Performing Arousal: Precarious Bodies and Frames of Representation

by Julia Listengarten (Editor), Yana Meerzon (Editor)

Overview

Shortlisted for the 2023 TaPRA Edited Collection Prize

This book considers arousal as a mode of theoretical and artistic inquiry to encourage new ways of staging and examining bodies in performance across artistic disciplines, modern history, and cultural contexts. Looking at traditional drama and theatre, but also visual arts, performance activism, and arts-based community engagement, this collection draws on the complicated relationship between arousing images and the frames of their representability to address what constitutes arousal in a variety of connotations. It examines arousal as a project of social, scientific, cultural, and artistic experimentation, and discusses how our perception of arousal has transformed over the last century. Probing “what arouses” in relation to the ethics of representation, the book investigates the connections between arousal and pleasures of voyeurism, underscores the political impact of aroused bodies, and explores how arousal can turn the body into a mediated object.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350155640
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	12/16/2021
Series:	Methuen Drama Engage
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Julia Listengarten is Professor of Theatre, Artistic Director and Director of Graduate Studies at University of Central Florida. She has written on avant-garde and contemporary theatre, theory and practice of performer training, scenographic practices and performances of national identity.

Yana Meerzon teaches at the Department of Theatre, University of Ottawa. Her research interests are in drama and performance theory, theatre of exile and migration, and cultural and interdisciplinary studies.
Julia Listengarten is Professor of Theatre at the University of Central Florida, USA. She is an artist scholar and her research interests range from contemporary performance to socially engaged creative practices. Her recent books include Visual and Performing Arts Collaboration: Transdisciplinary Practices (2023, with Keri Watson) and Performing Arousal: Precarious Bodies and Frames of Representation (Methuen Drama, 2022, with Yana Meerzon).
Yana Meerzon is Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Ottawa, Canada. She is the author of three books, most recently Performance, Subjectivity, Cosmopolitanism (2020). She has co-edited nine collections of articles, including Handbook on Theatre and Migration (2023; with S.E. Wilmer).

Table of Contents

List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Body and Arousal: On Social, Cultural, Scientific, and Artistic Experiment: Introduction - Julia Listengarten and Yana Meerzon


Section One Pleasured Body

1 Kokoschka's Fetish: Violence, Puppetness, and the Female Simulacrum as Mediated Body/Object in the Central European Avant-Garde - Tim Butler Garrett

2 Dalí's Dream of Venus: Sex, Surrealism, and Disability at the 1939 New York World's Fair - Keri Watson

3 Blood and Desire: Collaborating through Arousal - Alissa Clarke

4 Getting Lippy with the Patriarchy: Contemporary Women Artists' “Lip Art” - Lara Cox

5 Transformation and Arousal: The Pleasure of Performative Indeterminacy in Persona Theatre Company's Phaedra I - Avra Sidiropoulou


Section Two Political Body

6 Höch's Weimar and Wilhelm: Rundschau's Avant-Garde Reframing - J. Brandon Pelcher

7 The Dissonance of Resonating Bodies and the Collisions of Reality Friction: Structures of Ambiguity in Christoph Schlingensief's Bitte Liebt Österreich - Tony Perucci

8 The Sacrificed Young Woman: Necropolitics and Patriarchy in Koffi Kwahulé's Bintou - Selim Rauer

9 Pussy Riot's Radical Acts: Transgressive Bodies in Performance and the Ghosting of the Russian Avant-Garde - Julia Listengarten

10 Body as Site for Feminist Theatrical Discourse: A Pedagogic and Performative Experiment with Arousing Images by Anuradha Kapur - Indu Jain

11 Both Sides, Now: Between Narratives of Decline and Gestures of Care - Alvin Eng Hui Lim


Section Three Abject Body

12 The Knee, the Elbow, the Face: On Body as Abject in Vladimir Nabokov's Visual Imagination - Yana Meerzon

13 Trauma, Ethics, and the Puppet Body in Handspring Puppet Company - Dawn Tracey Brandes

14 “Upside Down”: The Rough Play of Narcissister's Avant-Porn - Rebecca Clark

15 Queer Epistemologies in the Making of Queer Makishi: Visibility, Trans-position, and Devised Performance Practice - Johann Robert Wood

16 Island Icarus: Signaling through the Flames as Critical Performance Design - Dorita Hannah
List of Contributors
Index