CTR 151, Summer 2012
This issue expands on Canadian formations of Performance Studies by connecting early work in the ethnography of performance with contemporary practices of performance ethnography. Researchers in folklore, anthropology, ethnomusicology, and communications drew on ethnographic methods initially to understand performance as the emergent, creative elaboration of tradition and repertoire, as an approach to a performer’s interactions with an audience, and to explore how cultural performance effects social change or maintains social order. Contemporary performance studies researchers have built on such uses of ethnography and integrated them with practice-based research and critical pedagogy. Contributions to this issue map these intellectual histories and show how researchers work with performance as an embodied way of knowing and as a means of representing ethnographic work. They share innovations in performance writing, collaborative fieldwork, and social or site-specific intervention. The issue demonstrates the transformative vitality of ethnographic practices in the analysis, devising, and pedagogy of performance.
Click here to read the introduction and view the table of contents.
Performing Arts Resources, Volume 28, draws together essays by forty historians researching in theatre, film, dance, music, and popular and cultural performance, who were given this direction: to focus on a personal experience with a “tyrannical” document from the archive, a document that would not allow for an otherwise apparent conclusion, that flew in the face of the evidence, or that carried embedded in it some aspect of an event that was incomprehensible, no matter how much additional research was brought to bear on it.
They were asked to reflect on the difficult balance sought among and between the historian’s respect for documentary evidence, the need to generate significance from it, and the natural-but-dangerous tendency to smooth out the rough edges of evidence.
We invite you to read the Introduction to the volume, as well as the Table of Contents. More about the volume can be found at http://www.tla-online.org/publications/par.html
INTRODUCTION
By Stephen Johnson
TABLE OF CONTENTS
As teachers of theatre history, theory, and performance theory and practice we engage in crucial public work: the training of future audiences. Our labour, every day, is social activism, whether we call it that or not. The latest issue of Canadian Theatre Review celebrates this work, and explores its challenges from multiple perspectives. [Read More]
Andrew Sofer, The Stage Life of Props. University of Michigan Press. 2003.
- John Bell. “The Stage Life of Props (review)”. TDR: The Drama Review 49.2(T186) (Summer 2005): 161-162. Available online [may require subscriber login]
- Michael M. Chemers. “The Stage Life of Props”. Theatre Survey. 45.2 (Nov 2004): 319. Available online [may require subscriber login]
- Heather May. “The Stage Life of Props. By Andrew Sofer. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. Pp. xiii + 278 + illus. $19.95 Pb”. Theatre Research International. 29:3 (October 2004): 289-290. Available online [may require subscriber login]
Bruce McConachie, Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
- Vanessa Ford. “Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre (review).” Theatre Journal 62.2 (2010): 303-304. Available online [may require subscriber login]
David Savran, Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class. University of Michigan Press, 2010.
- Randy Gener. “The Invention of American Drama”. American Theatre 26.10 (Dec 2009): 54-55. Available online [may require subscriber login]
- Mariis Schweitzer. “Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class”. The Journal of American History. 97.3 (Dec 2010): 844. Available online [may require subscriber login]
Diana Taylor and Sarah J. Townsend, eds. Stages of Conflict: A Critical Anthology of Latin American Theater and Performance. University of Michigan Press, 2008.
- Carla Beatriz Melo. “Stages of Conflict: A Critical Anthology of Latin American Theater and Performance (review).” Theatre Journal 61.3 (2009): 499-500. Available online [may require subscriber login]
- Jorge Huerta. “Stages of Conflict: A Critical Anthology of Latin American Theater and Performance.” Theatre History Studies 30 (2010): 254+. Available online [may require subscriber login]
Access the anthology’s accompanying website through www.hemisphericinstitute.org.
Erika Fisher-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. Routledge, 2008.
- Lisa Merrill. “The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics (review).” Modern Drama 52.4 (2009): 495-497. Available online [may require subscriber login]
Thomas Postlewait, The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography. Cambridge University Press, 2009.
- James Peck. “The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography (review).” Theatre Journal 62.2 (2010): 305-306. Available online [may require subscriber login]
Click below for info on the special issue of Canadian Theatre Review (#147, summer 2011), called “The Activist Classroom: Performance and Pedagogy,” edited by Kim Solga.
