Performance in Popular Culture reveals the intricate relationship between performance and popular culture by exploring how theatrical conventions and dramaturgical tropes have informed the way the social is constructed for popular consumption.
Staged as a series of case studies, this book considers the diverse ways the social is imagined and produced in live and mediated performances, in images and texts, in interactive experiences and in cultural institutions. By looking at performance in popular culture, the world we live in becomes more visible, open to investigation and (perhaps) to change. Performance in Popular Culture engages a wide range of disciplines and theoretical frameworks: performance, theatre and cultural studies; comparative literature and media studies; gender and sexuality, critical race and post-colonial theories.
Designed for accessibility at an undergraduate level, the case studies make use of visual materials, moving images and texts that are readily available to lecturers and students, to scholars and to the general public.
PART I Screens and things
1 The Marx Brothers: From stage to screen
2 Betty Boop’s animated performances
3 Performing the pandemic
PART II Boxed sets
4 Puppet plays: Boxes are made to be broken
5 I Love Lucy: From live performance to canned entertainment
6 Do you hear the people sing?
PART III Stars in our eyes
7 Like a diva: From Maria Callas to Madonna
8 Beyoncé’s Homecoming | ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’
9 Got Talent
PART IV Public arts/art’s publics
10 Fragments of the past, cabinets of curiosity and cultural convergences
11 Marina Abramovic is present
12 Pepper’s Ghost and the haunted, educational exhibits at Wellington Museum
PART V Sporting arenas and fields of play
13 The fix is in: Professional wrestling
14 Olympian opening ceremonies
15 Cheerleaders in the popular (American) imagination
PART VI Sideshows no more
16 Evangelical performance: From morality plays to the Power Team and Hell House
17 Queer shows
18 Feminism: One step forward, three steps back?
PART VII Culture shows
19 Performing Maori
20 Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre: Planted in London, popping up in Auckland
21 Making a show of royalty
PART VIII Power, politics and protest
22 Donald Trump and the pro-wrestling-ifi cation of politics in the USA
23 Race matters
24 Visions of the apocalypse
Biography
Sharon Mazer is Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies in Te Ara Poutama, the Faculty of Māori and Indigenous Development, at Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand.
