2016. In particular, Daniher focuses on pairing Ins Choi’s play-text Kim’s Convenience (2011) alongside a viewing of the made-for-PBS broadcast of Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (2001) in order to broach the topic of anti-Black racism in both Canada and the US in the Black Lives Matter moment . Although Daniher describes here a course and learning experience from within a US-American institutional setting, she directs the following emergent queries to the field of Canadian Theatre and Performance Studies in light of its recent inauguration of the new “sub-field” of Asian Canadian Theatre and Performance Studies: How should we frame Asian Canadian theatre and performance in the classroom? For what purpose and under what curricular conditions do we teach racialized “minority” repertoires of theatre and performance in Canada? Drawing on overlapping genealogies of Asian American and Asian Canadian Studies, Daniher contends that a more rigorous engagement with existing theories, methods, and critical analyses of racial power is urgently needed if Asian Canadian Theatre Studies hopes to coincide with the larger political-ethical stakes of “Asian Canadian studies projects” writ-large.

Virtual Embodiment as/and the Threshold of Love

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 97-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Harris
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
State Building ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Empire State Building ◽  
Arcades Project ◽  
Performance Texts ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Stranger

This essay draws upon the author’s performance script Fall and Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project as a provocation for considering the ways performance texts provide a threshold for somatic inquiry, and for recognizing the limits of scholarly analysis that does not take up performance-as-inquiry. Set at the Empire State Building, this essay embodies the connections and missed possibilities between strangers and intimates in the context of urban modern life. Fall’s protagonist is positioned within a landscape of capitalist exchange, but defies this matrix to offer instead a gift at the threshold of life/death, virtual/real, and love/loss. Through somatic inquiry and witnessing as threshold experiences, the protagonist (as Benjamin’s flaneur) moves through urban space and time, proving that both scholarship and performance remain irrevocably embodied, and as such invariably tethered to the visceral, the stranger, risk, and death.

Cultural Labour

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brahma Prakash
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Life Experience ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
Folk Performance ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Relationship

Folk performances reflect the life-worlds of a vast section of subaltern communities in India. What is the philosophy that drives these performances, the vision that enables as well as enslaves these communities to present what they feel, think, imagine, and want to see? Can such performances challenge social hierarchies and ensure justice in a caste-ridden society? In Cultural Labour, the author studies bhuiyan puja (land worship), bidesia (theatre of migrant labourers), Reshma-Chuharmal (Dalit ballads), dugola (singing duels) from Bihar, and the songs and performances of Gaddar, who was associated with Jana Natya Mandali, Telangana: he examines various ways in which meanings and behaviour are engendered in communities through rituals, theatre, and enactments. Focusing on various motifs of landscape, materiality, and performance, the author looks at the relationship between culture and labour in its immediate contexts. Based on an extensive ethnography and the author’s own life experience as a member of such a community, the book offers a new conceptual framework to understand the politics and aesthetics of folk performance in the light of contemporary theories of theatre and performance studies.

scholarly journals Cultural History, Ritual and Performance: George L. Mosse in Context

2021 ◽  
pp. 002200942094003
Author(s):  
Peter Burke
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Cultural Turn

George L. Mosse took a ‘cultural turn’ in the latter part of his career, but still early enough to make a pioneering contribution to the study of political culture and in particular what he called political ‘liturgy’, including marches, processions, and practices of commemoration. He adapted to the study of nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the approach to the history of ritual developed by historians of medieval and early modern Europe, among them his friend Ernst Kantorowicz. More recently, the concept of ritual, whether religious or secular, has been criticized by some cultural historians on the grounds that it implies a fixed ‘script’ in situations that were actually marked by fluidity and improvisation. In this respect cultural historians have been part of a wider trend that includes sociologists and anthropologists as well as theatre scholars and has been institutionalized as Performance Studies. Some recent studies of contemporary nationalism in Tanzania, Venezuela and elsewhere have adopted this perspective, emphasizing that the same performance may have different meanings for different sections of the audience. It is only to be regretted that Mosse did not live long enough to respond to these studies and that their authors seem unaware of his work.

scholarly journals A systematic review of definitions of motor vehicle headways in driver behaviour and performance studies

2021 ◽  
Vol 77 ◽  
pp. 38-54
Author(s):  
Raaj Kishore Biswas ◽  
Rena Friswell ◽  
Jake Olivier ◽  
Ann Williamson ◽  
Teresa Senserrick
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Review ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Motor Vehicle ◽  
Driver Behaviour ◽  
And Performance
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