Performance Ethnography

BOOK REVIEW of Ethnographically Speaking: Autoethnography, Literature, and Aesthetics

by Thalia Mulvihill

Initial Work on the Malta Music Memory Project - and its connections with Oral History

by Toni Sant

Published in Journal of Maltese History Volume 2, Number 2 (2011). pp. 42-50.

Two years after the publication of the author's preliminary plans to build a collaborative multimedia database of... more Two years after the publication of the author's preliminary plans to build a collaborative multimedia database of Maltese music and associated arts, this paper provides an assessment of what happened in the initial attempts to implement the plans in the original outline. The focus is primarily on the inaugural reach out activities around the Malta Music Memory Project (M3P), including an evolving series of oral history interviews. A number of significant research areas have became evidently the core points of interest, stemming from the broad critical issues identified in the original proposal for the project. These areas of research are gathered under two main keywords – memory and collaboration – each with its own related keywords. The paper indicates that M3P needs to develop a more systematic set of policies related to the recovery, preservation and dissemination of mediated memories.

Strategic performance management: A balanced approach to performance management issues in local government

by jackson ruaw

Miss Translation Goes to Cuba: Performance as Research toward a Performative Ethnography

by Shannon Rose Riley

Chapter published in _Mapping Landscapes for Performance as Research: Scholarly Acts and Creative Cartographies_, Eds. S. Riley and L. Hunter. New York and Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 214-222.

Johnny Saldaña, ed. Ethnodrama: An Anthology of Reality Theatre.

by Mia Perry

A Conversation with Anna Deavere Smith

by Heidi Rose

published in TEXT AND PERFORMANCE QUARTERLY, 31.4, 2011

The Prun Festival of the Birir Valley, Northern Pakistan, in 2006

by Pierpaolo Di Carlo

Un'antropologa nel backstage

by Cristina Balma Tivola

2008, unprinted, licensed under CC3.0.

An eploration of my seven years fieldwork among a cross-cultural theatre company for my PhD dissertation in... more An eploration of my seven years fieldwork among a cross-cultural theatre company for my PhD dissertation in Anthropology of Contemporary World and Performance Studies - developing my personal approach to research, data gathering and their interpretation.

Talking Back to Scripted Curricula: A critical performance ethnography with teachers’ collective narratives

by Jessica Nina Lester

Co-authored with Evans, K., & Brommel, A.

Dissertation Abstract

by Ivone Barriga

CFP: The Audience Through Time

by Christine Twite

A conference fostering an interdisciplinary dialogue around spectatorship, keynote Tracy C. Davis, http://theaudiencethroughtime.wordpress.com

Call For Papers: The Audience Through Time Conference

Keynote Speaker: Professor Tracy C. Davis, Barber... more Call For Papers: The Audience Through Time Conference

Keynote Speaker: Professor Tracy C. Davis, Barber Professor of Performing Arts, Northwestern University

Saturday December 3rd 2011

9am - 6.30pm (followed by drinks reception)

Arts Building, Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End, E1 4NS

CFP Deadline: September 16th 2011

How have audiences changed through time? Can contemporary theatre spectatorship inform how we understand audiences throughout history? How does historiographic research on audiences relate to present cultures of spectatorship? Using theatre as the core, but not only, focus of discussion, this conference will consider spectatorship across history.

Aims:
- To institute an interdisciplinary dialogue around audiences and spectatorship, particularly in relation to theatre.
- To bring together those who specialise in historiographical audience research with scholars of the contemporary.
- To look at the cultural construction of the audience across history from a variety of viewpoints, including the literary text.

Keynote Speaker: Professor Tracy C. Davis
Tracy C. Davis is a specialist in performance theory, theatre historiography, and research methodology. She edits the book series Cambridge Studies in Theatre and Performance Theory.

Chairperson: Dr Bridget Escolme
Bridget Escolme researches and teaches historical theatre and its contemporary production, particularly early modern drama and the ways in which original and current staging practices produce space and subjectivity.

Examples Papers:
- The female spectator in the eighteenth-century theatrical space
- A "Classic repeat" Audience?: Ibsen's Ghosts or Those Who Return and contemporary cultures of spectatorship

If you have a paper which you'd like to be considered please read the following, put the required information into a word document, attach and send to theaudiencethroughtime@hotmail.co.uk by September 16th

* Please submit your abstracts (500 words maximum) with a 50 word summary of the abstract.
* Papers should be 20 minutes long, and will be followed by 10 minutes of questions.
* Powerpoint and other AV resources are available; please state clearly the technical requirements of your paper.
* Please include a biography (up to 50 words, including your contact website/email if you wish), your full name, title, area of research and institution of study.
* If you have any further questions, please do also contact us on the above email.
* Please also see our website, theaudiencethroughtime.wordpress.com. If you would like your details to be included on our website (such as personal blog, academia.edu profile etc) please send us any relevant information.

On-line registration for the conference will open in August, please check our website for more details.

All the best,
Anna Kretschmer and Christine Twite
English and Drama Department, Queen Mary, University of London
theaudiencethroughtime@hotmail.co.uk

http://theaudiencethroughtime.wordpress.com

Performing (Dis)Ability in the Classroom: Pedagogy and (Con)Tensions

by Kurt Lindemann

Text and Performance Quarterly, Volume 31, Issue 3, 2011, Pages 285 - 302

Disability has become a pervasive and contested issue on college campuses, and instructors and students find... more Disability has become a pervasive and contested issue on college campuses, and instructors and students find themselves occupying physical and discursive spaces that hold great pedagogical potential. This essay pursues such a consideration. It examines one physically disabled student's staged performances of a personal narrative, her ethnography of a university's disabled student services office, an in-depth interview with the student, and the author's family experiences with disability to illustrate the ways a performative pedagogy offers insight into (dis)ability in the classroom. The analysis illuminates the classroom as a site for identity negotiation, performance as a tool to deconstruct and reconstruct notions of ability, and family relationships as an integral part of a critical communication pedagogy.

'In Repose': a photo-essay

by Mayu Kanamori

Performing the North: Folk culture, exotism and irony among expatriates

by Kristinn Schram

Að innbyrða útrásina

by Kristinn Schram

Shifting identities: A comparative study of Basque and Western cultural conceptualizations

by Roslyn Frank

Another paper in the series “Hunting the European Sky Bears”.

Full citation reference:

Frank, Roslyn M. 2005. “Shifting identities: A comparative study of Basque and Western cultural conceptualizations.” Cahiers of the Association for French Language Studies 11 (2): 1-54. Also available online at: http://www.afls.net/cahiers/11.2/frank.pdf

The paper analyzes two contrasting sets of cultural conceptualizations. One centers around the complementary opposition of the colours 'black vs. red' represented by cognitive frames of traditional Basque thought and performance art while the other set is the deeply rooted hierarchical opposition of 'black vs. white', embedded in Western thought.

As is well known, the Western worldview brings into play an extended colour-coded cultural model known as the Great... more As is well known, the Western worldview brings into play an extended colour-coded cultural model known as the Great Chain of Being, grounded in a mutually exclusive, asymmetric opposition between ‘black’ and ‘white’. In contrast, the Basque model introduces complementary colour-coded oppositions consisting of ‘black’ and ‘red’. The Basque dataset model should not be understood as merely some kind of inversion of the Western one, but rather as being composed of a radically different set of cognitive alignments. Nonetheless, there are junctures where the reader may be able to identify a certain overlap between the component parts of the two systems. Moreover, in the case of the Basque model it is clear that these alignments harken back to earlier indigenous pan-European beliefs in the efficacy of the colour black, its intrinsic epistemological grounding in notions of fecundity and wholeness as well as the positive role of black animals in general.

So far our provisional research results argue for the following scenario: that in the case of Europe the powerful life-giving and protecting characteristics associated previously with the colour black have been distorted, although not totally eradicated from the consciousness of Europeans, in part because of the influence of the Catholic Church and the Inquisitional authorities. The task of countering black’s positive polarity was central to the Church’s efforts to win converts. Given that the colour black was a key component in the competing eco-centric cosmology, attempts to assign a different value to it constituted an assault on one of the principle tenets of the indigenous interpretative grid. The fact that the colour black continues to have a highly charged aura about it – the sudden appearance of a black cat still generates a certain level of uneasiness in modern urban dwellers – testifies to the resilient nature of the older eco-centric cosmology: it has not been forgotten.

In contrast to the hierarchical anthropocentric cultural model encountered in and propagated by the ontological metaphors encountered in the Western dataset, we allege that those found in the Basque dataset derive their vitality from this earlier pan-European eco-centric cosmology, grounded in a different myth of origins, namely, in the belief that humans descend from bears. Reflexes of the belief in the sacredness of bears are still encountered in the rich folkloric traditions and practices of Euskal Herria.

'Mirrored Asylum: Reflections on Naming, Home and Subjectivity In Ireland

by Sara McKinnon

Habilidades creativas invisibles en danza: una etnografía del habitus coreográfico/ Invisible Skill in Dance: an ethnography of the choreographical habitus

by Dafne Muntanyola-Saura

Draft Only, to be presented at the Congreso Español de Sociologia Pamplona 2010.

A visual ethongraphy of teh creative process of a new choreography gives us an insight onto the creative process of... more A visual ethongraphy of teh creative process of a new choreography gives us an insight onto the creative process of the choreographer, as well as the dancers of an elite dance company. In a society that attaches particular value to abstractand verbal  knowledge, the details of practices become secondary. The dancer's skill doesn not take part in the legitimate knowledge in the artistic field.  The social construction of habitus as a discursive and/or abstract product exclusive to teh coreographer resultrs in simplified explanations of skill. Nevertheless, our sociological analysis does not fall into the phenomenological temptation of defining dance as a universalization of experience. We pinpoint two creative phenomena from the dancers' activity: marking and physical position in space. In all, an analysis with ELAN visual software of the observations and interviews with the company makes visible the hidden social dimension of the rehearsed creative process.

performing english: an autoethnography of a postcolonial first language

by hari stephen kumar

Draft only: Conference paper presented at the International Congress for Qualitative Inquiry, Urbana-Champaign, May 2010.

In this performance autoethnography I invite us toward decolonizing the disparate narrative connections between... more In this performance autoethnography I invite us toward decolonizing the disparate narrative connections between colonial constructions of English as First/Foreign/Second Language and their implications for postcolonial subjects navigating transnational citizenships. I trouble the intersections of nationalism with masculinity involved in my lived experiences navigating the powerful linguistic identities in between communities for whom English fluency is a mark of treachery to one’s “mother tongue.” Speaking from an acknowledged position of unspeakable privilege accessed by performances of hegemonic complicity, I seek to disrupt the stability of multiple subject positions through an always moving polyvocal co-performance text.

'Living In the Light'and Island Dance: Morality and Temporality In Warraber Christianities

by Julie Lahn