Street Performance Research Articles

Vestigial Pop: Hokkien Popular Music and the Cultural Fossilization of Subalternity in Singapore

As part of its modernization project, the postcolonial Singapore state has systematically marginalized the vernacular cultures of the country’s colonial-era immigrant society. Nevertheless, Hokkien popular music has persisted not only in the street festivals that were so characteristic of the colonial port city but also in local movies. A combination of official discouragement and changes in education levels and demography has diminished the significance of Hokkien music in the country. Instead of the mark of evolving, living culture, Hokkien music resembles more of a vestigial articulation of working class tribulations and of middle class nostalgia and reaction to the vicissitudes of capitalist modernity in Singapore. Critical scrutiny of the unchanging replay of traditionalized narratives in texts and live street performances of getai , as well as of theme songs from Singaporean films and Taiwanese soap operas, demonstrates the process through which pop music becomes vestigial.

Ecologies of Experience: Materiality, Sociality, and the Embodied Experience of (Street) Performing

Recently a range of relational approaches have established themselves in many arenas of geographical thought. Insights have been drawn in from poststructural philosophy and social theory to decentre the human subject and consider agency in a more distributed way. Within such work, amongst references to networks, rhizomes, assemblages, and the like, the term ‘ecology’ has at times been employed to refer to such relationalty. However, the implications of its use and the specific value of the term in thinking about relationality have not yet been fully considered. Therefore, this paper articulates an ‘ecological approach’ to the study of the embodied practices. The significance of such an approach is expressed in terms of its ability to pay attention to the co-constitutive relatedness of practices and the social—cultural—material environments in which they take place. This is articulated in the paper in three main ways: (1) by drawing attention to the sheer complexity and singularity of relatedness; (2) by reflecting on connections with, and the status of, human and nonhuman entities in the playing out of practices; and (3) by considering the structuring of affective relations and the context in which practices take place. This is illustrated in the paper in relation to the practice of street performance and the intertwining both of the more concrete ‘material’ aspects of the street space (architecture, benches, people), and of its less concrete, but still materially significant, aspects (meteorological-atmospheres, felt-ambiences, not physically present regulative formations), with the performer in the playing out of this practice.

大道芸ロボットコンテストによる創造性教育と卒業生アンケートによる評価

大道芸ロボットコンテストによる創造性教育と卒業生アンケートによる評価

Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary, 1780-1820. Diane Long Hoeveler.

Previous articleNext article No AccessGothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary, 1780-1820. Diane Long Hoeveler.Frederick BurwickFrederick Burwick Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 43, Number 4Autumn 2012 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24065363 Views: 7Total views on this site © 2012 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Three-dimensional hand movements during the execution of ball juggling: Effect of expertise in street performers

To determine expertise-related differences in performance and movement variability during the execution of closed skill codified tasks, we quantitatively assessed the 3D hand movements of two groups of jugglers with different levels of expertise: six advanced (who could juggle up to 7 balls) and six intermediate jugglers (who could juggle at most with 5 balls).All participants performed three trials for each 3-, 4- and 5-ball juggling schemes. The coordinates of the middle fingers were recorded by an optoelectronic motion analyzer (sampling rate 120Hz), and were analyzed and compared between groups, number of juggled balls and the spatial decomposition of hand trajectories.The higher the level of expertise, the more stable the hand movements, as the number of juggled balls increased. Advanced jugglers also exhibited lower execution frequencies than intermediate jugglers in each scheme.When the level of difficulty rises, a slower play may be one of the factors accounting for the capability of the advanced jugglers to limit movement variability at the end-effector, and juggle a higher number of balls.

Reconciliation and remembering: (how) does it work?

Public acts of remembrance are as much about shaping the future as about recollecting the past. This interplay between recollection and future-building has been implicit in much of the work done in the field of cultural memory in the last years. It has been explicitly at the core of the burgeoning field of transitional justice, informed as it is by the belief that future peace and stability depends crucially on finding ways of ‘coming to terms’ with past violence. This special issue, brought together by three editors from different disciplines, aims to bring debates within memory studies and in the field of transitional justice into a more intense dialogue. A central concern is with critically analysing, from a multidisciplinary perspective, the interplay between the many practices of public remembrance in post-conflict societies in relation to their impact on social relations and individual subjects. 1 The mnemonic practices examined include the cornerstones of discussions in transitional justice – legal tribunals, truth commissions, official apologies, reparations – but go beyond these cornerstones to include other, less-codified forms of commemoration (memorials, museums, street performances and the arts) that operate sometimes in conjunction, sometimes in tension, with legal procedures and that are often initiated by non-governmental actors. By exploring the interplay between these various forms of remembrance in relation to the fault-lines dividing particular societies, this special issue gives fresh insight into the multilayeredness of memory and the complex socio-cultural dynamic between remembrance and present-day alliances. Taken together, moreover, the articles also reveal some of the fault-lines within the reconciliation scenario itself, by addressing not just the practices and outcomes of reconciliatory acts of remembrance, but also the discourses surrounding them. In his famous essay ‘What is a Nation?’ (1947–61[1882]) Ernest Renan already linked national solidarity to overcoming past divisions through selective remembrance. Since all nations have known periods of conflict, Renan argued, it is necessary for people not only to be able to remember their common past but also to forget divisive events (such as the Saint-Barthelemy massacre in France) whose memory would only serve to reproduce old conflicts in present-day society. Since Renan, and certainly since the emergence of memory studies as a field of research, we have learned that collective forgetting and collective remembering are equally complex processes. 2 But the idea that the mediated production of common memory narratives can and should be ‘engineered’

Apprehending everyday rhythms: rhythmanalysis, time-lapse photography, and the space-times of street performance

This paper develops means of apprehending the rhythms of everyday practices and performances. Emerging from the context of recent calls for more explicit engagements with issues surrounding research methods and methodologies in the doing of cultural geography, and in particular in the examination of the geographies of practices, the paper responds to critiques of recent discussions of urban and social rhythms that highlight limitations in the articulation of methods for actually apprehending everyday rhythms. As such, in conversation with Lefebvre’s portrait of the rhythmanalyst and other works interested in the significance of rhythm to social practices, the paper proposes time-lapse photography as a useful component of such a rhythm-analytical, and more generally practice-orientated, methodology. In doing so, the paper draws attention to this method’s ability to document and facilitate the reflection upon the complex durational unfolding of events and the situation of key occurrences within this polyrhythmia. This is illustrated in relation to the everyday rhythms of a specific urban space in Bath, UK and a street magician’s variously successful attempt to intervene into the everyday life of Bath.

Monkey Dance Transformation And Displacement: From Traditional Performance To Urban Everydayness

This research attempts to investigate how the monkey dance, a traditional mobile performance from village to village, transforms and displaces itself into a semi-permanent urban street performance as the effect of modernization and globalization. The research is closely relevant to the theme of the everyday life on the relation between art and the social. Doger monyet (monkey dance) performance has always been regarded as the marginal art/culture. Its place has always been among the mid-lower class of society, thus when it changes its mode and place of performance, questions and curiosity arises. This phenomenon requires a re-examination of the cultural transformation effect to everyday life. This research attempts to answer several issues regarding the phenomena: how the performance negotiates its way to the urban everyday life and its everydayness; how it manages to place itself within the urban space; how it deals with the authority and the urban dwellers, and what its future is going to be like in the new space.

Passing The Flame: Dah Theatre’s 20th Anniversary Festival (review)

Reviewed by: Passing The Flame: Dah Theatre’s 20th Anniversary Festival Dennis Barnett Passing The Flame: Dah Theatre’s 20th Anniversary Festival. DAH Theatre, Belgrade. 18–2506 2011. DAH Theatre has produced politically driven, movement-oriented works for twenty years. Founded by Jadranka Anđelić and Dijana Milošević, the original group of young people performed on the streets of Belgrade to protest their government’s acts of aggression. Today, it has grown into one of the world’s most revered performance groups. Armed with the belief that the world can be changed through its performances, DAH’s commitment to social justice, healing the wounds of war, and fighting the nationalist agenda in Serbia has energized it throughout its history. Under the leadership of Milošević, DAH has performed on every continent and trained hundreds of performers from around the world in its International School for Actors and Directors, recently renamed The DAH Theatre Institute. To celebrate this history, DAH held a weeklong festival it called Passing the Flame. On the program [End Page 264]were twenty-three performances by nineteen companies and solo performers from nine countries. The festival was ostensibly to celebrate DAH’s twentieth anniversary, but, as the name implied, it was as much about DAH’s place in the culture of performance, its lineage and legacy, as it was about the group itself. Three generations of teachers and students were present, all of whom advocate for social justice through performance and are guided by somatic principles, similar to those of DAH. The programming included workshops, round-table discussions, and daily interviews with a collection of “masters”—teachers and practitioners who had contributed to the development of DAH or whose accomplishments DAH wished to recognize. They included Rena Mirecka, an original member of the Polish Lab Theatre; Gennady Bogdanov, who studied with Nikolai Kustov, one of Meyerhold’s actors; Jill Greenhalgh, founder of the Magdalena Project; Peter Schumann, founder and director of Bread and Puppet Theatre; and Serbian activist/actor/teacher Mirjana Karanović. The most significant master, however, was Eugenio Barba. His presence, along with that of his company Odin Teatret, where Milošević once worked and where many of her ideas took form, further highlighted the festival’s theme. One of her mentors, in fact, was Torgeir Wethal, a member of Odin who passed away in 2010 and to whom the festival was dedicated. Barba is credited with creating the field of Theatre Anthropology, which puts the diversity of world performance under one rubric by identifying common principles and techniques that Barba defines as a culture unto itself. It is a conceit that frames the identification of culture by physical boundaries as an arbitrary act of taxonomy. As recent events in Africa and the Middle East (or in the former Yugoslavia over the last two decades) have shown, nationalism and xenophobia threaten our common humanity at every turn. The reimagining of culture that Barba promotes, the reorientation required to call oneself a “performer” instead of an American or a Serb, potentially diminishes the power of a nationalist agenda, thus framing the culture of the performer as one within which the most divisive of conflicts can be healed. It may be an idealistic “charge of the Light Brigade” at best, but within this context, DAH’s festival seemed like a journey into the homeland; and occurring in Belgrade where there is a long history of internecine conflict and nationalist ideologies, the outlines of this alternative homeland created a stark contrast. Although most of the performances occurred in the evening, one morning was reserved for DAH’s newly revised In/Visible City. Originally performed in 2005 in Belgrade, In/Visible Cityis essentially a street performance staged on a working city bus. The earlier version of it involved three musicians (violin, accordion, percussion) and six other performers. The difference in the 2010 revision was minimal and consisted mostly of incorporating performers from Macedonia, the UK, and Denmark, countries DAH was preparing to tour. This swelled the troupe by three: a parkour artist, a trombonist, and a kanun player. To witness In/Visible Cityis to watch citizens of Belgrade, literally squeezed into their daily commute, surprised and...

De l'ethnicité en Bolivie ? Paradoxe d'une catégorie indigène, le folklorista

The presence of Bolivia’s highest political authority at the Senor Jesus del Gran Poder festival demonstrates the importance of fraternidades in this country. The large street performances, or Entradas Folkloricas, organized by these congregations, which can consist of several thousand members, are above all intended to promote their faith. They nevertheless play a role that goes well beyond the sphere of religious and cultural practices. Indeed, folklore is both an identity-based repertory through which individuals categorize themselves in terms of shared socio-cultural traits and a matter of growing importance on the political scene. By studying the festive practices associated with folklore, one may grasp an essential category of social life in Bolivia, that of the folklorista. Most members of the fraternidades fall under this category, which exists independently of the categorizations usually employed by political actors.

Street Performance Robot Contest as Practice in Creativity Education

This paper introduces the curriculum for creativity education that has been conducted at the Department of Mechano-Aerospace Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology, for 20 years, for the purpose of systematization of education using robots. In particular, we describe the significance of the lecture and operational know-how of contests for street performance robots, which we have continuously held in the course called “machine creation.” The results of a questionnaire survey of students indicate that this course is a valuable experience for students.

Street Performance and the City

This article examines the performative transformation of street spaces into performance places by considering the practices of street performers. Street performance here refers to a set of practices whereby either musical or nonmusical performances are undertaken in the street with the aim of eliciting donations from passersby. Drawing on ethnographic observations undertaken in Bath, U.K., and situating the discussion in recent conceptions of everyday life and public space, the specific sociospatial interventions that street performances make into Bath’s everyday life are considered. In doing so, the article focuses on the fleeting social relations that emerge from these interventions and what these can do to the experience of the everyday in terms of producing moments of sociality and conviviality. This is also reflected on in light of the various debates that have occurred in Bath as a result of these interventions relating to the increased regulation of street performances. The article then highlights the conflicted and contentious position that street performers occupy in the everyday life of such cities.

From mummers to new media: captivity, liberation, and the church of life after shopping

With the rise of new media, it is easy to overlook, not only old media but also mummery—the arcane medium of the flesh—street performances, stage shows, plays, and carnivals. In this paper, we look at the case of Reverend Billy and the Church of Life After Shopping. We begin by re‐introducing the term ‘mummer’ as a traditional medium of expression and conceptually locate it relative to both old and new media. We then provide a brief introduction to captivity narrative studies, specifically looking at the role of humor in providing aesthetic freedom in incarceration. Reverend Billy and the Church of Life After Shopping serve as our case study to show how humor can be used to liberate citizens' thinking around the three Cs of American political ideology: church, capitalism, and consumption; and to highlight how Reverend adroitly integrates the medium mummery, old media, and new media into a unified whole to free consumers from the dominant ideology of US political interlocution. We conclude by offering ways to extend and elaborate upon this research. Mummery Captivity studies New mediaCopyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Speed Flow Density Models Prediction for Urban Roadway in Falluja City

This research focuses on studying the speed flow density relationships which are considered the fundamental traffic flow relationships. The objective of the present study is to predict statistical models represent these relationships depending on a field survey data collected from Al-Thirthar road in Falluja city.Data were collected by using video-recording technique. The required data were abstracted, analyzed, grouped, and processed using computer programs developed for this purpose. Standard statistical analysis techniques were used to examine and analyze the observed data.FWASIM simulation traffic software program was used to verify the predicted traffic stream models, while the obtained results were presented in this research. To test the validity and reliability of the model, the output results of the predicated model were compared with the output data obtained from FWASIM model using similar input data and segment geometry. The comparison leads to consider that the developed regression model may be used to evaluate the performance of urban streets in Falluja city.

‘So, as you can see . . .’: some reflections on the utility of video methodologies in the study of embodied practices

Recently there has been a significant upsurge in the use of video methodologies in the study of the geographies of everyday and artistic practices. This paper seeks to contribute to this growing interest in a very particular sense, by thinking critically about what video does and does not offer to the study of embodied practice. Grounding this discussion in recent developments in the theorisation of practice, and related calls for further methodological thinking, the paper draws on the use of video in the study of the practice of street performance – and particularly the giving and receiving of donations within this and the contingency of the affective relations they produce – to show that while video can capture the minute detail of practices and allow for the close analysis of this, video in and of itself does not necessarily present or give a sense of the affective relations present in such encounters. The paper argues that video be incorporated into a broader ethnographic methodology in which the researching/researched body is central.

Gub Neal: Cracking the Business of TV Drama Production

Before Gub Neal set about making drama for the small screen, he cut his creative teeth on the fringes of British theatre, organising street performances for the biennial London International Festival of Theatre between 1981 and 1985. Simultaneously, Neal ran Stage Fright, his own theatre company, satisfying his formative appetites for writing, directing and producing. When the funding stream for street theatre subsequently ran dry, Neal looked to television as a natural career shift, entering the BBC’s employ as an assistant floor manager in 1985. Quickly rising through the ranks at the BBC, Neal gained further experience as a script editor before moving on to finding his niche as an independent producer. Within the space of just a few years he had forged a formidable reputation within the British television industry for his ability to recognise and nurture formats that could combine dramatic innovation with mainstream commercial success. Such ability is evidenced by his involvement in the likes of Prime Suspect (ITV, 1991–2006), Cracker (ITV, 1993–6, 2006), Band of Gold (ITV, 1995–7) and Hillsborough (ITV, 1996). Neal’s success as a producer made him an attractive prospect for executive positions with the major broadcasters and, in 1995, he was appointed Controller of Drama at Granada, before moving on two years later to run the Drama Department at Channel 4 where he continued to demonstrate an acute skill for recognising potential with commissions including The Young Person’s Guide to Becoming a Rock Star (C4, 1998), Queer as Folk (C4, 1999–2000), Psychos (C4, 1999) and Shackleton (C4, 2002). In 2000, Neal established his own independent production company, Box TV, along with co-founders Justin Thomson-Glover and

Japanese street performer mimes violation of Hering's Law

Mime artists often use movement to imply the breaking of physical laws: suitcases levitate, air becomes as impermeable as glass. We present the simulated (and actual) violation of a physiologic principle, Hering's Law of Equal Innervation. To provide stereopsis while avoiding double vision, the movements of forward-facing primate eyes must be closely coordinated. In a 19th-century debate, Helmholtz contended that this coordination is a learned process, taming naturally independent eyes. Hering, meanwhile, believed the eyes to be inherently reined to each other and driven by a single control signal.1 Hering's view predominated and this final common pathway for horizontal eye movement came to be accepted as a unilateral signal to the abducens nucleus. This directly controls the lateral rectus of the ipsilateral, abducting, eye but also necessarily adducts the other eye, via interneurons to the contralateral oculomotor nucleus. More recent neurophysiologic evidence, however, indicates that primate saccadic commands can be encoded monocularly,2 in common with the laterally mounted, independently moving eyes of our distant evolutionary forebears. Binocular coordination might therefore not arise as a necessary consequence of neuroanatomic connectivity. If so, it might be possible to execute voluntary monocular saccades. We present a case of a …

American Social History through Dance: A New Course at Vanderbilt University

In American Studies 100W at Vanderbilt University, students study American history -- not through battles or infamous uprisings, presidents or political speeches -- but through the dances danced on American soil and those who danced them, as well as those who opposed them. From Native American tribal dances, replete with spiritual significance, to the muscular in-your-face exuberance of the locking and popping of today’s hip hop street performers in South Central LA, dance can explain a great deal about America.

P01-460 - Communitarian campaign against the stigma of schizophrenia: “be on the stage”

The use of cultural approaches addressing stigma and discrimination promotes acceptance by raising consciousness. People with schizophrenia are often stigmatized by others.Discrimination associated with common myths contributes to social exclusion and treatment delay, creating a barrier to recovery.This paper aims to present the development, implementation and evaluation of an anti-stigma campaign in the context of primary health care and local community using theatrical techniques.In the Health Centre waiting rooms the invisible theatre technique was implemented, consisting in the performance of a previously rehearsed script without informing the public that it was a play, aiming to provoke debate and clarify problems related to social inequality and discrimination. The play script addressed common myths related to schizophrenia: People with schizophrenia are usually dangerous and violent; People with schizophrenia are unlikely to recover; Schizophrenia, as other mental conditions is a sign of weakness and not a true medical illness and others. In the local community, street performances were implemented based on image theatre techniques consisting in the use of living body imagery to address the myths described above.Behavioural responses to the intervention were assessed using Likert type scale. Most of the people in both the settings were paying attention to the performances and dialogues. People watching street performances, however, were more active in expressing opinions or making specific questions related to the subject.Further research on the impact of anti-stigma campaigns using theatre techniques is needed. These strategies may provide an effective approach to fight stigma in communitarian settings.

Punch and Judy at the Beach and in the Mall

This article examines how the traditional English folk form of Punch and Judy is deployed in two very different contemporary public settings in the UK: the beach and the shopping mall. It explores how the nature of public settings alters profoundly the meaning of this highly specific cultural object and how its commodification as part of the spaces of everyday consumption transforms its original value and connection to its audience. Other examples of street performance in British urban contexts are also considered. The article derives from recent ethnographic research into the contemporary significance of Punch and Judy, combined with theoretical accounts of spectacle in urban space. Its authors are from two quite different academic and research fields – puppetry and street performance, and urban design. The research demonstrates how these approaches and styles of conceptualizing public space can be creatively synthesized to yield fresh insights into the nature of spaces of performance – and on the notion of ‘tradition’ as it is experienced in the contemporary public realm. The analysis and examples of Punch and Judy performances derive from an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded PhD ethnographic study in collaboration with Royal Holloway, London.