Performance opens up an opportunity to explore gendered experiences of traumatic violations and survival.

This essay tells a story about blackness and being, black durational performance, black power and the powers that cohere in the blackness of Now. 

Seated centre-stage yet unconcerned with the anthropocentric voyeurism, self-consciousness, and self-display of traditional stage presence, the Green Man of Mesocosm dwells in a theatre of species—all species—and nonchalantly performs a scandalous form of species companionship and ecological intimacy.

Putting up with the hectic world of social media is not the sole challenge contemporary authors are facing. We are expected to master performance art and entertain an audience not only through our written work, but also by means of public talks and appearances. 

“What does knowledge do?” exposes our impoverished vocabulary for discussing how what appears political inside of a particular interpretation generates political change in the broader world. What if we took these expressions literally? What if discourse is a thing whose unfoldings we can modulate both through its meanings and through its materiality? Answering these questions requires a more strenuous examination of what we mean by the material, of how meaning matters. 

"Okay! As we continue our guitar journey, we need to talk about how you're going to be attacking the strings. And I'm going to recommend that you use a pick." David's tone is upbeat and encouraging, as always, and he seems to be looking right at me -- his ability to make eye contact with the camera is uncanny.

Yesterday evening at Berkeley's Zellerbach Theater, Icelandic musician Jónsi (of Sigur Rós) performed. The show was spectacular, perhaps the most compelling live performance I have experienced.

What does "improvisation" mean?  In the first place, every performance takes place in time, and will vary from any other performance.  Someone playing the melody of "Stardust" pretty much "as written" will still be improvising the phrasing, tempo, etc...

For my first post on Arcade I thought I would introduce myself and my recent and current projects.  I graduated with a PhD in Comparative Literature from Stanford in 1988 and am Professor of Spanish at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.  I blog at Bemsha Swing, mostly about jazz and contemporary Spanish poetry.