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Always the focal point in modern times for momentous political, social and cultural upheaval, Berlin has continued, since the fall of the Wall in 1989, to be a city in transition. As the new capital of a reunified Germany it has embarked on a journey of rapid reconfiguration, involving issues of memory, nationhood and ownership. Bertolt Brecht, meanwhile, stands as one of the principal thinkers about art and politics in the 20th century. The "Street Scene" model, which was the foundation for his theory of an epic theatre, relied precisely on establishing a connection between art's functioning and everyday life. His preoccupation with the ceaselessness of change, an impulse implying rupture a...
New Theatre Quarterly provides a lively international forum where theatrical scholarship and practice can meet, and where prevailing dramatic assumptions can be subjected to vigorous critical questioning. It shows that theatre history has a contemporary relevance.
Performing Cities is an edited volume of contributions by a range of internationally renowned academics and performance makers from across the globe, each one covering a particular city and examining it from the dynamic perspectives of performances occurring in cities and the city itself as performance.
Cities, with their rising populations and complex configurations, have become key symbols of a fast-changing modernity. This timely collection gathers together various urban writings from a range of relevant disciplines, including architecture, geography, sociology, visual art, ethnography and psychoanalysis. Its focus, however, is performance. Underscoring the importance of the field, it shows how performance functions as a dynamic, interdisciplinary mechanism which is central not only to understanding the multiplicity of urban living but also to the way the identities of cities are shaped. Gathering together key writings on the city and performance by authors ranging from Walter Benjamin to Tim Etchells to Carl Lavery, the reader can be navigated in any number of ways. Supported by extensive introductory material, it will be essential and evocative reading for anyone interested in making connections between performance and urban life.
To Henri Lefebvre, the space and 'lived everydayness' of the inter-dependent, multi-faceted city produces manifold possibilities of identifiction and realisation through often imperceptible interactions and practices. 'Art and the City' takes this observation as its cue to examine the role of art against a backdrop of globally rising urban populations, taking into account the more recent performative and relational 'turns' of art that have sought in their city settings to identify a participating spectator - an implicated citizen. In exploring how artworks present themselves as a means by which to navigate and plot the city for a writing interlocutor, Nicolas Whybrow discusses diverse examples, representing three key modern modalities of urban arts practice. The first, walking, involves works by Richard Wentworth, Francis AlA s, Mark Walllinger and others, the second, play, includes art by Antony Gormley, Mark Quinn and Carsten Holler. The third, cultural memory, Whybrow addresses through the controversial urban holocaust memorial sites of Peter Eisenman's memorial in Berlin and Rachel Whiteread's in Vienna.
"Contemporary Art Biennials in Europe examines five urban situations in diverse parts of Europe. Roughly tracing a central horizontal strip from the western to the eastern edges of the continent, the events and cities covered are the Folkestone Triennial, UK, Münster Sculpture Projects, Germany, the Venice Biennale, Italy, Belgrade's Mikser Festival, Serbia and the Istanbul Biennial, Turkey. Whybrow establishes how public artworks operate in these contexts as part of a complex prescribed by the format of the biennial event. This means drawing out the extent to which biennial events seek to engage with the complexity of the city in question, in a manner that takes into account local socio-cu...
Urban mindscapes are structures of thinking about a city, built on conceptualisations of the city’s physical landscape as well as on its image as transported through cultural representation, memory and imagination. This book pursues three main strands of inquiry in its exploration of these ‘landscapes of the mind’ in a European context. The first strand concerns the theory and methodology of researching urban mindscapes and urban ‘imaginaries’. The second strand investigates some of the representations, symbols and collective images that feed into our understanding of European cities. It discusses representations of the city in literature, film, television and other cultural forms, which, in James Donald’s phrase, constitute ‘archives of urban images’. The third and last section of the volume concentrates on the relationship between the collective mindscapes of cities, urban policy and the practice of city marketing.
Winner of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education Excellence in Editing Award 2016 Urban studies has long understood the city as a 'text'. What would it mean now to use performance to rethink that metaphor? Performance and the City queries the role theatre and performance play in urban policy, architecture, and civic history, while also exploring their important place in the memories created in the wake of urban trauma.
Winner of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education Excellence in Editing Award 2016 Following the ground-breaking Performance and the City, this new volume explores what it means to create and experience urban performance – as both an aesthetic and a political practice – in the burgeoning world where cities are built by globalization and neoliberal capital.
Performing Cities is an edited volume of contributions by a range of internationally renowned academics and performance makers from across the globe, each one covering a particular city and examining it from the dynamic perspectives of performances occurring in cities and the city itself as performance.