Performing objects and theatrical things
By: Edited by Marlis Schweitzer and Joanne Zerdy
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2014
Place of publication: Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York, NY
Language: eng
Number of pages: 264
ISBN-13: 9781137402448
Subjects: Theater; Philosophy; Material culture; Historiography; Symbolic anthropology; PERFORMING ARTS / Theater / History & Criticism
Description: "Performing Objects and Theatrical Things rethinks historical and contemporary theatre, performance, and cultural events from the perspective of the objects and things that activate stages, venues, environments, and archives. Embracing methodologies from across the humanities and social sciences, we understand physical materials as actants, with particular frequencies, energies, and potentials to affect human and nonhuman worlds. The texts, stage properties, instruments, costumes, photographs, and detritus that animate this collection emerge from the thirteenth- to the twenty-first century, traversing sites across Europe and North America. Challenging anthropocentric narratives that foreground humans as sole agents, our authors present object and 'thingcentric' methodologies that range from deeply personal autoethnographic reflections and close textual readings to carefully researched archival studies and rhizomatic explorations of an object's journey from one place and time to another"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 241-259) and index.
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note:; title: Introduction: Object Lessons; Marlis Schweitzer and Joanne ZerdyPART I: ARCHIVAL DIGS1. Technology and Wonder in Thirteenth-Century Iberia and Beyond; Christopher Swift2. 'Nothing but a string of beads': Maud Allan's Salome; Costume as a 'choreographic thing'; Marlis Schweitzer3. Cartomania and the Scriptive Album: Cartes-de-Visite as Objects of Social Practice; Nicole Berkin4. The Linguistic Animation of an American Yorick; Lezlie C. Cross5. House Arrest: Museological Performance and the Everyday; Margaret WerryPART II: EMBODIED RESEARCH PRACTICES6. The Unfolding Roles of a Walking Map within NVA's Half Life; Joanne Zerdy7. Military Memorialization and its Object(s) of Period Purification; Helene Vosters8. Entided, Enwatered, Enwinded: Human/More-than-Human Agencies in Site-specific Performance; Minty DonaldPART III: MATERIALIST SEMIOTICS9. 'All Transparent': Pepper's Ghost, Plate Glass, and Theatrical Transformation; Aileen Robinson10. Que(e)rying Theatrical Objects; Benjamin Gillespie11. Making the Invisible Visible: Virtual Stage Props and Christopher Marlowe's Dr Faustus; Joanne Tompkins12. Relic, Souvenir, or Just Hair?: Exploring the Complexities of Objects as Actants and Things as Mementos in the Merchandise of El Vez, The Mexican Elvis; Karen Jean MartinsonPART IV: EXCAVATING BETWEEN THE LINES13. Props Breaking Character: The Performance and Failure of Real Objects on the Naturalist Stage; Kee-Yoon Nahm14. Bodied Objects: An Analysis of the Whip in George Aiken's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Matthew Lopez's The Whipping Man; Chandra Owenby Hopkins15. Translocalized Drums: Mobilizing the Intercultural in the Cantares Mexicanos; Leo Cabranes-GrantEndnotesWorks CitedIndex.