Performance Studies

The current museographical approach seems to go towards a form of interdisciplinarity, which leverages the encounter between visual and performing arts. From the Tate Gallery in London to the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, this dialogue not only gives rise to aesthetic experiences but also defines new forms of exhibitions: choreographed exhibitions. Within a migration from the black box to the white cube, the theatrical body becomes a work of art, through a process of objectivation. Likewise, the exhibition space turns into a hybrid place of creation. Through a kind of ontological negotiation between different art languages, the beholder is thus called into question: his participation is choreographed, as well as the very act of observation.

This critical essay describes and demonstrates the uses and unique contributions of performative writing as a form of inquiry into the materialities and mobilities of sociocultural communicative phenom- ena. Embracing an Anzaldu an approach, the author utilizes Mesoamerican Aztec and Chicanx history, iconography, and mythos to argue for an ontological reimaging of where research should begin and end. As a methodological intervention, this article chal- lenges traditional impulses regarding where knowledge generation occurs, which knowledges are valid, and who counts as a valuable knowledge producer. By shifting genres, breaking grammatical rules, and creatively constructing poetics and rhythm (flor y canto), this “flight of the imagination” focuses on what Chicana, Latina, and indi- genous scholars have termed “fleshing the spirit” or “spiriting the flesh.” By embracing the soul work and spirituality of writing, this piece offers an art-based approach to methodological inquiry that functions as a sharp critique of the White capitalist cisheteropatriar- chal structure of higher education that maintains status quo under- standings of knowledge. When rerouting our methodological impulses toward a critical and decolonial telos and embracing the soul and spirit of performative writing, I argue that our first move must be to make an ontological shift in how we see the world and our place in it—we must begin and end with “theories in the flesh.”

A special issue of Studies in Musical Theatre offering a range of new critical perspectives on Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton, including:

“Is It Like a Beat Without a Melody?”: Rap and Revolution in Hamilton | Jeffrey
Severs

Rise Up: Nuyorican Resistance and Transcultural Aesthetics in Hamilton | Gabriel
Mayora

Hamilton’s Women | Stacy Wolf

Blackout on Broadway: Affiliation and Audience in In the Heights and Hamilton |
Elena Machado Sáez

Staging a Revolution: The Cultural Tipping Points of John Gay and Lin-Manual
Miranda | Tiffany Yecke Brooks

Miranda’s Les Miz | Jeffrey Magee

Hamilton Meets Hip-Hop Pedagogy | Alison Dobrick

“Hey Yo, I’m Just Like My Country”: Teaching Miranda’s Hamilton as an
American Chronicle | Timothy J. Viator

Lin-Manuel Miranda and the Metamyth of a Nation’s Founding | Helen M. Whall

“What If This Bullet Is My Legacy?”: The Guns of Hamilton | Meredith Conti

Hamilton and Class | Matthew Clinton Sekellick

A Conversation Rewound: Queer and Racialized Temporalities in Hamilton |
Shereen Inayatulla and Andie Silva

De la « femme enfant » (André Breton) et la « femme nature » (Xavière Gauthier), à travers la muse et la « séductrice perfide » (Alain Jouffroy) jusqu’à un type de femme étrange et angoissante, les surréalistes font toujours montre de leur fascination pour la femme et le corps féminin. Un genre en particulier de ces différentes images féminines  est au centre de leurs préoccupations : la femme hystérique. Prise entre fascination et appréhension, André Breton & Cie. ne semblent capables à échapper ce type de femme étrange qui se présente effrayant mais également sensuel.
        L’hystérie s’inscrit dans la recherche surréaliste d’un dépassement des limites qu’imposa une société détestée. Elle est un langage expressif du corps et les postures qui se manifestent pendant une crise sont libératrices. La femme hystérique devient donc, pour les surréalistes, un médium universel, permettant de libérer l’individu de carcans et de mécanismes d’oppression issus d’une bourgeoisie autoritaire. Mais en même temps, étant donné la rage psychique qui se déchaine pendant une crise, la femme hystérique devient terrifiante. Elle se transforme en symbole d’angoisse, car elle nous présente notre « soi intérieur » (Hélène Vanel) – complètement hors de notre contrôle. 
          Aucun exemple de ce genre de représentation surréaliste n’est aussi marquant que la performance intitulée Acte manqué, la caricature théâtrale d’une crise d’hystérie mise en scène pour l’Exposition internationale du surréalisme à la galerie des Beaux-arts de Georges Wildenstein en 1938. Hélène Vanel, une danseuse française, donna l’impression d’une « sorcière hirsute, cassante, cassée, spectre en charpie » . En faisant entendre des râles hystériques, elle se fraya un chemin entre des spectateurs, sauta sur un lit et s’y roula et se contorsionna « […] comme un tourbillon dans un mouvement inouï qui entraina toute l’assistance dans un délire démentiel […] » . En oscillation perpétuelle entre souffrance et extase, entre agression et gestes sexuels, Vanel, l’hystérique, éveille simultanément le désir et l’angoisse. Comme femme fatale surréaliste (belle mais dangereuse, sensuelle mais effrayante), elle incarne le portrait, d’un corps chargé d’une rage psychique – un rage qui ne se laisse plus contenir, qui devient dangereux, une rage qui peut faire « tomber une civilisation » (Don LaCoss).
        Une confrontation à la société, une enquête de la liberté, mais également symbole d’angoisse, ce spectacle agresso-sexuel semble prédestiné pour un colloque qui cherche à étudier les origines de la « femme fatale » et ses métamorphoses diverses. Je propose donc une étude détaillée de Vanel dans l’Acte manqué – en tant qu’hystérique, en tant que femme fatale selon l’image surréaliste.

Lorenzo Mango, Studing acting during avantgards age. Some methodological
issues
The avantgard theatre of 1900 has changed completely the theatrical style,
counterposing the concepts of representation, the mise-en-scene and the
centrality of the literary text.
According to that, the concept of acting has changed deeply. New scenic
conditions didn't consider as important the problems connected with acting
a specific character and two new phenomena were born such as the change
of position of acting and the improvement of it.
The former considers the work of the actor as a physical action during the
development of the stories, not contemplating his interpretation of a
specific character. The latter is referred to the insertion of non-theatrical
phenomena in the world of acting such as dance, happening and
performance.
The main point of these procedures is the centrality of the presence,
considered as the most important thing concerning the actors.

Questo intervento intende esplorare e problematizzare la rappresentazione delle donne in quanto icone, muse o soggetti passivi, e come esse diventino ricettacolo di proiezioni sociali. Quali strumenti estetici e politici le donne hanno impiegato per riappropriarsi della propria soggettività e autonomia in una cultura visuale patriarcale ed eteronormativa? Attraverso un’analisi critica queer-femminista – e percorrendo le definizioni di sesso, genere e sessualità – questa lectio prende come punto di partenza esempi tratti dai media mainstream per poi allargarsi verso problematiche che riguardano la rappresentazione dei corpi in ambito artistico.

[EN]
'Body, Femininity and Objectification: Queer-Feminist Perspectives'
This presentation explores and problematises how women are usually portrayed as either icons, muses or passive subjects, either way becoming receptacles of social projections. What aesthetic and political tools have women employed to re-frame their own subjectivity and autonomy within a heteronormative and patriarchal visual culture? Through a feminist and queer critical analysis, this lecture will take as its starting point examples drawn from mainstream media, to move towards issues that relate to the representation of bodies in the arts.

-- text available only in Italian --

This dissertation is a conversation upon process, creation and relation. It focuses on the collaborative choreographic practice I developed within my MA in Choreography at University College of Falmouth.
Drawing upon my experience, the essay approaches the processes that constitute a collaborative choreographic practice: the genesis and evolution of the articulation process, the collaboration, the performance, and the process
that begins at the performance and depends on the relation that each spectator will develop with it.
In doing so, the essay, wants to reflect upon the landscapes of relations that may develop in any of the stages described above, and the possibilities for discourse upon ethics in art practices that lie in these relationscapes.
The text follows the evolution of the process: from a prearticulated idea towards the actual performance. In between it invites a dialogue between theory and practice upon certain aspects of the process such as collaboration,
the relation between choreographer and performer and the relation developed between a performance and its audience.
Between is a key word to this essay- The essay concludes that inbetween is where creation lies, regarding all the above-mentioned relationscapes: Between the choreographer and the dancer/ the viewer and the performer, the words and the reader, creation happens in the interval between, within the developing relation.

Offering a radical re-evaluation of current approaches to performer training, this is a text that equips readers with a set of new ways of thinking about and ultimately 'doing' training. Stemming from his extensive practice and incorporating a review of prevailing methods and theories, Frank Camilleri focuses on how material circumstances shape and affect processes of training, devising, rehearsing and performing. Frank Camilleri puts forward the 'post-psychophysical' as a more extended form of psychophysical discussion and practice that emerged and dominated in the 20th century. The 'post-psychophysical' updates the concept of an integrated bodymind in various ways, such as the notion of a performer's bodyworld that incorporates technology and the material world. Offering invaluable introductions to a wide range of theories around which the book is structured-including postphenomenological, sociomaterial, affect and situated cognition-this volume provides readers with an enticing array of approaches to training and creative processes.

Dans son célèbre texte de 1989, bell hooks abordait d'une façon inusuelle la question de la marginalité. A travers sa lecture de la marge comme espace de résistance et lieu radical de possibilité, elle nous offrait une vision empowering de la marginalité, vu comme espace de création et non de soumission. Ce renversement du point de vue permettait de penser la marge comme un espace à habiter, dans lequel trouver sa place, où rester et non comme un espace de transit pour atteindre le centre. Il s'agit d'un changement épistémologique fort parce que cette idée transforme les marges en espaces de création, de partage, d'élaboration de stratégies collectives, de contre-espaces (Foucault, 1984) d'élaboration de façons différentes de vivre le monde. La marge comme espace contre-hégémonique est le lieu de la mise en commun des expériences, des conditions, des parcours de vie. La marginalité devient alors non seulement un lieu privilégié de création mais aussi un lieu qui offre un point de vue sur le monde capable de rendre visible l'invisible, de dénaturaliser les processus intériorisés, un lieu où voir les mécanismes qui rendent fonctionnel le système dominant. Un lieu de contre-attaque pour contre-attaquer : la marge devient l'espace privilégié d'élaboration de micro-politiques à diffusion virale. Voix off. (play), bell hooks (1989, p. 148-149) : « These margins have benn both sites of repression and sites of resistance (...). I am located in the margin. I make a definite distinction between that marginality which is imposed by oppressive structures and that marginality one chooses as site of resistance ? as location of radical openness and possibility. This site of resistance is continually formed in that segregated culture of opposition that is our critical response to domination. (...) We are trasformed, individually, collectively, as we make radical creative space which affirms and sustains our subjectivity, which gives us a new location from which to articulate our sense of the world » (musique stop). Est-il possible d'imaginer un centre différent à partir de ses marges ? Est-il sensé de parler des marges du centre ? Et dans ce cas, est-il possible de les occuper ? Est-ce que les marges du centre peuvent être considérées comme des espaces de production de radicalité pour la construction de nouveaux mondes ? #Cadre Je voudrais partager des pratiques que j'ai expérimentées à partir de la marge d'un espace-centre, c'est-à-dire d'un espace qui est central à l'intérieur du système dominant et qui est impliqué directement dans la reproduction des mécanismes de pouvoir et des rapports de domination : l'université. L'espace académique français résiste au développement et à l'engagement épistémologique critique. Il maintient l'épistémologie positiviste comme norme scientifique, soutenant souvent de multiples formes de

En el año 1889 se comercializaron en EEUU los primeros cilindros de cera que contenían grabaciones musicales. Estas grabaciones podían escucharse con auriculares de tubo mediante el fonógrafo de Edison en salones fonográficos y otros espacios urbanos ubicados en las zonas de ocio de numerosas ciudades del país. Sin embargo, fue a partir de 1896 cuando estos reproductores musicales comenzaron a tener un uso doméstico. Aprovechando la presencia de artistas españoles en el continente americano, la National Phonograph Company y la Columbia Phonograph Company realizaron numerosas grabaciones que contienen música extraída de la zarzuela, el género chico,  la canción de salón y el folclore regional.
Con el título De cera y Goma Laca. La producción de música española en la industria fonográfica estadounidense (1896-1914), Kiko Mora, profesor de semiótica audiovisual de la Universidad de Alicante, elabora un estudio preliminar, con entronque cuantitativo e historiográfico, de la producción musical española de carácter comercial en la primera mitad de su etapa acústica en los Estados Unidos de América.
¿Cuál fue el volumen total de producción musical y cuáles fueron los años más relevantes? ¿En qué ciudades se grabaron las piezas musicales y cuáles fueron sus contextos de producción? ¿Quiénes fueron los artistas y los compositores españoles más prolíficos? ¿Qué géneros y piezas musicales fueron los predominantes? Este libro ofrece respuestas a estas preguntas y abre un nuevo itinerario para otros estudios relacionados con la presencia de la música española y su interacción con otras músicas en los inicios de la industria discográfica más más influyente del siglo XX.

Este libro, editado por Miguel A. López y publicado por el Museo de Arte de Lima, ofrece una primera mirada exhaustiva a la obra de Sergio Zevallos como parte del Grupo Chaclacayo, realizado entre Perú y Alemania. Este colectivo fue un proyecto de convivencia creativa, sexual y afectiva que surgió a inicios de los años 80 en el Perú, en medio de una violenta guerra entre la organización subversiva maoísta Sendero Luminoso y el Estado Peruano.

El libro está dividido en dos partes (dos PDFs) y es bilingüe. Incluye ensayos de Miguel A. López, Fernanda Carvajal, Paul [B.] Preciado, y una conversación con los artistas Alfredo Márquez, Jaime Higa, Frido Martin y Sergio Zevallos.

This article examines the relationship between costume and character, self and appearance in Luca Guadagnino’s film, I Am Love (Io Sono l'Amore, Guadagnino: 2009). As played by Tilda Swinton, Emma Recchi is a woman whose dress reveals a meticulous record of her emotional journey, providing an almost text-book case of costume performing emotional exteriority. Complicating any straightforward analysis of costume design in I Am Love, however, is a deep fashion consciousness that pervades the film and goes beyond the widely publicized association with fashion houses, Jil Sander, Fendi and Hermès, to a recognition of fashion as a complex discourse able to canvas multiple, even contradictory, interpretations. Just as Guadagnino draws on other narratives and other films to tell his story, Swinton’s off-screen life and on-screen personae shadow her portrayal of Emma, constructing a character who is both the unique individual of ‘I Am Love’ and the hollow image of fashion that is the Emma of ‘I Am Style.’

Funeral of the Acrobat (“Cambazın Cenazesi”) written by Firuze Engin, directed by Berfin Zenderlioğlu as a production of IkinciKat theatre in Istanbul is a new breath in Turkey’s theatre field; but beyond its local importance, it is a very important rebellion against the Anglocentric current of the contemporary world. The theatricality of this play paradigmatically contradicts with Anglophone theatre’s purist obsession to grasp “authenticity”, which is a paradigm still colonially distributed through media and academia. The play’s staging is revolutionary in the most pre-modern way: two performers use the “meddah” technique to embody the narrators and eleven characters each, where they tell and act the story without a fourth wall. Putting two “meddahs” in dialogue is a surprising use of tradition since the comedic “meddah” storytelling technique is known to be a solo performance tradition which originated in Anatolia and Mesopotamia. These two “meddahs” act on a stage designed with shadow images appearing in light screens behind them, images which also refer to the tradition of shadow puppetry in Turkey. Two “meddahs” sometimes go behind these screens and become a part of the shadows of the story and dissolve in the allegorical landscape. On the other hand Funeral of the Acrobat has a concrete dramatic structure with a chain of events layering from the most personal to the most social where the fictional Western Thracian village Yapıldak slowly becomes a microcosm of the transformation of the Turkish society in the last decade as a result of rapidly precipitating neoliberal urban transformation. Yapıldak exists in the same parallel universe of the planet Solaris of Stanislaw Lem, country of Uqbar of Jorge Luis Borges, or the town Macondo of Gabriel Garcia Márquez where allegory devours life and creates a habitat of truth beyond the stagnating pornography of our contemporary and mediatised “reality”.

Sleep No More’s immersive adaptation of Macbeth has attracted scholarly attention for its insight into spectatorial desires for mobility and interaction. This promotion of spectatorial choice has  drawn critiques from scholars such as Adam Alston, Jen Harvie and Keren Zaiontz for its enthusiastic complicity in neoliberal modes of consumption and labor. The article conceives of Sleep No More’s version of neoliberal spectatorship as sleepless spectatorship, modeled on Macbeth’s own insomniac characters, reading Sleep No More’s form of spectatorship in conversation with what Simon Williams terms ‘sleep cultures’ research, including Jonathan Crary’s 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. Sleep No More encourages its spectators to have embodied experiences of the sleeplessness brought about by defining characteristics of neoliberal life, including the deregulation of human biological patterns, the interweaving of ‘real’ life with virtual technology and the experience of intimate relationships as frustrated by a free market logic of scarcity. The article also looks beyond the performance itself to trace neoliberal discourses in the production’s online fan communities and potential labor law violations. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s The Emancipated Spectator, the article proposes that a sleep cultures approach to theatrical performance might challenge the dichotomy between active and sleepy spectatorship, advocating for a ‘sleeping’ spectator, reclaiming sleep from passivity and framing it as political action performed over a long duration.

How many playwrights, novelists, philosophers, artists, composers, performers, filmmakers and critical thinkers influenced Samuel Beckett? And how profound has Beckett's impact been on creative artists worldwide, who have responded to the stimulus of his work using every available medium, from theatre and television, through opera and contemporary art, and now to the internet and virtual reality?

This book approaches these two questions under two broad headings: first, "Influencing Beckett," or the ongoing traces of how Beckett constructed his own work by drawing on artists and thinkers near and far, ancient and current; second, "Beckett Influencing," or how his work has unfolded into the contemporary world across genre, across media, and as a source for others' artworks. The third section, "Practitioner Voices," concerns the implementation of such patterns of influence in theatrical practice.

With contributions from eight countries, this volume emerges from the first Beckett conference to be held in Hungary. It captures the international, experimental, and collaborative spirit of the Samuel Beckett Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research.

The 'Setting Up' chapter of my new textbook (Palgrave, 2014, out as paperback, hardback and e-files): how to think about accessible classrooms.
Short Table of (full book) content:
1. Setting Up
2. Languages of Disability
3. Discourses of Disability
4. Embodiment/Enmindment: Processes of Living
5. Disability Culture
PART II
6. Life in the Institution: Discourses at Work and at Play
7. Freak Shows and the Theatre
8. Disabled Dance and Dancerly Bodies
9. Superheroes and the Lure of Disability
10. Looking at Autism
11. Classroom Activism and Resources
12. Appendix: For Teachers

“Power is war, the continuation of war by other means”: Foucault’s reversal of Clausewitz’s formula has become a staple of critical theory — but it remains highly problematic on a conceptual level. Elaborated during Foucault’s 1976 lectures (“Society Must Be Defended”), this work-hypothesis theorises “basic warfare” [la guerre fondamentale] as the teleological horizon of socio-political relations. Following Boulainvilliers, Foucault champions this polemological approach, conceived as a purely descriptive discourse on “real” politics and war, against the philosophico-juridical conceptuality attached to liberal society (Hobbes’s Leviathan being here the prime example).
However, in doing so, Foucault did not interrogate the conceptual validity of notions such as power and war, therefore interlinking them without questioning their ontological status. This problematic conflation was partly rectified in 1982, as Foucault proposed a more dynamic definition of power relations: “actions over potential actions”.
I argue, somewhat polemically, that Foucault’s hermeneutics of power still involves a teleological violence, dependent on a polemological representation of human relations as essentially instrumental: this resembles what Derrida names, in “Heidegger’s Ear”, an “anthropolemology”. However, I show that all conceptualisation of power implies its self-deconstruction. This self-deconstructive (or autoimmune) structure supposes an archi-originary unpower prior to power: power presupposes an excess within power, an excessive force, another violence making it both possible and impossible. There is something within power located “beyond the power principle” (Derrida). This (self-)excess signifies a limitless resistantiality co-extensive with power-relationality. It also allows the reversal of pólemos into its opposite, as unpower opens politics and warfare to the messianic call of a pre-political, pre-ontological disruption: the archi-originary force of différance. This force, unconditional, challenges Foucault’s conceptualisations of power, suggesting an originary performativity located before or beyond hermeneutics of power-knowledge, disrupting theoreticity as well as empiricity by pointing to their ontological complicity.
The bulk of this essay is dedicated to sketching the theoretical implications of this deconstructive reading of Foucault with respect to the methodology and conceptuality of political science and social theory.

"'Performance, the Body, the Home: Documentary Cinema in Israel-Palestine' is a major contribution to understanding 21st-century transnational film history. Looking at key documentary films by Arab and Mizrahi filmmakers living within the contested borders of Israel-Palestine, Shirly Bahar develops an argument for the vital place of documentary within contemporary politics and identities…In this profound study, we see how documentary and its critics mediate a uniquely performative and affective politics in Israel-Palestine, but also elsewhere and everywhere." (Paula Rabinowitz, University of Michigan)

Traduction en français du fanzine édité par RE/Search Publications dans le cadre de l'événement « Industrial Music and Experimental Films from San Francisco by Marian Wallace » (Les Voûtes, Paris, 27 mai 2016). Transcription des entretiens avec les différents artistes du documentaire Artists of the Industrial Scene, de Marian Wallace. Édition bilingue (anglais / français).

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A transcription of the film by the same name, this color-illustrated, 44-page zine takes you through 10 viewpoints of the “how” and “why” of noise music, from the late 1970s to now, with viewpoints and experiences from five different countries.

In English and French (translation by Nicolas Ballet). Interviews with 10 Industrial artists: Genesis P-Orridge (Throbbing Gristle/ Psychic TV), Mark Pauline (Survival Research Laboratories), Johanna Went, Jim Thirlwell (foetus), Ryoichi Kurokawa, Ilpo Väisänen and Mika Vainio (Pan Sonic), Peter Christopherson (Throbbing Gristle), Graeme Revell (SPK), Naut Humon (Rhythm & Noise), Gerald V. Casale (DEVO).

P[art]icipatory urbanisms (please also visit www.part-urbs.com) is a web publication interrogating the “participatory turn” in contemporary urban studies, performance studies, and art practice. The bracketed [art] in the title of this publication refers to participatory urban aesthetic practices which could include community, social, or relational art initiatives, but also more general claims by city residents, city workers or activists on the visible and sensible aspects of public space. Bracketing the [art] in ‘participation’ also suggests a blurring of the conventional separation between the aesthetic and the political dimensions of urban participation.

The publication has two components. The first, is an interactive platform of interviews featuring the praxes of twenty participatory urban practitioners and collectives in the cities of São Paulo, Brazil and New Delhi, India. The interviews map the multiple and disjunctive ways in which ‘participation’ is enacted—from mobile performances of poetry and theater, to citizen journalism on gentrification in Sao Paulo’s old city center, to radical neighborhood pedagogical initiatives in Savda Ghevra, a New Delhi resettlement colony, and in Grajau, a southern periphery neighborhood of São Paulo. The interviews trace how urban actors create politico-aesthetic ruptures; experience and experiment with the material and affective force of participation; and potentially reshape the urban imaginary. The interviews also speak to the limits of participatory working processes in the face of small budgets and divided spaces. The cities of São Paulo and New Delhi were chosen as sites for this project for the comparisons that their similar size and positions in global urban imaginations and political economy enable, and for the enduring histories of participatory urban activity in both spaces.

A second element of this publication is a peer-reviewed anthology of twenty articles expanding methodological and theoretical debates around the themes of urban participation and its entanglement with state power, aesthetic praxis, racialized and queer spaces, citizenship, temporality, publics, and infrastructure. Contributions to the anthology span a broad range of disciplines and engage research from diverse geographic and temporal sites–from the occupation of a theater in Athens amidst the Greek economic crisis, to agonistic politics and participatory video art in a New Delhi urban village, to the cartographic interventions of a Harlem mailman in Jim Crow-era America. The form of writing extends beyond traditional scholarly articles to include ethnographic reflections, case studies, and photo essays.

This thesis investigates artworks born at the convergence of digital media and contemporary performance, and the ways in which technology impacts the field of performance. The term digital media refers to technology that produces digitised (as opposed to analogue) content such as text, audio, video, graphics and metadata. Contemporary performance refers to artworks that combine different artistic traditions—experimental theatre and dance, video art, visual art, music composition and performance art—in a single performance event. The convergence of these two fields has produced a significant body of technological works of art that challenge and reconfigure traditional conventions in contemporary performance. This thesis examines the impact of digital media on the ways performance is created, received and experienced, and the extent to which media open up new possibilities for creative expression and may generate new art forms.
I mapped the field by defining three large categories that mark the heterogeneous landscape of technologically enhanced performances today, namely multimedia theatre, telematic performance and pervasive performance. Methodologically, I combined hermeneutic methods of interpretation and reflection with academic forms of practical inquiry, combining textual analysis of relevant works from each of the three categories—such as Ghost Road (Murgia and Pauwels 2012), make-shift (Jamieson and Crutchlow 2010) and Rider Spoke (Blast Theory 2007)—with the practical development and analysis of a pervasive performance experiment titled Chain Reaction (Pérez 2009 and 2011). Theoretically, the project is interdisciplinary, bringing together performance theory, digital media studies, experimental game scholarship and experiential art documentation.
In discussing the ways in which digital media impact contemporary performance, I identify a number of traditional conventions in the field of theatre and performance that are currently being challenged. These are in the areas of audience participation, use of space, actor role, rehearsal and staging, and performance documentation. Central arguments in the thesis are, on the one hand, that researchers, critics and practitioners must look beyond the visionary expressions of aesthetic potential in order to grasp the real state of technologically enhanced art forms. On the on the other hand, it is only by considering both, the horizon-pushing high-tech along with the purpose-orientated low-tech, that a more grounded understanding of the present impact of developing technology on art culture can and should be reached.

Επιχειρείται μια φαινομενολογική προσέγγιση της νύχτας στην ελληνική δραματουργία, από τη μεταπολίτευση και μετά. Η νύχτα είναι και λειτουργεί ενδοκειμενικά ως μία αναπαράσταση, δηλαδή ως μία ελλιπής ή και παραπειστική επανάληψη μιας ελικοειδούς και δυσπρόσιτης πραγματικότητας, ως μία επανάληψη που ενεργοποιεί κατά το μάλλον ή ήττον τις μεταφορικές δυνάμεις της γλώσσας, παράγοντας, ως εκ τούτου, νοητικά σχήματα ασταθή, αμφίβολα και αμφίσημα. Το μελέτημα δεν εστιάζει στις τυπικές χρονικές σημάνσεις της νύχτας, εκεί δηλαδή όπου μια σκηνική οδηγία μας πληροφορεί ότι απλώς είναι νύχτα, αλλά στα «γεγονότα» που λαμβάνουν χώρα κατά τη διάρκεια αυτής της νύχτας και, σε αρκετές περιπτώσεις, στα γεγονότα γενικότερα που θα μπορούσαν να χαρακτηριστούν ως «νυχτερινά». Άρα, το ζήτημα μετακυλύεται από τη χρονική σήμανση στο περιεχόμενο της νύχτας, σε αυτό που θα μπορούσε να είναι νυχτερινό χωρίς απαραίτητα να λαμβάνει χώρα τη νύχτα, σε αυτό που είναι «σκοτεινό», ανοίκειο ή παραβατικό. Η νύχτα είναι το σύνορο του οριοθετημένου και του απεριόριστου, της λογικής και της φαντασίας, του φυσιολογικού και του τερατώδους, είναι η οριακή εκείνη περιοχή όπου ο άνθρωπος μπορεί να σταθεί έχοντας στη μία πλευρά του το οικείο περιβάλλον της «κατοικίας» του, (που αποτελείται λ.χ. από υιοθετημένες στάσεις και συμπεριφορές, από αυτονόητες προϋποθέσεις και κοινόχρηστες έννοιες), και στην άλλη, όλους εκείνους τους ακατοίκητους τόπους που αγνοεί, παραβλέπει ή απωθεί.
Οι αναλύσεις των έργων κινούνται σε δύο κατευθύνσεις: στην κατεύθυνση του ανοίκειου και σε εκείνη του οικείου. Μεταξύ των εξεταζόμενων κειμένων στην κατεύθυνση του ανοίκειου είναι ο Γάμος  και η Γυναίκα του Λωτ του Μάριου Ποντίκα, η Κατσαρίδα του Βασίλη Μαυρογεωργίου, το Playmobil του Παναγιώτη Μέντη, ο Αόρατος θίασος και οι Δύκολες νύχτες του κυρίου Θωμά του Ιάκωβου Καμπανέλλη, ο Φιλοκτήτης και Τα επτά κουτιά της Πανδώρας του Βασίλη Ζιώγα, ο Περιποιητής φυτών και Προς Ελευσίνα του Παύλου Μάτεσι, το Μαγικό δωμάτιο του Γιάννη Χρυσούλη, το Μόνο την αλήθεια  των Βασίλη Μαυρογεωργίου και Μαρία Φιλίνη. Στην κατεύθυνση του οικείου εξετάζονται τα έργα: Σε φιλώ στη μούρη του Γιώργου Διαλεγμένου, το Γάλα του Βασίλη Κατσικονούρη, Στην Εθνική με τα μεγάλα του Μιχάλη Βιρβιδάκη, οι Φιλοξενούμενοι του Μάρκαρη και οι Ξένοι του Μέντη, οι Εφτά λογικές απαντήσεις του Λεωνίδα Προυσαλίδη κ.ά, ενώ στις διασταυρώσεις των δύο κατευθύνσεων εξετάζονται το Σε σας που με ακούτε της Λούλας Αναγνωστάκη, Ο Κήπος με τα χελιδόνια του Μπάμπη Τσικληρόπουλου, το 314 του Παναγιώτη Παναγόπουλου, το Ατύχημα του Χρυσούλη ή ο Ορθός λόγος του Μάριου Ποντίκα.
Τα θέματα, οι εικόνες, οι ιστορίες και οι προσωπικές περιπέτειες που συναντούμε εδώ μπορούν να αποτελέσουν μέρος μιας μεγαλύτερης αφήγησης παραβάσεων και υπερβάσεων, αποκλίσεων και συμβολικών μορφών, η οποία θα μπορούσε να διευρύνει τις οπτικές γωνίες επόπτευσης των κειμένων. Μια παρόμοια προσέγγιση μας προτρέπει να ξαναδιαβάσουμε διεστιακά πολλά κείμενα της νεοελληνικής δραματουργίας με διαφορετικούς τρόπους και να διερευνήσουμε πώς οι ταυτότητες και οι διαφορές εμπλέκονται στη σύνθεση των κειμένων αυτών, διαμορφώνοντας μια διαλογική σχέση του εγώ και του άλλου.

Membership in Newar Buddhist monasteries includes individuals from the Vajrācārya and Śākya castes who serve as Tantric Buddhist householder monks. Of this population, the ten eldest members of each monastery are known as the Daśa Sthavira Ājus (Ten Elders of the Highest Esteem). Because of their position, these Ājus are the ritual specialists for their communities and serve as exemplars of the monastic ideal in Newar society. This paper explores the ways in which Newar Buddhists at the Kwā Bahā monastic complex in Patan, Nepal, utilize ceremonial dress to reinforce their Buddhist identity and publicly reaffirm their ancient Buddhist heritage in Nepal. This study, the first to analyze the Ājus’ ceremonial regalia, provides an analysis of the garments, headdresses, and ornaments worn by these figures to explain the ways in which dress embeds Buddhist iconographic symbolism into Newar visual culture. Additionally, this paper demonstrates that the ritual veneration of the Ājus gives their regalia agency, reinforcing their public, ritual role as living embodiments of buddhahood. [PDF of article available in link]

The purpose of this article is to review spirituality at work literature and to explore how spirituality improves employees’ performances and organizational effectiveness. The article reviews about 140 articles on workplace spirituality to review their findings on how spirituality supports organizational performance. Three different perspectives are introduced on how spirituality benefits employees and supports organizational performance based on the extant literature: (a) Spirituality enhances employee well-being and quality of life; (b) Spirituality provides employees a sense of purpose and meaning at work; (c) Spirituality provides employees a sense of interconnectedness and community. The article introduces potential benefits and caveats of bringing spirituality into the workplace; providing recommendations and suggestions for practitioners to incorporate spirituality positively in organizations.

This essay gives a situated introduction to body hacking, an underground surgical process that seeks to transform the body’s architecture, offering an ethnographic account of the affects that drive this corporeal intervention for performance artist Cheto Castellano, and later, for the author. A brief history of recent body modification movements is offered. Through these situated stories of corporeal transformation there is an exploration of Eva Hayward’s concept of transbecoming, exploring the perpetual change of the body in transition, particularly in relation to posthumanistic transformations. The article closes with a speculative cyborg feminist body modification project titled 10,000 Generations Later, which explores how a subdermal archive of silicone implants stored under the author’s skin may assist her in a posthumanist transbecoming after the death of her companions species toy poodle Luk Kahlo, and perhaps even in a distant future. The author argues that this project becomes an apparatus of mestizaje between speculative cyborg feminism and significant otherness.