Search results for ""Author Rachel Bowditch""
Seagull Books London Ltd On the Edge of Utopia: Performance and Ritual at Burning Man
During the week before Labor Day every year, nearly fifty thousand people gather in Nevada's Black Rock Desert and build Black Rock City. At the center of Black Rock City is a forty-foot wooden effigy of a man, an icon around which art, performance, and community revolve. Since 1986, the Burning Man Festival has evolved from founder Larry Harvey's personal healing ritual into a cultural movement where ceremony, religion, visual art, and performance converge on an epic scale. In "On the Edge of Utopia", Rachel Bowditch - performer, theater director, scholar, and Burning Man participant - explores the spectrum of performance and ritual practices within Black Rock City from the everyday to wild spectacle, the profane to the sublime. Bowditch argues that Burning Man can be understood as a contemporary galaxy of happenings, a revival of the ancient Roman Saturnalia, a site for rehearsals of utopia, and a secular pilgrimage. As Burning Man continues to grow, it will create new paradigms for performance, installation art, community, and invented rituals that bridge ancient traditions to the twenty-first century.
£26.50
Seagull Books London Ltd Performing Utopia
In her landmark study Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre, Jill Dolan departed from historical writings on utopia, which suggest that social reorganization and the redistribution of wealth are utopian efforts, to argue instead that utopia occurs in fragmentary "utopian moments," often found embedded within performance. While Dolan focused on the utopian performative within a theatrical context, this volume, edited by Rachel Bowditch and Pegge Vissicaro, expands her theories to encompass performance in public life from diasporic hip-hop battles, Chilean military parades, commemorative processions, Blackfoot powwows, and post-Katrina Mardi Gras to the Philadelphia Mummers Parade, Festas Juninas in Brazil, the Renaissance Fairs in Arizona, and neoburlesque competitions. How do these performances rehearse and enact visions of a utopic world? What can the lens of utopia and dystopia illuminate about the potential of performing bodies to transform communities, identities, values, and beliefs across time? Performing Utopia not only answers these questions, but offers a diverse collection of case studies focusing on utopias, dystopias, and heterotopias enacted through the performing body.
£27.42
