Decomposition: Post-Disciplinary Performance (Unnatural Acts: Theorizing the Performative) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0253337232 ISBN 13: 9780253337238

Publisher: Indiana University Press, 2000

Synopsis

The fluid nature of performance studies and the widening embrace of the idea of performativity has produced in "Decomposition: Post-Disciplinary Performance", a collection of great interest that crosses disciplinary lines of academic work. The essays move from the local to the global, from history to sport, from body parts to stage productions, and from race relations to global politics. In the title essay, Elizabeth Wood writes with eloquence about a basic human relation cast around the question of performance and triangulated by the role a great performer took within it. In this unnatural act of somatic and sonic decomposition of the maternal body's "soundscape", she seeks to liberate herself and us from the last refuge of patriarchal order and compulsory heterosexuality, the subordinating myth of maternal omnipotence. The decomposition of such myths is a binding force in this volume. Together these essays pursue critical understandings of performance in our postmodern world, embodying perspectives that help us understand the historical and cultural issues that underpin it.

About this title

About the Author

1) Sue-Ellen Case is Chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, Davis. She has authored and edited several books in the field of feminism and performance studies, including Feminism & Theatre; the Domain-Matrix: Performing Lesbian at the End of Print Culture; and Performing Feminisms.

2) Philip Brett is Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of California, Riverside. A leader in gay studies in musicology, he is co-editor of Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, and he has written extensively on the music of Benjamin Britten.

3) Susan Leigh Foster, choreographer, dancer, writer, is Professor of Dance at the University of California campuses of Riverside and Davis. She is author of Reading Dancing and Choreography and Narrative and editor of Choreographing History and Corporealities.

Edition details

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0253337232
• ISBN 13: 9780253337238
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 232
• Editor: Case Sue-Ellen, Brett Philip, Foster Susan