New Books in Performing Arts

Why does race matter in film and TV? In Screen Deep: How Film and TV Can Solve Racism and Save the World (Faber and Faber, 2024), Ellen E. Jones, a journalist, broadcaster and the co-host of the BBC’s Screenshot, shows how the storytelling potential offered by screen media shape how we understand ourselves and our societies. The book covers a huge range of genres in film and TV, from superheroes and horror, through romance and crime, to costume drama, comedy and westerns. It tells the history of race in Hollywood, the struggles over British history on screen, and how filmmakers are challenging genre stereotypes across screen industries. Offering a powerful call to reimagine the power, potential, and possibilities offered by film and TV, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary culture as well as a more just and equal world.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

State of the Arts: An Ethnography of German Theatre and Migration (Cambridge UP, 2023) is a bold and wide-ranging account of the unique German public theatre system through the prism of a migrant artistic institution in the western post-industrial Ruhr region. State of the Arts analyses how artistic traditions have responded to social change, racism, and cosmopolitan anxieties and recounts how critical contemporary cultural production positions itself in relation to the tumultuous history of German state patronage, difficult heritage, and self-cultivation through the arts. Jonas Tinius' fieldwork with professional actors, directors, cultural policy makers, and activists unravels how they constitute theatre as a site for extra-ordinary ethical conduct and how they grapple with the pervasive German cultural tradition of Bildung, or self-cultivation through the arts. Tinius shows how anthropological methods provide a way to understand the entanglement of cultural policy, institution-building, and subject-formation. An ambitious and interdisciplinary study, the work demonstrates the crucial role of artistic intellectuals in society.

Adam Bobeck received his PhD in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His dissertation was entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Ontology and Ritual Theory”.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Presenting engaging, thought-provoking stories across centuries of military activity, Shakespeare at War: A Material History (Cambridge UP, 2023) demonstrates just how extensively Shakespeare's cultural capital has been deployed at times of national conflict. Drawing upon scholarly expertise in Shakespeare and War Studies, first-hand experience from public military figures and insights from world-renowned theatre directors, this is the first material history of how Shakespeare has been used in wartime. Addressing home fronts and battle fronts, the collection's broad chronological coverage encompasses the Seven Years' War, the American War of Independence, the Napoleonic Wars, the Russian War, the First and Second World Wars, and the Iraq War. Each chapter reveals an archival object that tells us something about who 'recruited' Shakespeare, what they did with him, and to what effect. Richly illustrated throughout, the collection uniquely uncovers the agendas that Shakespeare has been enlisted to support (and critique) at times of great national crisis and loss.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How do art schools influence music? In No Machos or Pop Stars: When the Leeds Art Experiment Went Punk (Duke UP, 2022), Gavin Butt, a Professor of Fine Art at Northumbria University, Newcastle, tells the story of art, music and higher education in Leeds in the mid-1970s. Using archives and interviews, as well as analysis of the music and art of the era, the book shows the importance of art and art theory to a huge range of bands, including Gang of Four, Scritti Politti and Soft Cell. The analysis also takes a critical perspective on art, music and the era, thinking through the importance of class, gender, and racial inequalities to punk and post-punk. A rich and detailed defence of the importance of arts education, the book will be of interest across the arts and humanities, as well as for anyone wanting to know more about why Leeds matters!

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How can artists survive today? In Cultural Work and Creative Subjectivity: Recentralising the Artist Critique and Social Networks in the Cultural Industries (Routledge, 2023), Dr Xin Gu, Director of the Master of Cultural and Creative Industries at Monash University and an expert appointed by UNESCO 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of Diversity of Cultural Expression, examines contemporary labour conditions for cultural workers. Drawing on detailed historical and global case studies, as well as up to date analysis of changing working practices, the book offers a new theorisation of the role of culture in society. The book is the basis for a major reassessment of how art and culture function in our global context, and will be essential reading across the humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in cultural industries.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

It’s the UConn Popcast, and Taylor Swift is by some measures the most popular person on the planet. Her periodic reinventions set the mass cultural terms of debate, and her political interventions – through exhorting her fans on social media – lead to huge spikes in voter registration. It is hoped by Democrats, and feared by Republicans, that a Taylor endorsement of Joe Biden in 2024 might meaningfully tip the scales in favor of reelection.

In this episode, we consider Taylor Swift as a popular and political text, over which she exercises substantial, but not total, authorial control. What role in the culture does she play? How should we interpret her recent association with the NFL? How do the parasocial relationships of her fans – “Swifties” – to the artist herself contribute to authorship of the Taylor text. And how should we read the counter-subversive conspiratorial responses to her halting forays into electoral politics?

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Tell It to the World: The Broadway Musical Abroad (Oxford UP, 2024) offers a look at how the Broadway musical travels the world, influencing and even transforming local practices and traditions. It traces especially how the musical has been indigenized in South Korea and Germany, the commercial centers for Broadway musicals in East Asia and continental Europe. Both countries were occupied after World War II by the United States, which disseminated U.S. American popular music, jazz, movies, and musical theatre in the belief that these nations needed to rebuild their cultures in accordance with U.S. guidelines. By the 1990s, Broadway imports had become phenomenally popular in Seoul and Hamburg while home-grown musicals proliferated that adapted and transformed the prototypes that had been disseminated by the U.S.

Although this book focuses on recent musicals, it also looks back through the twentieth century to plot the evolution of musical theatre in South Korea and Germany. Part One considers the key questions: What is a musical? Why is it the great success story of U.S. theatre? How has it been assimilated to musical theatre traditions around the world? Part Two focuses on musical theatre in South Korea, studying the import/export business in large-scale musicals about Korean history and innovative hybrid experiments that mix local performance traditions with the Broadway vernacular. Part Three moves to Europe to analyze the conflicted attitudes toward musicals in the German-speaking world. Its three chapters survey the history of musicals in Germany from 1945 until the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reconfiguration of musical theatre conventions by experimental directors, and finally the ground-breaking German-language productions of Broadway classics by Barrie Kosky and other innovative directors.

In the twenty-first century, Broadway-style musical theatre has succeeded in becoming a lingua franca, the template for musical theatre around the world. This book shows how some of the most innovative, beautiful, and exciting musical theatre is being made outside the United States.

Peter C. Kunze is a visiting assistant professor of communication at Tulane University.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How can culture be authentic in the modern world? In The Poet's Song: Folk and its Cultural Politics in South Asia (Rouitledge, 2023), Dr Priyanka Basu, a Lecturer in Performing Arts at Kings College London, explores the history and practice of the folk performance Kobigaan. The book draws on rich archival and historical analysis, as well as fieldwork in West Bengal and Bangladesh, to tell the story of how Kobigaan has evolved over time, how it has been preserved, how it has changed media and changed practice, and how the struggles over to whom Kobigaan belongs play out today. A fascinating and engaging text, the book will be of interest to scholars across the humanities, as well as for anyone interested in arts and culture!

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What people ultimately want from music-drama, audience research suggests, is to be absorbed in a story that engages their feelings, even moves them deeply, and that may lead them to insights about life and, perhaps, themselves. Joseph Cone's Seeing Opera Anew: A Cultural and Biological Perspective (Routledge, 2023) shows how both human biology and culture cause these effects.

Cone, a lifelong opera fan, ardent amateur singer and professional science writer, goes beyond the traditional approaches of musicology, criticism, history and biography. He adopts a "stereo" approach to assimilate cultural perspectives and contemporary evolutionary theories based in human biology. In doing so, he offers fresh insights on why music-dramas can offer such rich, immersive experiences, powerfully affecting our feelings and our understanding of life.

Written to stimulate the student and opera-goer as much as the professional, "Seeing Opera Anew" examines and interprets more than 15 operas in an informal and lively way based on a range of recent scholarship.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Only one performance style has dominated the lexicon of the casual moviegoer: “Method acting.” The first reception-based analysis of film acting, Imagining the Method: Reception, Identity, and American Screen Performance (U Texas Press, 2024) investigates how popular understandings of the so-called Method—what its author Justin Rawlins calls "methodness"—created an exclusive brand for white, male actors while associating such actors with rebellion and marginalization. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book maps the forces giving shape to methodness and policing its boundaries.

Imagining the Method traces the primordial conditions under which the Method was conceived. It explores John Garfield's tenuous relationship with methodness due to his identity. It considers the links between John Wayne's reliance on "anti-Method" stardom and Marlon Brando and James Dean's ascribed embodiment of Method features. It dissects contemporary emphases on transformation and considers the implications of methodness in the encoding of AI performers. Altogether, Justin Rawlins offers a revisionist history of the Method that shines a light on the cultural politics of methodness and the still-dominant assumptions about race, gender, and screen actors and acting that inform how we talk about performance and performers.

Peter C. Kunze is an assistant professor of communication at Tulane University.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.