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Costume is an active agent for performance-making; it is a material object that embodies ideas shaped through collaborative creative work. A new focus in recent years on research in the area of costume has connected this practice in vital and new ways with theories of the body and embodiment, design practices, artistic and other forms of collaboration. Costume, like fashion and dress, is now viewed as an area of dynamic social significance and not simply as passive reflector of a pre-conceived social state or practice. This book offers new approaches to the study of costume, as well as fresh insights into the better-understood frames of historical, theoretical, practice-based and archival re...
This volume collects research and critical explorations of the performing body by scholars and practitioners in visual and performing arts, textile, fashion and experimental design research, scenography and costume design, dance and performance history. Authors examine performativity of the body, its materiality, immateriality, and virtuality, and investigate experiences of embodiment. They reenvision the body as a site for representation, exploring the absent body in performance and as performance through time and space. Contributors bring a broad variety of contemporary approaches, from live performance to mediated performance, from installation art to performance art, and from experimental fashion to theatre and dance. They discuss issues of process and meaning-making and practices from concept and interpretation to creative production and reception. The volume expands possibilities for the role of the body in performance, while also challenging roles and hierarchies of existing performance practice.
Insubordinate Costume: Inspiring Performance presents a comprehensive study of historical and contemporary examples of scenographic costume – the type of costume that creates an almost complete stage environment by itself, simultaneously acting as costume, set and performance. This book provides readers with an overview of the costumes, designers, context and theory that have contributed to the emerging field of ‘costume as performance’. Focusing on artists and their creative approach to space, form, materials and movement, the book looks at iconic figures such as Loïe Fuller, Oskar Schlemmer and Leigh Bowery, amongst contemporary examples of practitioners that are blurring disciplina...
This volume features a select group of essays presented at the 4th Global Conference on Visual Literacies. Celebrating an interdisciplinary approach, this volume features work ranging, among others, from photography and video production studies to graffiti and film analysis with a variety of theoretical approaches.
This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2013. Fashion-Wise offers an interdisciplinary and transcultural approach to the phenomenon of fashion, investigating its historical, socio-political and artistic aspects. The chapters collected in the volume discuss fashion in the contexts of personal and national identity, gender politics, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, history, consumer culture, ethics, education, performance studies, authenticity, disability studies, sport and celebrity culture. The authors included in this seven-part volume not only comment on the ways in which we have been ‘consuming’ fashion across centuries and cultures but also explore its relevance as a critical subject in cultural studies.
"The term "macaroni" was once as familiar a label as "punk" or "hipster" is today. In this handsomely illustrated book devoted to notable 18th-century British male fashion, award-winning author and fashion historian Peter McNeil brings together dress, biography, and historical events with the broader visual and material culture of the late 18th century. For thirty years, macaroni was a highly topical word, yielding a complex set of social, sexual, and cultural associations. Pretty Gentlemen is grounded in surviving dress, archival documents, and art spanning hierarchies and genres, from scurrilous caricature to respectful portrait painting. Celebrities hailed and mocked as macaroni include politician Charles James Fox, painter Richard Cosway, freed slave Julius "Soubise," and criminal parson Reverend Dodd. The style also rapidly spread to neighboring countries in cross-cultural exchange, while Horace Walpole, George III, and Queen Charlotte were active critics and observers of these foppish men."--Publisher's website.
This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2016. If, indeed, ‘Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others,’ as Jonathan Swift has so famously phrased it, then visual literacy is the art of translating the seen – through image, word and gesture – so that the invisible can be made visible to others. In other words, visual literacy specifies a process of articulation that employs both sight and insight in the service of interpreting the language of the image, reading the narrative of the graphic, and deciphering the codes and modes of the visual. This volume represents an attempt to convey some of the many ideas surrounding visual literacy and advance the interdisciplinary field of visual literacy studies toward new areas of research and inquiry.
This volume contains chapters derived from papers presented at the 3rd Global Conference on Visual Literacies: Exploring Critical Issues held in Oxford, UK, July 14th through the 16th, 2009. The conference brought together a broad range of cultural, artistic and academic participants.
This ebook is an inter-disciplinary collection of topics representing conventional and unconventional approaches to fashion studies, exposing a wide variety of methodological perspectives from fields including anthropology, history, art history, sociology, and material culture.
"Pamela Howard’s ground-breaking What is Scenography? was the first book to set out the bold new approaches to designing and directing for theatre which had dazzled audiences in Europe during the previous decades. It did us all a service by enriching the scope of how we understand the aesthetics of the stage. The lavish new materials (drawings, colour photos, new production analysis) included in this second edition make it even more essential for anyone interested in new developments in theatre." - David Bradby "To write, design, organize, manage, sculpt, educate, paint, research and above all, to passionately live the life of the performance is what Pamela has done throughout her whole ca...