Utopia in Performance
Finding Hope at the Theater
Publication Year: 2005
Published by: University of Michigan Press
Chapter One: Introduction: Feeling the Potential of Elsewhere
Utopia in Performance argues that live performance provides a place where people come together, embodied and passionate, to share experiences of meaning making and imagination that can describe or capture ›eeting intimations of a better world...
Chapter Two: “A Femme, a Butch, a Jew”: Feminist Autobiographical Solo Performance
How can performance, in itself, be a utopian gesture? Why do people come together to watch other people labor on stage, when contemporary culture solicits their attention with myriad other forms of representation and opportunities for social gathering? Why do people continue to seek the...
Chapter Three: Finding Our Feet in One Another’s Shoes :Multiple-Character Solo Performance
Utopia can be a placeholder for social change, a no-place that the apparatus of theater—its liveness, the potential it holds for real social exchange, its mortality, its openness to human interactions that life outside this magical space...
Chapter Four: Def Poetry Jam: Performance as Public Practice
Performance, as I argued by discussing monopolylogue performers in the last chapter, offers a way to practice imagining new forms of social relationships. I believe in theater’s use value as a place to fantasize how peace and justice, equality and truly participatory democracy might take hold sometime...
Chapter Five: The Laramie Project: Rehearsing for the Example
The Laramie Project uses the idiom of performance to construct a public with which to examine the ›aw in the social fabric illuminated by the murder of Matthew Shepard. On October 6, 1998, the twenty-one-year-old gay college student, out searching for a semblance of a queer life for himself in Laramie...
Chapter Six: Militant Optimism: Approaching Humanism
I find myself with a keen desire to reclaim a commitment to human commonality. I know that gender, race, sexuality, ability, class, and other vectors of identity remain entrenched as discriminatory benchmarks in public discourse and in the distribution of social and political power. But more and more...
Epilogue: Finding Hope at the Theater
Throughout Utopia in Performance, I’ve suggested that moments of liminal clarity and communion, ›eeting, brie›y transcendent bits of profound human feeling and connection, spring from alchemy between performers and spectators and their mutual confrontation with a historical present that lets...
E-ISBN-13: 9780472025572
E-ISBN-10: 0472025570
Print-ISBN-13: 9780472069071
Print-ISBN-10: 0472069071
Page Count: 248
Publication Year: 2005
OCLC Number: 647888893
MUSE Marc Record: Download for Utopia in Performance
