Solo Performance Research Articles

The Power of Unwanted Presence

Presenting human bodies in public space against the will of the state is a well-known strategy to protest. Indeed the presence of the body as a materiality bears meaning. Furthermore if the body is doing an act for the eyes of the spectator it has an explanation therefore a performance happens. As Judith Butler claims the body is a manner of doing, dramatizing and reproducing a historical situation. Meanwhile it is subjectivated by culture, power structures and its social environment. In a public protest performing bodies(body) get connected to each other and form a resistant performativity. This enables the subject to vitalize possibilities for social transformation and objection with dominating power structures. However there are groups of humans who are not eligible to appear as subjects. When the subject is defined by elimination then performance is a kind of resistance that reclaims agency and power. Since the Islāmization of Iran revolution(1979), Iranian women have managed to protest in four particular mass gatherings to resist socio-political oppression related to their gender and compulsory hijab. The very first was A five-day protest march starting on March 8, 1979 to prevent legalization of compulsory hijab. The second one was a peaceful gathering of women's rights defenders in June 2006 in Tehran’s central business district that ended with violent objection from the state and the third is a solo performance of an Iranian woman known as the Girl of Enghelab Street on 27 December 2017. Aesthetics of these Performances vary according to different strategic and artistic choices. This Article tries to define and explain the surrounding environment and socio-political basis which lead to formation of these different constructions. It studies the performative strategies of these public gatherings of powerful subjects with a common object: social equality through a nonviolence subversive performance. It is essential to mention that by the time of this article's publication, the very last nationwide uprising against compulsory Hijab with the Manifest “Woman, Life, Freedom” is ongoing in Iran. It is ignited by the brutal murder of Jina 'Mahsa' Amini while in the custody of the moral police on 16th September 2022. This article has been submitted by May 2021, hence these developments have not been considered.

Encounters in the Chthulucene: Simon McBurney’s Theatre of Compost

Abstract Looking at Simon McBurney’s award-winning solo performance The Encounter (2015), this paper examines the play’s contribution to environmental humanities through an ecocritical study of its combined use of state-of-the-art sound design and the age-old art of storytelling to address the link between the ecological and spiritual crises that we are facing. The Encounter relates the real story of the American photographer Loren McIntyre who lived with the Mayoruna tribe for six weeks in 1969 after getting lost in the Amazon rainforest. Relying heavily on sound design to take us deep into the jungle, the show addresses our relation to nature and technology and elicits our empathy to denounce the dictates of a globalised world ruled and threatened by neoliberal and neocolonial capitalistic ideologies. As the brain – and the stage – become the forest, The Encounter challenges the notions of distance and separation from the Other in favour of a deep sense of interconnectedness. Using Donna J. Haraway’s 2016 book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, this article sheds light on how The Encounter invites us to recognise the urgency of defining what it means to live together in “response-ability on a damaged earth” (Haraway 2) and how the intermedial, hybrid qualities of the play found not a “post-human” but, on the contrary, a “com-post” theatre piece (11).

No Joy in the Brilliance of Sunshine

Sean Bell Student number: 3230643 Master Early Music Voice Research supervisor: Dr. Inês de Avena Braga Title: No Joy in the Brilliance of Sunshine Research question: How can I create a stage performance combining and connecting my two sound worlds/style identities as a performer? Summary of the results of the research: In this research I have explored the creative development of a stage performance, combining operatic music by Handel with contemporary performance art. Through this I have explored how I can combine my duality as a performer: the early music singer and the contemporary performer and creator. This project and its connected research are a part of my artistic development as a musician, creator and performer, and the urge to explore this music and questions grew out of previous projects and ideas. I have created and developed my project through following a consequential progression of artistic choices, and through this space that has unfolded I have come to find an essential identity of myself as a performer and creator. By being honest towards myself through the critical reflection, I have been able to investigate my process, my preferences, inspirations and my distinct personal style. Through this I have been able to strengthen my artistic identity and the artistic tools I use, bringing forth a more complete performer. Short biography: Sean Bell is a countertenor and performance artist from Oslo. His studies centre mainly on chamber and sacred music and opera, yet also includes a focus on new ideas and methods of interpreting classical and contemporary repertoire. Through sonic imaginations and arrangements, he explores this repertoire in new ways. This has led him to a series of collaborations and solo performances on the border line between classical music and performance art. Bell also works with contemporary music and has premiered several pieces for countertenor. He is an active improviser, plays baroque guitar and engages in instrument building and music electronics.

A STUDY OF STRUGGLE IN VERSATILITY IN TABLA PERFORMANCE

Tabla is the most versatile among percussion instruments today. The challenge that it meets till date is the recognition that Tabla has in terms of a Solo instrument. Although acclaimed worldwide for its versatility, yet the role of Tabla as a Solo instrument remains undefined at large. The tabla player today occupies a decent place on stage during accompaniment and exhibits the art, at times with his repertoire, especially when he accompanies to instrumental music. The rich repertoire of Tabla, which is learnt through life finds its expression only through solo performances, but this is confined only to the elite artists. There is no denial to the fact that Tabla is basically an accompanying instrument. Accompaniment is a beautiful art and every tabla artist should be an able accompanist. In fact, the art of accompaniment does need a better craftsmanship and a greater aesthetic sense than the art of tabla solo presentation. Given to these facts, the repertoire of tabla finds complete expression only during a solo performance. The collection of compositions of tabla from the masters of yesteryears is huge, and how many tabla players are able to put it across the listeners, even a meagre part of what they have learnt in the lineage? And the truth is that the Tabla is the primary accompanying instrument in North Indian classical, fusion and light music today. This is the struggle in its versatility. The music fraternity and the organizers need to ponder over this and improve their endeavors to promote Tabla more, as a solo instrument also.

‘Animated Sound’: An application of digital technologies and open scores in interdisciplinary collaboration and education

We describe a collaborative project carried out with an ensemble of amateur adult musicians in which a participant created a composition derived from her background as an animator in conjunction with the appropriation of interface elements used in digital animation software. Conceived of during the 2020 quarantine for online performance with an undefined instrumentation of acoustic and electronic sound sources, subsequent versions have been created for film soundtracks, ensemble concerts, live-scoring/coding audio-visual presentations and solo performances. These diverse realizations are analysed through two frameworks. The first, adapted from an analysis of the embodiment of values in digital games, indicates that the community-oriented values present in early ensemble versions are replaced by more typical aesthetic values, such as complexity and virtuosity, as the work evolves from one realization to another. The addition of notational and technical elements presupposing conventional musical training results in a particularly profound shift in the perceived nature of the composition. The second framework addresses this divergence in embodied values by expanding the role of the instructor/facilitator in educational and socially engaged practices, situating artistic control and outcomes alongside functions of learning and inclusivity.

Issues in African American Music: Power, Gender, Race, Representation

Issues in African American Music: Power, Gender, Race, Representation

Keep the Arrows: Interrogating Discrimination in Fandom Through Solo Performance

ABSTRACT Keep the Arrows was a 30-minute solo performance about the experience, and discrimination faced by Black people who are active in Futurist Fantasy Fiction fandom from children to adults. Framed in the context of the conflict between idealized fantasy worlds and societal racial values, the performer/author attempted to show the audience a view of the intersection of these opposing influences, through a performance developed through dramaturgy, devising, and accent exploration. In this practice as research study, the performer/author explored their own experiences in fandom as well as the experiences of Black professional level cosplayers, casual fans, and people of all ages who share the stories of being unwelcomed in fandom. The mission of Keep the Arrows was to define and dissect the discrimination faced by Black fans of worlds beyond race.

Onstage and Behind the Scenes: Autistic Performance and Advocacy

For many autistic performers in arts and entertainment, the stage can be an important site of self-advocacy and creative expression. Whereas everyday social interactions may be unpredictable, being onstage can allow autistic performers to work from a script and anticipate audience responses. This article explores the affordances and challenges of performance for young autistic adults in Canada through interviews with four autistic performers (two singers and two stand-up comics). While solo performance was the focus, participants discussed the creative employment of diverse media platforms, from the stage to screenwriting and children’s books, and emphasized the need for autistic people to be involved in all creative realms. This research follows a Critical Disability Studies (CDS) framework which challenges deficit models of autism (McGuire, 2016), “supercrip” tropes (Clare, 2015, p. 2), and narratives of overcoming autism (Cheng, 2017). While one participant noted being uncomfortable with the sense that they were a source of inspiration for non-autistic audiences, each found it encouraging that autistic audiences relate to their work and might be motivated to participate in similar forms of self-advocacy; in particular, they noted the value of performance in building confidence. As previous CDS literature is wary of disability as spectacle (Darke, 1994), this research provides insight into how young autistic adults use their work onstage and behind the scenes to promote and perform self-advocacy.

Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance by Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes

Reviewed by: Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance by Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes Enzo E. Vasquez Toral TRANSLOCAS: THE POLITICS OF PUERTO RICAN DRAG AND TRANS PERFORMANCE. By Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes. Triangulations: Lesbian/Gay/Queer Theater/Drama/Performance series. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021; pp. 350. Loca, a Spanish word for a madwoman or a slur for an effeminate man, unsettles people as it travels across spaces in the Americas. In Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes breathes a new meaning into this stigmatized identity by introducing the neologism transloca, which accounts for the "trans-" elements of diasporic movement and displacement of Puerto Rico as a "transnation" (15). Instead of proposing transloca as an identity, La Fountain-Stokes builds transloca performance as a theoretical lens to read "Puerto Rican loca, drag, and trans theatrical, film, literary, activist, and cabaret/ nightclub performances" (3). Although the works under analysis extend from the 1960s to the present, Translocas is far from a historical account; rather, it theorizes based on historical events and individual works that speak of a broader phenomenon and considers drag and trans as elastic—and at times intersecting—labels to characterize performance. Specifically, La Fountain-Stokes argues that these transloca performances challenge the status quo and "are key to understanding translocal Puerto Rican, American, Latin American, and Caribbean national imaginaries and social processes" (6). At its core, transloca performance is a decolonial mode of analysis that addresses the complexities of Puerto Rican race, gender, sexuality, class, and migration. Transloca is a term that resists Anglo-American words such as "queer" and the process of globalization and capitalist logics of LGBTQ politics. La Fountain-Stokes puts in conversation an impressive amount of literature about, or produced in, Latin America and the Caribbean across different languages and disciplines. In his opening chapter "Theorizing la Loca," he traces the different theorizations and uses of loca as a debated term in queer and feminist studies and places his own contribution in these genealogies. For instance, the late sociologist Lionel Cantú Jr. used transloca for the first time to refer to a group of Latina transnational feminist scholars (35). Although significantly different in definition, La Fountain-Stokes considers his use of this term as an extension of Cantú's insights. The two subsequent chapters focus on separate groups of performers who embody the contradictory aspects of transloca performance such as life and death and glamour and poverty. Chapter 2 contrasts the transloca aesthetics and self-fashioning of androgynous drag performer Nina Flowers to those of aspiring fashion designer and makeup artist Jorge Steven López Mercado and femme trap singer Kevin Fret, who were both brutally murdered. La Fountain-Stokes delineates the ways in which transloca embodiments and knowledges manifest in these three artists to argue for a broader transloca epistemological framework. Homing in on class as a vector of analysis, chapter 3 argues for the transloca drag of poverty as "a multifaceted, resourceful drag of resistance and negotiation, involving contradictions, invention, and inversion" (70). Drawing from solo performance, autobiography, film, and television appearances, this chapter analyzes the individual works of Erika Lopez, Holly Woodlawn, and Monica Beverly Hillz in juxtaposition to the radical activism of Sylvia Rivera. Historically grounding the work of each of these performers, La Fountain-Stokes shows how they "challenge[d] social structures in the context of inequality" across time (101). Throughout his book, La Fountain-Stokes accounts for whiteness in Puerto Rican identity by introducing some artists as "light-skinned"; nevertheless, it is only in chapters 4 and 5, where race takes center stage, albeit in distinct manners. In chapter 4, La Fountain-Stokes introduces the works of Freddie Mercado in genres such as painting, installation, performance art, and female impersonation. The author coins "ultrabaroque drag of rasanblaj" (reassembly, in Haitian Kreyòl) as a rubric to read Mercado's aesthetics—epitomic transloca work in its ability to cross "the line between sanity and madness, the known and the unknown, and the real and the imaginary" (105). As a light-skinned performer, Mercado's treatment of the politics of race and mestizaje in Puerto Rico...

Trifles and Sometimes I Sing

Trifles and Sometimes I Sing

Introduction

Introduction

The Last Will and Testament of Silverdene Emblem O'Neill

“The Last Will and Testament of Silverdene Emblem O'Neill,” performed by Alex Roe, is among the recent offerings from the Metropolitan (Virtual) Playhouse to feature lesser-known works by Eugene O'Neill and the Provincetown Players. This solo performance of a short prose piece embodies the imagined final thoughts and wishes of O'Neill's beloved dog, affectionately called “Blemie,” who passed of old age in 1940.Although O'Neill endows Blemie with the considerate and loving impulses of a canine family member, he crafts a character whose voice and preoccupations are unmistakably O'Neill's. Early in the performance, Blemie notes that he is burying his missive in his master's brain, although “he will not know it is there until after I am dead.” Blemie clearly knows his master well, and he predicts O'Neill's and his wife Carlotta's deep well of loneliness once he passes, even as he works to assuage that loss. The piece is both a mourner's rationalization of loss and a gift to those who love and mourn him. As in his great plays, O'Neill here contemplates the fact that humans live lives of gathering property and possessions, only to find that the most important things we can pass on are the things that dogs leave behind: love and faith.The parallel enactment of Blemie's “last will and testament” and O'Neill's exorcism of his sorrow is detailed, charming, and understated. Roe highlights this parallelism through visual cues, including a Beckettian close-up on his penetrating stare and a black-and-white aesthetic that focuses the viewer's gaze on the actor's face. His evocative vocal and physical choices include a deep sigh that emerges from his nose before he begins to speak and a pronounced clacking of his tongue—a sound no human normally makes but one typical of a dog. This work continues subtly throughout, with Roe's “paw” adjusting an errant ear and his darting sideward glance indicating that something has caught his eye.Blemie's tone is formal; he is well mannered, well bred, and had been distinguished and handsome in his prime. Roe's deep and resonant voice conjures all of these features and smoothly supports O'Neill as he utilizes Blemie's generosity of spirit to plead with Carlotta to adopt another dog. Blemie notes, “Dalmatians, naturally, as everyone knows, are best,” before bequeathing his made-to-order Hermès coat to his imagined successor.Finally, Roe's performance of Blemie evokes another of O'Neill's favorite themes: the contemplation of what lies beyond death. For Blemie, the vision of paradise involves a life of full bladders, with each blissful hour a mealtime. For O'Neill during his years with Blemie, however, this question was a constant source of inspiration. Blemie references his life “on the ranch,” indicating the O'Neills' beautiful Northern California property and residence, Tao House, now the home of the Eugene O'Neill Foundation and a National Historic Site. O'Neill wrote his final and most memorable plays at Tao House, where Blemie is buried. Visitors pause at the memorial and grave to appreciate O'Neill's deep love for his pet, which is beautifully expressed in the rare vision of hope and open adoration in the final lines of the “Last Will and Testament.” Blemie instructs O'Neill and Carlotta to think this as they look at his grave: “Here lies one who loved us, and whom we loved. No matter how deep my sleep, I shall hear you. And not all the power of death can keep my spirit from wagging a grateful tail.”

Contributors

Contributors

From hearth to hard drive: well-being benefits of online Irish traditional singing sessions during COVID-19.

SummaryThis article explores the impact of online Irish traditional singing sessions on health and well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic. Singing sessions are unique facets of Ireland’s music tradition that saw dramatic closure, interruption and digital transition in response to COVID-19 social distancing measures. This study highlights a gap in health promotion literature with regard to traditional singing sessions as a group singing activity and examines the potential for online group singing activities to have positive impacts on the health and well-being of participants. While traditional singing sessions foreground solo performances, they are quintessentially group activities, and include community engagement and active participation from singers and listeners alike. Through an online survey (n = 108), and ethnographic interviews (n = 3), this study explores potential health and well-being implications of online traditional singing sessions, and reveals four main areas of impact: social connection, enjoyment, cognitive motivation and timekeeping. The study suggests that online traditional singing sessions can promote health and well-being in participants, particularly during times of isolation.

Visual Culture and Diasporic Self -Writing: Wajdi Mouawad Paints His Way Home

Through the motif of painting, Wajdi Mouawad’s novel Visage retrouvé and solo performance Seuls depict ruptures from a homeland and deferred return, while resisting autobiographical interpretations. Although Mouawad’s works contain elements of his forced departure from Lebanon and migration to Montreal, his aesthetic choices confound correlations between the narratives and specific places or events.

Children's feelings about piano performances across a year of study.

Solo performance is a common experience for children learning to play an instrument, yet the research literature on these experiences is limited, with a focus on older children and adolescents. The purpose of this study was to examine younger children’s feelings about performance over the course of a year of study. Forty-one children were interviewed about their piano lessons and performance experiences at the end of two consecutive semesters of study. They also responded to a pictorial scale on their feelings about performance at each interview and again at two piano recitals. Results indicate that children are remarkably consistent in their feelings about performing in piano recitals, with few significant changes over time and context. Correlation analyses indicate changes in the relationships between feelings about performance and certain study variables over time—in particular age, liking of lessons, liking of performing, practice time, and perception of being good at piano. In the fall term, gender and age are significant predictors of feelings about performance, with younger children and boys feeling most positive. In the spring, the findings shift and the only significant predictor is children’s liking of piano lessons. Implications and directions for further research are discussed.

Revisiting theatre of the minoritarian in neoliberalism: The Embodied Memories in Denise Uyehara’s and Dan Kwong’s Auto-performances

In a neoliberal multicultural landscape, minoritarian artists tend to, deploying various forms of self-media or virtual platforms, create their artistic spaces for their identitarian performances. While self-media has been more and more entrepreneurially dominant, the aura of theatrical performance of the self seems to be now obsolete. Moreover, in view of neoliberalism as an increasing hegemony that has insidiously marginalized theaters of minoritarian performances (such as the New WORLD theater) in the past decade in the U.S., “minoritarian subjects” (to borrow José Esteban Muñoz’s term) are experiencing a predicament in which they are becoming more and more visually contingent owing to the neoliberal representational violence. With an urge of reviving such distant aura, this paper revisits the solo performances of Denise Uyehara and Dan Kwong staged in the Highway Performance Space, a generative site of what Meiling Cheng calls the “heterolocus”. By exploring auto-performance as a minoritarian genre, the paper examines what Diana Taylor calls the “embodied memories” in the works of Uyehara and Kwong, and further argues that these performances should not be simply understood as an individual aesthetic and political expression, but also be rendered as a powerful epistemological repertoire to perform cultural politics for the communal Asian American theater.

Evaluating an Analysis-by-Synthesis Model for Jazz Improvisation

This paper pursues two goals. First, we present a generative model for (monophonic) jazz improvisation whose main purpose is testing hypotheses on creative processes during jazz improvisation. It uses a hierarchical Markov model based on mid-level units and the Weimar Bebop Alphabet, with statistics taken from the Weimar Jazz Database. A further ingredient is chord-scale theory to select pitches. Second, as there are several issues with Turing-like evaluation processes for generative models of jazz improvisation, we decided to conduct an exploratory online study to gain further insight while testing our algorithm in the context of a variety of human generated solos by eminent masters, jazz students, and non-professionals in various performance renditions. Results show that jazz experts (64.4% accuracy) but not non-experts (41.7% accuracy) are able to distinguish the computer-generated solos amongst a set of real solos, but with a large margin of error. The type of rendition is crucial when assessing artificial jazz solos because expressive and performative aspects (timbre, articulation, micro-timing and band-soloist interaction) seem to be equally if not more important than the syntactical (tone) content. Furthermore, the level of expertise of the solo performer does matter, as solos by non-professional humans were on average rated worse than the algorithmic ones. Accordingly, we found indications that assessments of origin of a solo are partly driven by aesthetic judgments. We propose three possible strategies to install a reliable evaluation process to mitigate some of the inherent problems.

Retanning Performance of Carboxymethyl Starch and Its Effects on Dyeing

The tanning characteristics of starch samples modified by different methods were investigated in our previous studies. In this study, utilization of modified starch in leather making as a retanning agent and its effect on dyeing process have been investigated. For this purpose, the molecular size of native corn starch was reduced by H2O2 oxidation and then carboxymethylated. A series of analyses (water solubility, degree of substitution, Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy, Proton and Carbon Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy) were carried out for characterization. Then, carboxymethyl starches were used in retanning processes to be 3, 5 and 10% based on leather weight and the shrinkage temperatures and filling coefficients of the leathers were determined. Acid and metal complex dyestuffs were used in dyeing processes and the effect of carboxymethyl starch on dyeing was also investigated by examining dye consumption, dry and wet rubbing fastness and color of the leathers. From the results it was concluded that carboxymethyl starch showed a noticeable solo performance in terms of filling property and shrinking temperature without any considerable adverse effect on dyeing.

RETRACTED ARTICLE: A Voice of Her Own: The Persistence of Muslim American Women in Rohina Malik’s Unveiled

We, the Editors and Publisher of Women’s Studies, have retracted the following article: ‘A Voice of Her Own: The Persistence of Muslim American Women in Rohina Malik’s Unveiled’, Women’s Studies 51:2, published online 07th January2022, DOI: 10.1080/00497878.2021.2020116. Since publication, significant concerns have been raised about the fact that this article has substantial overlap with the following dissertation, which is not cited or referenced: Megan Stahl (2016). Arab and Muslim American Female Playwrights: Resistance and Revision Through Solo Performance. [PhD] Tufts University. Available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10427/011825 Upon query, the author has not been able to provide asatisfactory explanation for this significant level of overlap. As this is aserious breach of our Editorial Policies, we are retracting the article from the journal. The author does not agree with the retraction. We have been informed in our decision-making by our policy on publishing ethics and integrity and the COPE guidelines on retractions. The retracted article will remain online to maintain the scholarly record, but it will be digitally watermarked on each page as ‘Retracted’.