Overview

""Performance"" has multiple and often overlapping meanings that signify a wide variety of social behaviors. In this invitation to reflect on the power of performance, Diana Taylor explores many of its uses and iterations: artistic, economic, sexual, political, and technological performance; the performance of everyday life; and the gendered, sexed, and racialized performance of bodies. This book performs its argument. Images and texts interact to show how performance is at once a creative act, a means to comprehend power, a method of transmitting memory and identity, and a way of understanding the world.

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9780822359975

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Reviews

Taylor's fascinating, multicultural analysis of performance explores not only what performance is but also what it does-what it allows one to see, to experience, and to theorize-and 'its complex relation to systems of power.' . . . Recommended. -- M. S. LoMonaco * Choice * Performance offers scenarios... for active pedagogy, inviting students and others to explore and perhaps undo the links between images and writing, texts and performances, so as to conduct their own performatic appropriations. -- Loren Kruger * Critical Inquiry * At the beginning of this book Diana Taylor makes the claim that since the 1960s artists have been placing the body 'front and center' in artistic practice, and at the end she asks, 'How would our disciplines and methodologies change if we took seriously the idea that bodies (and not only books and documents) produce, store, and transfer knowledge?' In between, Taylor offers, not so much a set of answers to that question, but instead, an array of perspectives on performance from which we can commence an inquiry into its cultural, aesthetic, and political significance. As such this book provides a comprehensive and enticing introduction to what performance is, what it does, and why it matters. But the book does more: in the examples it discusses and the visual documentation it provides, it inspires us both to see how performance theorizes the world and also how we might imagine its possible futures. -- Susan Leigh Foster, Distinguished Professor, University of California, Los Angeles Diana Taylor is the best kind of scholar: engaged, partisan, concerned not merely with describing her subjects, but with bringing forth the political power of their work. And that's what this book does: it leavens existing visions in order to nourish new ones. -- Jacques Servin, New York University Diana Taylor concludes with a strong claim that 'Performance is a powerful weapon. We need to understand it.' In that light she is clearly a warrior and an exemplary scholar. But she is also, as evidenced in the pages of this book, a profoundly insightful, compassionate, hope-filled lover of performers and performance. I've rarely come across such a trustworthy witness to the potential of art and activism. For that last ounce of courage, I think I'll just have to carry this inspiring chronicle of performance studies, performance art, and, from my read, artists of all sorts-and have it with me in every type of backstage dressing room I might occupy. -- Anna Deavere Smith

At the beginning of this book Diana Taylor makes the claim that since the 1960s artists have been placing the body 'front and center' in artistic practice, and at the end she asks, 'How would our disciplines and methodologies change if we took seriously the idea that bodies (and not only books and documents) produce, store, and transfer knowledge?' In between, Taylor offers, not so much a set of answers to that question, but instead, an array of perspectives on performance from which we can commence an inquiry into its cultural, aesthetic, and political significance. As such this book provides a comprehensive and enticing introduction to what performance is, what it does, and why it matters. But the book does more: in the examples it discusses and the visual documentation it provides, it inspires us both to see how performance theorizes the world and also how we might imagine its possible futures. --Susan Leigh Foster, Distinguished Professor, University of California, Los Angeles

Author Information

Diana Taylor is University Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at New York University. She is the author and editor of several books, including The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas and Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's ""Dirty War"", both also published by Duke University Press.

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