Screen LibraryPerforming magic on the Western stage
Performing Magic on the Western Stage examines magic as a performing art and meaningful social practice, linking magic to cultural arenas such as religion, finance, gender, and nationality.
Saved in:
| Group Author: | ; ; ; |
|---|---|
| Published: |
|
| Literature type: | Electronic Software eBook |
| Language: | English |
| Series: |
Palgrave studies in theatre and performance history |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: |
http://www.palgraveconnect.com/doifinder/10.1057/9780230617124 |
| Summary: |
Performing Magic on the Western Stage examines magic as a performing art and meaningful social practice, linking magic to cultural arenas such as religion, finance, gender, and nationality. "The product of intense preparation by scholars and teachers trained in theatre, film, media, dance, philosophy, anthropology, literature, religion, psychiatry and, of course, magic itself, Performing Magic on the Western Stage skillfully conjures the interdisciplinary powers of performance studies to achieve an apparently impossible feat: an edited collection in which every contribution is equally strong and equally necessary." - Joseph Roach, Sterling Professor of Theater, Yale University "Performing Magic on the Western Stage offers a much-needed and carefully compiled anthology of essays addressing some of the most important questions that have emerged out of the recent explosion of academic interest in staged magic. Drawing on work from a wide variety of fields, including Theater and Performance Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Cinema and Media Studies, Philosophy, and Anthropology, the essays collected here examine how staged magic shapes and exposes our relation to: otherness; class mobility; gender, sexuality, nationality and ethnicity; secrecy; disability; community; entertainment; ritual and religion; capitalism and money; self-deception; and the figure of the magician. This volume takes magic seriously as a meaningful art form, and explores its changing significance in specific historical and geographical locations. The collection brings together a wealth of original archival and field research, and initiates a series of interdisciplinary conversations that need to be continued. We learn, among other things, of the continued importance of the magician in film history long after the heyday of "the cinema of attractions"; of how contemporary bad-boy magicians like Penn and Teller pave the way for alternative relations among the magician, the assistant and the audience; of the relationship between William Robinson's yellow-faced performances of Ching Ling Soo and Chinese magician Chee Ling Qua (a.k.a. Ching Ling Foo); and of the range of magicians - including transgressive tricksters, retro-sexists, escape artists and clairvoyants - who provoke audiences to widen their eyes in wonder or roll them tiredly, as though the time of magic had passed. Yet as Coppa, Hass and Peck make clear, magic's time has only just begun." - Karen Beckman, Jaffe Associate Professor of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Vanishing Women: Magic, Film and Feminism. |
| Item Description: |
Ebook. Originally published in: 2009. |
| Carrier Form: | 256 p. |
| ISBN: |
9780230607880 9780230617124 : 0230617123 : |
| CLC: | F719.5 |
| Contents: | Life Magic and Staged Magic: A Hidden Intertwining - Lawrence Hass * The Family Romance of Modern Magic: Contesting Robert Houdin's Cultural Legacy in Contemporary France - Graham M. Jones * Magicians and the Magic of Hollywood Cinema during the 1920s - Matthew Solomon * The Body Immaterial: Magicians' Assistants and the Performance of Labor - Francesca Coppa * Conjuring Capital: Magic and Finance From Eighteenth-Century London to the New Las Vegas - James Peck * The Sacred and the Sleight of Hand in American Indian Gaming - Mary Lawlor * Outdoing Ching Ling Foo-Christopher Stahl * Intersecting Illusions: Performing Magic, Disability and Gender - Karen Dearborn * Through A Glass Darkly: Magic and Religion in Western Thought and Practice - Susan L. Schwartz * Illusions About Illusions - Robert E. Neale. |