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"What stands out when we blend in? Performing Ground is the first book to explore camouflage as a performance practice, arguing that the act of blending into one's environment is central to the ways we negotiate our identities in and through space. LauraLevin tracks contemporary performances of camouflage through a variety of forms - performative photography; environmental, immersive, and site-specific performance; activist infiltration; and solo artworks - and rejects the conventional dismissal of blending in as an abdication of self. Instead, she contemplates the empowering political possibilities of 'performing ground,' of human bodies intermingling with the material world, while directly engaging with the reality that women and other marginalized persons are often relegated to the background and associated with the properties of space. Performing Ground engages these questions through the works of some of today's most exciting performance artists such as Rebecca Belmore, Liu Bolin, Janieta Eyre, andVioleta Luna, and groups like Gob Squad, Punchdrunk, The Yes Men, and Urban Mimics"--
List of contents
1. World Pictures 2. Camouflage Acts 3. Performing Ground 4. Environmental Unconscious 5. Embedded Performance 6. Epilogue: Situating the Self Notes Select Bibliography Index
Report
"Levin's Performing Ground: Space, Camouflage and the Art of Blending In arguably makes the boldest moves toward reorienting the spatial analysis of performance. ... Levin's innovative use of the notions of camouflage to understand a variety of relationships between self and world will surely prove valuable to performance scholars working not just in relation to place, but also to gender, race, ecology, animal studies, scenography, photography, and visual art." (Fiona Wilkie, Theatre Journal, Vol. 67, December, 2015)
'Performing Ground asks important questions about environmental responsibilities, global and local mobilities, boundaries, subjectivities, and issues of entitlement and dispossession, while remaining sensitive to conditions of gender, nationality, class, ethnicity and more. It argues persuasively that we are never solo, but always figures in a ground, embedded in dynamic and meaningful contexts, with responsibilities to others and to our environments. It is rich, admirably ambitious and fiercely compelling.' - Jen Harvie, Queen Mary University of London, UK
