Search results
4 Performing the border and queer rasquachismo in Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s performance art Where Gregory Scofield’s negotiation of the practice and habitus of citizenship in Canada is focused on the Métis, a group whose rights and identity have been debated and unjustly dismissed for centuries, this chapter recrosses the 49th parallel and returns to the border between the United States and Mexico, the site that features most prominently in work by Mexican- American and self- identifying Chicano performance artist and cultural theorist Guillermo Gómez- Peña
This article explores the reception and transformation of William Blake’s countercultural legacy by focusing on the neo-Romantic resurgences within maelstrÖm reEvolution, an experimental performance and arts collective based in Brussels but with heavy transnational affiliations. In relation to the company’s neo-shamanic and therapeutic conception of poiesis, Blake is an inspirational figure amongst a broader family of mentors ranging from Beat Generation writers to Arthur Rimbaud and Alexandro Jodorowsky. The Blake–maelstrÖm connection is here examined for the first time. Blending classical reception studies with a broader interest in the intersections between poiesis and the ‘sacred’, this article approaches countercultural Blake as the archetypal embodiment of the shamanic poet. More specifically, it reflects on how, as the poet of ‘double-edged madness’ and ‘Spiritual Strife’, Blake’s subversion of alienation into ecstasy feeds maelstrÖm’s own ‘therapoetic’ experimentalism and psycho-aesthetic endeavours to restore the lines of communication between the ‘visible’ and the ‘invisible’.
Celebrated as a leader of London’s ‘Underground’ in the 1960–70s, and a leading British poet and performance artist of his time, Jeff Nuttall found fame through his critique of post-nuclear culture, Bomb Culture, which provided an influential rationale for artistic practice through absurdism but lost that recognition a decade or so later. Less well recognised, and with greater influence, is the distinctively visceral sensibility underlying much of his creative work, notably his poetry that draws on Dylan Thomas and the Beat Movement, his graphic drawing and luscious painting styles, and his pioneering performance art. This article argues that it is through these artistic expressions of visceral intelligence that Jeff Nuttall’s art and its long-term influence can now best be understood. It is intended to complement the Jeff Nuttall Papers in the Special Collections of The John Rylands Research Institute and Library, University of Manchester, deposited by the gallerist and poetry publisher Robert Bank (1941–2015), to whose memory this article is dedicated. Further papers have been added by Nuttall’s friends and relatives.
, popular theatre. It very acutely highlights and embodies Trauma-tragedy: Symptoms of contemporary performance the (fantasy) trauma borne witness to in the novels. Finally, there is Untitled (Syncope): a piece of Live/Performance Art developed by the artist in response to ‘a whole load of ideas [and] questions about […] what it is to have a body, what a body is and how that engages [with society]’ (O’Reilly 2008; personal interview). Despite their generic structural and aesthetic differences, each is an instance in which trauma is theatrically addressed or borne
This book is about science in theatre and performance. It explores how theatre and performance engage with emerging scientific themes from artificial intelligence to genetics and climate change. The book covers a wide range of performance forms from the spectacle of the Paralympics Opening Ceremony to Broadway musicals, from experimental contemporary performance and opera to educational theatre, Somali poetic drama and grime videos. It features work by pioneering companies including Gob Squad, Headlong Theatre and Theatre of Debate as well as offering fresh analysis of global blockbusters such as Wicked and Urinetown. The book offers detailed description and analysis of theatre and performance practices as well as broader commentary on the politics of theatre as public engagement with science. It documents important examples of collaborative practice with extended discussion of the Theatre of Debate process developed by Y Touring theatre company, exploration of bilingual theatre-making in East London and an account of how grime MCs and dermatologists ended up making a film together in Birmingham. The interdisciplinary approach draws on contemporary research in theatre and performance studies in combination with key ideas from science studies. It shows how theatre can offer important perspectives on what the philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers has called ‘cosmopolitics’. The book argues that theatre can flatten knowledge hierarchies and hold together different ways of knowing.
At a time when monolingualist claims for the importance of ‘speaking English’ to the national order continue louder than ever, even as language diversity is increasingly part of contemporary British life, literature becomes a space to consider the terms of linguistic belonging. Bad English examines writers including Tom Leonard, James Kelman, Suhayl Saadi, Raman Mundair, Daljit Nagra, Xiaolu Guo, Leila Aboulela, Brian Chikwava, and Caroline Bergvall, who engage multilingually, experimentally, playfully, and ambivalently with English’s power. Considering their invented vernaculars and mixed idioms, their dramatised scenes of languaging – languages learned or lost, acts of translation, scenes of speaking, the exposure and racialised visibility of accent – it argues for a growing field of contemporary literature in Britain pre-eminently concerned with language’s power dynamics, its aesthetic potentialities, and its prosthetic strangeness. Drawing on insights from applied linguistics and translation studies as well as literary scholarship, Bad English explores contemporary arguments about language in Britain – in debates about citizenship or education, in the media or on Twitter, in Home Office policy and asylum legislation – as well as the ways they are taken up in literature. It uncovers both an antagonistic and a productive interplay between language politics and literary form, tracing writers’ articulation of linguistic alienation and ambivalence, as well as the productivity and making-new of radical language practices. Doing so, it refutes the view that language difference and language politics are somehow irrelevant to contemporary Britain and instead argues for their constitutive centrality to the work of novelists and poets whose inside/outside relationship to English in its institutionalised forms is the generative force of their writing.
and an analytic observer. This exhibition was held concurrently with the renowned performance art group COUM Transmissions’ multimedia installation Prostitution to mark their exit from the art world to form the experimental rock band Throbbing Gristle. Hanif and Paul idolised co-founder member Cosey Fanni Tutti and her revolutionary performance art. The highly controversial installations of dirty nappies, used tampons and images of Cosey Fanni Tutti posing naked for pornographic magazines provoked media outrage, but, as he gleefully recalls ‘not a flicker did they
out close readings of the aesthetics, the form and the workings of the text. A remarkable feature is that these very close readings lead the various critics to draw on a range of different theoretical and interpretative frameworks from within literary criticism and, importantly, beyond – from psychoanalysis to linguistics, through trauma and post-colonial studies and performance art. The critical discourse generated by these interdisciplinary forays produces fruitful and thought-provoking analyses of contemporary writing and confirms its relevance to contemporary
other art forms. Here he saw performance art for the first time. Michael Clarke moved out of ballet to become the Studio's resident punk choreographer, and had performance artist Leigh Bowery staggering across the stage in 10-inch heels with a chainsaw. He felt energised and inspired to work at such a creative, vibrant place, increasingly renowned as a powerhouse of the arts. Riverside Studios was unusually nominated for the Turner Prize for its programme, while the BBC's flagship arts programme Arena regularly featured the studio's productions. In retrospect
my argument diverges from Hopenwasser's identification of Margery as a ‘naïve’ ‘comic figure’ written with ‘irony’ by the ‘more sophisticated’ writer Kempe, I continue her deliberately anachronistic comparison of Margery to contemporary performance artists, and her interest in audience response. 11 Such contemporary artists often distinguish their work from that of the theatre, yet the dividing line between theatre and performance art is contestable in the contemporary world and was probably never operative in