Author : Naomi Andre
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 14,91 MB
Release : 2021-10-28
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 0472054821
Explores how performance arts, whether staged or in daily life, regularly interface with political action across the African continent
Author : Frances Harding
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 382 pages
File Size : 44,77 MB
Release : 2013-12-16
Category : Drama
ISBN : 113641696X
The Performance Arts in Africa is the first anthology of key writings on African performance from many parts of the continent. As well as play texts, off the cuff comedy routines and masquerades, this exciting collection encompasses community-based drama, tourist presentations, television soap operas, puppet theatre, dance, song, and ceremonial ritualised performances. Themes discussed are: * theory * performers and performing * voice, language and words * spectators, space and time. The book also includes an introduction which examines some of the crucial debates, past and present, surrounding African performance. The Performance Arts of Africa is an essential introduction for those new to the field and is an invaluable reference source for those already familiar with African performance.
Author : Jay Pather
Publisher : Wits University Press
Page : 384 pages
File Size : 36,92 MB
Release : 2019-02-01
Category : Art
ISBN : 1776142799
Fifteen writers explore the experimental, interdisciplinary and radically transgressive field of contemporary live art in South Africa, focusing on a wide range of perspectives, personalities and theoretical concerns. Contemporary South African society is chronologically ‘post’ apartheid, but it continues to grapple with material redress, land redistribution and systemic racism. Acts of Transgression represents the complexity of this moment in the rich potential of a performative art form that transcends disciplinary boundaries and aesthetic conventions. The contributors, who are all significantly involved in the discipline of performance art, probe its intersection with crisis and socio-political turbulence, shifting notions of identity and belonging, embodied trauma and loss. Narratives of the past and visions for the future are interrogated through memory and the archive, thus destabilising entrenched colonial systems. Collectively analysing the work of more than 25 contemporary South African artists, including Athi-Patra Ruga, Mohau Modisakeng, Steven Cohen, Dean Hutton, Mikhael Subotzsky, Tracey Rose and Donna Kukama, among others, the analysis is accompanied by a visual record of more than 50 photographs. For those working in the fields of theatre, performance studies and art, this is a must-have collection of critical essays on a burgeoning and exciting field of contemporary South African research.
Author : DeRon S. Williams
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 265 pages
File Size : 28,3 MB
Release : 2023-04-06
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 1350252948
How are Black artists, activists, and pedagogues wielding acts of rebellion, activism, and solidarity to precipitate change? How have contemporary performances impacted Black cultural, social, and political struggles? What are the ways in which these acts and artists engage varied Black identities and explore shared histories? Contemporary Black Theatre and Performance investigates these questions to illuminate the relationship between performance, identity, intersectionality, and activism in North America and beyond. It features contributions from scholars, artists, and activists from across disciplines who explore the nuances and varied forms of Black performance in the 21st century while incorporating performance-based methodologies and queer and black feminist theories. Among the many topics addressed by contributors are antiracist pedagogy, Black queer identity formation in Black playwriting, digital blackface, and Black women's subversive practices within contemporary popular culture. It encompasses dramatic analysis of Lynn Nottage's Sweat, Tarell Alvin McCraney's Choir Boy, and acts of resistance during the Black Lives Matter summer 2020 highway protests. A series of conversations with artists and scholars are woven throughout the book's three sections, including with playwrights Christina Anderson and Donja R. Love, and Willa Taylor, Director of Education and Community Engagement at the Goodman Theatre, Chicago.
Author : Kene Igweonu
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Page : 190 pages
File Size : 23,12 MB
Release : 2014-01-02
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 1443855103
This book is part of a three-volume book-set published under the general title of Performative Inter-Actions in African Theatre. Each of the three books in the set has a unique subtitle that works to better focus its content, and differentiates it from the other two volumes. The contributors’ backgrounds and global spread adequately reflect the international focus of the three books that make up the collection. The contributions, in their various ways, demonstrate the many advances and ingenious solutions adopted by African theatre practitioners in tackling some of the challenges arising from the adverse colonial experience, as well as the “one-sided” advance of globalisation. The contributions attest to the thriving nature of African theatre and performance, which in the face of these challenges, has managed to retain its distinctiveness, while at the same time acknowledging, contesting, and appropriating influences from elsewhere into an aesthetic that is identifiably African. Consequently, the three books are presented as a comprehensive exploration of the current state of African theatre and performance, both on the continent and diaspora. Performative Inter-Actions in African Theatre 3: Making Space, Rethinking Drama and Theatre in Africa offers essays that seek to re-conceptualise notions of drama and theatre in Africa, and therefore redefine our understanding of the practice, role, and place they occupy in a constantly evolving African socio-cultural contexts. Contributions in Making Space, Rethinking Drama and Theatre in Africa range from essays that explore notions of space in performance, to those that challenge the perceived orthodoxy of conventional forms and approaches to theatre.
Author : John Conteh-Morgan
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Page : 285 pages
File Size : 19,36 MB
Release : 2004-10
Category : Drama
ISBN : 0253217016
This title explores the diversity of the performing arts in Africa and the diaspora, from studies of major dramatic authors and formal literary dramas to improvisational theatre and popular video films.
Author : D. Soyini Madison
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 335 pages
File Size : 21,23 MB
Release : 2010-01-14
Category : Drama
ISBN : 1139484826
This book was first published in 2010. Madison presents the neglected yet compelling and necessary story of local activists in South Saharan Africa who employ modes of performance as tactics of resistance and intervention in their day-to-day struggles for human rights. The dynamic relationship between performance and activism are illustrated in three case studies: Act One presents a battle between tradition and modernity as the bodies of African women are caught in the cross-fire. Act Two focuses on 'water democracy' as activists fight for safe, accessible public water as a human right. Act Three examines the efficacy of street performance and theatre for development in the oral histories of Ghanaian gender activists. Unique to this book is the continuing juxtaposition between the everyday performances of local activism and their staged enactments before theatre audiences in Ghana and the USA. Madison beautifully demonstrates how these disparate sites of performance cohere in the service of rights, justice, and activism.
Author : Paulla A. Ebron
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 264 pages
File Size : 30,84 MB
Release : 2009-04-11
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1400825210
The jali--a member of a hereditary group of Mandinka professional performers--is a charismatic but contradictory figure. He is at once the repository of his people's history, the voice of contemporary political authority, the inspiration for African American dreams of an African homeland, and the chief entertainment for the burgeoning transnational tourist industry. Numerous journalists, scholars, politicians, and culture aficionados have tried to pin him down. This book shows how the jali's talents at performance make him a genius at representation--the ideal figure to tell us about the "Africa" that the world imagines, which is always a thing of illusion, magic, and contradiction. Africa often enters the global imagination through news accounts of ethnic war, famine, and despotic political regimes. Those interested in countering such dystopic images--be they cultural nationalists in the African diaspora or connoisseurs of "global culture"--often found their representations of an emancipatory Africa on an enthusiasm for West African popular culture and performance arts. Based on extensive field research in The Gambia and focusing on the figure of the jali, Performing Africa interrogates these representations together with their cultural and political implications. It explores how Africa is produced, circulated, and consumed through performance and how encounters through performance create the place of Africa in the world. Innovative and discerning, Performing Africa is a provocative contribution to debates over cultural nationalism and the construction of identity and history in Africa and elsewhere.
Author : Joyce Scott
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 32,73 MB
Release : 2024-04-02
Category : Art
ISBN : 0300276206
"This essential retrospective of genre-defying artist and MacArthur Fellow Joyce J. Scott (b. 1948) showcases her expansive and versatile career. From early textiles and wearables, to performances and public artworks, to celebrated beaded sculptures and signature necklaces, her innovative oeuvre centers on the ancient, global technologies of needle and thread, beadwork, salvage, song, and storytelling. Interviews with Scott and essays from an extraordinary group of artists and scholars explore this dynamic practice, rooted in place, community, and intergenerational knowledge. Extensive new photography and rich archival images reveal a dazzling, provocative body of work that makes difficult subjects intimately felt, confronting racism, sexism, classism, ableism, and histories of trauma through wearable art and exquisite sculpture. With humor and pathos, Scott twists menacing stereotypes into grotesque and tender retorts that spur conversation and reflection, grief and laughter, learning and healing."--Back cover.
Author : Judith Hamera
Publisher : SAGE
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 28,65 MB
Release : 2006
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 1412905583
Opening Acts: Performance in/as Communication and Cultural Criticism offers new, rigorous ways to analyze communication and culture through performance. Editor Judith Hamera, along with a distinguished list of contributors, provides students with cutting-edge readings of everyday life, space, history, and intersections of all three, using a critical performance-based approach. This text makes three significant contributions to the field - it familiarizes readers with the core elements and commitments of performance-based analysis, links performance-based analysis to theoretical and analytical perspectives in communication and cultural studies, and provides engaging examples of how to use performance as a critical tool to open up communication and culture. offers new, rigorous ways to analyze communication and culture through performance. Editor Judith Hamera, along with a distinguished list of contributors, provides students with cutting-edge readings of everyday life, space, history, and intersections of all three, using a critical performance-based approach. This text makes three significant contributions to the field - it familiarizes readers with the core elements and commitments of performance-based analysis, links performance-based analysis to theoretical and analytical perspectives in communication and cultural studies, and provides engaging examples of how to use performance as a critical tool to open up communication and culture.
