New Books in Performing Arts

How can we create a more equal media industry? In Access All Areas: The Diversity Manifesto for TV and Beyond, Marcus Ryder and Sir Lenny Henry, both founder members of the The Sir Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity at Birmingham City University, tell the story of their work to transform British television and set out an eight point manifesto for change. The book lays out the diversity crisis in the media industry, setting out the numerous barriers confronting those who are labelled as minorities (despite being the majority of the population!) and showing why previous efforts to address the problems have failed. By doing so, the book sets up its alternatives that will create a more just, and thus more diverse, television industry. The book, along with Marcus’ blog, is essential reading for academics and the public, both in the UK and beyond.

Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art.

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Diana Taylor's ¡Presente! The Politics of Presence (Duke University Press, 2020) examines what it means to be presente in the context of protest, theatre, and everyday life. Taylor pays particular attention to the performativity of protest politics and the politics of performance art in the Americas, including case studies of the Zapatistas, post-dictatorship historical memory in Chile and Argentina, and the leftist pranksters The Yes Men. ¡Presente! is a wide-ranging and entertaining work of scholarship that looks at how performance and performance studies can become useful tools in the fight against neo-liberal capitalism and in the creation of new modes of living.

Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts.

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Musical Solidarities: Political Action and Music in Late Twentieth-Century Poland (Oxford University Press, 2020) by Andrea Bohlman is a study of the music of dissent and protest during the Solidarity Movement in 1980s Poland. This book is not simply a re-telling of significant events in the fight against state socialism or an examination of important political anthems (although she does this as well). Instead, she grounds her study in the media networks and material culture by which music circulated throughout Poland and internationally. Through close readings of clandestine and state-sponsored recordings augmented by archival research and interviews with participants, Bohlman analyzes the hymns, art and popular music that made up the repertory of the Solidarity Movement. She argues that sound both unified and splintered the Polish opposition. She considers how different kinds of music contributed to the civil resilience of a country suffering under martial law, while at the same time narrating the Solidarity Movement and amplifying the political messages of its leaders.

Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century.

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For six years, anthropologist and artist Maya Stovall enacted a series of dance performances outside of liquor stores in the McDougall-Hunt neighborhood on Detroit’s east side. Stovall conceptualized these performances as prompts for people that may pass by and as a means to open up space for conversation with Detroit residents. 

These filmed performances and the interviews that followed make up Liquor Store Theatre (Duke University Press, 2020). In the book, Stovall probes the historic, economic, and political forces that constructed and shape the city of Detroit. Liquor Store Theatre attends closely to the methods of performance and interviews as they unfold in the author’s pursuit of this project. Stovall’s interlocuters share their perspectives on the changes in the city, the challenges the city faces, as well as their hopes for a future in which they can enjoy the benefits of the city. A native Detroiter herself, Stovall’s artistic ventures turn the lens back on the city itself and center the voices of Detroiters, whose awareness of the city’s challenges mixes with their pursuit of opportunity. Liquor Store Theatre videos have been screened at the 2017 Whitney Biennial and at the Cranbrook Art Museum. Stovall brings together ethnography, contemporary art and performance, and geography to offer an innovative method for troubling the relationship between the observed and the observer of city life.

Maya Stovall is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Liberal Studies at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Stovall’s exhibition for 1526 appears at the Reyes Finn gallery. Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. 

Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creations.

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On this episode, I interview Mario Telò, professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, about his new book, Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy, recently published by The Ohio State University Press. In the text, Telò examines how contemporary theorizations of the archive (especially Derrida’s Mal d’Archive) and the death drive (in Freud as well as Bersani, Butler, Edelman, Deleuze, Lacan, Rancière, and Žižek) can help us understand the aesthetic experience of tragedy. Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy locates the tragic genre's aesthetic allure beyond catharsis in a vertiginous sense of giddy suspension, in a spiral of life and death that resists equilibrium, stabilization, and all forms of normativity. In so doing, Telò forges a new model of tragic aesthetics.

Britt Edelen is a Ph.D. student in English at Duke University. He focuses on modernism and the relationship(s) between language, philosophy, and literature. You can find him on Twitter or send him an email.

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André Gregory's not-memoir This Is Not My Memoir (FSG, 2020) is a fascinating trip through theatre history as seen through the eyes of one of its greatest directors. The André we encounter in this book will be familiar to fans of his theatre work or of his celebrated performance in My Dinner with André: curious, ebullient, searching, passionate, funny, and inspiring. This book also includes reflections on André's collaborations and friendships with some of theatre's greatest artists, including Jerzy Grotowski, Wallace Shawn, and Helene Weigel. This book belongs on a shelf next to great autobiographies of the theatre like Harold Clurman's The Fervent Years and Tennessee Williams' Memoirs.

Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts.

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Much is known about the Qing sartorial regulations and how the Qing conquerors forced Han Chinese males to adopt Manchu hairstyle and clothing. But what happened on the stage? What did Qing performers wear, not only when they performed as characters in the Han past, but also when they appeared as subjects in the Manchu present? Reading dramatic works against Qing sartorial regulations, Staging Personhood: Costuming in Early Qing Drama (Columbia University Press, 2020) explores a two-sided question: how did the Ming-Qing transition influence costuming as theatrical practices and how, in turn, did costuming enable the production of different types of personhood in early Qing China?

With readings of several early Qing theatrical works, from the canonical Peach Blossom Fan (Taohua shan) to the lesser-known A Ten-Thousand-Li Reunion (Wanli yuan), combined with visual and performance records and historical documents, Staging Personhood provides a new and interdisciplinary perspective on the cultural dynamics of early Qing China. Not only does this book turn an interdisciplinary lens to the entanglements between Chinese drama and nascent Manchu rule, it contains a plethora of fascinating moments from early Qing plays—from double-cross-dressers to fake queues—touching on issues of class, gender, ethnicity, and conceptions of time.

Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard. She works on Manchu language books and is interested in anything with a kesike.

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The “diva” is a common trope when we talk about culture. We normally think of the diva as a Western construction: the opera singer, the Broadway actress, the movie star. A woman of outstanding talent, whose personality and ability are both larger-than-life.

But the truth is throughout history, many cultures have featured spaces for strong female artists, whose talent allows them to break free of the gender roles that pervaded their societies. In Three Asian Divas: Women, Art and Culture in Shiraz, Delhi and Yangzhou (Abbreviated Press: 2020) David Chaffetz briefly explores how these “Asian divas” could be seen as some of the first recognizably “modern women''.

In this interview, David and I talk about the three different cultures of Three Asian Divas: Shiraz, Delhi and Yangzhou. We discuss what it meant to be a diva in these historical contexts, and what they say about gender roles in these historic Asian societies.

After studying Persian, Turkish and Arabic in college, David Chaffetz worked on the publication of the Encyclopedia Iranica and is also the author of A Journey through Afghanistan, a study of its varied people, social classes and religious sects. He has lived in Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey, and travelled extensively in Asia. After a forty-year break working in the technology industry, he returned to writing with “Three Asian Divas.”

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. In his day job, he’s a researcher and writer for a think tank in economic and sustainable development. He is also a print and broadcast commentator on local and regional politics. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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When Mike Anthony moved to New York City to become an actor, he’d imagined being under the bright lights of Broadway, living a life full of fame and fortune. Instead, he took a job not on stage for a Broadway show, but behind its bar, and found a life full of meaning.

In Life at Hamilton: Sometimes You Throw Away Your Shot, Only to Find Your Story (Waterside, 2020), Mike takes us along on his journey, recounting his extraordinary experiences as Hamilton rocketed into Broadway history, from its unparalleled opening night, through the 2016 election, to its COVID-19 intermission. On display along the way are Mike’s heartfelt and often humorous encounters with the show’s patrons, including some of the most famous celebrities in the world, and its biggest (and littlest) Hamilfans. Mike’s story is a testament to the potent power of theater to connect, to inspire, and to heal.

For as long as there have been people, they have put on plays. Life At Hamilton reminds us why.

Alexandra Salkin is currently a student at University of California, Santa Cruz.

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The story of the Passion of Christ has lived through the ages in the Netherlands despite secularism growing in the popular narrative of the nation.

In this episode, Dr. Mirella Klomp, of the Protestant Theological University, the Netherlands, discusses her book “Playing On: Re-staging the Passion after the Death of God,” published by Brill, and talks about how the Passion has seeped out from the liturgy to the wider cultural domain, why its story remains so popular today, whether depicting Christ in conjunction with popular music and pursuits is disrespectful, and whose story the Passion really is.

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