
Performance in America
Contemporary U.S. Culture and the Performing Arts
David Roman(Author)
Duke University Press
Will be published approx. on 23. November 2005
Book
Paperback/Softback
376 pages
978-0-8223-3663-1 (ISBN)
Description
Performance in America demonstrates the vital importance of the performing arts to contemporary U.S. culture. Looking at a series of specific performances mounted between 1994 and 2004, well-known performance studies scholar David RomAn challenges the belief that theatre, dance, and live music are marginal art forms in the United States. He describes the crucial role that the performing arts play in local, regional, and national communities, emphasizing the power of live performance, particularly its immediacy and capacity to create a dialogue between artists and audiences. RomAn draws attention to the ways that the performing arts provide unique perspectives on many of the most pressing concerns within American studies: questions about history and politics, citizenship and society, and culture and nation.The performances that RomAn analyzes range from localized community-based arts events to full-scale Broadway productions and from the controversial works of established artists such as Tony Kushner to those of emerging artists. RomAn considers dances produced by the choreographers Bill T. Jones and Neil Greenberg in the mid-1990s as new aids treatments became available and the aids crisis was reconfigured; a production of the Asian American playwright Chay Yew's A Beautiful Country in a high-school auditorium in Los Angeles's Chinatown; and Latino performer John Leguizamo's one-man Broadway show Freak. He examines the revival of theatrical legacies by female impersonators and the resurgence of cabaret in New York City. RomAn also looks at how the performing arts have responded to 9/11, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, and the second war in Iraq. Including more than eighty illustrations, Performance in America highlights the dynamic relationships among performance, history, and contemporary culture through which the past is revisited and the future reimagined.
Reviews / Votes
"Coming together to lift a celebratory glass to their peculiarities, as if they have suddenly found themselves together again in Nick's Pacific Street bar from Saroyan's The Time of Your Life (1939), the carefully assembled guests of David RomAn's Performance in America add up to an improbable but exhilarating ensemble. Anyone who can make Elaine Stritch feel right at home at a party with the ghost of Sarah Siddons will show you the time of your life, and RomAn is that kind of host, entertaining the divas of stage, screen, dance, and cabaret while cordially welcoming his readers. rsvp."-Joseph Roach, author of Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance "In a work of immediate political relevance and lasting theoretical importance, David RomAn forcefully establishes live performance at the center of America's cultural life, showing how its unique capacity to mobilize 'provisional collectivities' in the here and now allows it to express and inform crucial national debates. RomAn's brilliant readings of various undervalued genres of popular performance are themselves a tour de force of critical performance, teaching us how to engage the vast 'embodied archive' in which American publics and counter-publics understand themselves."-Una Chaudhuri, Professor of English and Drama, New York University "RomAn makes a persuasive case for the centrality of performance in contemporary U.S. culture. . . . In its analyses, tone, and scope, this book succeeds in achieving what its subjects accomplish: a critical reassessment of performance in America." - Debora Paredez (Theatre Research International)More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
North Carolina
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
86 b&w photos
Dimensions
Height: 223 mm
Width: 151 mm
Thickness: 34 mm
Weight
495 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8223-3663-1 (9780822336631)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
David RomAn is Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS and a coeditor of O Solo Homo: The New Queer Performance.
Content
List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction: Here and Now 1
1. Not About AIDS 49
2. Visa Denied: Chay Yew's Theatre of Immigration and the Performance of Asian American History 78
3. Latino Genealogies: Broadway and Beyond - the Case of John Leguizamo 109
4. Archival Drags; or, the Afterlife of Performance 137
5. Cabaret as Cultural History: Popular Song and Public Performance in America 179
6. Tragedy and the Performing Arts in the Wake of September 11, 2001 226
Afterword: The Time of Your Life 281
Notes 311
Bibliography 333
Index 345
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction: Here and Now 1
1. Not About AIDS 49
2. Visa Denied: Chay Yew's Theatre of Immigration and the Performance of Asian American History 78
3. Latino Genealogies: Broadway and Beyond - the Case of John Leguizamo 109
4. Archival Drags; or, the Afterlife of Performance 137
5. Cabaret as Cultural History: Popular Song and Public Performance in America 179
6. Tragedy and the Performing Arts in the Wake of September 11, 2001 226
Afterword: The Time of Your Life 281
Notes 311
Bibliography 333
Index 345