Interdisciplinary Performance

Integrative Performance serves a crucial need of 21st-century performers by providing a transdisciplinary approach to training. Its radical new take on performance practice is designed for a climate that increasingly requires fully rounded artists. The book critiques and interrogates key current practices and offers a proven alternative to the idea that rigorous and effective training must separate the disciplines into discrete categories of acting, singing, and dance. Experience Bryon’s Integrative Performance Practice is a way of working that will profoundly shift how performers engage with their training, conditioning and performance disciplines. It synthesizes the various elements of performance work in order to empower the performer as they practice across disciplines within any genre, style or aesthetic. Theory and practice are balanced throughout, using: Regular box-outs, introducing the work's theoretical underpinnings through quotes, case studies and critical interjections. A full program of exercises ranging from training of specific muscle groups, through working with text, to more subtle structures for integrative awareness and presence. This book is the result of over twenty years of practice and research working with interdisciplinary artists across the world to produce a training that fully prepares performers for the demands of contemporary performance and all its somatic, emotive and vocal possibilities.

Spanning a hundred years (1910 – 2010) and three geographical locations – Europe, Japan and North America – this unique book examines the capacity of performance to recode reality. It argues for a seamless continuity between philosophy, critical theory and artistic practice. Each chapter ends with scores, providing readers with the opportunity to explore the discussed ideas in an embodied, and, where applicable, interactional way. The book's analysis of such landmark phenomena as the ready-made, action painting, intermedia, feminine writing, identity politics, cyborgian bio-art and ludic (h)activism make it an invaluable source for practical theorists, and undergraduate and Masters-level students of performance studies, performing arts, fine and visual arts and cultural studies.

Sport, Recovery and Performance is a unique multi-disciplinary collection which examines both the psychological and physiological dimensions to recovery from sport. Including contributions from medicine, neuroscience, psychology and sport science, the book expertly explores the implications for applied and strategic interventions to both retain and stabilize performance, and promote health and well-being. Including chapters written by its leading experts, the book represents an important milestone in this evolving field of study. It covers issues around measuring recovery, the impact of overtraining on sleep and mental health, and addresses topics such as the impact of travel on performance. The book informs not only how managing recovery can improve performance, but also offers insights in how recovery can sustain athletes’ physical and mental health. Citing research from a range of individual and team sports, as well as extreme situations and the workplace, this is an important book that will be widely read across the sport sciences.

This volume brings together dynamic perspectives on the concept of liveness in the performing arts, engaging with the live through the particular analytical focus of audiences and experience. The status and significance of the live in performance has become contested: perceived as variously as a marker of ontological difference, a promotional slogan, or a mystical evocation of cultural value. Moving beyond debates about the relationship between the live and the mediated, this collection considers what we can know and say about liveness in terms of processes of experiencing and processes of making. Drawing together contributions from theatre, music, dance, and performance art, it takes an interdisciplinary approach in asking not what liveness is, but how it matters and to whom. The book invites readers to consider how liveness is produced through processes of audiencing - as spectators bring qualities of (a)liveness into being through the nature of their attention - and how it becomes materialized in acts of performance, acts of making, acts of archiving, and acts of remembering. Theoretical chapters and practice-based reflections explore liveness, eventness and nowness as key concepts in a range of topics such as affect, documentation, embodiment, fandom, and temporality, showing how the relationship between audience and event is rarely singular and more often malleable and multiple. With its focus on experiencing liveness, this collection will be of interest to disciplines including performance, audience and cultural studies, visual arts, cinema, and sound technologies.

Integrative Performance serves a crucial need of 21st-century performers by providing a transdisciplinary approach to training. Its radical new take on performance practice is designed for a climate that increasingly requires fully rounded artists. The book critiques and interrogates key current practices and offers a proven alternative to the idea that rigorous and effective training must separate the disciplines into discrete categories of acting, singing, and dance. Experience Bryon’s Integrative Performance Practice is a way of working that will profoundly shift how performers engage with their training, conditioning and performance disciplines. It synthesizes the various elements of performance work in order to empower the performer as they practice across disciplines within any genre, style or aesthetic. Theory and practice are balanced throughout, using: Regular box-outs, introducing the work's theoretical underpinnings through quotes, case studies and critical interjections. A full program of exercises ranging from training of specific muscle groups, through working with text, to more subtle structures for integrative awareness and presence. This book is the result of over twenty years of practice and research working with interdisciplinary artists across the world to produce a training that fully prepares performers for the demands of contemporary performance and all its somatic, emotive and vocal possibilities.

Performing Interdisciplinarity proposes new ways of engaging with performance as it crosses, collides with, integrates and/or disturbs other disciplinary concerns. From Activism and Political Philosophy to Cognitive Science and Forensics, each chapter explores the relationships between performance and another discipline. Including cross-chapter discussions which address the intersections between fields, Performing Interdisciplinarity truly examines the making of meaning across disciplinary conventions. This is a volume for performance practitioners and scholars who are living, learning, writing, teaching, making and thinking at the edges of their specialisms.

This is the first volume to provide a detailed introduction to some of the main areas of research and practice in the interdisciplinary field of art and neuroscience. With contributions from neuroscientists, theatre scholars and artists from seven countries, it offers a rich and rigorous array of perspectives as a springboard to further exploration. Divided into four parts, each prefaced by an expert editorial introduction, it examines: * Theatre as a space of relationships: a neurocognitive perspective * The spectator's performative experience and 'embodied theatrology' * The complexity of theatre and human cognition * Interdisciplinary perspectives on applied performance Each part includes contributions from international pioneers of interdisciplinarity in theatre scholarship, and from neuroscientists of world-renown researching the physiology of action, the mirror neuron mechanism, action perception, space perception, empathy and intersubjectivity. While illustrating the remarkable growth of interest in the performing arts for cognitive neuroscience, this volume also reveals the extraordinary richness of exchange and debate born out of different approaches to the topics.

This book makes a compelling case for ‘performance fieldwork’ as a vital new approach to interdisciplinary collaboration. Refocussing the histories and practices of field research, it shows how creative methods and artistic processes can contribute to an embodied and situated knowledge of complex landscapes and environments. The book brings together case studies of innovative research in the fields of ecology, clubbing, heritage, mobility and deep time, which took place in the United Kingdom between 2009 and 2021. These accessible and engaging field notes connect to international and intercultural contexts, with attention to alternative experiences and perspectives throughout. Together, they provide a critically informed ‘toolbox’ of playful and exploratory strategies for working with a diverse range of urban and rural sites – including a river, a museum, a nightclub, a motorway and a cave. This is a timely methodology that reaches across disciplines to demonstrate how performance continually plays out ‘in the field’.

Cities, with their rising populations and complex configurations, have become key symbols of a fast-changing modernity. This timely collection gathers together various urban writings from a range of relevant disciplines, including architecture, geography, sociology, visual art, ethnography and psychoanalysis. Its focus, however, is performance. Underscoring the importance of the field, it shows how performance functions as a dynamic, interdisciplinary mechanism which is central not only to understanding the multiplicity of urban living but also to the way the identities of cities are shaped. Gathering together key writings on the city and performance by authors ranging from Walter Benjamin to Tim Etchells to Carl Lavery, the reader can be navigated in any number of ways. Supported by extensive introductory material, it will be essential and evocative reading for anyone interested in making connections between performance and urban life.

This edited collection offers an examination of and guide to interdisciplinary collaboration through the working practices of performance makers, exploring its pleasures, problems and pitfalls. At a time when interdisciplinary practice is actively encouraged in the academy, through strategic priorities, policy and funding, this book asks what it means in practical terms to engage with artists and scholars outside of our home territories. Where does the interdisciplinary exist and what does it rely on? How do theatre makers approach and sustain these projects? What is the nature of the journey? This edited collection explores contemporary working practices at the interfaces between performance and other disciplines. Focusing on collaborations between theatre makers and these 'others', it investigates the processes and conditions involved in the interdisciplinary, and develops the notion of 'journeying' beyond conventional boundaries. The book includes chapters covering areas such as psychology, the environment, physical cultures, the military, healthcare, festivals and communities, architecture, pedagogy and fine dining. Offering examples of unusual collaborations and arranged through three key areas of performance-making as journey and permeation, a negotiation with other spaces, and as pedagogy, this book offers a contemplation of the challenges and pleasures of material circumstances in interdisciplinary projects. While acknowledging the difficulties of such work and that the aims of interdisciplinarity can fail, it also examines how new methods and understandings can shift notions of knowledge.