Where do we find the dead? Do the dead appear in our dreams? What is it like to play dead? This book is an exciting exploration of the relationship between death and play in performance. Exploring a range of artists and creative disciplines that remember, personify and re-imagine the dead, it playfully unpacks the psychoanalytic concepts of the Death Drive, Desire and the Uncanny as a way of thinking about performance. Embodying the Dead draws on work of Gary Winters and Claire Hind and the various qualities of deadness found in their projects. The authors' work includes live art, theatre, installation, Super 8mm film, walking arts practice and durational performance. This book includes scripts and scores of their performances, original creative texts, interviews with internationally renowned artists and a series of practice-led research tasks to support readers creating their own imaginative performance work. Rich in creative and critical content, this book is ideal for students of drama, theatre and performance studies who have an interest in devised theatre, theatre making, writing for performance and intermedial practice.

This edited collection offers a range of critical, analytic and personal reflections on how music provides a container and a medium for experiencing, processing and integrating embodied encounters with death. It showcases interdisciplinary case studies written by authors from across Australia, France, The Netherlands, Poland and the UK.

Embodying Mexico examines two performative icons of Mexicanness--the Dance of the Old Men and Night of the Dead of Lake Pátzcuaro--in numerous manifestations, including film, theater, tourist guides, advertisements, and souvenirs. Covering a ninety-year period from the postrevolutionary era to the present day, Hellier-Tinoco's analysis is thoroughly grounded in Mexican politics and history, and simultaneously incorporates choreographic, musicological, and dramaturgical analysis. Exploring multiple contexts in Mexico, the USA, and Europe, Embodying Mexico expands and enriches our understanding of complex processes of creating national icons, performance repertoires, and tourist attractions, drawing on wide-ranging ethnographic, archival, and participatory experience. An extensive companion website illustrates the author's arguments through audio and video.

The human body is not a given fact-it is acquired, achieved, and learned. The body remembers, and it does so in collectively relevant ways. This book discusses how, why, and to what extent corporeal memories are constructed but also resisted, modified, or created anew.

Do liminal embodied experiences such as illness, death and dying affect literary form? In recent years, the concept of embodiment has been theorized from various perspectives. Gender studies have been concerned with the cultural implications of embodiment, arguing to move away from viewing the body as a prediscursive phenomenon to regarding it as an acculturated body. Age studies have extended this view to the embodied experience of ageing, while drawing attention to the ways in which the ageing body, through its materiality and plasticity, restricts the possibilities of (de)constructing subjectivity. These current debates on embodiment find a strong counterpart in literary representation. The contributions to this anthology investigate how and to what extend physical borderline experiences affect literary form.

Offering a unique perspective, this book explores the lived, embodied and affective experiences of reproductive rights activists living under, and mobilizing against, Ireland’s constitutional abortion ban. Through qualitative research and in-depth interviews with activists, the author exposes the subtle influence of the 8th Amendment on Irish women and their (reproductive) bodies, whether or not they have ever attempted to access a clandestine abortion. It explains how the everyday embodied practices, bodily labours and affective experiences of women and gestating people were shaped by the 8th amendment and through the need to ‘prepare’ for crisis pregnancies. In addition, it reveals the integral role of women’s bodies and emotions in changing the political and social landscape in Ireland, through the historical transformation of the country’s abortion laws.

Examining a wide range of archaeological data, and using it to explore issues such as the sexual body, mind/body dualism, body modification, and magical practices, Lynn Meskell and Rosemary Joyce offer a new approach to the Ancient Egyptian and Mayan understanding of embodiment. Drawing on insights from feminist theory, art history, phenomenology, anthropology and psychoanalysis, the book takes bodily materiality as a crucial starting point to the understanding and formation of self in any society, and sheds new light on Ancient Egyptian and Maya cultures. The book shows how a comparative project can open up new lines of inquiry by raising questions about accepted assumptions as the authors draw attention to the long-term histories and specificities of embodiment, and make the case for the importance of ancient materials for contemporary theorization of the body. For students new to the subject, and scholars already familiar with it, this will offer fresh and exciting insights into these ancient cultures.

Disability and racial difference in Mexico's early post-revolutionary period

Embodied Geographies provides an account of different types of life moments and stages which can contribute to forging our identities.

Embodied Liturgy marks a return to the body in thinking about Christian liturgy and sacramental practice. Rooted in phenomenology and incarnational theology, the book gives primary focus to the body as it considers the prayer offices and the liturgical calendar, sacrifices and sacraments, initiation and vestments, ritual theory and play, word and meal, fasting and feasting, penance and celebration, rites of passage, cultural perspectives, and the role of art, music, dance, and drama in worship. The author invites readers to return to the experience of their own body through guided yogic exercises. As a text for students and liturgical practitioners, the volume gives fresh voice to the experience and practice of worship as bodily acts. Embodied Liturgy is a dynamic, accessible new resource in liturgical and sacramental theology from one of the premiere scholars in the field. Frank C. Senn distills an established legacy of expertise in an innovative and inviting perspective on bodily acts of worship.