Performance ethnography (Theatre Studies)

In her close professional relationship to composers, such as Luciano Berio, John Cage, Hans Werner Henze, Igor Stravinsky and Sylvano Bussotti, Cathy Berberian has productively tainted historical preconceptions about the authorial “work” and the role of the singer in the realization of the composer’s creation. Her flamboyant character on the concert stage, where she showcased her more popular work, captured the public’s imagination. The success of this performer–audience rapport was intrinsic to the singer’s performative persona; however Pieter Verstraete argues that through her own composed work ("Stripsody" is the best known), Berberian presented a myriad of personas. She achieved this primarily by deconstructing her own voice as instrument and object, thereby subverting the stability of her relationship to the authorial power of the musical score. Consequently, Berberian’s work invites us to rethink the authorial position of the composer in relation to the singer/performer as well as the enhanced position of the listener whose function it is to imagine such personas in relation to seeing and hearing the performer’s singing body over a number of changing instances.

This study aimed to identify the effectiveness of reciprocal teaching in developing the meta-scientific reading skills and academic achievement with a sample of gifted pupils with varied academic achievement levels enrolled in a science course at the primary educational cycle. The sample of the study consisted of 80 students randomly selected from the pupils of the fifth primary level. These students were stratified in accordance with the variables of age, sex and the level of under achievement in the science course). The sample was randomly divided into two groups: the first is experimental and the second is control. The two groups were taught in accordance to the reciprocal teaching methods. Fourteen lessons were taught during seven weeks in the second semester of the academic year 1434/1435 AH. In order to measure the effectiveness of the reciprocal teaching methods, The scale of meta-scientific reading of Al-Farmawi and Redwan (2014) was applied before and after the experiment. Furthermore, an achievement test prepared by the researcher was applied on the students of both groups. The study results showed that there were statistically significant differences at (0.01) between the mean scores of the experimental and the control groups. The differences were in favor of the experimental group and in the rest of female pupils who studied with reciprocal teaching.

Throughout the ages, from ancient Greek theatre to the postmodern, acting styles have been changing, adapting and developing. In order to understand what these approaches meant to both performer and audience, it is important to understand the various theories of the self which inform these approaches to acting. By delving into the assumptions about the self that underlie any approach to acting we can reveal that such theories are not absolute or universal, but on the contrary, are informed by practitioners' changing cultural, historical and personal contexts. Arjun Appadurai  in his "topographies", Phillip Zarrilli in his "implicit theories of the self", Joseph Roach in his discussion  of celebrity and stardom in America as being privileged above text and even performance  , and Thomas Khun, are all theorists who have attempted to identify and explicate the phenomenon of changing epistomologies in their re-evaluation of their respective disciplines. Two approaches to acting which can be informed and explained by such theories are: Vsevolod Meyerhold’s system of Biomechanics in Bolshevic Russia, and Lee Strasberg's Method in the USA. Both The Method, and Biomechanics, although in many  ways diametrically opposed, developed systems of acting which assumed an empirical and objective science of absolute self that was accepted as a given in the Platonic dualism of mind and body.

A presente proposta de comunicação visa a uma abordagem crítica da linguagem
cinematográfica de Glauber Rocha, enfocando principalmente suas relações com a estética teatral, em
específico o diálogo com o teórico francês Antonin Artaud e o Teatro da Crueldade. Ao Longo de
nossa apresentação, analisaremos trechos de filmes de Glauber relacionados àquele conceito.
Palavras-chave: Cinema, teatro, crueldade, transe, duplo.

The emergence of the COVID-19 Pandemic has brought many theatre organizations into isolation. The result of government quarantine measures led many student-artist theatre groups to hold their productions online. Before the quarantine, the resident theatre group of De La Salle University, DLSU Harlequin Theatre Guild (DLSU-HTG), has been known since its inception in the 1960s to stage original Filipino that advocate socio-cultural awareness and responsibility for the community through experimentation and exploration of the theatre arts. Now the pandemic prohibits them from doing so. How do the student-artists of this university-based theatre group stage their performances before the Pandemic? How do they respond to the quarantine measures? How about their productions every trimester? Are these online performances the same as before? This paper highlights the history of DLSU Harlequin Theatre Guild and how its student-artists staged their productions online during the Pandemic. Supplemented with oral history and netnography, it focuses on the period from April 2020 to April 2021 to acquire data from student-artists of DLSU-HTG who actively performed or produced performances online through its live stream broadcasts on official platforms. The author reflects on the argument that performing online transcends the spaces of theatre. Even though performing these within the walls of the theatre may temporarily invoke dramatic action, it is not the source of this emotion. If physical limitations of space become irrelevant, then performance becomes confined within its event-space. Such articulates “how space performs” and “how the event spatializes this performance. Uniquely, the quarantine has transitioned and transformed theatre performances from the physical space of the theatre to the virtual event-space, “quaranscenes.”

This book, The Dancing Word presents a systemic and phenomenological description of a contemporary intercultural theatre practice. The product of over eighteen years of embodied research by the author, this volume offers a blueprint for both training and collaborative performance creation that integrates the best of western laboratory theatre with the practice and ontological underpinnings of Chinese martial (Wushu) and healing/self care (Qigong) arts. This is a volume for theatre practitioners, students, scholars, and those interested in exploring transcultural methodologies.

Much recent thinking about performance documentation has coalesced around an apparent opposition between the relative stability of the document and the ontological ephemerality of the live event. Indeed, if we begin from the problem of translating a singular and ephemeral event into a stable document, then failure is guaranteed from the start. Understood as an inherently transient moment, performance "cannot be saved, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance" (Phelan 1993: 146). But the problem of documentation is illusory insofar as the performing arts have no special claim to ephemerality. As I have argued elsewhere, it is not performance but life in general -the world, the real, being itself -that escapes documentary capture (Spatz 2015a: 234). In fact, the questions faced by a documentarian are not entirely different to those faced by a director or choreographer who works through the craft of composition to condense various embodied and dramaturgical materials into a repeatable performance score. Nor do the spectators who attend such a performance necessarily have better or more direct access to the underlying processes that gave rise to it than do those who encounter the work through written or recorded documents. Understood in this way, documentation poses not the insoluble problem of grasping the ungraspable but rather the concrete challenge of isolating and articulating those aspects of a practice that can be shared and transmitted through the available tools. As the tools change, the potential for sharing and transmission also changes. Both transmissible documents and live performance events owe their existence to underlying phenomena that structure practice over time. Rather than opposing these two kinds of phenomenon as ontological opposites, I would like to consider some of the ways in which specific kinds of events and documents relate to the practices from which they emerge. To document performance is, as Phelan says, impossible. What can be documented is practice -which is the basis of performance -as well perhaps as the structure of practice, including transmissible knowledge or technique. As soon as we begin to refocus our discussion on practice and technique rather than performance, much of the conceptual twisting around issues of liveness and ephemerality evaporates. Instead we are left with two different and complementary strategies for encountering performance: documents and performances. Just as performances may be shared with many

As a critical methodology, performance ethnography offers researchers a unique opportunity to tap into what I call queer social scientific remainders by using the dramatic staging of ethnographic material such that it can be disseminated to audiences in an arts-based dramatic forum. While ethnographers are often drawn to the atmosphere of the theatre and its capacity to give multidimensionality to their research, there is a lack of engagement with queer theory and transgender countercultural aesthetics. There is also an investment in a transcendental truth that negates the possibilities of staging the emotive and unknowable dimensions of the gendered subject. Performance ethnography has become a pedagogically exciting methodological form because it can emotionally engage audiences in topics they would normally avoid. However, such topics must incite curiosity and critical questioning, as opposed to definitive truth claims and easy answers. As evidenced by the play Queer Bathroom Monologues (QBM)*my case study*audiences engage, refuse, query, contest, affectively respond to, and ignore, the difficult and disturbing excesses of research about queer and transgender material.

This article argues that Harold Pinter's fascination for the game of cricket is recorded in his dramaturgy. Beginning with a consideration of the theatrical quality of cricket, the author goes on to analyse Pinter's dramatic form, the psychology of combat and elements of the 'absurd' and of ideology common to both cricket and Pinter's plays. When I direct, or see my own plays, I am playing cricket shots in my mind. I'm always going through the motions, the feet perfectly in position. (Pinter, quoted by Menon) What we're trying to do [as playwrights] is write cricket bats, so that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock, it might travel [. . .] (Henry in The Real Thing by Tom Stoppard) Harold Pinter loved cricket. He is not, of course, the only cricketing playwright. Samuel Beckett was a gritty opening batsman and left-arm bowler, and is notable for being the only Nobel Prize winner to have also achieved an entry in Wisden's Cricketers' Almanac; Tom Stoppard played for the Gaieties, the cricket team for whom Pinter was captain. However, Pinter's interest in cricket was intense, and was a deep, lifelong passion and fascination. Captaining the

This essay will explore two approaches to acting, namely Bertolt Brecht’s Epic performance and the American Method, and evaluate the ways in which they have been informed by 'implicit theories of the self'. This exploration will make use of an array of theoretical concepts, belonging to Auslander, Appadurai, Derrida, Roach and Zarrilli, among others, to discern what is truly at stake (be it on a theoretical or a practical level) when approaches to acting are intricately and inextricably tied to a particular theory or topography of the self.

In this article I focus on the performance practices of one of Sumatra's little-known mask varieties, that of sakura theater, performed in the southernmost province of Lampung. I also draw attention to four other Sumatran mask types, namely, those used in funeral ceremonies of the Karo Batak in North Sumatra, mak yong theater of Bintan, gobang ritual of the Anambas islands, and mendu theater of Natuna. In order to gain a greater understanding of the Sumatran mask images and to illuminate their use in performance, I first trace the history of Sumatran mask design, sourcing relevant iconographical and archeological data dating back to the migrations to the island in the Dongson era (500– 1000 bce) and the subsequent Hindu-Buddhist period (first to fourteenth centuries ce). The masks' facial features and their functions in Lampung personify animals, gods, demons, and humans and resemble carvings of supernatural beings on Buddhist temple remains throughout Sumatra. The ancestors are believed to have traveled along South Sumatra's and Lampung's extensive river system to Skala Brak in West Lampung along the southwestern Bukit Barisan mountain range, bringing with them their cultures and artistic skills. Moreover, the later interethnic contact between southern Sumatrans and the Benanek Dayak community in Kalimantan may have influenced the designs of the masks, given the similarities between them in the two areas. Today Lampung sakura masking in its various forms, dating back to the pre-Hindu-Buddhist period in Skala Brak, takes place in mystical healing and village cleansing ceremonies, at pole-climbing festivals, and in street processions on the Muslim feast day of Idul Fitri. As an indirect means of affecting the people's mindset, sakura processional performance practices and their allure affirm the Lampung worldview. Karen Kartomi Thomas is an adjunct senior research fellow in the Performance Research Unit, Centre for Theatre and Performance at Monash University. Her primary research projects focus on theater in Sumatra, including the Riau Islands.

The works of Ideogram Théâtre offer a concrete example of how the Sufi teaching of Anatolia (tasavvuf) might today inspire a distinctive approach to the actor's art. With actors who are not only doers but also witnesses of the truth behind their actions, Ideogram Théâtre makes visible the Sufi concept of ayn, which considers each human being a mirror of truth for another. Through their work, the essence of the 700-year-old ritual performance of semâ lives on the theatre stage.

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This paper explores parallelism as a phenomenon not restricted to language and poetic expression but rather something that may be manifested through any type of signs.

The first half of the paper concentrates on the relationship of parallelism to different orders of representation - i.e. verbalization, signs communicated verbally such as images and motifs, and higher order signs e.g. communicated through images and motifs as signs. This part considers both parallelism at these different orders of representation and also interactions and relations between them.

The second half of the paper outlines an approach to parallelism across different media (channels, modes) of performance as a mode of expression. This is complementary to the discussion of parallelism at different orders of representation and considers the rhythm of the performance mode as coordinating meters of verbal, musical etc. aspects of expression.

Examples are taken from mythological epic and ritual performance. A model is also presented for considering that the 'reality orientation' (Siikala 1978) associated with certain rituals as not only subjective to a performance specialist such as a shaman, but also interfaced with the 'performance arena' (Foley 1995) of a particular traditional practice.  According to this model, the activation of the performance arena is connected to a change in reality orientation, inciting participants / audiences to attend to the unseen world engaged through performance over empirical realities of immediate experience (even if each participant's subjective engages with the performance arena may vary).

The practice of taolu (tao4lu4, tào lù, 套路), the prearranged movement patterns of the Chinese martial arts, has been explained in fantastically diverse ways spanning a range of interpretations from the essential and functional to the narrative, theatrical and religious. Rather than trying to find a universal reason for the practice of taolu, this paper proposes to look at the idea of prearranged movement patterns through the lens of credibility and decipherability. These twin concepts, borrowed from the Great Reform movement in 20th century theatre practice, helpfully embrace both the criteria by which the performance of taolu is usually judged and also the deficiencies in our contemporary understanding of reasons behind this palimpsestic training method. As conceptual tools, credibility and decipherability also offer us insight into how the practice of prearranged martial movement patterns is presented and interpreted as a personal and phenomenological experience of embodied practice. This paper hopes to pragmatically present new perspectives from which the practice of taolu can be understood.

«Karagkiozis performers of Solea:
Th. Themistokleous, A. Kokonas, G. Idalias»

Shadow Theatre (“Karaghiozis”) in Cyprus is a quite intriguing field for researchers, due to its geographical position and its particular political-social situation. Questions as “dialogue” between Greek-Cypriots or Turkish-Cypriots and Greeks, Turks and even Arabs shadow puppets performers, seek for answers.
This essay is focused on the connection between three Greek-Cypriots neighboring (Nicosia ’s district) performers, mirrored in their archives: A. Kokonas (from Tembria), Th. Themistokleous (from Kakopetria), G. Idalias (from Nikosia, Korakou).
It is acknowledged that each’ s development was mainly determined by factors as social-family environment, educational level, family status, financial security, friendship or collaboration with other performers/designers, individual talent and style.
In addition to that, it is shown what kind of models were followed, how these three performers depended on each other and up to what level did they intercourse.

This paper explores the experience of space afforded by the practice of tàolù 套路, the prearranged movement patterns of the Chinese martial arts. It examines the roots of tàolù in Chinese martial preparation, religious self-consecration and theatrical performance. It develops the structure and phenomenology of this practice with special attention to its exponents’ perceptions of negative space. Following an interdisciplinary approach, the author contextualizes embodied, martial knowledge in terms of Chinese social history, theatre and religious praxis.

Starting in the summer of 2022, the University of the Peloponnese, through the Department of Theatre of the University of the Peloponnese (Τμήμα Θεατρικών Σπουδών του Πανεπιστημίου Πελοποννήσου) will host Performing Space, an international event that will take place annually in Nafplio, Greece, starting this year in late summer of 2022. Performing Space 2022 - Epidaurus will include a conference and a workshop, whose purpose is to present and promote, in a coherent way, a number of studies and works on performance and space, and, at the same time, to offer a framework in which to experiment with performance in significant spaces in the history of the development of the built environment.

This year, the event will hold the Performing Space Conference, on the 27th and 28th of August, which is open to proposals by practitioners, and researchers from all academic disciplines who want to share their work on performance and space, and the Performing Epidaurus Workshop, from 29th August to 2nd September, orientated towards to practitioners, undergraduate and postgraduate students who want to experiment with performance as a means of learning about our built environment.

Researchers and practitioners from art, theatre, architecture, dance, anthropology, archaeology, history, landscape architecture, urban planning, cognitive sciences, etc. who are developing any reflection from a performative perspective on the built environment are invited to participate in this conference which aims to articulate performance and space studies.

Performing Epidaurus Workshop will focus on the Asklepeion of Epidaurus as a case study and is open to participants who want to explore through performance such a significant place, by using the tools provided by the different disciplines that study the relationship between performance and space.

Books included in this cutting-edge series centre on global and embodied approaches to performance and technology. As well as focussing on digital performance and art, books in the series also include the theoretical and historical context relevant to these practices. The series offers fresh artistic and theoretical perspectives on this exciting and growing area of contemporary performance practice, and includes contributors from a wide range of international locations working within this varied discipline. Titles in the series will include edited collections and monographs on issues including (but not limited to): identity and live art; intimacy and engagement with technology; biotechnology and artistic practices; technology, architecture and performance; performance, gender and technology; and space and performance.

EcoCentrix: Indigenous Arts, Sustainable Acts
International Exhibition of Indigenous Art and Performance
Bargehouse, Oxo Tower Wharf, Southbank, London
25 October – 10 November 2013
Alive to the power of performance, contemporary indigenous artists merge the familiar with the unexpected, the traditional with the experimental, creating new forms and objects along the way. They provoke dialogues about resources, social justice and stereotypes, and show the triumphs and failures of our times.
EcoCentrix: Indigenous Arts, Sustainable Acts [brought] to London the work of more than 40 artists from the Americas, Australia, the Pacific and South Africa. Uniquely comprised of both live performance and the traces it leaves behind in images, digital media, sounds, texts and crafted objects, this interactive exhibition [offered] fresh ways of grasping what sustainable can mean.
Chief Curator: Prof. Helen Gilbert
Assistant Curator: Dani Phillipson
Film Curator: Charlotte Gleghorn
Designers: Lucy Algar, Dani Phillipson
Digital Designer: Jamie Griffiths
Curatorial Assistants: Sergio Huarcaya, Genner Llanes-Ortiz, Dylan Robinson

The celebrated Munich cabaret artist Karl Valentin first came to prominence with his performance of his sketch Das Aquarium in 1908. This was also the moment at which he first established a comedy based upon extreme logic, wordplay and verbal misunderstanding, which in turn created a world in which his innocent 'matter-of-fact-ness' exposed the absurdities of social situations. This article explores Valentin's use of his extraordinary skinniness to create both an effective comic persona and a comic physicality in his work. The authors argue that it was in Valentin's slightly earlier sketch, Ich bin ein armer magerer Mann, that the comedian found his physical 'comic voice', and they go on to provide an analysis of the importance of physicality in Valentin's work, particularly in relation to this sketch. A new translation of the sketch is also provided.

The aim of this paper is to investigate museum educators' articulations of their performance during guided tours. The paper investigates preparations for a guided tour, considerations related to doing guided tours and the events after the guided tour. The text focus especially on preparation and the aftermath as this is not normally discussed in research on museum education. The paper is based on participant observation of guided tours, filming of guided tours and qualitative semi-structured interviews. The material is analysed using performance theories and theories on materiality. The paper seeks to unearth knowledge imbued in the museum educators' performance and reveal what can be known from guiding bodies.

Recipient of the Canadian Association for Theatre Research 2014 Ann Saddlemyer Book Award Honorable Mention

"This book will be a valuable resource for scholars interested in the work of Grotowski, Polish theatre, women theatre practitioners, as well as those engaged in practice-as-research." - Review by Tanya Dean, TDR

"This is a valuable body of work... the first to give full attention to the female angle of Grotowski’s legacy." - Review by Lara Szypszak, Canadian Theatre Review

"Magnat is asking provocative and important questions, and offering access to a rich and fascinating realm of performance practice." - Review by Brian Schultis, Studies in Theatre and Performance

Watch the Companion Documentary Film Series on the Routledge Performance Archive (http://www.routledgeperformancearchive.com)

The version presented here may differ from the published version or, version of record, if you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the 'permanent WRAP URL' above for details on accessing the published version and note that access may require a subscription.

sometimes-distant lands for a variety of reasons. Some move away from real or imagined threats to their very existence. Others seek a better quality of life. And some adventurous souls are inhabited by a restless wanderlust – a desire to roll the dice and see what happens. Such mobility requires fortitude and faith. Migrants move through space and, if they have an aspirational disposition, they attempt to accumulate symbolic capital to move up those social and economic hierarchies that bestow status and prestige within their adopted homes. The migrant journey to Australia often ends with the realisation that one has to make and remake one's identity, and perform a series of adjustments – adjustments in terms of comportment, dress, accent and tells a story about the author's father, A.J. D'Cruz. It draws on historical archives and the material remnants of A.J. D'Cruz's relatively short life (letters, photographs,

In Dancing Jewish, Rebecca Rossen engages with a wide-ranging history of Jews and Jewishness in American modern and postmodern dance between the 1930s and the early twenty-first century. She outlines the vital role Jewish choreographers have played in the development of modern dance in the United States and the ways in which these choreographers reiterate and unsettle signifiers of Jewishness through movement. Utilising choreographic analysis, archival research and engaging with her own choreographic practice, Rossen effectively illustrates her argument that 'Jewish choreographers have negotiated ethnicity and gender in tandem, using dance and dancing bodies to publicly challenge traditional models for femininity (or masculinity); advance social and political agendas; and imagine radical new possibilities for themselves as individuals, artists, and Jews' (p. 5). Rossen defines 'dancing Jewish' as a process of making dances that utilises repertoires of movement associated with Jewishness and 'embraces the fluidity and complexity of Jewish identity' (p. 3). Dancing Jewish is a work that contributes to the understanding of ethnic and gendered identities constituted by 'a repertory of images, themes, and frames' (p. 3) signifying these identities, and specifically contributes to understandings of Jewishness, Americanness and gender as constituted through dancing Jewish.

This article explores a notion of the theatre that should make possible, in Antonin Artaud's words, a 'decisive transfusion of matter by mind'. I begin by contending that whilst Artaud refused to treat the body and the mind as separated entities, he spoke of a 'latent disorder' whereby thought and bodiliness are in continuous conflict. Although the suggestion of an alchemical transfusion that would unify body and mind is an odd and perhaps perplexing one, what is more perplexing still is Artaud's idea that the empty body would have to be filled by an essence such as mathematics. This paper seeks to understand why Artaud turned to mathematical images to explain the kind of transfusion of matter he had in mind for his alchemical theatre. Much of this paper deals with images Artaud conjures up whereby theatrical experience is analogous with a blood transfusion. My aim is to explain this image as a metaphorical link, or 'site of passage', from that which Artaud saw as the corrupted materiality of the body, to the abstract, or trans-corporeal, as part of an alchemical theatre that sought to trans-form and trans-fuse the actor into a coded or reflective bodily mathematics.

Knowledge of the complexity of human communication comes from three main sources – (i) studies of the linguistics and neuropsychology of dysfunction after brain injury; (ii) studies of the development of social communication in infancy, and its dysfunction in developmental psychopathologies; and (iii) the evolutionary history of human communicative interaction. Together, these suggest the need for a broad, integrated theory of communication of which language forms a small but critical component.

Performance ethnography is a critical research method that takes seriously the role of the body in doing qualitative research. The sensuous and performing body becomes a central tool in ethically encountering others, and can also function as an interpretive tool to translate research back into the world. Centering the body also means considering the ways the body is read in terms of race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, and how those differences elicit particular kinds of data. Taking fieldwork as performance, this method also considers the contingency, context, and aesthetics of interactions in the field and of quotidian life. In this class, students will learn of the emergence of performance ethnography; consider the ethics of ethnographic research; try on fieldwork, participant observation, interview, oral history; and explore ethnographies that center performance as method and object of analysis. This iteration of the performance ethnography class will focus on "fun," asking what it means to enjoy doing research, and researching something you (or others) are supposed to enjoy. Participants will locate a field site in the area to focus their study.