How might performance serve as a means for facing ubiquitous trauma and pain, in humans and ecologies? While reflecting on her multidisciplinary work Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience, artist Meghan Moe Beitiks considers bodies of knowledge in Trauma Theory, Intersectional Feminist Philosophy, Ecology, Disability Studies, New Materialism, Object-Oriented Ontology, Gender Studies, Artistic Research, Psychology, Performance Studies, Social Justice, Performance Philosophy, Performance Art, and a series of first-person interviews in an attempt to answer that question. Beitiks brings us through the first-person process of making the work and the real-life, embodied encounters with the theories explored within it as an expansion of the work itself. Facing down difficult issues like trauma, discrimination, and the vulnerability of the body, Beitiks looks to commonalities across species and disciplines as means of developing resilience and cultivating communities. Rather than paint a picture of glorious potential utopias, Beitiks takes a hard look at herself as an embodiment of the values explored in the work, and stays with the difficult, sucky, troubling, work to be done. Performing Resilience for Systemic Pain is a vulnerable book about the quiet presence and hard looking needed to shift systems away from their oppressive, destructive realities.

Pandemic Performance chronicles the many ways that people are surviving/thriving through performance in a global pandemic. Covering artists and events from across the United States: from New York to California and from South Dakota to Texas, the chapters are equal parts theory and practice, weaving scholarship with personal experience from contributors who are interdisciplinary artists, scholars, journalists, and community organizers providing unique and invaluable perspectives on the complicated work of resilience during COVID-19. This study will hold interest for students and scholars in the performing arts, arts, and social justice as well as professional artmakers and creative community organizers.

This collection uncovers connections and coincidences that challenge the old stories of pioneering performers who crossed the Atlantic and Pacific oceans from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. It investigates songlines, drama, opera, music theatre, dance, and circus—removing traditional boundaries that separate studies of performance, and celebrating difference and transformation in style, intention, and delivery. Well known, or obscure, travelling performers faced dangers at sea and hazardous journeys across land. Their tracks, made in pursuit of fortune and fame, intersected with those made by earlier storytellers in search for food. Touring Performance and Global Exchange takes a fresh look at such tracks—the material remains—demonstrating that moving performance does far more than transfer repertoires and people; it transforms them. Touring performance has too often beenconceived in diasporic terms, as a fixed product radiating out from a cultural centre. This collection maps different patterns—ones that comprise reversed flows, cross currents, and continually proliferating centres of meaning in complex networks of global exchange. This collection will be of great interest to scholars and students in theatre, music, drama studies, and cultural history.

This research project investigates the concepts of absence across the disciplines of theatre, visual art, and performance. Absence in the centre of an ideology frees the reader from the dominant meaning. The book encourages active engagement with theatre theory and performances. Reconsideration of theories and experiences changes the way we engage with performances, as well as social relations and traditions outside of theatre. Sylwia Dobkowska examines and theorises absence and presence through theatre, performance, and visual arts practices. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre, visual art, and philosophy.

This book discusses the evolution of Commedia dell’Arte in the Asia-Pacific where through the process of reinvention and recreation it has emerged as a variety of hybrids and praxes, all in some ways faithful to the recreated European genre. The contributors in this collection chart their own training in the field and document their strategies for engaging with this form of theatre. In doing so, this book examines the current thoughts, ideas, and perceptions of Commedia – a long-standing theatre genre, originating in a European-based collision between neo-classical drama and oral tradition. The contributing artists, directors, teachers, scholars and theatre-makers give insight into working styles, performance ideas, craft techniques and ways to engage an audience for whom Commedia is not part of their day-to-day culture. The volume presents case studies by current practitioners, some who have trained under known Commedia ‘masters’ (e.g. Lecoq, Boso, Mazzone-Clementi and Fava) and have returned to their country of origin where they have developed their performance and teaching praxis, and others (e.g. travelling from Europe to Japan, Thailand, Singapore and China) who have discovered access points to share or teach Commedia in places where it was previously not known. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in Performing arts, Italian studies, and History as well as practitioners in Commedia dell’Arte.

This book offers a broad, comprehensive overview of the contemporary state of the Gardzienice theatrical company and its evolution. Their most recent production, The Wedding, is taken as a focal point for a retrospective discussion on the company’s development. Premiered at the festival celebrating the 40th anniversary of the company, The Wedding echoes most of the major achievements of Staniewski’s stage language and his capacity of exploring and developing the performative potential of liveness. This study consists of essays by prominent practitioners and theoreticians of theatre, director’s notes, conversations with Staniewski and other company members, selected archival materials and substantial visual coverage. It promises to be of great interest to students and scholars across the fields of theatre and performance studies.

Tango and the Dancing Body in Istanbul explores the expansion of social Argentine tango dancing among Muslim actors in Turkey, pioneered in Istanbul despite the conservative rule of the Justice and Development Party (JDP) and Tayyip Erdoğan. In this book, Melin Levent Yuna questions why a dance that appears to publicly represent an erotic relationship finds space to expand and increase dramatically in the number of contemporary Turkish Muslim tango dancers, particularly during a conservative rule. Even during the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, tango dance classes, gatherings, and messages flourished on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Zoom. Urban Turkey and its tango dance performances provide one symbol and example of how neoliberal capitalism could go hand in hand with conservatism by becoming a bridge between Europe and the Middle East. This study largely focuses on the dancers’ perspective while presenting the policies of Erdoğan. It presents the social characteristics of the tango dancers, the meanings they attach to their bodies and their dance as well as what this dance reflects about them – besides the policies of the Justice and Development Party. The book approaches the tango dance and its dancing body in terms of layers of meaning systems in a neoliberal and conservative context. This study will be of great interest to students and scholars in dance, anthropology, cultural studies, and performance studies.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • From authors of Lean In and Originals: a powerful, inspiring, and practical book about building resilience and moving forward after life’s inevitable setbacks After the sudden death of her husband, Sheryl Sandberg felt certain that she and her children would never feel pure joy again. “I was in ‘the void,’” she writes, “a vast emptiness that fills your heart and lungs and restricts your ability to think or even breathe.” Her friend Adam Grant, a psychologist at Wharton, told her there are concrete steps people can take to recover and rebound from life-shattering experiences. We are not born with a fixed amount of resilience. It is a muscle that everyone can build. Option B combines Sheryl’s personal insights with Adam’s eye-opening research on finding strength in the face of adversity. Beginning with the gut-wrenching moment when she finds her husband, Dave Goldberg, collapsed on a gym floor, Sheryl opens up her heart—and her journal—to describe the acute grief and isolation she felt in the wake of his death. But Option B goes beyond Sheryl’s loss to explore how a broad range of people have overcome hardships including illness, job loss, sexual assault, natural disasters, and the violence of war. Their stories reveal the capacity of the human spirit to persevere . . . and to rediscover joy. Resilience comes from deep within us and from support outside us. Even after the most devastating events, it is possible to grow by finding deeper meaning and gaining greater appreciation in our lives. Option B illuminates how to help others in crisis, develop compassion for ourselves, raise strong children, and create resilient families, communities, and workplaces. Many of these lessons can be applied to everyday struggles, allowing us to brave whatever lies ahead. Two weeks after losing her husband, Sheryl was preparing for a father-child activity. “I want Dave,” she cried. Her friend replied, “Option A is not available,” and then promised to help her make the most of Option B. We all live some form of Option B. This book will help us all make the most of it.

Female solo aerialists of the 1920s and early 1930s were internationally popular performers in the largest live performance mass entertainment of the period in the UK and USA. Yet these aerialists and this period in circus history have been largely forgotten despite the iconic image of ‘the’ female aerialist still flaring in the popular imagination. Kate Holmes uses insights gained as a practitioner to reconstruct in detail the British and American performances and public personae of key stars such as Lillian Leitzel, Luisita Leers, and the Flying Codonas, revealing what is performed and implicit in today’s practice. Using a wealth of original sources, this book considers the forgotten stars whose legacy of the cultural image of the female aerialist echoes. Locating performers within wider cultural histories of sport, glamour, and gender, this book asks important questions about their stardom, including: Why were female aerialists so alluring when their muscularity challenged conservative ideals of femininity and how did they participate in change? What was it about their movements and the spaces they performed in that activated such strong audience responses? This book is vital reading for students and practitioners of aerial performance, circus, gender, popular performance, and performance studies.

Home and Away explores how performative writing serve as a process that critically interrogates space/place in relation to personal, social, cultural, and political understanding. By combining aesthetic expression and inquiry with critical reflection, the contributors in this volume use a variety of narrative strategies—autoethnography, mystoriography, creative cartography, the lyric essay, fictocriticism, collage, the screenplay, and poetics—to position place as the starting point for the aesthetic impulse. The anthology showcases the power and potential of performative writing to illustrate the ways we interact with and in place; provides examples of the ways one can express lived experience; and demonstrates the ways discourses overlap while extending our understanding of identity and place, whether one is home or away. Although the chapters are fixed by their literary form in this volume, many of chapters are best realized in a performance or shared publicly via an oral tradition. This collection will be of great interest to students and scholars in performance, communication studies, and literature.