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Unlimited action concerns the limits imposed upon art and life, and the means by which artists have exposed, refused, or otherwise reshaped the horizon of aesthetics and of the practice of art, by way of performance art. It examines the ‘performance of extremity’ as practices at the limits of the histories of performance and art, in performance art’s most fertile and prescient decade, the 1970s. Dominic Johnson recounts and analyses game-changing performance events by six artists: Kerry Trengove, Ulay, Genesis P-Orridge, Anne Bean, the Kipper Kids, and Stephen Cripps. Through close encounters with these six artists and their works, and a broader contextual milieu of artists and works, Johnson articulates a counter-history of actions in a new narrative of performance art in the 1970s, to rethink and rediscover the history of contemporary art and performance.

For centuries, Spain and the South have existed on the margins of U.S. and European identities—as much for the Francoist and Jim Crow periods as for their “exotic” cultures and sunny beaches attractive to tourists worldwide. Between Distant Modernities theorizes this trans-Atlantic link to show exactly how Spanish and Southern exceptionality became a performance developed as a specific response to modernity, and its perceived threat of homogenization, in the United States and Europe across the twentieth century. Seeing the War of 1898 as a climactic moment, this book begins by exploring the writings of the Nashville Agrarians and members of the so-called Generation of 1898, who each tried to regenerate a “traditional” Spain and South located in an agrarian past. That desire is constantly re-enacted by main characters in cultural production across the twentieth century as these characters simultaneously enact and problematize the issue of self/other, exile/citizen, and tourist/native that dominate both literary traditions.

While several critical works on Spanish cinema have centred on the cultural, social and industrial significance of stars, there has been relatively little critical scholarship on what stars are paid to do: act. Bringing together a range of scholars that attend carefully to the performances, acting styles, and historical influences of Spanish film, Performance and Spanish Film is the first book to place the process of Spanish acting centre stage. Comprising fifteen original essays, the book casts light on the manifold meanings, methods and influences of Spanish screen performance, from the silent era to the present day. It situates the development of Spanish screen acting in both its national and global contexts, tracing acting techniques that are largely indigenous to Spain, as well as unpicking the ways in which Spanish performance has frequently been shaped by international influences and forces. As the volume ultimately demonstrates, acting can serve as a powerful site of meaning through which broader questions around Spanish film practices, culture and society can be explored.

In today's fast-moving, e-commerce economy, information is power. For years, companies have been investing in IT, expecting to develop their ability to exploit the power of information and achieve better business performance. Frequently, a company's investment has been a cost with no clear payback; a competitive necessity rather than a strategic advantage. The book presents a framework for evaluating IT strategies: Information Orientation. Information Orientation does this by determining the degree to which a company implements and realizes the synergies across three information capabilities: information behaviours and values; information management practices; and information technology practices. This book provides a description of the dimensions of each of the capabilities, along with the analytical basis which validates the research, finding that a company must integrate all three information capabilities as a precondition for achieving superior business performance. It presents the Information Orientation Dashboard as a diagnostic tool to measure and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of a company's information capabilities.

Performing women takes on a key problem in the history of drama: the “exceptional” staging of the life of Catherine of Siena by a female actor and a female patron in 1468 Metz. These two creators have remained anonymous, despite the perceived rarity of this familiar episode; this study of their lives and performances brings the elusive figure of the female performer to center stage, however. Beginning with the Catherine of Siena play and broadening outward, Performing women integrates new approaches to drama, gender, and patronage with a performance methodology to trace connections among the activities of the actor, the patron, their female family members, and peers. It shows that the women of fifteenth-century Metz enacted varied kinds of performance that included and extended beyond the theater: decades before the 1468 play, for example, Joan of Arc returned from the grave in the form of a young woman named Claude, who was acknowledged formally in a series of civic ceremonies. This in-depth investigation of the full spectrum of evidence for female performance – drama, liturgy, impersonation, devotional practice, and documentary culture – both creates a unique portrait of the lives of individual women and reveals a framework of ubiquitous female performance. Performing women offers a new paradigm: women forming the core of public culture. Networks of gendered performance offered roles of expansive range and depth to the women of Metz, and positioned them as vital and integral contributors to the fabric of urban life.

Celluloid Singapore is not about Singapore cinema per se, or Singapore, but both. It is a ground-breaking study of the three major periods in Singapore cinema’s fragmented history – the golden age (50s and 60s), post-studio 70s and revival from the 1990s onwards. Set against the context of Singapore’s own trajectory of development, the book poses two central questions: how can the films of each period be considered Singapore films, and how is this cinema specifically national? Celluloid Singapore argues that the films of these three periods collectively constitute a national cinema through different performances of Singapore, offering a critical framework for understanding this cinema and its history in relation to the development of the country and the national.

After Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the surrounding region in 2005, the city debated whether to press on with Mardi Gras or cancel the parades. Ultimately, they decided to proceed. New Orleans’s recovery certainly has resulted from a complex of factors, but the city’s unique cultural life—perhaps its greatest capital—has been instrumental in bringing the city back from the brink of extinction. Voicing a civic fervor, local writer Chris Rose spoke for the importance of Carnival when he argued to carry on with the celebration of Mardi Gras following Katrina: “We are still New Orleans. We are the soul of America. We embody the triumph of the human spirit. Hell. We ARE Mardi Gras”. Since 2006, a number of new Mardi Gras practices have gained prominence. The new parade organizations or krewes, as they are called, interpret and revise the city’s Carnival traditions but bring innovative practices to Mardi Gras. The history of each parade reveals the convergence of race, class, age, and gender dynamics in these new Carnival organizations. Downtown Mardi Gras: New Carnival Practices in Post-Katrina New Orleans examines six unique, offbeat, Downtown celebrations. Using ethnography, folklore, cultural, and performance studies, the authors analyze new Mardi Gras’s connection to traditional Mardi Gras. The narrative of each krewe’s development is fascinating and unique, illustrating participants’ shared desire to contribute to New Orleans’s rich and vibrant culture.

Mulata Nation traces the figure of the mulata, the woman of mixed racial heritage in Cuban artwork and performance from the colonial era through the modern to the contemporary. While perhaps most widely linked with sensuality and sexual desirability, the mulata also serves as the embodiment of Cuba’s spirituality, and as emblematic of Cuban identity. Through close readings of representations of the mulata in fine and graphic art, mulata performers and the performance of mulata characters at distinct historical and ideological moments, the book claims that far from being a static, flat figure, images of the mulata have shifted over time and continue to find new expressions. Different expressions of the mulata are linked to specific historical moments. Representations of the mulata on cigarette packaging, marquillas cigarreras, and in the musical theater form zarzuela of the late colonial era, cabaret performance, fine art and popular magazine covers during the Republic, as an icon of Mexican cinema in the first wave of the diaspora of Cuban artists and Cuban cultural forms, and as an icon of the new (wo)man of revolutionary Cuba in Cuban cinema of the 1960s and 70s all figure the mulata as crucial figures in national culture. At present, both the significant diaspora of Cuban artists and others to the US and other countries have been re-inscribing the mulata and mulataje to bear, contest and sometimes reinforce the tropic positions explored in previous chapters. Furthermore, the performance of mulataje on and off the island is no longer limited to women; the performance of mulataje is prominent in highly popular drag shows and film in contemporary Cuba.

This two-volume set presents detailed interpretations of singular performances by several of the most compelling actors in cinema history, asking in many different and complementary ways what makes performance meaningful, how it reflects a director's style, as well as how it contributes to the development of national cinemas and cultures. Whether noting the precise ways actors shape film narrative, achieve emotional effect, or move toward political subversion, the essays in these books innovate new approaches to studying screen performance as an art form and cultural force. This second volume focuses on international cinema, and includes case studies of key performances from actors like Ingrid Bergman, Gael Garcia Bernal, Nikolai Cherkassov, Alec Guinness, Setsuko Hara, Isabelle Huppert, Peter Lorre, Madhubala, Anna Magnani, Toshirô Mifune, and Choi Min Sik, amongst many others.

The Performance of Listening in Postcolonial Francophone Culture argues That globalized media has allowed for efficient transmission of transnational culture, and in turn, our everyday experiences are informed by sounds ranging from voices, to music, to advertising, to bombs, and beyond. In considering cultural works from French-speaking North Africa and the Middle East all published or released in France from 1962-2011, Solheim’s study of listening across cultural genres will be of interest to any scholar or lay person interested in contemporary postcolonial France. This book is also a primer to contemporary Francophone culture from North Africa and the Middle East. Some of the French-speaking world’s most renowned and adored artists are the subject of this study, including preeminent Algerian feminist novelist, filmmaker and historian Assia Djebar (1936-2015), the first writer of the Maghreb to become part of the Académie Française; celebrated Iranian graphic novelist and filmmaker Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis, Chicken with Plums); the lauded Lebanese-Québecois playwright and dramaturge Wajdi Mouawad (Littorial, Incendies), and Lebanese comic artist and avant jazz trumpeter Mazen Kerbaj, whose improvisation with Israeli fighter jets during the 2006 Israeli War, “Starry Night,” catapulted him to global recognition. An interdisciplinary study of contemporary Francophone cultures, this book will be of interest to scholars and students in literary studies, performance studies, gender studies, anthropology, history, and ethnomusicology.

This book provides a comprehensive account of Robert Guédiguian’s numerous films since 1980, combining stylistic analyses with historical, political, and generic context. More importantly, it makes the case that Guédiguian’s work represents one of the most discretely original but radical projects of contemporary French cinema: to make politically committed films with friends, predominately in a local space, over a long period of time. The book starts with a consideration of the philosophy of friendship and its relation to politics, relation, difference, time, and space. It concentrates on Guédiguian’s early life in the Estaque neighbourhood of Marseilles, where he became politically active and developed the friendships that would continue in his filmmaking, as well as Guédiguian’s disillusionment with the Communist Party. It then examines the political pessimism of the 1980s through Guédiguian’s four early films. The book examines the turn toward local activism and utopianism in the 1990s, and follows Guédiguian’s work as it spreads into diverse experimentation with genres and registers in more recent work. It emphasises Guédiguian’s political assessments and his frequent meditations on history, violence, and utopia. But it returns consistently to the underlying themes of friendship, and thus intervenes at the crossroads of affect, politics, philosophy, and art.

Since 2004, the Baby Doll Mardi Gras tradition in New Orleans has gone from an obscure, almost-forgotten practice to a flourishing cultural force. The original Baby Dolls were groups of black women, and some men, in the early Jim Crow era who adopted New Orleans street-masking tradition as a unique form of fun and self-expression against a backdrop of racial discrimination. Wearing short dresses, bloomers, bonnets, and garters with money tucked tight, they strutted, sang ribald songs, chanted, and danced on Mardi Gras Day and on St. Joseph feast night. Today’s Baby Dolls continue the tradition of one of the first street women's masking and marching groups in the United States. They joyfully and unabashedly defy gender roles, claiming public space and proclaiming through their performance their right to social citizenship. Essayists draw on interviews, theoretical perspectives, archival material, and historical assessments to describe women’s cultural performances that take place on the streets of New Orleans. They recount the history and contemporary resurgence of the Baby Dolls while delving into the larger cultural meaning of the phenomenon. Over 140 color photographs and personal narratives of immersive experiences provide passionate testimony of the impact of the Baby Dolls on their audiences. Fifteen artists offer statements regarding their work documenting and inspired by the tradition as it stimulates their imagination to present a practice that revitalizes the spirit.

The gestures of participatory art offers a critical investigation of key debates in relation to participatory art, spanning the domains of applied and community theatre, immersive performance as well as the visual arts. Rather than seeking a genre-based definition, it asks how artists, audiences and art practices approach the subject of participation beyond the predetermined options allocated to them. In doing so, it inquires into the ways that artworks participate in civic life. Participation is the utopian sweet dream that has turned into a nightmare in contemporary neoliberal societies. Yet can the participatory ideal be discarded or merely replaced with another term, just because it has become disemboweled into a tool of pacification? The gestures of participatory art insists that the concept of participation must be re-imagined and shifted onto other registers. It proposes the concept of the gesture as a rewarding way of theorizing participatory art. The gesture is simultaneously an expression of an inner attitude as well as a social habitude; it is situated in between image, speech and action. The study reads the gestural as a way to link discussions on participatory art to broader issues of citizenship and collective action. Moving from reflections on institutional critique and impact to concrete analyses of moments of unsolicited, delicate participation or refusal, the book examines a range of practices from India, Sudan, Guatemala and El Salvador, the Lebanon, the Netherlands and Germany. It engages with the critiques of participation and pleads for a critical reclaiming of participatory practices.

Before his mysterious murder in 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini had become famous—and infamous—not only for his groundbreaking films and literary works but also for his homosexuality and criticism of capitalism, colonialism, and Western materialism. In Pier Paolo Pasolini: Performing Authorship, Gian Maria Annovi revisits Pasolini's oeuvre to examine the author's performance as a way of assuming an antagonistic stance toward forms of artistic, social, and cultural oppression. Annovi connects Pasolini's notion of authorship to contemporary radical artistic practices and today's multimedia authorship. Annovi considers the entire range of Pasolini's work, including his poetry, narrative and documentary film, dramatic writings, and painting, as well as his often scandalous essays on politics, art, literature, and theory. He interprets Pasolini's multimedia authorial performance as a masochistic act to elicit rejection, generate hostility, and highlight the contradictions that structure a repressive society. Annovi shows how questions of authorial self-representation and self-projection relate to the artist's effort to undermine the assumptions of his audience and criticize the conformist practices that the culture industry and mass society impose on the author. Pasolini reveals the critical potential of his spectacular celebrity by using the author's corporeal or vocal presence to address issues of sexuality and identity, and through his strategic self-fashioning in films, paintings, and photographic portraits he destabilizes the audience's assumptions about the author.

Since the dawn of Hip Hop graffiti writing in the late ‘60s, graffiti writers have inscribed their tag names on cityscapes across the globe to claim public space and mark their presence. In the absence of knowing the writer’s identity, the onlooker’s imagination defaults to the gendered, classed, and racialized conventions framing a public act that requires bodily strength and a willingness to take legal, social, and physical risks. Graffiti subculture is thus imagined as a “boys club” and consequently the graffiti grrlz fade from the social imagination. Utilizing a queer feminist perspective, this book is a transnational ethnography that tells an alternative story about Hip Hop graffiti subculture from the vantage point of over 100 women who write graffiti in 23 countries. Grounded in 15 years of research, each chapter examines a different site and process of transformation. Under the radar of feminist movement, they’ve remodeled Hip Hop masculinity, created an affective digital network, challenged androcentric graffiti history and reshaped subcultural memory, sustained all-grrl community, and strategically deployed femininity to transform their subcultural precarity. By performing feminism across the diaspora, graffiti grrlz have elevated their subcultural status and resisted hetero/sexist patriarchal oppression.