Performance Theory

The Medium on the Stage: Trance and Performance in Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism

by Simone Natale

Early Popular Visual Culture 9.3 (2011): 239-255

Free download in the Francis&Taylor site (only available for a limited time):
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/gqUsqrF3zfVir2srnGYS/full

While historians of spiritualism have been eager to focus on its political and social implications, less attention has... more While historians of spiritualism have been eager to focus on its political and social implications, less attention has been given to the fact that spirit communication was also a matter of visual spectacle. This article aims to analyse spiritualist séances as a form of spectacular entertainment. Relying on a wide array of spiritualist sources, it argues that séances were meant not only as moments of religious and scientific inquiry, but also as a brilliant amusement where theatrical effects embellished an exciting shared experience. The intermingling of religion and entertainment can thus be seen as one of the defining characteristics of the spiritualist experience. After sketching the history of the presence of spiritualist mediums on the stage and discussing the involvement of professionalism in mediumship, the article will then focus on the trance as a specific performance strategy. It will examine how the trance combined issues of automatism, theatricality and absorption, and contributed to the coexistence in spirit séances of spectacular features and claims of authenticity.

The Performative Body: Symbolic Interactionism, Dramaturgy, Affect, and the Sociology of the Body

by Phillip Vannini

Co-authored with Dennis Waskul, forthcoming in the Handbook of Dramaturgy, edited by Charles Edgley (Ashgate, 2013)

Haunting Technologies: Performing Memories of Place Through Effervescent Mobilities

by Phillip Vannini

Co-authored with Rhys Evans.

See accompanying multimedia essay here: See accompanying multimedia essay here: http://ferrytales.innovativeethnographies.net/content/ghosts-sailings-past

The Shadow of Don Alonso: Staging Ghosts in the Comedia

by Laura Vidler

published in Critical reflections: essays on Golden Age Spanish literature in honor of James A. Parr . Ed. Amy Williamsen and Barbara Simerka . Bucknell UP: Lewisburg, PA, 2006, pp. 144-157. Print.

The" Severed Gate": staging the versality and (Im) permeability of the" Reja"

by Laura Vidler

published in Bulletin of the Comediantes, 2007, Vol 59(1), pp. 69-88. Print.

Bourdieu, Boswell and the Baroque Body: Cultural Choreography in 'Fuenteovejuna'

by Laura Vidler

published in Comedia Performance. 9.1 (2012). Print. 38-64

Revivalist Lamenting
 As Sacred Therapy: Contemporary Finnish Lament Training As Post-secular Healing Practice

by James Wilce

Presented at the International Conference on Religion, Healing, and Psychiatry, February 2012, Münster University

Like other European countries, contemporary Finland has witnessed an explosion of healing modalities designatable as... more Like other European countries, contemporary Finland has witnessed an explosion of healing modalities designatable as “New Age” (though not without profound controversy). My presentation focuses on Finnish courses in lament (wept song, tuneful weeping with words) that combine healing conceived along psychotherapeutic lines with lessons from the lament tradition of rural Karelia, a region some Finns regard as their cultural heartland. A primary goal of the paper is to explicate a concept of “authenticity” emerging in lament courses, in which disclosing the depths of one‘s feelings is supported not only by invoking “psy”- discourses of self-help, but also by construing the genuine emotional self-disclosure that characterizes neolamentation as a sacred activity and a vital contribution to the welfare of the Finnish people.

Self-Flagellation as Sanctification in the Roman Catholic Church’s Prelature of the Holy Cross and Opus Dei

by Andrew Nicholas Cirillo

Defining religious ritual as something that harbors faith more deeply through the practice of a dramatic, yet... more Defining religious ritual as something that harbors faith more deeply through the practice of a dramatic, yet spiritual act of gravity, we can see that corporal mortification is one way this can be done. The society of Opus Dei’s rituals of corporal mortification, and most specifically the one dealing with self-flagellation, is what I will put into the most careful consideration within this paper. In addition to the attention that the movie The Da Vinci Code has placed on Opus Dei, the overall action of corporal mortification can be seen by present society as appalling and outrageous. However, using the viewpoints and objectivities of such ritual explication as symbolism, performance theory and rite of passage, I argue that the ritual process of self-flagellation, specifically for the organization of Opus Dei, is one that fosters an ideal way to live, and one which fulfills the overall goal of life here on earth: sanctifying yourself and others to be closer to God.

Keywords: ritual, Opus Dei, corporal mortification, self-flagellation, symbolism, performance theory, rite of passage, sanctification

Practice Theory in Folklore and Folklife Studies

by Simon Bronner

Appeared in the journal FOLKLORE, vol. 123 (April 2012).

Circling the globe: International feminism reconsidered, 1920 to 1975

by Katie Oliviero

Co-authored with Ellen Dubois

Documentary in the Age of Digital Biopolitics: Catfish & the “Aesthetics of Amphibology”

by Gabriella Calchi-Novati

CINEMASCOPE-Indipendent Film Journal
year VIII ~ issue 17 ~ JANUARY-JUNE 2012

Performance-Philosophy: the philosophical turn in Performance Studies

by Laura Cull

Paper presented at Performing Research: Creative Exchanges conference at the Central School of Speech and Drama, London 19-20 January 2012

Martin Puchner’s The Drama of Ideas (2010), Freddie Rokem’s Philosophers and Thespians (2010), and Simon Bayly’s The... more Martin Puchner’s The Drama of Ideas (2010), Freddie Rokem’s Philosophers and Thespians (2010), and Simon Bayly’s The Pathognomy of Performance (2011) are only three recent publications that one could cite as evidence that the international field of Theatre and Performance Research is undergoing what we might call ‘a philosophical turn’: an intensification of its long-standing interest in and engagement with philosophy, as a source of diverse concepts, plural methods and multiple ontologies that can be productively explored in relation to performance.

But what is at stake in this turn? What relationship between performance and philosophy is being staged in this work? In this presentation, I will suggest that we need to move beyond the mere application of philosophy to performance, beyond an approach to philosophy determined by a pursuit of the next new and fashionable method of performance analysis. In particular, I will propose that our experiments with what I am calling ‘performance-philosophy’ need not begin with clear and distinct definitions of each term. We do not yet know what either performance or philosophy can do; it is precisely the indeterminacy of the distinction between the activities that we call ‘performance’ and ‘philosophy’ (as exposed in the ‘nonart’ of Allan Kaprow) that makes performance-philosophy an exciting prospect.

Ultimately, I will argue that the encounter between performance and philosophy is at its richest and most egalitarian if philosophy is willing to encounter performance as thinking, and as that which might extend what philosophy counts as thinking – a discussion that will also lead us to question the implications of the provocative idea that everything (not just the theatrical subject or philosophical mind) thinks. In this way, I hope to address not only the philosophical turn in performance, but also the non-philosophical turn in philosophy: the democratization of thought that has recently been called for by the French (non-) philosopher, François Laruelle. Non-philosophy will meet nonart, then – but as its equal, not as its illustration.

"Biopolitics on Screen": Aernout Mik's Moving-Image Installations

by Gabriella Calchi-Novati

Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image
Issue 2 - December 2011

’O’ Giglio e Paradiso’: Celebration and Identity in an Urban Ethnic Community

by Joseph Sciorra

Urban Resources 5.3 (1989), 15-20, 44-46.

Re: akt! Reconstruction, re-enactment, re-porting

by antonio caronia

'The Singing Vice: Music and Mischief in Early English Drama'

by Maura Giles-Watson

Early Theatre 12.2 (2009), 57-90.

A Cultural History of the Chinese Language

by Sharron Gu

This book has been released last week. You can order it directly from the publisher, McFarland Publishers 800-253-2187, Barnes and Nobles, or Amazon.com.

It is the first multimedia history of the Chinese language and also the first book that compares the history of... more It is the first multimedia history of the Chinese language and also the first book that compares the history of Chinese with Greek, Latin, English and Semitic languages

Between Identity and Agency in Ancient Egyptian Ritual

by Harold Hays

2009a
“Between Identity and Agency in Ancient Egyptian Ritual,” in R. Nyord and A. Kyølby, eds., Being in Ancient Egypt: Thoughts on Agency, Materiality and Cognition. Oxford: Archaeopress, pp. 15-30

Paper: Birth, Death, and Rebirth: Reconstruction of Architecture in Ruskin’s Writings

by Anuradha Chatterjee

Variations on Charisma: Shakespeare's Saintly, Villainous, and Lustful Leaders

by Madiha Hannachi