This collection of essays on politics, the performing arts, and various forms of activist performance uses the framework of performance studies to explore the engagements of political resistance, public practice and performance media. It places these engagements on various scales of performance production within local, national and transnational structures of neoliberal and liberal government and power. Performance has always been a way of articulating the conditions of contemporary society, and of pointing through the body of the performance to ways of defining, understanding and changing those conditions. Throughout these essays performance takes place in the environments of heightened everyday action, the aesthetic and cultural activity of the performing arts, and in the activist performance of political commitment. These trajectories in performance studies delineate the way people identify themselves and communicate with one another, both in attempts to change the structures of governance they experience, and vitally, alongside those structures
Introduction; Lynette Hunter -- PART I: EXPANDING THE POLITICAL WITH PERFORMANCE -- 1. Performance and Language Diversity in a Globalizing World; Moradewun Adejunmobi -- 2. Zooming In and Out: Tactical Media Performance in Transnational Contexts; Marcela Fuentes -- 3. The Role of Theatre in the Breaking and Making of Two African Nations: Ethiopia and Eritrea, 1916-2011; Jane Plastow -- 4. For the Eyes of the Dear Father: Staging National Unity in the North Korean Arirang Festival; Suk-Young Kim -- 5. The Emaciated Spectator and the Witness of the Powerless; Alan Read -- PART II: DISTURBING THE POLITICAL WITH PERFORMANCE -- 6. 'Asking, We Walk'; Susan Kelly -- 7. Colour Blind: Seeing Difference, Performing Sightlessness; Patrick Anderson -- 8. Constellation: Engaging with Radical Devised Dance Theatre ₆ Keith Hennessy's Sol Niger; Lynette Hunter -- 9. Glocalqueer Pink Activism; Eng-Beng Lim -- 10. The Palestinian State of Emergency and the Art Practice of Emily Jacir; Stephen Morton -- PART III: CRITIQUING THE POLITICAL WITH PERFORMANCE -- 11. Raw Life and the Ruse of Empathy; Frank Wilderson III -- 12. Siting Geography: Octavio Solis and the Circulation of Performance; Jon Rossini -- 13. Peter Sellars's Changing Conceptions of the Audience in Productions of Three Greek Plays; Peter Lichtenfels -- 14. Kleenex Citizens and the Performance of Undisposability; Shannon Jackson
Includes bibliographical references (p. 253-262) and index
