Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship in a Global Age: (Studies in International Performance)

Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship in a Global Age is an innovative book that makes a significant contribution to performance studies scholarship. It undertakes a detailed investigation into the relationship between ethics and spectatorship in and in response to contemporary performance. Considering spectators both within and beyond the theatre, the text explores the ways in which they are stimulated or provoked by performance to address ethical questions about their roles as spectators and as citizens in a fraught media-saturated landscape. Through a detailed engagement with five internationally-acclaimed performances, this book talks about both the emotional and intellectual responses generated by politically-inflected work. It explores the feelings of awe, shock, delight and unsettlement that good performance engenders, and it traces the process spectators go through in making sense of those emotions through extended ethical reflection.

Table of Contents:
Contents List of Illustrations Series Editors' Preface Acknowledgements Introduction Situating the Spectator Genesi: The Spectator and 'Useless Suffering' 'The Career Highlights of the MAMU': Alterity and Ahame Sandakan Threnody: Testimony and the Dangers of Polyphony The Limits of Testimony: Ariane Mnouchkine and Theatre du Soleil's Le Dernier Caravanserail (Odyssees) Otherness and Responsibility in Three Tales by Steve Reich and Beryl Korot and Nature's Little Helpers by Patricia Piccinini Afterword Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author :
HELENA GREHAN is a Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Arts at Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia. She is the author of Mapping Cultural Identity in Contemporary Australian Performance, as well as many scholarly articles on performance, representation and interculturalism.

Review :
Joint winner of the Australasian Drama Studies Association Rob Jordan Award 2010. 'With this book, Helena Grehan makes a dynamic contribution to a new generation of scholarship that is driven by a deep sense of ethical concern and an engagement with the major human issues of our times. Her focus on theatrical renditions of difficult and urgent themes is vivid and lucid, and creates a study that will be of wide interest in all disciplines of the humanities.' - Jane Goodall, Professor with the Writing and Society Research Group, The University of Western Sydney, Australia, and author of Stage Presence: The Actor as Mesmerist 'What Grehan is advancing here is not only a theory of spectatorship but also a methodology of spectatorship...Each chapter is richly - but never exclusively - descriptive, always carefully theorising the spectator's experiential trajectory as keyed to the micro-level of performance (set elements, costume, gesture, scenic discourse) and the meta-level of theory. For readers who might have witnessed these performances, the discussion illuminates and amplifies one's memory in ways that initiate - or re-initiate - the kind of ethical response Grehan is arguing for; for those who have not, it offers a vivid account of both content and context, the latter including both the critic's and the culture's preoccupations, investments, and limitations. Performance, Ethics, and Spectatorship in a Global Age is a work of original, generous, and - above all - responsible theatre theory.' - Una Chaudhuri, Collegiate Professor and Professor of English and Drama at New York University, Performance Paradigm