
- 248 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
Winner of the 2024 TaPRA David Bradby Monograph Prize How is decadence being staged today – as a practice, issue, pejorative, and as a site of pleasure? Where might we find it, why might we look for it, and who is decadence for? This book is the first monographic study of decadence in theatre and performance. Adam Alston makes a passionate case for the contemporary relevance of decadence in the thick of a resurgent culture war by focusing on its antithetical relationship to capitalist-led growth, progress, and intensified productivity. He argues that the qualities used to disparage the study and practice of theatre and performance are the very things we should embrace in celebrating their value – namely, their spectacular uselessness, wastefulness, outmodedness, and abundant potential for producing forms of creativity that flow away from the ends and excesses of capitalism. Alston covers an eclectic range of examples by Julia Bardsley (UK), Hasard Le Sin (Finland), jaamil olawale kosoko (USA), Toco Nikaido (Japan), Martin O'Brien (UK), Toshiki Okada (Japan), Marcel·lí Antúnez Roca (Spain), Normandy Sherwood (USA), The Uhuruverse (USA), Nia O. Witherspoon (USA), and Wunderbaum (Netherlands). Expect ruminations on monstrous scenographies, catatonic choreographies, turbo-charged freneticism, visions of the apocalypse – and what might lie in its wake.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Half-Title
- Series
- Dedication
- Title
- Contents
- List of figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Zombie time: Sickness, performance, and the living dead
- 2 Para-sites and wired bodies: Decadence, scenography, and the performing body
- 3 Alien nation: Afropessimism, Afrofuturism, and the decadent society
- 4 Frenetic standstill: Decadence, capitalism, and excess on the Japanese stage
- 5 ‘A dangerous form of decadence’: Decadence, performance, and the culture wars
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Works cited
- Index
- Copyright