Afterword: Quicksilver and Revelations: Performance Art at the End of the Twentieth Century

2000 ◽  
pp. 473-492
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Performance Art

Ả Đào Singers

2020 ◽  
pp. 136-161
Author(s):  
Christina Elizabeth Firpo
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Performance Art ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Traditional Culture ◽  
Traditional Art ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Female Performance

This chapter is a study of the sale of sex in ả Đào singing houses, a form of female performance art dating back to the fourteenth century. In its twentieth-century iteration, sex work in ả Đào singing houses appealed to those with a taste for traditional culture in an era of dynamic cultural change. The success of clandestine sex work in ả Đào venues lay in the ability of sex workers and their managers to capitalize on both the sensuality inherent to this genre of female performance art and the legitimacy associated with a revered traditional art form. The result was that ả Đào venues operated as ambiguous spaces that blurred the traditional lines separating art, sex, and commerce.

Mapping Sound

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 35-67
Author(s):  
William O'Hara
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Performance Art ◽  
Music Analysis ◽  
Mobile Form ◽  
Environmental Sounds ◽  
Free Exploration ◽  
Musical Representations ◽  
Graphic Scores ◽  
Musical Modernism ◽  
Complementary Actions

Each playthrough of Ed Key and David Kanaga's Proteus (2013) presents players with a new, randomly generated island to explore. This unstructured exploration is accompanied by a procedurally generated ambient soundtrack that incorporates both harmonic textures and melodic motives, and abstract musical representations of environmental sounds. In the absence of clearly defined goals—except to progress through four distinct “seasons” of the game—the player's relationship to the soundtrack becomes a core gameplay element, and a playthrough of Proteus becomes, among other things, a kind of improvised performance art. Viewed from this perspective, Proteus's combination of free exploration and chance strongly evokes ideas from mid-twentieth-century musical modernism, including the graphic scores of Cardew and Cage and the “mobile form” works of Stockhausen and Ligeti. Proteus further complicates analysis by concealing the mechanisms that produce particular musical fragments and by eliding the roles of listener and player/performer. This article examines the tensions inherent in the complementary actions of playing/performing Proteus and listening to/analyzing it, and argues that the game challenges the distinctions between creator, performer, and observer by vividly embodying the most deeply ingrained metaphors of music analysis.

Holding Place: Resistance, Reframing, and Relationality in the Representation of Indigenous History

2021 ◽  
pp. e20200045
Author(s):  
Cody Groat ◽  
Kim Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Policy Change ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Performance Art ◽  
Public Art ◽  
Public History ◽  
Indigenous Languages ◽  
Canadian History ◽  
Historical Society ◽  
The Public

This article explores questions of commemoration in Canadian history from the perspective of two Indigenous historians: one who has engaged in public history through performance art (Anderson) and another who is building a career studying public history (Groat). Our interest lies not only in commemorative acts related to Canadian history that we must resist and reframe but also in questions of how Indigenous peoples might hold place through our own commemorative practices. The article is shaped around recollections of performance art that Anderson has conducted with the public history troupe, the Kika’ige Historical Society – work that evolved in response to celebrations of Canada’s sesquicentennial. We argue that, as demonstrated by the Kika’ige Historical Society, Indigenous peoples have resisted, reframed, and engaged in processes of relationality to create new ways of sharing Indigenous histories. We document Canadian commemorative monuments and acts that have invited resistance from Indigenous peoples. This resistance started in the early twentieth century and has increased exponentially in recent years. Indigenous peoples are now reframing colonial informed commemoration and asserting their own practices that include renaming sites in Indigenous languages, engaging ceremony and public art, and calling for policy change. We celebrate contemporary Indigenous commemorations as relational practices that distinguish themselves by their engagement with the land and the integration of human, natural, and spirit worlds.

Performative Practices and Life-Creation

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Lipovetsky
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Performance Art ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
Per Se ◽  
The 1960S

Beginning with Nikolai Evreinov’s concept of the perfomative formed at the turn of the twentieth century, this article discusses performative practices and life-creation in the underground of the 1960s–1970s (excluding the performance art per se). According to Evreinov, the “theatrlization of life” is defined by the transgression of existing norms (behavioral, social, cultural, and moral) coupled withthe excess, redundancy, and demonstrative overproduction of perfomrative forms. These characteristics united the underground group and individual performances with the lifecreation (zhiznetvorchestvo) of Russian modernists and avant-gardists. A special focus is given to such a permanent stage of performative practices as the Leningrad café “Saigon.” The article also discusses group perfomrative styles, shared by such communities as “Philological poets” and Khelenukty, as well as individual lifelong performances exemplified by such figures as Dmitrii Prigov, Venedikt Erofeev, or Sergei Chudakov.

scholarly journals Europejskie performanse Ive Tabara – od dyskursu politycznego do metanarracji

2018 ◽  
pp. 7-16
Author(s):  
Jacek Wachowski
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Performance Art ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Communication Strategies ◽  
Social Protest ◽  
The Other ◽  
Body Art ◽  
Public Activity ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The One

The article is an attempt to analyze the works of Ive Tabar – one of the most interesting Slovenian artists (relatively little known) working on the borderline of body art and performance art. On the one hand, Tabar’s works refer to loud experiments – undertaken on the basis of body art in 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. On the other hand, they are seeking their own language and new communication strategies with the viewers. Tabar’s works are both personal acts and political declarations (regarding the future of Slovenia). In this sense, they can be understood as a return to the concept (that had been developed in Europe and America in the second half of the twentieth century) of engaging art for public activity. Tabar uses this tradition in its own and unique way. He creates metanarratives works that combine the poetics of political and social protest with a radical body art-style experiment. He shows the way how art can contribute a political life.Key words: Slovenian performance, Ive Tabar, body art, performing arts.

Beckett's Breath

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sozita Goudouna
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Performance Art ◽  
Samuel Beckett ◽  
Sound Art ◽  
Stage Directions ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Theatrical Text ◽  
Modernist Discourse

Samuel Beckett, one of the most prominent playwrights of the twentieth century, wrote a thirty-second playlet for the stage that does not include actors, text, characters or drama but only stage directions. Breath (1969) is the focus and the only theatrical text examined in this study, which demonstrates how the piece became emblematic of the interdisciplinary exchanges that occur in Beckett's later writings, and of the cross-fertilisation of the theatre with the visual arts. The book attends to fifty breath-related artworks (including sculpture, painting, new media, sound art, performance art) and contextualises Beckett's Breath within the intermedial and high-modernist discourse thereby contributing to the expanding field of intermedial Beckett criticism.

Animating Morecambe: Forkbeard Fantasy Goes to the Ball

2000 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-16
Author(s):  
Nicolas Whybrow
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Performance Art ◽  
Unique Form ◽  
Senior Lecturer ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Integrated Performance ◽  
The Town

Forkbeard Fantasy is one of Britain's oldest ‘alternative’ performance companies. Founded in 1974 by the brothers Tim and Chris Britton, who have continued to work with the company ever since, Forkbeard's practice may be identified with a peculiarly British variant on performance art, which dates from the mid-sixties. Influenced as much by elements of variety entertainment as by early twentieth-century avant-garde movements in the visual arts, it produced a unique form of integrated performance which was often daringly experimental yet refreshingly tongue-in-cheek. In the Spring of 1999, Nicolas Whybrow, then teaching at Lancaster University, observed the company's residency in Morecambe, on the Lancashire coast, over a period of three weeks. Here, he presents his impressions based on a consideration of Morecambe's identity as a place and the nature of Forkbeard's relationship to that place as residential visitors. His analysis takes into account the activities he observed – including his daily trips into Morecambe by train, media ‘takes’ on the town, informal conversations with contributors to the residency, and a formal interview with the company itself, represented here by interjections into the text. Nicolas Whybrow is now Senior Lecturer at De Montfort University, Leicester.

scholarly journals Editorial: The Importance of the Astonished Eye

2014 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
CHARLOTTE CANNING
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Performance Art ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The People ◽  
Theatrical Adaptation ◽  
Tahrir Square ◽  
A Performance ◽  
The Revolution

The four articles in this first issue of 2014 could not have, at first glance, less in common. The first piece, ‘Zooësis and “Becoming with” in India: The “Figure” of Elephant in Sahyande Makan: The Elephant Project’ by Ameet Parameswaran, examines the theatrical adaptation of a 1944 Malayalam poem by the company Theatre Roots and Wings. In ‘The Dynamics of Space and Resistance in Muhammad ‘Azīz's Tahrir Square: The Revolution of the People and the Genius of the Place’, Salwa Rashad Amin discusses the importance of ‘Azīz's play in the context of Egypt's recent and historical revolutions. Ketu Katrak takes up the performance of affect and its implication for social justice in ‘“Stripping Women of Their Wombs”: Active Witnessing of Performances of Violence’. Finally, Katia Arfara explores the work of a performance artist in terms of early twentieth-century precedents for European performance art, ‘Denaturalizing Time: On Kris Verdonck's Performative Installation End’. Theatre Research International readers will find much of value in each article, and they represent the kind of broad international focus our journal endeavours to provide.

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