Performance Studies Commons^™

Guddling About: Experiments In Vital Materialism With Particular Regard To Water, Minty Donald

The Goose

With reference to Jane Bennett’s notion of "vital materialism," this photo essay documents and reflects on Guddling About: a series of experiments or actions carried out by artists Nick Millar and Minty Donald with the Bow River and its watershed in Calgary and Southern Alberta in August-September 2013. Each experiment is described as a set of instructions — a script or score for an event — which can be enacted in any location where human settlement has evolved around a river. The experiments will be repeated, and new ones developed, with the River Clyde in Glasgow and Southern Scotland in …

Presentation Of The Issue On The Artist Researcher, Ludivine Allegue, Ivan Magrin-Chagnolleau

Presidential Fellows Articles and Research

Ivan Magrin-Chagnolleau : Ludivine, I am delighted to start the adventure of the journal p-e-r-f-o-r-m-a-n-c-e with an issue co-edited with you on one hand, and on the theme of the artist researcher on the other hand. Can you tell me why this theme of the artist researcher is so important to you?

Ludivine Allegue: I had the opportunity to work on the Practice as Research in Performance project in UK. This was a fascinating phase in my research: finally the essential role of artistic practice was taken into consideration in the Art research context, with the avowed aim of …

In Praise Of The Artist Researcher, Ivan Magrin-Chagnolleau

Presidential Fellows Articles and Research

I will start by defining the terms artist, researcher and artist researcher and then give some examples of artist researchers: Leonardo da Vinci, Constantin Stanislavski, Bertolt Brecht and Lee Strasberg. Finally, I will address the issue of artist researcher from my own perspective, as an actor and director in particular. I will thus demonstrate the benefits of linking the practice of art with a more theoretical research of this practice, and how these two aspects – art and research – are mutually reinforcing and help creativity to flourish.

The Bollywood Item Number: From Mujra To Modern Day Ramifications, Avantika Saraogi

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis deals with the “item number” genre of Bollywood song and dance sequences. I argue that the item song has evolved from a combination of the historically rich culture of prostitution in old India and the western influence of modern times; and that it contributes highly to the male dominated patriarchal society perpetuated by Hindi films by means of the voyeuristic male gaze and objectification of the female body. In conjunction with this research I choreographed a dance called Item No. 3 that was performed in Scripps Dances 2013. A discussion of the significance and decisions behind the …

The Body Eclectic: Viewing Bodily Modification In David Nebreda, David Houston Jones

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

David Nebreda's work presents current thinking on body/performance art with a dilemma. In stretching social prescriptions of the (re)presentable body, it exemplifies a pervasive anxiety concerning bodily modification and the politics of looking, and demands a new theorisation of the body in photographic representation. Autoportraits (2000) depicts a series of visibly emaciated bodies on which wounds are inflicted by knives, cords and flames [1]. The photographs document the strict schedules of discipline to which the bodies are subjected, and sometimes represent the very moment at which practices of bodily modification are executed. It is this subject-matter which threatens …

The Mind Museum: Rudolf Schwarzkogler And The Vienna Actionists, Philip Barnes

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Sixth paragraph]

In the following essay I discuss the Austrian artist Rudolf Schwarzkogler. I have enjoyed the process of ferreting out articles and references to him, although these are seemingly as scarce as his own artistic output. Schwarzkogler spent just 2 years staging performance-actions in his apartment in the 1960s. These methodically photographed scenes involved sliced fish, bandages, light bulbs, razor blades, foodstuffs and surgical apparatus, all manipulated by anonymous figures. The photographs, works of art in their own right, have since toured internationally. Schwarzkogler was the least outgoing of a group called the Viennese Actionists, whose orgiastic, bloody Happenings …