Performing Ruins

Download or read book Performing Ruins written by Simon Murray and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-08-17 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book engages with the relationship between ruins, dilapidation, and abandonment and cultural events performed within such spaces. Following the author’s fieldwork in the UK, Bosnia Herzegovina, Poland, Germany, Greece, and Sicily, chapters describe, investigate, and reflect upon live performance events which have taken place in sites of decay and abandonment. The book’s main focus is upon modern economic ruins and ruins of warfare. Each chapter provides several case studies based upon the author’s own site visits and interviews with actors, directors, producers, curators, writers, and other artists. The book contextualises these events within the wider framework of Ruin Studies and provides brief summaries of how we might understand the ruin in terms of time, politics, culture, and atmospheres. The book is particularly preoccupied with artists’ reasons and motivations for placing performance events in ruined spaces and how these work dramaturgically.

Download or read book Telling Ruins in Latin America written by M. Lazzara and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-07-20 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book highlights the ruin's prolific resurgence in Latin American cultural life at the turn of the millennium and sharply reveals a stirring creative drive by artists and intellectuals toward ethical reflection and change in the midst of ruinous devastation.

Download or read book Ruins in the Literary and Cultural Imagination written by Efterpi Mitsi and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-11-28 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on literal and metaphorical ruins, as they are appropriated and imagined in different forms of writing. Examining British and American literature and culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the book begins in the era of industrial modernity with studies of Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Henry James and Daphne Du Maurier. It then moves on to the significance of ruins in the twentieth century, against the backdrop of conflict, waste and destruction, analyzing authors such as Beckett and Pinter, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton and Leonard Cohen. The collection concludes with current debates on ruins, through discussions of Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, as well as reflections on the refugee crisis that take the ruin beyond the text, offering new perspectives on its diverse legacies and conceptual resources.

Download or read book Ruins and Rivals written by James E. Snead and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2004-02-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University Ruins are as central to the image of the American Southwest as are its mountains and deserts, and antiquity is a key element of modern southwestern heritage. Yet prior to the mid-nineteenth century this rich legacy was largely unknown to the outside world. While military expeditions first brought word of enigmatic relics to the eastern United States, the new intellectual frontier was seized by archaeologists, who used the results of their southwestern explorations to build a foundation for the scientific study of the American past. In Ruins and Rivals, James Snead helps us understand the historical development of archaeology in the Southwest from the 1890s to the 1920s and its relationship with the popular conception of the region. He examines two major research traditions: expeditions dispatched from the major eastern museums and those supported by archaeological societies based in the Southwest itself. By comparing the projects of New York's American Museum of Natural History with those of the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles and the Santa Fe-based School of American Archaeology, he illustrates the way that competition for status and prestige shaped the way that archaeological remains were explored and interpreted. The decades-long competition between institutions and their advocates ultimately created an agenda for Southwest archaeology that has survived into modern times. Snead takes us back to the days when the field was populated by relic hunters and eastern "museum men" who formed uneasy alliances among themselves and with western boosters who used archaeology to advance their own causes. Richard Wetherill, Frederic Ward Putnam, Charles Lummis, and other colorful characters all promoted their own archaeological endeavors before an audience that included wealthy patrons, museum administrators, and other cultural figures. The resulting competition between scholarly and public interests shifted among museum halls, legislative chambers, and the drawing rooms of Victorian America but always returned to the enigmatic ruins of Chaco Canyon, Bandelier, and Mesa Verde. Ruins and Rivals contains a wealth of anecdotal material that conveys the flavor of digs and discoveries, scholars and scoundrels, tracing the origins of everything from national monuments to "Santa Fe Style." It rekindles the excitement of discovery, illustrating the role that archaeology played in creating the southwestern "past" and how that image of antiquity continues to exert its influence today.

Download or read book Archaeology of the Political Unconscious written by Jennifer Williams and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-09-03 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the aesthetic and political dialectics of East Berlin to argue how its theater and opera stages incited artists to act out, fuel, and resist the troubled construction of political legitimacy. This volume investigates three case studies of how leading East Berlin stages excavated fragmentary materials from Weimar dramatist Bertolt Brecht’s oeuvre and repurposed them for their post‐fascist society: Uta Birnbaum’s 1967 Man Equals Man at the Berliner Ensemble, Joachim Herz’s 1977 Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny at the Komische Oper, and Heiner Muller’s own productions of his trailblazing plays. In each instance, reused theatrical artifacts dialectically expressed the contradictions inherent in East German political legitimacy, at once amplifying and critiquing it. Illuminated by original archival research and translations of letters and artistic ephemera published in English for the first time, and engaging with alternative East German feminist epistemologies, this book’s critical investigation of culture and political legitimacy in the shadow of Germany’s fascist past resonates beyond the Iron Curtain into the twenty‐first century. Its final chapter examines how performative artifacts influence the process of political legitimation in more recent history, ranging from Checkpoint Charlie tourism to the January 6, 2021 US insurrection. This study will be of great interest to students and scholars in theater and performance studies, art history, musicology, German studies, anthropology, and political science.

Download or read book Latin American Literature at the Millennium written by Cecily Raynor and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-16 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Latin American Literature at the Millennium studies canonical and peripheral literary texts that complicate links between locality and geographical place, revealing new configurations of the local. It explores the region's transition into the twenty-first century and evaluates Latin American authors' reconciliation of conflicting forces in their construction of everyday places and modes of belonging.

Download or read book Performing Utopias in the Contemporary Americas written by Kim Beauchesne and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-05-09 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an innovative examination of the utopian impulse through performance as a proposition of practical engagement in the contemporary Americas. The volume compiles unique multidisciplinary and exploratory texts, applying diverse critical and artistic approaches. Its contributors reconceptualize utopia as a creative and theoretical method based on a commitment to sociopolitical transformation. Chapters are organized around notions of mapping utopias, indigenizing practices, political manifestations, and the construction of social identities.