Ruptured relations : guerrilla theatre, time & Pranksterish disability performance practice

Guerrilla theatre tends, by its very definition, to pop up unpredictably – it interrupts what people might see as the proper or typical flow of time, place and space. The subversive tenor of such work means that questions about ‘what has happened’ tend to the decidedly less polite form of ‘WTF’ as passersby struggle to make sense of, and move on from, moments in which accustomed narratives of action and interaction no longer apply. In this paper I examine examples of guerrilla theatre by performers with disabilities in terms of these ruptures in time, and the way they prompt reflection, reconfigure relations, or recede into traditional relations again - focusing particularly on comedian Laurence Clark. Many performers with disabilities – Bill Shannon, Katherine Araniello, Aaron Williamson, Ju Gosling, and others – find guerrilla-style interventions in public places apposite to their aesthetic and political agendas. They prompt passersby to reflect on their relationship to people with disabilities. They can be recorded for later dissection and display, teaching people something about the way social performers, social spectators and society as a whole deal with disability. In this paper, as I unpack Clark's work, I note that the embarrassment that characterises these encounters can be a flag of an ethical process taking place for passersby. Caught between two moments in which time, roles and relationships suddenly fail to flow along the smooth routes of socially determined habits, passersbys’ frowns, gasps and giggles flag difficulties dealing with questions about their attitude to disabled people they do not now know how to answer. I consider the productivity, politics and performerly ethics of drawing passersby into such a process – a chaotic, challenging interstitial time in which a passersbys choices become fodder for public consumption – in such a wholly public way.

Playing Pranks: Traditions, communities & co-creative cultural performance practice

Pranks, hoaxes and practical jokes are co-creative cultural performance practices that appear across times, contexts and cultures. These practices include everyday play amongst families, friends and coworkers, entertainment programs such as Prank Patrol, Punked or Scare Tactics, and aesthetic and activist pranks perpetrated by situationist artists, guerrilla artists, and, most recently, culture ‘jammers’ or ‘hackers’ intent on turning capitalist systems back on themselves. Although it can, in common usage, describe almost any show off behaviour, a prank in the strictest definition of the term is a performance that deploys a very specific set of strategies. It is an act of trickery, mischief, or deceit, that must be taken as real, and momentarily cause real fear, anger or worry for an unwitting spectator-become-performer, who is meant to play along until the trick is revealed and their response can be represented back to the prankster, other spectators, or society as a whole, either for the sake of entertainment or for the sake of commentary on a cultural phenomenon. A prank, in this sense, deliberately blurs the boundaries between daily and dramatic performance. It creates a moment of uncertainty, in which both the prankster’s ability to be creative, clever, or culturally astute, and the prankee’s ability to play along, discern the trick, discern the point of the trick, and, in the end, be duped, be a good sport, or even play/pay the prankster back, are both put to the test. In this paper, I consider a number of pranking traditions popular where I am in Australia, from the community-building pranks of footballers, bucks parties and ‘drop bear’ tales told to tourists, to the more controversial pranks of radio shock jocks, activists and artists. I use performance, spectatorship and ethical theory to examine the engagement between prankster, pranked spectator, and other spectators, in this most distinctive sort of community-driven performance practice, and the way it builds and breaks status, social and other sorts of relationships within and between specific communities.

VIXEN, VIRGIN, AND GODDESS: PERFORMANCE PRACTICE AND THE BAROQUE HEROINE

This dissertation comprises performance of three soprano roles in Baroque musical theater pieces, recorded on compact disc. These roles are "Poppea" in The Coronation of Poppea (1642) of Claudio Monteverdi (a filly-produced staging of the 1989 Alan Curtis critical edition in English translation, with the Maryland Opera Studio at the Kay Theater, Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, May 3 and 6, 2002; Ken Slowik, conductor); "Galatea" in Acis and Galatea (1718) of George Friederich Handel (a staged reading at Gildenhorn Recital Hall, Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, May 29,2003; Edward Maclary, conductor); and "Miecke" (Soprano Soloist) in Mer hahn en neue Oberkeet (Peasant Cantata), BWV 212 (1742) of Johann Sebastian Bach (a staged and costumed performance with the Washington Bach Consort at Rachel M. Schlesinger Concert Hall, Alexandria, Virginia, February 2,2003; J. Reilly Lewis, conductor). In addition to performing these three roles, I was the stage director for the reading of Acis and Galatea. Close readings of the libretti, examination of contemporary guides to ornamentation, and research into production histories inform the improvisatory ornamentation found in these compact disc recordings.

The Performance Practice of Buddhist Baiqi in Contemporary Taiwan

The baiqi (Buddhist percussive instruments), also known as faqi (dharma instruments), are mentioned in the Chinese Buddhist scriptures under many different terms: jianzhi, jiandi, jianzhui, or jianchi. The original function of baiqi in earlier monastic life was to gather people or to call an assembly. With the completion of monasticism and monastic institutions, baiqi have become multifunctional in monasteries, and many baiqi instruments have been developed for different monastic applications. In contemporary Buddhist monasteries in Taiwan, baiqi are used, on the one hand, to mark the time throughout the day, signal the beginning and end of monastic daily activities, and regulate the monastic order; and on the other hand, baiqi are indispensable to the musical practices of all Buddhist rituals, where they are used to accompany fanbai (Buddhist liturgical chants) and to articulate the whole ritual process. This study investigates multiple facets of Buddhist baiqi in their performance practice, function, application, notation, and transmission, exploring the interaction between baiqi and fanbai, baiqi and the practitioner, baiqi and the monastic space, and baiqi and various Buddhist contexts. I draw upon ideas from performance theory as it concerns different disciplines, but I maintain a sharper focus on the musicological dimension of performance practice when analyzing, interpreting, and explaining the performance and music of baiqi in terms of the monastic lifestyle and its rituals. The study not only uncovers the musical system of baiqi, but also encapsulates various issues of performed identity, social interaction, performer/audience, associated behaviors, the musical construction of space, and transmission.

Polychoral performance practice and maestro di cappella conducting

Abstract This article disputes some basic questions concerning the coordination of seventeenth century sacred music, approaching the phenomenon through a musical species of particular interest, though largely unstudied from a performance practice point of view. Roman polychorality with its specific performing conditions offers an illuminating perspective on principles of musical direction and interaction which differ significantly from our modern access path towards these topics. The inquiry ranges from basics of performance (such as sheet music, rehearsals, direction technics, models and stylistic conditioning of the performers) over the concrete role of the maestro di cappella as well as the tactus as cornerstones of sacred music practice, up to the philosophical content the particular 'system of values', shining though this overall picture, seems to represent. On this groundwork the essay opens a discussion on conventions which have remained literally unchallenged by generations of researchers and performers.

Music performance practice in the early ʻAbbāsid era 132-320 A.H./750-932 A.D. /

Includes index.

The sound of whiteness: early music vocal performance practice in Britain

American Musicological Society annual meeting, San Francisco, 10 Nov. 2011

THE INTERPLAY PERFORMANCE PRACTICE: PLAY AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN LATE CAPITALISM

Practitioners of the performance form “InterPlay” utilize dance, storytelling and song to build community and generate social change. I elucidate how this community of practitioners conceptualizes “social change.” I argue that the InterPlay social movement organizes around the application of play to performances of self in everyday life. I explore how the InterPlay non-profit corporation, Body Wisdom Inc., employs this technique to address racial justice in its organizational practices. I also examine how practitioners understand their use of this performance play in places of work, concluding that—even in these endeavors—they see social change as a process immanent to both individual people and the systems they create, not as the intervention of an autonomous external power. Ultimately, I argue that, within late capitalism, play should no longer be conceptualized as an activity separate from everyday sociality but as an immanent process of change constitutive of a socioaesthetic domain.

Gospel Music Training, Performance Practice and Its Impact on Leadership Development and Performed Nationalism in a Collegiate Military Choir

Since America’s beginnings as a British colony, its musical standards have adhered to those of Western Europe. For this reason, musical forms native to America like Black folk spirituals and Gospel music have historically been marginalized in favor of music in the Western classical tradition. Today, a bias towards music of the Western classical tradition exists in those American universities that grant music degrees. While this bias is understandable, inclusion of Gospel music history and performance practice would result in a more complete understanding of American music and its impact on American nationalism. The United States Naval Academy is one of the few American universities that have consistently elevated the performance of Gospel music to the level of Western Classical music within its institutional culture. The motivations for writing this document are to provide a brief history of Gospel music in the United States and of choral music at the Naval Academy. These historical accounts serve as lenses though which the intersection of Gospel music performance practice and leadership development at the United States Naval Academy may be observed. During the last two decades of the twentieth century, Gospel music intersected American military culture at the U.S. Naval Academy. After a few student-led attempts in the 1970s, a Gospel Choir was formed in 1986 but by 1990, it had become an official part of the Music Department. Ultimately, it received institutional support and today, the Gospel Choir is one of three touring choirs authorized to represent the Academy in an official capacity. This document discusses the promotion of Gospel music by the Naval Academy in its efforts to diversify Academy culture and ultimately, Naval and Marine Corps leadership. Finally, this dissertation examines the addition of performed cultural expression (Gospel music) in light of a shift in American nationalism and discusses its impact on Naval Academy culture.

WORK: hybridity and endurance within solo dance practice and performance

Performance Research in Rangeland Communities

In 2003, Bill Dunstone, John McCallum and Paul Makeham began a collaboration with researchers at the Centre for the Management of Arid Environments (CMAE) in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. CMAE researchers are keen to develop 'people-oriented' strategies for implementing agricultural extension initiatives in their region. Traditional hierarchies of knowledge-transfer have impeded the 'connectedness' between community and researchers that gives meaning and relevance to useful practice (Ison and Russell, 2000). Our aim is to establish a partnership between the Live Events Research Network (LERN) and CMAE, investigating ways to link creative, performance-based research and practice with the scientific methodologies associated with natural resources management. This accords with recent work undertaken by Deborah Mills and Paul Brown, showing how community cultural development strategies enhance the implementation of policy concerned with community wellbeing. Mills and Brown 'adopted a concept of wellbeing which builds on a social and environmental view of health', and considered such themes as ecological sustainability, rural economic revitalisation, community strengthening, health and wellbeing (Mills, 2003). We propose that rangeland communities can creatively manage some of the challenges confronting them through performance-based projects which: - activate the stories through which a community enacts its sense of place; - facilitate live events in which the community enacts ownership of its culture and identity; - directly involve the community in the formulation of research issues

Performing composition : developing a computer assisted composition system through live coding performance

This thesis maps the author's journey from a music composition practice to a composition and performance practice. The work involves the development of a software library for the purpose of encapsulating compositional ideas in software, and realising these ideas in performance through a live coding computer music practice. The thesis examines what artistic practice emerges through live coding and software development, and does this permit a blurring between the activities of music composition and performance. The role that software design plays in affecting musical outcomes is considered to gain an insight into how software development contributes to artistic development. The relationship between music composition and performance is also examined to identify the means by which engaging in live coding and software development can bring these activities together. The thesis, situated within the discourse of practice led research, documents a journey which uses the experience of software development and performance as a means to guide the direction of the research. The journey serves as an experiment for the author in engaging an hitherto unfamiliar musical practice, and as a roadmap for others seeking to modify or broaden their artistic practice.