Description
Book SynopsisExplores a range of disciplinary, institutional, and political puzzles that engage the social and aesthetic practice of performance in this collection of twenty essential essays spanning Shannon Jackson’s career.
Trade Review“More than anyone, Shannon Jackson has helped us grapple with the gestures, trajectories, and vibrant interanimations among visual, mediatic, theatrical, and performance-based arts. Across decades of commitment, her work has invited us into sumptuous critical entanglements where arts' histories meet performance studies, where arts work is social work and social work performs. Now,
Back Stages offers a vital collection of Jackson's influential essays curated to show the arc of her oeuvre and including some new work as well. The book will be an essential reader for all of us who meet at the crossroads of arts disciplines or gather where making meets thinking meets making again.” —Rebecca Schneider, author of
Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment“Shannon Jackson is the great participant-observer of performance. These essays, written over twenty years, are vibrant with insights, observations, and reflections. Reading them allows us to relive and rethink performance studies at its best. Highly recommended.” —Martin Puchner, author of
The Language of Thieves: My Family’s Obsession with a Secret Code the Nazis Tried to Eliminate“This anthology’s breadth of exploration exemplifies Jackson’s depth of knowledge and agility in moving confidently and with compelling insight across a range of performative practices—particularly socially-engaged forms—connecting disciplines and their histories while offering more expansive methods for their interpretation and analysis.
Back Stages is an essential contribution to the field.” —Paula Marincola, executive director of
The Pew Center for Arts & HeritageTable of Contents
- INTRODUCTION
- SECTION 1: BACKGROUND STAGES
- 1. Performance at Hull-House: Museum, Microfiche, and Historiography
- 2. Performing Show and Tell: On the Disciplinary Problems of Mixed-Media Practice
- 3. Theatricality’s Proper Objects: Genealogies of Performance and Gender Theory
- 4. When “Everything Counts”: Experimental Performance and Performance Historiography
- 5. Resist Singularity
- 6. Rhetoric in Ruins: Performing Literature and Performance Studies
- 7. Living Takes Many Forms: Creative Time
- SECTION 2: THE ARTS AT WORK
- 8. Life Politics/Life Aesthetics: Environmental Performance in red, black & GREEN: a blues
- 9. Elmgreen & Dragset’s Theatrical Turn
- 10. Performativity and Its Addressee: Walker Art Collection
- 11. Just-in-Time: Performance and the Aesthetics of Precarity
- 12. Seven Ways to Look at Windows: Harrell Fletcher
- 13. Counter-Carnival in a Performance-Friendly World: En Mas’
- 14. Utopian Operating Systems: Theaster’s Way of Working
- 15. Trusting Publics: Paul Ramirez Jonas
- SECTION 3: RE-STAGINGS
- 16. The Way We Perform Now
- 17. Drama and Other Time-Based Arts
- 18. Assemblies: Public Participation, Heteronomous Worlds
- 19. Epilogue: Essential Labor and Proximate Performance
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
