Performing Animality Animals in Performance Practices

by Parker-Starbuck, Jennifer; Orozco, Lourdes

• ISBN13: 9781137373120
• ISBN10: 1137373121
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2015-04-14
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Performing Animality provides theoretical and creative interventions into the presence of the animal and ideas of animality in performance. Animals have always played a part in human performance practices. Maintaining a crucial role in many communities' cultural traditions, animal-human encounters have been key in the development of performance. Similarly, performance including both living animals and/or representations of animals provides the context for encounters in which issues of power, human subjectivity and otherness are explored. Crucially, however, the inclusion of animals in performance also offers an opportunity to investigate ethical and moral assumptions about human and non-human animals. This book offers a historical and theoretical exploration of animal presence in performance by looking at the concept of animality and how it has developed in theatre and performance practices from the eighteenth century to today. Furthermore, it points to shifts in political, cultural, and ethical animal-human relations emerging within the context of animality and performance.

Author Biography

Lourdes Orozco is Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the Workshop Theatre, University of Leeds, UK. Her research interests are in Contemporary Theatre and Performance in Europe. Her recent publications focus largely on contemporary Western European performance practice with special focus on the material conditions of performance and its relationship with politics, ethics and identity.

Her most recent research focuses on the presence of animals and children in theatre and performance contexts. She is the author of Theatre and Animals (Palgrave, 2013), and has published various articles/book chapters on the intersection between Theatre and Performance Studies and Animal Studies.

Jennifer Parker-Starbuck is a Reader in Drama, Theatre and Performance at University of Roehampton, UK. She is author of Cyborg Theatre: Corporeal/Technological Intersections in Multimedia Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and her essays on bodies, animality, and multimedia have appeared in a variety of books and journals. Her essay 'Animal Ontologies and Media Representations: Robotics, Puppets, and the Real of War Horse' (Theatre Journal, October 2013) received the ATHE 2014 Outstanding Article award. She is an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media and a Contributing Editor for PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Lourdes Orozco and Jennifer Parker-Starbuck
PART I: SETTING THE STAGE
1. From Homo Performans to Interspecies Collaboration: Expanding the Concept of Performance to Include Animals; Laura Cull
PART II: BULLS, DOGS, PIGS, BEARS, AND HORSES: ANIMALS IN PERFORMANCE
2. The Art of Fierceness: The Performance of the Spanish Fighting Bull; Garry Marvin
3. 'Genus Porcus Sophisticus': The Learned Pig and the Theatrics of National Identity in Late Eighteenth-Century London; Monica Mattfeld
4. 'A Very Good Act For an Unimportant Place': Animals, Ambivalence, and Abuse in Big-Time Vaudeville; Catherine Young
5. Acrobatic Circus Horses: Military Training to Natural Wildness; Peta Tait
PART III: 'PERFORMING' ANIMALS AND 'THEATRES OF SPECIES'
6. Massive Bodies in Mortal Performance: War Horse and the Staging of Anglo-American Equine Experience in Combat; Kim Marra
7. Embattled Animals in a Theatre of Species; Una Chaudhuri
8. Animal Pasts and Presents: Taxidermied Time Travellers; Jennifer Parker-Starbuck
9. Effacing the Human: Rachel Rosenthal, Rats and Shared Creative Agency; Carrie Rohman
PART IV: 'LOOKING AT/LOVING/WITH ANIMALS'
10. There and not There: Looking at Animals in Contemporary Theatre Practice; Lourdes Orozco
11. It's Hard to Spot the Queerness in this Image; Holly Hughes
Index