The Methuen Drama Companion to Performance Art

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The Methuen Drama Companion to Performance Art offers a comprehensive guide to the major issues and interdisciplinary debates concerning performance in art contexts that have developed over the last decade. It understands 'performance art' as an institutional, cultural, and economic phenomenon rather than as a label or object. Following the ever-increasing institutionalization and mainstreaming of performance and its methods of display, representation, and mediation in the wider cultural sphere, the books chapters identify a marked change in the economies and labor practices surrounding performance art and its institutional curating and presenting practices, reflective of an advanced stage of capitalism that approaches art production in tandem with event production. Embracing what we perceive to be the 'oxymoronic status' of performance artwhere it is simultaneously precarious and highly profitablethe essays in this book map the myriad gestures and radical possibilities of this extreme contradiction. The Companion activates an interdisciplinary perspective to better attend to performance arts legacies and its current practices. It brings together specially commissioned essays from leading innovative scholars from a wide range of approaches including art history, visual and performance studies, dance and theatre scholarship in order to provide a non-hierarchical merging of the disciplines within and between the humanities. It provides ten methodological directions that examine possibilities of transformative changethe core of performance arts transgressive radical legacy. The book also includes a section on new directions and resources devoted to performance art. The chapters will thus provide multifocal perspectives on recent research trends to offer an array of intertwined methodologies.

Author Bio

Bertie Ferdman is Professor of Theatre at Borough Manhattan Community College and consortium faculty at The Graduate Center, CUNY, USA. Recent publications include Off Sites: Contemporary Performance beyond Site-Specific (2018) and Curating Dramaturgies: How Dramaturgy and Curating are Intersecting in the Contemporary Arts (2021), co-edited with Peter Eckersall. Jovana Stokic is a Belgrade-born, New York-based art historian and curator. She is currently on the faculty of the MFA Art Practice, School of Visual Arts, New York, USA, and New York University Steinhardt Department of Art and Art Professions. She holds a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.