Performance Research Volume 21 Issue 3

On Dialectics

Issue editors: Eleanor Massie and Philip Watkinson

ISSN: 1352-8165 (2016) 21:3

On Dialectics provides a platform for articles, performative essays and artist's pages that focus on the interrelations between dialectics and performance, and a space to reflect on how dialectical methods have been or can be applied in theatre and performance theory and practice. This issue asks how a theory of flux, contradiction and becoming might be particularly vital to the study of the contemporary performance industry in an era of increased global socio-economic instability. When thinking of alternatives to neoliberalism in the sphere of cultural production, why might scholars and practitioners recuperate a praxis that places fracture and antagonism at its very heart? How might the playful and dialogic engagement that dialectics promotes speak to the creation, process and experience of contemporary cultural activity? Is performance inherently dialectical, or dialectics inherently performative?

On Dialectics

Eleanor Massie, Philip Watkinson

pp. 1 - 5

Dialectics and the Brechtian Tradition : Some thoughts on politicized performance

David Barnett

pp. 6 - 15

Brecht’s Gale : Innovation and postdramatic theatre

Michael Shane Boyle

pp. 16 - 26

A Trialectical Cusp: Between the Real and the Represented : At the Bus Stop in SPID Theatre Company’s 23176

Katie Beswick

pp. 27 - 36

Materiality as Performance : Blurring the boundaries between the real and the imagined

Cecilie Sachs Olsen

pp. 37 - 46

Constructing Dialectical Images in Sound and Space : Adapting Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project

Campbell Edinborough

pp. 47 - 53

A Note on Spatial Dialectics

Michal Kobialka

pp. 54 - 64

Heterotopia as Choreography : Foucault’s sailing vessel

Arabella Stanger

pp. 65 - 73

On the Dialectics of Charisma in Marina Abramović’s The Artist is Present

Adele Senior, Simon Kelly

pp. 74 - 83

Violence in Martial Arts Actor Training : A dialectical view

Eve Wedderburn

pp. 84 - 91

Subvert/Reinscribe : Reading self-consciously employed stereotypes through performativity

Kee-Yoon Nahm

pp. 92 - 103

Soil : Crisis, the cultural commons and performing South-east Asia in America

Michael Sakamoto

pp. 103 - 114

The Schizoid Dialectic : Theses on winning the Union back

Gary Anderson, John Bennett, Steven Shakespeare

pp. 115 - 121

Weird Seance Extras (Revisited) – artist’s pages

Daniel Oliver

pp. 122 - 123

Resisting Dispossession: Affective Alliances Labouring for Justice (review)

Kristin Flade

pp. 124 - 126

Debating the Future of the Left, or Why We Should Perform the Arts as Tactics and Not as Instrumental Logic (review)

Marilena Zaroulia

pp. 127 - 128

Notes on Contributors

pp. 129 - 130