Description
Book SynopsisIn this invitation to reflect on the power of performance, Diana Taylor explores the multiple and overlapping meanings of performance, showing how it can convey everything from artistic, economic, and sexual performance, to providing ways of understanding how race, gender, identity, and power are performed.
Trade Review"
Performance offers scenarios... for active pedagogy, inviting students and others to explore and perhaps undo the links between images and writing, texts and performances, so as to conduct their own performatic appropriations." -- Loren Kruger * Critical Inquiry *
"Taylor's fascinating, multicultural analysis of performance explores not only what performance is but also what it does—what it allows one to see, to experience, and to theorize—and 'its complex relation to systems of power.' . . . Recommended." -- M. S. LoMonaco * Choice *
"The book is performative and multivocal, combining images of performances in the Americas, Taylor’s narrative essays, and important excerpts from key texts on performance by academics, activists, and artists....The result is a work that gives ample space to artists/artivists as the creators of tactics rather than to performance studies
scholars who analyze nonperformance phenomena as performance." -- Patricia Ybarra * TDR: The Drama Review *
"Introduction, reflection, and provocation coalesce most successfully in Taylor’s passionate insistence on the necessity of performance and its academic study. Performance, Taylor argues, has real effects, but the nature of those effects is not pre-determined. The wielder determines the worth of the weapon. These passages alone would suffice to make the book a trusted companion of students and senior scholars alike." -- David Calder * New Theatre Quarterly *
"This book is a valuable introduction to performance art and performance studies. It is deftly argued and elegantly composed. Taylor concludes by saying that performance is ‘world-making’ and that we need to understand it (208). This book helps us to do just that." -- Adrian Curtin * Studies in Theatre and Performance *
“Incredibly important.
Performance is a proffer of a new way of looking and thinking about performance.” -- Robert Summers * CAA Reviews *
Table of ContentsPreface
1. Framing [Performance]
2. Performance Histories
3. Spect-Actors
4. The New Uses of Performance
5. Performative and Performativity
6. Knowing through Performance: Scenarios and Simulation
7. Artivists (Artist-Activists), or What's to Be Done?
8. The Future(s) of Performance
9. Performance Studies
Notes
