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Brian Hill’s musical documentaries embody the essence of Judith Butler’s notion of ‘performativity’ as the discourse used in identity formation. By asking his characters to sing their stories in addition to traditional interviews, Hill creates multiple screen identities, which elicits an embodied intimacy that is as much about freeing marginalised people to enact themselves in front of the camera as it is about revealing the director’s own performance. This article uses a cognitive framework to explore how Hill’s documentary, Pornography: The Musical (2003), leads the spectator to challenge existing social stereotypes of sex workers, as well as schematic ideas about traditional documentary form and function.
together’ (Fevered Sleep, 2017 ). While the production certainly celebrates adults and children being and dancing together, Men & Girls Dance arguably achieves much more than this and performs a mode of caring that both challenges and extends our understanding of both our preconceptions of encounters between men and girls and how we think about strength, vulnerability and the power structures of care in performance. Through its improvisational structure and choreography, Men & Girls Dance critiques many of the gender-normative assumptions that often become projected
1 Trauma’s performative genealogy ‘Daddy!’ she screams. ‘Daddy!’ – Her voice is snatched away by the boom of the surf. Her father turns aside, with a word She cannot hear. She chokes – Hands are cramming a gag into her mouth. They bind it there with cord, like a horse’s bit […] Now rough hands rip off her silks And the wind waltzes with them Down across the beach, and over the surf. Her eyes swivel in their tears. She recognises her killers. (Aeschylus 1999: 15) On 22 February 2007 I read an article detailing the gang rape of a fourteen-year-old Iraqi girl and
3 Performing citizenship, engendering consent: constructing militarised masculinities and citizenship in South Africa We had come to accept that it is the law. Your children get called up for two years and that’s it. [My son] did not have time to learn that it was all lies. According to him, he died a hero because that’s all he knew. (letter from Mrs Ann-Marie Wallace, mother of a conscript killed in service, to TRC, 1998a: 312) Is it possible to maintain stability if the burden, and the risks, of defence must be carried by some – while others escape the
All that he had his image should present, All that it should present he could afford: To that he could afford his will was bent, His will was followed with performing word. Let this suffice, by this conceive the rest, He should, he could, he would, he did the best. 1
This chapter focuses on the planned, institutionalised transitional justice project and its institutions in action. It shows how the planned transitional justice project interacted with political developments, dissects the interplay between these two elements, and demonstrates how transitional justice was performed in this setting. As will become clear, the processes I distinguish here analytically are deeply intertwined. In order to do so, the chapter mainly concentrates on the TDC, its work, and the debates it gave rise
Performing women takes on a key problem in the history of drama: the ‘exceptional’ staging of the life of Catherine of Siena by a female actor and a female patron in 1468 Metz. These two creators have remained anonymous, despite the perceived rarity of this familiar episode; this study of their lives and performances, however, brings the elusive figure of the female performer to centre stage. Beginning with the Catherine of Siena play and broadening outward, Performing women integrates new approaches to drama, gender, and patronage with a performance methodology to trace connections among the activities of the actor, the patron, their female family members, and peers. It shows that the women of fifteenth-century Metz enacted varied kinds of performance that included and extended beyond the theatre: decades before the 1468 play, for example, Joan of Arc returned from the grave in the form of a young woman named Claude, who was acknowledged formally in a series of civic ceremonies. This in-depth investigation of the full spectrum of evidence for female performance – drama, liturgy, impersonation, devotional practice, and documentary culture – both creates a unique portrait of the lives of individual women and reveals a framework of ubiquitous female performance. Performing women offers a new paradigm: women forming the core of public culture. Networks of gendered performance offered roles of expansive range and depth to the women of Metz, and positioned them as vital and integral contributors to the fabric of urban life.
The book advances our understanding of performance as a mode of caring and explores the relationship between socially engaged performance and care. It creates a dialogue between theatre and performance, care ethics and other disciplinary areas such as youth and disability studies, nursing, criminal justice and social care. Challenging existing debates in this area by rethinking the caring encounter as a performed, embodied experience and interrogating the boundaries between care practice and performance, the book engages with a wide range of different care performances drawn from interdisciplinary and international settings. Drawing on interdisciplinary debates, the edited collection examines how the field of performance and the aesthetic and ethico-political structures that determine its relationship with the social might be challenged by an examination of inter-human care. It interrogates how performance might be understood as caring or uncaring, careless or careful, and correlatively how care can be conceptualised as artful, aesthetic, authentic or even ‘fake’ and ‘staged’. Through a focus on care and performance, the contributors in the book consider how performance operates as a mode of caring for others and how dialogical debates between the theory and practice of care and performance making might foster a greater understanding of how the caring encounter is embodied and experienced.
This book looks in detail at the growth in popularity and profile of the English folk arts in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Based on original research within English folk culture, it is the only ethnographic study of its kind. The book first examines the salient characteristics of the twenty-first-century English folk resurgence. Then, it looks at the development of a 'folk industry', beginning with a broad analysis of the historical context of the first two folk revivals. Taking the emergence of folk industry conferences as a case study, it traces the folk industry's web of intersecting institutions and discourses. Its second case study of the new folk club the Magpie's Nest examines further the coming together of commercialisation and professionalisation with the folk ethos. The book also discusses the actual music and dance being performed within the English folk arts, and considers the ways in which these texts are engaging with both popular and high-art cultural products and processes. It gives a brief contextualisation of the wider cultural interest in Englishness within which the folk resurgence is situated. Following on from the exploration of England, the book analyses the versions of Englishness that can be found within the work of contemporary English folk artists. The book codifies a range of English identities under construction in the resurgence, and examines their politics. It concludes with a consideration of some broader theoretical issues raised by the author's findings.
6 Performing cosmopolitics Most people have some kind of experience of motion sickness from travelling as a child in a stuffy car, staying on a swing or roundabout too long, being in a boat on a rough sea or on a turbulent flight. It grows as a feeling of nausea, perhaps with a slight headache and clammy skin and leads to feelings of weakness, drowsiness or apathy. It is perhaps slightly puzzling that people do not usually develop motion sickness from walking or running. While it has a long history, the possibilities of motion sickness seem to have proliferated