Vanguard Performance Beyond Left and Right challenges assumptions regarding “radical” and “experimental” performance that have long dominated thinking about the avant-garde. The book brings to light vanguard performances rarely discussed: those that support totalitarian regimes, promote conservative values, or have been effectively snapped up by right-wing regimes the performances intended to oppose. In so doing, the volume explores a central paradox: how innovative performances that challenge oppressive power structures can also be deployed in deliberate, passionate support of oppressive power. Essays by leading international scholars pose engaging questions about the historical avant-garde, vanguard acts, and the complex role of artistic innovation and live performance in global politics. Focusing on performances that work against progressive and democratic ideas (including scripted drama, staged suicide, choral dance, terrorism, rallies, and espionage), the book demonstrates how many compelling performance ideals—unification, exaltation, immersion—are, in themselves, neither moral nor immoral; they are only emotional and aesthetic urges that can be powerfully channeled into a variety of social and political outlets.

Vanguard Performance Beyond Left and Right challenges assumptions regarding “radical” and “experimental” performance that have long dominated thinking about the avant-garde. The book brings to light vanguard performances rarely discussed: those that support totalitarian regimes, promote conservative values, or have been effectively snapped up by right-wing regimes the performances intended to oppose. In so doing, the volume explores a central paradox: how innovative performances that challenge oppressive power structures can also be deployed in deliberate, passionate support of oppressive power. Essays by leading international scholars pose engaging questions about the historical avant-garde, vanguard acts, and the complex role of artistic innovation and live performance in global politics. Focusing on performances that work against progressive and democratic ideas (including scripted drama, staged suicide, choral dance, terrorism, rallies, and espionage), the book demonstrates how many compelling performance ideals—unification, exaltation, immersion—are, in themselves, neither moral nor immoral; they are only emotional and aesthetic urges that can be powerfully channeled into a variety of social and political outlets.

Illustrates how theatre's engagement with politics changes over time

DIVA radical re-thinking of one of the most canonized figures in theater history, theory, and practice/div

Theatre History Studies (THS) is a peer-reviewed journal of theatre history and scholarship published annually since 1981 by the Mid-America Theatre Conference THEATRE HISTORY STUDIES, VOLUME 37 STEFAN AQUILINA Meyerhold and The Revolution: A Reading through Henri Lefebvre’s Theories on “Everyday Life” VIVIAN APPLER “Shuffled Together under the Name of a Farce”: Finding Nature in Aphra Behn’s The Emperor of the Moon KRISTI GOOD Kate Soffel’s Life of Crime: A Gendered Journey from Warden’s Wife to Criminal Actress PETER A. CAMPBELL Staging Ajax’s Suicide: A Historiography BRIAN E. G. COOK Rousing Experiences: Theatre, Politics, and Change MEGAN LEWIS Until You See the Whites of Their Eyes: Brett Bailey’s Exhibit B and the Consequences of Staging the Colonial Gaze PATRICIA GABORIK Taking the Theatre to the People: Performance Sponsorship and Regulation in Mussolini’s Italy ILINCA TODORUT AND ANTHONY SORGE To Image and to Imagine: Walid Raad, Rabih Mouré, and the Arab Spring SHULAMITH LEV-ALADGEM Where Has the Political Theatre in Israel Gone? Rethinking the Concept of Political Theatre Today CHRISTINE WOODWORTH “Equal Rights By All Means!”: Beatrice Forbes-Robertson’s 1910 Suffrage Matinee and the Onstage Junction of the US And UK Franchise Movements LURANA DONNELS O’MALLEY “Why I Wrote the Phyllis Wheatley Pageant-Play”: Mary Church Terrell’s Bicentennial Activism JULIET GUZZETTA The Lasting Theatre of Dario Fo and Franca Rame ASHLEY E. LUCAS Chavez Ravine: Culture Clash and the Political Project of Rewriting History NOE MONTEZ The Heavy Lifting: Resisting the Obama Presidency’s Neoliberalist Conceptions of the American Dream in Kristoffer Diaz’s The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity

Explores how women playwrights illuminate the contemporary world and contribute to its reshaping

Throughout her extraordinary career, Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter has always pushed the boundaries through her high-level field research, and her breakthrough ideas with practical applications for a broad audience. One of the world's bestselling business thinkers, her work on leadership and change management has influenced the most enlightened and successful executives and entrepreneurs. Supercorp, based on a three-year worldwide research program, provides the answer to a question crucial to both business and society more broadly: as a company grows, how can it avoid becoming a lumbering, corrupt giant? Companies such as IBM, Procter & Gamble, Mexican-based Cemex and Japanese-based Omron provide the models that businesses small and large can use to stay on track, outstrip the competition, and attract and motivate the new generation of talent. And, Professor Kanter provides the evidence of the powerful synergy between the financial success shareholders want and social conscience - it is only these 'vanguard companies' that are big but human, efficient but innovative, global but local, that will succeed in the future.

Almost without exception, studies of the avant-garde take for granted the premise that the influential experimental practices associated with the avant-garde began primarily as a European phenomenon that in turn spread around the world. These ten original essays, especially commissioned for Not the Other Avant-Garde, forge a radically new conception of the avant-garde by demonstrating the many ways in which the first- and second-wave avant-gardes were always already a transnational phenomenon, an amalgam of often contradictory performance traditions and practices developed in various cultural locations around the world, including Africa, the Middle East, Mexico, Argentina, India, and Japan. Essays from leading scholars and critics-including Marvin Carlson, Sudipto Chatterjee, John Conteh-Morgan, Peter Eckersall, Harry J. Elam Jr., Joachim Fiebach, David G. Goodman, Jean Graham-Jones, Hannah Higgins, and Adam Versényi-suggest collectively that the very concept of the avant-garde is possible only if conceptualized beyond the limitations of Eurocentric paradigms. Not the Other Avant-Garde is groundbreaking in both avant-garde studies and performance studies and will be a valuable contribution to the fields of theater studies, modernist studies, art history, literature, and music history. "Joins the growing field of critical and transnational theories on the arts. . . its grounding in live performance and its foregrounding of the performative human body presents a new theoretical paradigm that is pathbreaking." --Haiping Yan, University of California, Los Angeles James M. Harding is Associate Professor of English at Mary Washington University. He is author of Adorno and "A Writing of the Ruins": Essays on Modern Aesthetics and Anglo-American Literature and Culture and editor of Contours of the Theatrical Avant-Garde: Performance and Textuality. John Rouse is Associate Professor of Theater at the University of California, San Diego. He is author of Brecht and the West German Theatre.